Among the lost messages of
Christianity communion ranks right up there with giving, faith, and salvation.
The Old Dragon does his job well when it comes to things that get us in contact
with God. The greater Truths of God can always be found surrounded with
controversy. Money and the Church has forever been a hotbed of debate. The
Faith and Works battle has raged since James was faced down by Paul at the
first church council in Jerusalem. The shortest investigation of the treatment
of communion by various factions of Christendom will uncover many variations
and rules regarding the ritual.
Go now and get your
elements. It doesn’t have to be
red wine and unleavened bread.
Whatever you have is OK for now.
Water and and animal cracker will do. As we’ll see, it’s not what you do, it’s how
you do it.
Communion is no longer
a simple act of faith done in one's home. Some folks can't take communion
unless they are members of the church! Others only used to get to have half the
elements! Some pastors can't give communion to a hospitalized parishoner
without permission from the governing board of the church! There must be
something worthwhile in communion for the Devil to stir the pot with so much
confusion. Time to find out the God-Truth in communion.
In order to completely understand the
communion of the Bible I'm going to give you some extensive background. The
whole premise for being "saved", the whole concept of saving is this
thing faith. Every place in the New Testament that you find something about
being justified, it means looked at as just like God. Justified, if you look it
up in the dictionary, is something that isn't something else but is viewed as
just like the other thing. The same way that a jury justifies a criminal when
they call him guilty or innocent (either one), he's to be treated as though he
were innocent or guilty, whatever their verdict was. That's justification.
Justification in the Bible is referring to being "just like God"-who
is one hundred percent righteous.
The only way we're justified, which is
another way of saying "being saved", the only way we're seen like
that is through this thing called faith.
The problem we have immediately is that
in English when we hear the word faith, or the word faith comes into our minds,
our traditional thinking makes the word faith a noun. When we define faith it
comes out sounding like belief. That's a big point of confusion. Faith, in
English, is indeed more the concept of belief, and we must stretch it somewhat
to make it into an action.
Whereas, the Greek word that's translated
into faith in ALL Bibles is spelled p-i-s-t-i-s in English letters and is
pronounced peece-teece. Pistis comes directly, it is one generation away from a
primary verb. A primary verb.
Now we know what verbs do. Verbs move.
They act. So that means that every time you see the word faith in the Bible, an
action is happening, or it's describing the process of an action. That
description is as far away from a verb as the word faith gets.
If the word is used in a context where it
feels like a noun, then it's the noun that's describing the process of the
action, or the noun that's describing the
faithing. Faith being an
action, when you do this action you faithe.
If the word bath is termed as a noun,
then when you do a bath, you bathe. Faith and faithe, bath and bathe. We feel
that faith is akin to bath, when really faith is a bathe. Faith is an action.
Again, those times in the Bible when faith sounds like a noun it's only the
noun form of a verb. It's describing a verb. An action is still taking place.
Another very interesting thing is that
every time you see the word believe, or any of it's cousins, belief, believed,
believers, unbelief, the word is derived directly from pistis! The word pistis
is the word for faith, but the word pisteuo(peece-tyoo-oh), notice the same
root, is the word translated into belief. And, as you remember, pistis came
from a primary verb. So pistis and pisteuo come from a primary verb. They are
both action words.
If you understand this, you understand
the most important thing in the whole New Testament, nay the whole Bible. This
concept will open the scriptures to you and make you ask questions. Every time
Jesus heals someone he says, "Your faith has made you whole." We read
that and think believe. "Oh, your belief in God, and your belief that I
can heal you has made you whole." No, that's not it. What Jesus said when
he talked in Greek was, "Your action, your believing action, has made you
whole."
There's one story about a woman with an
"issue of blood for twelve years" who believed that Jesus was who he
said he was. She at least believed that he could heal her if she only touched
the hem of his garment. So she crawls through the crowd, touches his hem and is
healed. He turned around and said, "Your faith has made you whole."
