Friday, July 29, 2005

Eat the Light-Communion thoughts

For several weeks in our communion meal I have been exhorting you to eat and drink Jesus. Why do we do this? One, because it is a sacrament instituted by our Lord Jesus. We do it because He said to do it. And if you have walked with Jesus for any length of time, you have come to realize that He did not give us frivolous things to do. What He tells us to do has reason behind it, even if that reason is somewhat hidden in the mystery of God. It might not fully make sense to us but we have come to know, through faith, that it does to God. An unbeliever cannot be satisfied with such reasoning of belief but that is a truism.

But let us think about what is going on in this eating of Jesus. We have come to understand that sin is lack. It is a want of conformity unto God’s perfection. In words that we can comprehend, it is a lack of light. There is no way to get more light by eliminating darkness. We must eliminate the darkness by getting more light. There is a sense in which, if we have Jesus, we have all of the light. But I believe that is only true in principle and denies the organic world that God has made. In God’s world, light grows. The sun rises but it continues to rise until it fully shines. Jesus is like that with us. If He has risen in your hearts, well and good. But He must continue to rise until He shines at midday. So, we must continue to eat the Light that is Jesus until we are so full of that Light that there is no darkness left. This will take us a lifetime and more and will not come to complete fruition until the resurrection, when Jesus will fill us completely and no darkness will remain. But we come to this meal as a means of seeing the Light, partaking of it and being lit by Jesus. So eat the Light.

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