Seat, it's great to have you here with us this second week of
Advent. Just before we get started this
morning, just want to let you know some of you may be aware of
a bill that is been in discussion this week in our
Parliament, Bill C9, and the discussion around removing
sincerely held religious belief as a defense of free speech.
And I just want to let you know that Pastor Kirk and I are aware
we have spoken to a number of other pastors in the area and we
have put together a letter to send to our MPs to express our
concern about that. We would stand with the
government in wanting to make sure that no one is a victim of
violence because of incitement through words.
But we have a deep concern and conviction that we are able to
preach the whole counsel of God without fear.
And I know this reality. I know sooner or later, if you
are here at Forward Church, I will end up saying something.
Pastor Kirk will end up saying something because we preach from
the word of God. That's going to bother you.
It's going to invent you. It's going to maybe strike a
nerve with you. That's what happens when we get
an encounter of truth that transcends culture and we would
never want to allow the culture of the time to affect what we
preach. So we're always going to preach
the full council of God's word here at Forward Church.
And whatever happens with legislation, that wouldn't stop
us from doing that. But we think it's our duty to
respond and use the the levers of influence that we have to
make our concerns known. And so just wanted to keep you
aware in case you've heard some things about this bill.
There's nothing to be scared of. God's in control, God's
sovereign, but we want to do our due diligence in letting our
position be known to those who He has placed an authority over
us. I'm going to invite you to turn
to Matthew chapter one, verse 18.
You walked in the door and you would know this Christmas season
has arrived, right? The Christmas tree was out
there. In fact, the Christmas trees are
out there. I'm so thankful for the team of
people that have been in decorating out there in here
over the last week or so. Man, it looks, I mean, yeah,
let's give them a round of applause.
I, I forgot last week the lights are going up in here and I
walked in. I was like, man, this is
beautiful, this is so great. And just loved watching the tree
come in this week and everybody rally around and work.
And yesterday we had Sharing Christmas and it was amazing to
watch our guests walk into the building.
Thank you for all of you. We had so many who served at
Sharing Christmas. Let's give them a round of
applause too. One lady, she walked in and and
I was close to the door and I heard her say this.
It's like heaven. And, and what I was so blessed
by yesterday was I think that was the experience of a lot of
our guests in the building, that because of you who served and
put in so much time and effort, man, you brought a little bit of
Jesus into the lives of everybody who stepped into the
door. It was such a blessing.
I, I mean, I just heard so much feedback from our guests, the
people who attended, just how overwhelmed they were.
And we're hoping to see many of them back at a Christmas Eve
service this year. I said Christmas arrived, some
of you, it arrived November 1st because you're weirdos.
It was like Halloween done Christmas here.
But traditionally this season that we find ourselves in in the
church calendar is not Christmas.
This is Advent. The the Christmas or the
Christmas starts December 25th with the Christmas and then it's
12 days of feasting and celebration.
Some of us would probably be better off if Christmas was
limited to 12 days of feasting celebration.
I don't know I would be if it wasn't like 2 months of feasting
and celebration. But traditionally it goes from
December 25th to January or or December 25th to January 5th.
And then Advent is this season of four weeks leading up to
Christmas. And Advent comes from the Latin
word Adventist, which means arrival or coming and see.
Advent is, is meant to be a season not of feasting and
celebration, but of preparation and anticipation.
It's, it's this season where we talk about these four things
that we're talking about over these four weeks of, of hope and
peace and joy and love, but in anticipation of Christ coming to
bring those. And then now on the other side
of his first coming in anticipation of his second
coming, when it will come in full completion.
So Advent is a season of not yet.
Advent is a season of of tension and, and I have a sneaking
suspicion, although we probably haven't consciously thought
about this as churches or as a culture, that that's exactly why
we've kind of written Advent out of the story, because we love
everything to be wrapped up neat and tidy.
We don't like the seasons of tension, we like the seasons of
completion. We want to move straight from
tension to resolution, but Advent forces us to live in this
in between time. It makes me think of the reality
that Amanda and I have faced when we have moved houses
before. I don't know what moving is like
for you, but this is a little bit of what moving.
I don't have a, I don't have a picture of Amanda, but that is
basically the face that my wife makes.
She said I could share this. I got permission.
When we move and everything is just in, in chaos and in boxes
and our life is in pieces around us, she just freezes because she
just feels overwhelmed. She, she, she gets paralyzed in
the center of it. And I think for a lot of us,
like that picture in some way symbolizes how the entirety of
the world feels just chaotic, uncertain, unsteady.
Everything in, I mean, the pieces feel like they're all
there, but we're not sure where to find them.