Her action made her whole. She could have sat home for the next twelve years,
with the issue of blood, believing that the healing could take place, but she
never would have been healed because she would have still been sitting in the
chair at home. She had to get out of the chair, acting on that belief. Acting is where the faith comes in. She
was acting on the belief that she could be healed. And the action is what
released God's healing, which is all around us anyway. Faith is an action. Now
we've got that pinned down.
It's this faith stuff that saves us. How
can that be? Faith is an action, based on some belief. What belief is that?
That's where the crux lies. What belief is it on which we're acting?
We're acting on beliefs all day long.
When we walk down the stairs we act on the belief that gravity will pull us
down and not have us fly off into space. Everything we do is a faith act, but
the faith act that saves us, the faith act of the Bible, the faith act of God
and salvation is a faith act based on the belief, not in gravity, not in
friction, but in God's ability to keep His word. A belief that when God says
something, He does it. No matter how out of the ordinary or against apparent
circumstances it my be.
God says "I'll provide, I'll heal,
I'll protect." If you can find in the Bible a place where God is promising
the people of the Bible something, with few exceptions, you can know that the
same is available to you too, and you can claim that promise. You can say,
"OK, God, I need this money to do this project. I'm going to get started
without the full amount because I'm claiming your promise to provide."
That's a somewhat rough example and I don't want to get off into asking God to
provide for our wants, like a new Cadillac.
So faith, then, is A B C. An A-ct, based
on a B-elief in God's word, and the C-part is the confidence that takes us into
and sustains the action. The confidence that God can and does keep His word.
When we do that particular kind of a
faith act, a faith act based on God's word as opposed to gravity or celestial
mechanics, He says, "Wow, that person trusts me. That person thinks I'm
faithful to my word. Good for you. I'll put a little of my God- Force, my
Life-Force, into you." That's the saving part-when God sees us acting in
trust of Him. We get this Life Force whether or not we get what we're faithing
for. You might be faithing for healing or provision, you might be acting in
faith for anything in your life, on the physical plane, and not get it. In
fact, more than not you probably won't get it. I guarantee you'll always get
what you need. But we often try to get more than we need and wind up short.
"Ah well, God didn't keep His promise." "Oh yeah, I had enough
to pay the bills, but I couldn't go on vacation." Well, that's not the
point.
The point is that we don't always get the
physical things, we don't always get the promise. But that's very secondary.
I'd rather go to heaven with a broken leg, than go to hell healed, able to
walk.
The primary thing is that when we act in
trust, act in faith, God sees that and puts His Life Force in us, and it goes
to work as our redemption, as our passkey into the eternal realm, into the
spiritual world. Regardless of whether we get down here what we were faithing
for, we get this Life Force of God put in us. This is not some change of
attitude. This is a definite force. It's like radio-activity. You can't see it,
hear it, feel it, but get it in your and body pretty soon you die.
This Life Force of God is exactly the
same, but initiates a double happening. Your old self is overcome and your new
self gains life that can last forever. Like radio-activity, God's Life Force is
a definite substance, not some idea. It gets into you, like an xray. You go to
the hospital for an xray or you do this faith act and you get a shot of the
electromagnetic energy of the Life Force of God. That's exactly the process on
a basic level.
But in what does that process result? It
results in God looking at us and seeing His Life Force and not seeing our Death
force, if you will. That Death force is the thing that makes us human people
fall down, the selfishness, the fear. All the little stuff that we go through
that makes us act less than one hundred percent, God-like righteous. That's the
only way we can be around God-if we're one hundred percent God-like righteous.
If we imperfect humans ever come into contact with God's perfection(one hundred
percent righteousness), we die. It's an instantaneous death.
You can look at the story in the early
chapters of Judges, I think, where the Ark of the Covenant was taken by the
Philistines. After time it was sent back to God's people, but when it got back
to a certain village, they opened up the cover and a couple of them looked in.
Fifty thousand and seventy were killed. Fifty thousand symbolizes harvest,
seventy symbolizes spiritual completion compounded with human responsibility.
