About the Author: Rob is a entrepreneur in Statesboro, GA, where he envisions and pursues missional-shaped business for the kingdom. He and his wife Sherri have been married for 18 years and together have three sons and a daughter. Rob believes the mission of the gospel is summed up in four simple phrases: know God, obey Jesus, make disciples, and plant churches. This is the pursuit of his life, as well as the point of his blog. I find it more than odd, but terribly common, that Christians know very little about Jesus. Most Christians know very little about Christian doctrine and practice but they know even less about Jesus. The reason for this is not hard to find in most contexts.
First, ministers did not learn much about Jesus in college and seminary. In the best schools we were taught how to exegete Scripture and how to understand basic doctrine. Catholics are given additional courses in canon law and liturgy that most evangelicals know nothing about. Both evangelicals and Catholics are given a course, or at least a part of a course, on Christology. They know about the two natures (Jesus was God and man) and about how the church developed its understanding of Jesus in the face of heresies. But hardly anyone learns in depth about Jesus himself. How does he think and feel, what are his values, what issues in life truly concern him?
Protestants are generally more interested in the text of the Bible, especially the Pauline letters and certain parts of the moral code of the Old Testament. Catholics are enamored with the church as the teaching authority established by Jesus. One old German lady told a Roman Catholic priest a few years ago, "The way I size up Christianity is like this: The Catholics worship the Church, the Protestants worship the Bible, and there are darn few who ever get to know Jesus Christ!"
I believe the old German lady is right. The Church and the Bible have become our message. But our message is Jesus Christ. The Church and the Bible are the medium of the message. The New Testament has authority because Jesus Christ gave his authority to those human authors who composed it. Evangelism is introducing people to Jesus Christ, not to doctrines about Christ or the faith.
Why is it that we've have settled for preaching the medium rather than the message? The consequences of this are immense. You may study the Scriptures your whole life, or attend Mass every single day, and miss Jesus.
The four Gospel writers (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) give us a divinely inspired account of the life and thought of Jesus. How did he respond to different audiences and in different cultural contexts? Because they give us a truly human account we can know a great deal about Jesus' life and teaching. Trying to grasp what they actually told us helps us get to know the real Jesus.
I suggest that the way to know Jesus is to read the Gospels and ask questions. Listen to the various interpretations of the Gospels but then meditate prayerfully before the accounts. Try to enter into the scenes pictured in the story and thus enter into the heart and mind of Jesus of Nazareth as he lived in these real scenes.
What we desperately need is a deeper knowledge of the God-man, Jesus the Christ. We can have it if we hunger for it, read the Gospels in this way and ask the Spirit to give this to us. Seeking to know Jesus will totally change your life. It might even bring about the real ecumenism I long to see in the coming years. After all, true Christians are united first in Jesus, not in their agreement on every doctrine and debate.
Sometime back I posted on "How the Gospel Applies to Christian's Refusal to Take Communion." In that post I made the fight-picking statement,"It is not easy to preach the truth that we are saved by the Grace of Christ alone, and that is through the vicarious humanity of Jesus and in its substitutionary bearing upon faith that we can properly believe, but this is what may be proclaimed at the Holy Communion as nowhere else....
"I have found in my own ministry that it is easiest to preach the unconditional nature of grace, and the vicarious humanity and substitutionary role of Christ in faith, at the celebration of the Eucharist, where the call for repentance and faith is followed by Communion in the Body and Blood of Christ in which we stretch out empty hands to receive the bread and wine: 'Nothing in my hands I bring, simply to the Cross I cling.'
"There at the Holy Table I know that I cannot rely on my own faith but only on the vicarious faith of the Lord Jesus in the total substitution of his atoning sacrifice on the Cross. Salvation and justification are by the grace of God alone. Faith, as John Calvin taught, is an empty vessel, so that when you approach the Table of the Lord, it is not upon your faith that you rely, but upon Christ and his Cross alone. That is what the Covenant in his body and blood which the Saviour has forged for us actually, practically, and really means. It is of the very essence of the Gospel that salvation and justification are by the grace of Christ alone, in which he takes your place, that you may have his place.
"I believe this emphasis in the mission of the Church may well be more important than anything else today. There is a kind of subtle Pelagianism in preaching and teaching that has the effect of throwing people back in the last resort on their own act of faith, so that in the last analysis responsibility is taken off the shoulders of the Lamb of God and put upon the shoulders of the poor sinners, and we know well in our hearts that we cannot cope with it. Is that not one of the things that keeps pushing people away from the Church? I think here the reluctance of many people to approach the Holy Table, which happens on Communion Sundays when people fail to understand the absolutely free and unconditional nature of the Grace of the Lord Jesus Christ. He came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. Through the miracle of his Cross, he turns our sins and failings into the very means he uses in order to save us and bind us to himself. That is precisely what he pledges to us in the Communion of his Body and Blood." (Emphasis mine)
These thoughts are so key as we seek to apply the purpose of the Lord's Supper and answer questions in 1 Corinthians 11. And in this passage it seems that eating and drinking unworthily is about how you act at the table, and not what you've done before you come to the table.
When we tell people they shouldn't partake because of a sin that must be confessed or repented of first, we make the table moment something it is not about: me. The purpose of the table is to point me to who Jesus is and what He has done...not what I have done or must do. Making the table about the latter unwittingly turns the table into a moment fertile for cross-destroying evils:
In conclusion then, when a pastor tells people to refuse the elements or just pass them along or pass them by when the bread and cup are offered is to refuse the very thing God offers as a means of repenting from the sin we're saying should keep them from the table! Oh, how I've ignored the true meaning and purpose of the elements when I've said such things. What tragic irony for the people of God when these things are communciated.
May the Lord abundantly pour out His grace on us for this grave error and turn our hearts into the richness of His mercy...even for this grave error I've committed against His cross. What joy there is in eating and drinking because of what He's done for me and not what I've done for Him.