I I, I, I think that's the spirit of our age, this spirit
of uncertainty that we live in where it feels like either
everything is falling apart or everything could fall apart
tomorrow morning when we open up the news, right?
I don't know if you've been, I feel like I've been living that
for the last six years. There's just this low level of
anxiety that just permeates everything, all of culture and,
and gets weaponized by social media.
That's the society. Why low?
And then there's the personal level, right?
There's the reality that always, at all times in all of our
lives, all it takes is a single phone call or text and your life
gets flipped upside down. All it takes is is 4 simple
words. These four simple words, hey, we
need to talk. And all of a sudden everything
kind of starts spinning around you.
We just live our lives and make our plans.
They get upended all the time by a job loss or by a diagnosis or
by a secret that gets brought from the darkness into the
light. And I, I just want to let you
know that that uncertainty, that, that feeling that peace
could be shattered, that that reality, that peace does get
shattered. That's nothing new.
It's not a new reality. It is what it looks like to live
in this world. It, it's the world that Jesus
enters into. So let's, let's look at this
story, because this is the story of Jesus arrival on to the
scene. This is the story of the
nativity. Don't take my word for it.
Matthew says this in Matthew 118.
He says that the birth of Jesus came about this way.
Now listen to what the this way is, how Jesus birth comes about.
After his mother Mary had been engaged to Joseph, it was
discovered before they came together that she was pregnant
from the Holy Spirit. That's the story that Jesus
enters into a story of relational chaos, right?
This is the story of Joseph, who is the earthly father, the one
who will take care of and father Jesus here on earth.
He knows what it's like to have a life thrown into disarray with
an announcement that comes to him with a word that comes to
him. One moment Joseph is there and
he is looking forward to his upcoming wedding.
Man, he's stoked and excited. He's got this wonderful fiance
by the name of Mary. They're looking forward to
getting married. The next thing that he knows, he
finds out that the woman he's engaged to is pregnant and he's
never slept with her. Imagine being Mary trying to
explain this to Joseph. It's not that I slept with
anybody else. The Holy Spirit came and now I'm
going to have a baby, Joseph. And it's not your baby and you
know it's not your baby, but just trust me, it's the Holy
Spirit. This is not a relational speed
bump in a relationship, is it? This is this is not like Mary
and Joseph debating, OK, when we get married, whose parents are
we going to spend Passover with? No, this is total relational
crisis. This is a life altering moment.
I don't in a Canadian culture. We just don't understand the
level of what is going on. This is an honor shame culture
and this is incredible shame on Joseph because either Joseph did
it or Mary went behind Joseph's back in either way, it's not
good. Joseph's peace in this moment,
man. Matthew makes it clear to us
again, Matthew is speaking to a Jewish audience who understood
very well when he said that Jesus birth came about in this
way. This is scandalous.
His life has been blown to pieces.
And so today I want to look at Joseph's story to find out this
How can we find peace when our world is falling to pieces?
Because Joseph's world has been turned upside down.
Joseph's world is falling to pieces.
So what's he going to do? Well, let's read verse 19.
So her husband Joseph, being a righteous man, not wanting to
disgrace her publicly, decided to divorce her secretly.
Remember last week we were looking at the story of Simeon,
and it's interesting that Simeon also had that word righteous
applied to him, that Simeon was a a devout and righteous man.
And now we're told Joseph is a righteous man.
We should talk about what does that word righteous mean?
Well, righteous means that we have a right standing with God.
So it's saying that Joseph in God's eyes had a right standing
with him. He was in in good stead with
God. Righteousness, though, comes
through faith in Christ. In the Old Testament and in this
moment, it's faith that God is a promise, keeping God who will
keep his word in bringing a rescuer, in bringing a Messiah.
And so in the Old Testament, people are saved by faith in
believing in the truth that God's promise will come to pass.
In the New Testament, they're saved by faith in the same
Jesus. And we are saved by faith in
trusting that that rescuer did come, that Savior has come as
the Savior of the world, that that Jesus was that one who was
promised. And then faith works itself out
in obedience. It displays itself in the way
that righteousness, good works show up in our life.
It's the evidence of trust. That's that's what obedience is.
It's the evidence of trust. So Joseph, as you can see in
here, he's a man who wants to do the right thing.
He has faith in God and is wrestling with what it looks
like to be righteous in this. But there's something else I
want you to see. I want you to see that bad
things can happen to righteous people right here.
Here's Joseph. He is, he's sorting through all
of the realities of this world. He, he's confused.
He's sitting there. How could this happen?
He's hurt. He's got a deep sense of
betrayal. He's fearful.