God shows us through that example that we can't look on His perfection, which
was inside the Ark in the form of the Ten Commandments. With no filter or
buffer between us and God, we die. The covering over the top of the Ark, called
the Mercy Seat is a type of Christ. That filters God's Law up through Christ to
us and protects us. The Mercy Seat symbolizes Christ's intermediary role
between God and us.
When we come into contact with God's
perfection, if we're not perfect, we die. But as humans we can never be
perfect. Not that kind of perfect. You could be the best person in the world
and have an occasional thought that was imperfect. We can't be perfect like
God. But when we do this faith act, acting in trust of God's word, and He puts
His Life Force inside us, it covers over us just like the ozone layer of the
earth. Even though only molecules thick, the ozone layer protects the earth
from the sun's harmful ultra-violet rays.
The same thing happens when we faithe and
God's Spirit comes inside us. It covers us over and were protected from God's
perfect righteousness. He can look at us. He can pay attention to us now
because we've got that little stuff inside us. Anybody that's "like"
God gets to go where God is, and do the stuff that God is doing. It's called by
many names: the after-life, eternal life, ultimate salvation, or being saved,
as Traditional Christianity would say. That's what saves you, the implantation
of God's Spirit.
Try looking up the word faith in all the
gospels, and the letters of Paul. Romans, Galations, and Hebrews are the best
books to find out about faith. It's very clear in there, when you do some
extensive study, that it says, "we're saved by faith." "We're
saved by faith." Other places say that we're saved by a couple other
things like grace or belief, but grace is usually coupled with faith, and we've
already seen that belief and faith are the same thing. We’re saved by doing
this verb, this action based on God's word.
This is the basic process we must
understand. It's a faith act that saves us. It opens the door to God's Spirit.
When God's Spirit is inside us, it does exactly the same thing it does anywhere
else. It works Good. It works Love. And Love provides, protects, guides, heals;
all of those things that we need to get through our physical days.
If that's all true, then the first thing
I want to do is figure out how to act in trust or faithe. I want the clearest
possible example of faithing, trusting in God for something that He's said. I
want the very clearest way I can find to do that so I can really lock it down
and be sure I'm OK. Sure I'm doing what I need to do.
In our daily life, it's a bit harder to
do than we think. Things get in the way. How can I always be sure that I'm not
acting out of selfish motives, twisting the process around somehow? I can't be
sure, but I don't want to take any more chances than I have to. We're talking
about our eternal soul, not the purchase of a two-bit candy bar. Our eternal
salvation. If that stuff is really true, then I want some of it. Even if, in
the process, eternity turns out not to be true, maybe I'm still farther ahead
by doing the right thing anyway. I win in either case. I wind up doing the
right thing, plus I get the eternal side of the process.
If it's going to be a bit difficult to
figure out in my personal life what to do for a faith act, I'll go to the Bible
and see what it says there.
If you'll go to Matthew six, you'll find
three different kinds of faithing listed. It begins the chapter by saying,
"When you do your alms," which is more properly translated,
"When you do your righteousness," when you do your acts of
righteousness, your faithing. "When you do your acts of righteousness,
don't do them out in public. That's the main message of the chapter, and it
lists three different things that are considered by God as acts of
righteousness. Giving money is first. It says alms again, but the word used is
different than the first alms, which I said is really righteousness. Prayer and
fasting are also included.
These are acts of faith. Giving money to
someone who turns you on to God's word, which is the same as the tithing in the
Old Testament. The amount is meant to be the same for the New Testament people
and us, but that's where it goes. It goes to the preacher or the one who helps
you understand God and helps you grow spiritually. That's the person who's
supposed to get those alms.
Prayer. Again, is not to be done in
public. It says to do it in your closet. In your closet. And as far as I'm
concerned, you should always pray out loud. Even when you're amongst some
people, you can still mutter under you breath. It's supposed to be an act that
impinges on the physical reality. I think that should always be heavily
preferred to any "thinking" prayer. Don't think your prayer. You can
think about God, but you better set aside a good amount of your prayer time for
the out-loud kind. It'll mean way more to you when you hear yourself. It's
psychologically good for us to pray out loud.
