Beautiful Body and Blood

I’ve spent a lot of extra time listening to this song, trying to get these tricky rhythms!  The most difficult section (and it’s repeated, so it’s important to get it right) is where the words say:

Born to be broken and spilled out for us;

And as I was practicing that over and over, the power in those words suddenly hit me. He was born to be broken.

Mothers and fathers have dreams for their children and we spend our lives figuring out what we were born to do. Thomas Edison was born to give us the ease of a light switch. Johannes Gutenburg was born to bring us the gift of reading God’s Word for ourselves. And Jesus, the King of Glory, was born “to take the nails and wear the thorns.”

1 Timothy 1:15 

Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners – of whom I am the worst. 

In Peter's message to the crowd on the day of Pentecost, he had this to say about his Lord: 

Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death. (Acts 2:22-23)

Acts 3:18 

But this is how God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, saying that his Messiah would suffer. 

Christ’s beautiful, selfless love for us meant that he would take on flesh and step into this sinful world for the sole purpose of suffering an excruciating death to atone for our ugly sin. It was God’s plan from the beginning.

The sacrament of communion is a vivid reminder of Christ’s beautiful sacrifice for us. We are given a time of quiet, purposeful reflection while holding in our hands a visual representation of His body and blood.

Dr. Sam Storms, author and founder of Enjoying God Ministries, wrote an essay regarding Christian sacraments. In his essay, he closes with this thought: “The Spirit works profoundly at the time of communion to awaken in my mind and to impress upon my heart the eternal significance of Christ’s finished work at Calvary and his love, not merely for people in general, but for me in particular.”

As we open our hands to hold the elements on Sunday, may we open our hearts to the beauty of Christ’s sacrifice - that he was born to suffer for us.