We know he's fearful because he's about to be told don't be
afraid, but he's fearful. His reputation is on the line
and just I think that we need to understand and know that you can
be righteous and still have your world shaken.
You can be righteous and still have all of these emotional
realities that you're grappling through.
You can be righteous and still have a really difficult,
terrible stuff come into your life and be confused about it
and not understand why this is happening.
Being a follower of Jesus does not mean that you will never
have your life fall to pieces, quite the opposite.
Jesus himself later on as he's getting ready to head towards
the cross in John 1633, on the eve of going to the cross, he,
he's talking to his disciples, He's trying to prepare them in
the upper room and he says to them, you will have trouble or
depending on your scripture, you will have suffering in this
world. You'll have times where life
falls to pieces. So if your peace feels shattered
today, if you're in that spot where you feel like the world is
falling to pieces around you, it's not necessarily the case
that you have fallen out of peace and favor with God.
It just means that you are a human being living in a broken
world, and that is the nature and state of things living in
this time of tension, in this time of Advent.
So you can be godly and still be confused.
You you can be faithful, still feel afraid.
You can love God and still struggle to understand what in
the world he's up to. You can be righteous and you can
still have your peace shaken. You still feel like your world
has fallen to pieces around you. Next verse says, but after he
had considered these things and I just imagine here this this
idea of Joseph gets the news and I don't know what type of time
period he is sitting there wrestling dealing with this
stuff, but he's sitting there and he's you can tell he's
trying to it says he's trying to he's a righteous man.
He doesn't want to disgrace Mary.
So how do I do this? How do I love God and how do I
love Mary? Well, right, He's wrestling
through all these emotions. Then an Angel of the Lord
appeared to him in a dream saying Joseph son of David,
Don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife because what has been
conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.
She's going to give birth to a son and you are to name him
Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.
And here's what I want you to see from Joseph's story.
When the world feels like it's falling to pieces, peace is
found when we let God's words speak louder than our emotions
just got all sorts of emotions going on.
But into those emotions, God speaks and he, he says a few
things. I want you to hear the word that
the Angel brings to Joseph because I think there's some
words in here that may be very helpful to your heart this
morning. I know they've been helpful to
my heart this week. First, the first thing we see is
this. God knew Joseph.
Look how the Angel addresses him, bringing a word from God.
Joseph, son of David, he knows him by name.
He knows his story, right? He knows his lineage.
He knows where where Joseph has come from.
And God knows you. He knows your name.
He knows your story as you're here today, or maybe you're
watching online or listening later.
He knows where you're coming from.
He knows what's gone on in your past.
He knows what's brought you to this moment.
It's it's not a generic knowledge that God has of
Joseph. It's a personal knowledge.
It's a it's a deep knowledge. And so just know right now.
God knows the situation that you're in.
And then second thing we see is he knew what he was feeling,
right? What does he say to him?
Joseph, son of David, don't be afraid.
It's, it's not command as much as it is an invitation because
he can't command Joseph's feelings to cease.
It's, it's an invitation to, instead of being wrapped up in
his feelings to change his focus, right?
We get so overwhelmed in the moment we come into these spaces
where our world is falling to pieces that we, all of us, we
just get tunnel vision and it's all we can see.
And this is an invitation by God to just, hey, you're not alone
in this. I know about it and I'm here.
You don't have to be afraid. I'll be with you.
This is about how you make decisions moving forward.
It's about not letting that moment, that situation that
you're in be so overwhelming to you that it clouds all of your
decision making moving forward. And then third, God invites
Joseph into what God is doing, he says.
You shall call his name Jesus. That's the may seem kind of just
innocuous to us, but what he's actually doing in this moment is
he's giving Joseph naming rights.
That means that he is giving Joseph adoption rights.
This Jesus, this is going to be Joseph's responsibility and
privilege to be the father of here on earth.
He's saying, Joseph, I'm working out a plan and I'm inviting you
into my plan to be a part of it. And then the fourth thing is he,
he opens his eyes to the scale of the plan that he's working
out, right? He says he will save his people
from their since he's in Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, I know you're
caught up in this unplanned pregnancy right now.
I get it. It's, it's all you can think.
It's the only way that you can see this.
But this is so much bigger than that.
So often when we have lost our peace as Christians, it's
because we lose the bigger picture of all that God is doing
and has done. And it's this invitation from
God for Joseph to step back from his situation and recognize
God's working up something so much bigger than he can imagine
right in in this world, right in this waiting for hope world that
we talked about last week. I think we so often lose our
peace because we lose our hope. We we lose sight of the fact
that we have hope and the confusion of our circumstances.