Again with fasting, you're told in
Matthew not to do it in front of people. I think you can figure out how fasting
can be a faithing act. It has to do, at least, with God's provision.
The fourth clear faith act in the Bible
is communion. It is outlined in as much detail, in many places, as one could
want. Communion becomes God's word through Christ, because at the last supper,
when Jesus first instituted communion, he's the one who said, "This is my
Body." He said, "This is my blood. Do this and remember me."
Remember the things that it pertains to as far as Christ is concerned.
That's still a little too abstract. We
know what the act is, because it's outlined in four different books: Matthew
26, Mark 14, Luke 22 and 1 Corinthians 11. Paul is the best one to look at
because his is the most extensive account. It gives not only instructions on
what to do, but he explains it. That's what Paul's job is: to explain all the
stuff from the Old Testament that points to Jesus.
When you go to those passages you know
what to do. We take a cup of wine and some kind of bread. You can be extra
picky about it and make sure it's red wine and it's unleavened, broken bread,
or you can take an animal cracker and water or orange juice. What you do is not
so important. It's mainly symbolic. Having red wine instead of orange juice is
not going to save you or not. It doesn't make any difference. Your discernment,
what you remember, what you focus on is what's important. And , of course, you
focus on Christ.
OK. We're at the last supper, and Christ
institutes communion. As the Son of God, the spokesman directly for God, he
says this is what you should do. "Do this in remembrance of me." Now
I'm acting on God's word.
We have to take an indirect route to find
out what was going on there. They were at the last supper, but the last supper
was really the Passover. They were celebrating the Passover. The Passover is
where we'll find out what communion is all about. We know Jesus said "This
is my body, and this is my blood," but they were having the Passover. He
took the wine of the Passover and said, "This is my blood." Whose
blood was it before that? If it was His blood now, whose blood was it then? It
was symbolizing the blood of the very first Passover.
The bread also was there, and Jesus said,
"This is my body." His body symbolizes the body of the lamb of
the first Passover.
We have to spend a bit of time with
Melchizedek. The first Communion
happened in about 1900 BC. Yeah,
almost 2000 years before Christ.
Genesis 14:17-20 says:
Gen 14:17 And the king of Sodom went out
to meet him (Abram) after his return from the slaughter of Chedorlaomer, and
the kings that were with him, at the valley of Shaveh, which is the king’s
dale.
Gen 14:18 And Melchizedek king of salem brought forth bread and
wine: and he was the priest of the most high God.
Gen 14:19 And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of the
most high God,. Possessor of heaven and earth:
Gen 14:20 and blessed be the most high God, which hath delivered
thine enemies into thy hand. And
he gave him tithes of all.
Who is this guy Melchizedek?
He’s the king of Jerusalem, but he’s also a priest of God. And he came from Jerusalem to meet
Abram. Sodom was at least 40 and
as much as 60 miles from Jerusalem.
This is quiestionable behavior.
It doesn’t make sense in the usual idea of what kings do. Melchizedek isn’t out to war. It doesn’t’; say that he has any
objective, just that he came out and met Abram. Just wanted to say hello? And brought a snack? What, no grapes, figs, olives, dates,
nuts: Only bread and wine. Because of a statement by Paul, many
teachers say that Melchizedek is what’s calle a Christophany, an apperance of
Christ in the Old Testament. Paul
doesn’t say in Hebrews 7 tht Melshi8zedek didn’t have any parents. He said that he didn’t know Melchizedek’s
heritage. Here ore some definitions
out of Strong’s concordance:
Without father- From G1 (as a negative particle) and G3962; fatherless,
that is, of unrecorded
paternity:
Without mother- From G1 (as a negative particle) and G3384; motherless,
that is, of unknown
materity:
Without descent- From G1 (as a negative particle) and G1075; unregistered
as to birth
Paul wasn’t making the pint about Melchizedek’s bloodline, but
that he was NOT of the tribe that would have been given tithes. The Levites.
The book of Jasher clears this up by telling us that Abram spent
39 years living with Noah and shem.
