The Rejuvenating Power of the Gospel

As the son of a pastor I know I heard my dad explain the Lord's Supper hundreds of times. He often referred to Paul's declaration in 1 Corinthians 11:26 that "as often as you do this, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes." But it took many years to understand what Paul meant. And I am still growing in that understanding.

I'm not talking about the controversies surrounding the bread and the cup that, ironically, have turned this demonstration of union with Christ into a divisive thing down through church history. What I really want to explore is this: just who are we proclaiming the death of Christ to in the Supper?

Of course, as the church continues to see in the Supper the centrality of Christ crucified and risen, we proclaim to the world that the church is His, and under His command. But I believe there is another audience that is just as important. I believe that in the Supper we proclaim the death of Christ to ourselves, and in so doing, bathe ourselves in the gospel every time. Or at least we should!

Growing up the gospel for me was really just the minimum amount of truth you had to believe in order to get on the bus to heaven. And once you grasped it, and believed it, you largely moved on from it to more weightier topics like not going to movies, drinking wine, and dancing. It looked to me like the gospel was only for unbelievers, and after you believed, you forgot the gospel in order to focus on the laws of Christianity. But this is really backwards! Biblically, the law is for unbelievers since it is what demonstrates their brokenness and inability to live up to God's standard. And the law is supposed to bring us to Christ who stands in the middle of a glorious garden of grace we know as the gospel. This gospel is much more than a minimized, homogenized, dehydrated, 4 sentence sales pitch for team Jesus; it is the glorious story of God's redemptive plan, first hinted at in Genesis 3:15 and magnificently worked out to completion in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

This gospel is a rejuvenating truth that must become part of our daily spiritual intake as Christ-followers. As Tim Keller has so simply stated it, we must preach the gospel to our selves, and do it regularly. As one hymn writer puts it "Jesus keep me near the Cross, there a precious fountain, free to all a healing stream, flows from Calvary's mountain."

In a series of posts I will be taking up this concept of the rejuvenating power of the gospel. Until then,

Hope this helps,

David