All that time he was learning about God. In the story we’re looking at it call Melchizedek
Adonizedek, and says the same was Shem.
Abram was only following God’s instruction to tithe to his
teacher. When the Levites finally
came along, three generations later, they were assigned the role of Priests and
teachers of god, and thereby received the tithes of the people.
The association of Abram to Shem and Noah makes it certain that
Abram wasn’t just wandering around the desert and one day God happened to talk
to him. He was connected to God
from birth. And this is important
to the account of Abraham being told to sacrifice his only son Isaac. That was just the last in a very long
list of faithing acts that God taught Abraham. Abraham had a very long history with God. That may be why we have that puzzling
fact in the story of Isaac’s almost sacrifice. Abraham doesn’t even seem worried by having to kill his only
son. He even tells the two guys
that went with them that he and Isaac would return. He says, “we” will go, worship and return. Not I will return. He says, “We.”
Let's quickly go through that first
Passover and see what was happening there. All the people were in Egypt, just
before the Exodus. Nine plagues had gone by: lice, frogs, water turned to
blood. Now the first-born being killed was about to happen; even the first-born
of the animals. God sends word to the people through Moses saying a catastrophe
was going to happen. The Bible doesn't outline the announcement, but I'll
paraphrase. "A catastrophe is going to happen, but you can avoid being
touched by this calamity if you do these things."
God gives them a long list of instructions.
They were find a "perfect" lamb, take it on the tenth day of the
month, and keep it for four days. “On the fourteenth day of the month, kill it.
Take the blood of the lamb, put it all around the door and go in the house.
There's more, but when the Death Angel comes over and he starts killing all the
first born, if he sees blood on the door he'll pass
over. You'll be saved, you won't
be killed. You will be saved from death.” Let me interject a reminder. The
first born were not only children. A sixty-year-old man could be the first born
of his family. They were saved by the blood.
The rest of the instructions, because
they were happening inside the house, didn't effect the saving from death. The
blood on the door, no matter what was going on inside, even if the house was
empty, told the Death Angel not to touch that house. They were saved from death
by the blood. Now clearly that's a complete concept. It had nothing to do with
what's going on in the house.
But what was happening in the house was
extremely important also. It didn't save their lives, but it did something
else. Remember we have two elements at the communion table. We have the wine
and the bread. So we have the blood and the body of the lamb.
Here's what they were instructed to do
with that lamb. Take it in the house, roast it, don't boil it and don't break
any of its bones. When it's finished, put on your shoes, your coat, and with
your staff in hand, eat in haste.
You know there were no Rabbis, there
weren't temple police that went around and looked in the windows or opened the
door to find out if they were standing up while they ate. No one checked to see
if they roasted or boiled the lamb or were taking their time eating. Nobody but
God knew what they were doing in those houses. But all those instructions came
about so that they would be ready for the long desert trek on which they were
about to embark. They had at least a three-month walk to get from where they
were to the Promised Land. Even though it took them forty years, it was still
only a three-month trek. They had to all be healthy for such an ordeal. That's
the point.
We have confirmation of the eaten lamb being
responsible for healing in Psalm 105, which outlines the Exodus. Two thins are listed there in verse
37. They came our rich, which was
the fulfillment of the promise by God to Abraham. And that there wasn’t a “feeble” person among them. When I looked up “feeble”, I found this?
A primitive root; to totter or waver
(through weakness of the legs, especially the ankle); by implication to falter,
stumble, faint or fall;
Anyone who had leg or ankle ailments didn’t
have them in the morning. How
appropriate for the walk to Sinai.
Eating the roasted lamb provided their
physical healing. The blood on the door provided their spiritual healing, if
you will. The blood saved their lives, the lamb saved their bodies.
That's why we have the two elements. We
have the wine and the bread. Jesus took those two elements, the blood of the
lamb and the body of the lamb that they were celebrating at that Passover, and
said, "From now on you guys, this isn't the blood of the lamb anymore.
This is my blood." Obviously, it wasn't the actual blood of the
lamb, it represented the blood of that first Passover lamb. "And this
bread, which represents that the flesh of that first lamb, this bread now
represents my body."
We’ll mention this again, but Exodus
12:46 shows that the Passover was an in-home thing.
In Exodus 24:8 we see that blood is
included in the process of God overlooking out imperfections. After Moses fives the Law of God to the
people, and the people give their word that they will keep the Law, God has
Moses take it a step further. The
Israelite’s word was not enough.
God topped it off with the shedding of blood The lesson through the whole Bible is that we can’t get next
to God unless some blood is shed.
This is confirmed be Leviticus 17:11
where God states that the life of the soul resides in the blood. The blood is life. Some “life” has to be given in order to
make up for out imperfections.
We’re saved be the blood. That takes care
of the sin part of Communion. But we have to lock down the idea that the bread
is not for saving, but healing.
In microcosm, we see that Communion is
the new covenant talked about be Jeremiah in chapter 31, verse 31. The Communion act is a faith act that
accesses the Holy spirit. That’s
what Jeremiah indicates by telling us that God will put His law in our hearts.
One idea that must be stressed Is what
Paul clarifies in his writing on Communion. In 1 Corinthians 11 he is careful to remind us that we take Communion
in a worthy manner, and not like the Corinthians were doing. They were having a drunken bash and
tacking Communion on the end of it.
They were taking in an unworthy manner. “Unworthily” as Paul puts it.
So we have two elements. Each one of
those acts is a faith act. As we drink the wine, we remember Jesus. We discern
his sacrifice. We don't look at ourselves to see if we're worthy. We're not
there to drink a whole gallon of port. We're there to remember Jesus and what
He did. When we drink with that proper discernment it provides our saving from
death. That's God's word or promise. We're saved from death. We get saved, our
sins are not looked at any more.
Now the only way our sins can't be seen
by God, is if He sees Himself first. When He looks at me without the covering
of His Spirit, He sees all my junk. If this taking of the wine takes care of
that and saves me, this taking communion must be a faith act. Drinking the wine
is a faith act. God's word says I'll be saved if I do this. So I'm to take Him
at His word.
The same goes with the bread. When we eat
the bread, we're recognizing all the physical punishment that Jesus took. By
the way, only one in ten ever survived a Roman scourging. One in ten. Nine out
of ten who took the Roman lash died. And that's not all that happened to
Christ's body.
If you go to Isaiah 53, which is about
the suffering Messiah, you'll find it says in verse six, "All we like
sheep have gone astray, and the Lord (God) hath laid on him (Jesus) the
iniquity of us all." All of our shortcomings. Iniquity, sins, all that
means is being short of God's one hundred percent righteousness. It doesn't
just mean murder and rape, etc. The basic, generic meaning of sin is missing
the mark. That's the literal translation of the Greek word homartia. Miss the
mark. That's all, miss the mark. Who hasn't missed the mark of God's
perfection? And there's no judgment in that. It just says that we did less than
perfection, and we have to be perfect to make it in.
Well, all our shortcomings, all the times
we didn't measure up, which is everything we do, is laid on Christ. It's
covered by His crucifixion.
If you go back up into verse five you
find out that He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our
iniquities, and with His stripes ye are healed. In other words, when He gets hit, we get healed.
Our infirmities are put on Him.
Let's put this into practical terms. Two
thousand years ago this guy was beat up really bad, he was nailed to a cross,
and when his blood poured out and he died, he took on himself every sickness,
every cold we've ever had, all our broken bones, our lameness past, present and
future. They were already healed when He took His stripes. The healing took
place then. What we have to do is find a way to access that healing.
The same thing happens with our sins, our
falling short. All the falling short we ever did, do or will do is covered by
His death two thousand years ago. It's already taken care of, so all we have to
do is access it.
I think I must warn you against any kind
of adulteration of the communion act by an outside person. Do this alone. This
wasn't meant to be done in church. It was meant as a home thing. They didn't
all gather in the main room and roast the lamb there and put the blood on the
door there. They went to their houses. It was meant to be, and started out in
one house. Exodus 12:46 outlines the at-home concept.
I certainly don't mean for your family to
be excluded, but I do suggest that in the beginning you be alone with God so
you don't feel any outside pressures. Remember the closet?
Additionally, when we go back to the
concept of faithing, that putting in of God's Spirit, God's the only one who
can do that. God, not some priest, not some minister, not someone on the
street. This is strictly between you and God. Don't ever let anyone put any
rules about this communion on you. "Oh, you have to be a member of the
church before you can take communion." Bull Dooky. Not true. This is God's
thing, and you and God work it out together. And again, it's better not to
split your focus by having someone else involved. Do it alone 'till you feel
strong and confident about it.
Even after you feel confident, I suggest
that mainly you be alone with God when you take communion. Do it on special
occasions with other people, for specific reasons that are for all of you
together, like celebrating Passover. But make this one ofyour regular faith
acts Hang out alone with God, so that you can hang out. It's hard to hang out
when we're thinking about what other people might think or hear or think about
you when you do it.
At this point I'm going to pretend that
we're both taking communion, alone, with God. You have the choice of
participating or listening in. You can stop right now and get whatever you have
there. Wine, water, juice. Bread cracker.
The wine and the bread. We'll take the
bread first. First Peter echoes Isaiah in verse twenty-four, "By His
(Jesus) stripes ye were healed." This is after the resurrection. So he
said "ye were healed." In other words, "Your healing already
took place." When you take the bread, personalize that. Thank God for His
healing, and talk some faith as well as take the bread in faith and say
"By His stripes I was healed." Take the bread now and say it with me,
"By His stripes I was healed, in Jesus' name."
The wine, again, covers our shortcomings.
It's by God's grace. He sits up there and He's such a gracious, merciful, longsuffering
God that He gives us this wonderful thing, salvation, for simple little faith
act. It's so easy for us to do. All we have to do is remember Jesus, and ask
God for His mercy. Remember that this wine represents Jesus' blood and the
blood covers us. This was given to us to remove the separation from Him; that
will kill us forever. This faith act allows us to come back into contact, allow
Him to make contact with us, and in His Love draw us back in.
So take the cup now, and thank God for
His grace, asking Him for His continued mercy, in Jesus' name. Say it with me.
Thank for your grace, Lord. Have mercy on me, in Jesus' name.
I want to urge you to do some in-depth
study of the communion. You might want to look at the following passages: Psalm
105:37, Leviticus 17:11, Jeremiah 31:31, Matthew 8:17, plus the chapters
already mentioned.
Pay particular attention to what Paul has
to say in 1 Corinthians 11:24-29; especially where he says that worthily
partaking is partaking with proper discernment(as opposed to being worthy,
which we can't).
Remember that one of the things we're
trying to do is to show God that we trust Him; by doing something that's really
against apparent circumstance. We just took communion. We just had the wine and
the bread, and that's crazy stuff. If you put it out of the context of God and
the Bible, and do those same types of acts, people would think you're crazy.
Because it evidences a belief that nobody else can prove. They can't see God,
can't hear Him, feel Him. Neither can we, yet here we are acting like there is
this thing that's actually going to do some good in our lives.
It's a faith act that overcomes some kind
of risk, some kind of doubt. And the bigger the faith act, the more the risk,
the more our reluctance. "Oh, I can't afford to tithe. I haven't got
enough money." Well, you can't afford not to. You can't afford not to act
in faith. Every time you find a way to act in faith, do it. You can't afford to
pass up a chance to faithe. You can't afford to wait even one day, and think
you'll do it tomorrow.
My personal opinion is that we get a shot
of God's Spirit and It starts to work It's way out of our bodies and soon we
don't have any. We have to renew our commitment, we have to renew our faith
every day.
Your soul can't afford for you not to
faithe. Taking communion every day, as some do, might be a part of the way that
helps you stay saved. It's a faith act.
God’s promise to implant some of His
Spirit in your body will come true. I know, because God is real and He does
what He says.