It crowds out the peace of God in our lives.
It crowds out the promises that Pastor Keith was talking to us
about. I love the fact that we just
walked through that first song that we sang and talked about
those promises. They are truths of Scripture.
And in case Joseph isn't getting it, in case we don't get it,
Matthew is now going to take a little just kind of step over to
the side to show exactly that this has been part of the plan
all along with God, right in verse 22, he says all of this.
It took place to fulfill what was spoken by the Lord through
the prophet Isaiah 700 years before.
See, the version will become pregnant and give birth to a son
and they will name him Emmanuel, which is translated God with us.
He's saying listen, listen, 707 hundred years before this
moment, this moment was already set in stone.
I love this. I love this truth.
Do you know what it means? It means long before Joseph had
a problem, God had a promise. And that's true for us.
Those promises in God's word, some of them are thousands, 3000
plus years old, but they're as true.
Today is the day that they were written down, they far out date
and they will far outlast your current problem.
This is where peace comes from. Not in your ability currently to
manage your circumstances, not in your ability to control the
outcomes. It's not in your ability to be
able to hold everything together when everything feels like it's
falling apart. It's not in your ability to be
able to come up with a plan to sort out every possible
circumstance, right? Some of you are planners or
you're over planners. Try and come up with all of the
potentialities and figure them all out.
That's not where peace is going to come from.
It comes from knowing that God is in control even when your
real world feels like it's out of control.
It comes from knowing that He is true to His promises no matter
what the world throws at you. It's knowing that God knows you,
that He loves you, that He hasn't forgotten you, that I'll
never forsake you. That's where peace comes from.
That that's why it's so critical.
That's why we're going to harp on this over and over and over
again. It's so critical that you know
God's Word, that you're in God's Word, that you're taking in
these promises, that you're memorizing these truths because
rooting yourself in this is what allows you to hear His word over
your emotions. That's why it's critical to
Createspace to be present in, in in corporate worship here, God's
word, yes, but also in your daily life to to createspace to
open God's word and let it speak into your life.
So this is now the 5th decade in life that I have got to
experience on this planet. And I will just say, if I was
ranking decades, the twenty 20s is the worst absolutely out of
the five decades. And man, and I were talking
about this, in case you're wondering, the 90s was the best,
but the twenty 20s is the worst. And so I live in this same world
as you. I live in this world as a dad
who's trying to figure out how to raise and and raise up three
teenage kids. I live in this world as a
husband to a wife who she would never, ever, ever talk about
this or tell you this, but deals daily with chronic disease.
I, I, I don't have any more idea where the economy is going,
where the stock market is going, where the global affairs of this
world are going than you do. In fact, if you've got a good
tip, I'd love to hear it. There are times where I wake up
and I read the news and I can feel anxiety start to creep into
my heart, but I read these words that God said to Joseph and I
know that these words are words for all of God's people.
Don't be afraid. Jesus has come.
The Holy Spirit's with you and Jesus is coming again.
And if you can know those three things with certainty, don't be
afraid. Don't be afraid.
See, when you already know the end of the story.
Story never gets that scary, does it?
When you are certain. Michael Caine used to talk about
the fact I'm going to have to censor this.
He would read, he would decide whether he's going to be in a
movie. He would read the script and see
if he was there at the beginning and if he was still there at the
end, and if he was still there at the end, he'd do the movie,
right? The great truth for you if
you're a Christian is the Bible says if you're in Christ, you're
there at the end. You don't have anything to be
afraid of. There may be a whole bunch of
things that come up and get stirred up in the middle of that
story, but you know how the story ends.
That gives you a lot of peace in all of those uncertain chapters.
I think more than we need people who will solve our problems, we
will. We need people who are going to
assure us of God's promises if we're going to have peace.
Joseph is not going to get answers to all of his questions
here. What he got was a promise, and
that promise was enough to give him the peace that he needed to
walk forward. Look at what happens next.
When Joseph woke up, he did as the Lord's Angel had commanded
him. He married her but did not have
sexual relations with her until she gave birth to a son and he
named him. Jesus says Joseph woke up and he
does exactly what God had told him to do.
He moves forward, but he does so without certainty of how this is
going to go for him. You didn't get any of the
answers about what this was going to mean for his reputation
sorted out or Mary's reputation. He's got no clarity about what
the future is going to hold for this child.
He doesn't have a guarantee of how the people around him are
going to respond to his decision making.
None of that. All those things that would have
been working up, all of the fear, none of that gets solved.
It doesn't get a resolution here, but what he has now is he
has faith and confidence in what God has told him to do, and he
has faith and confidence in the God who has told him to do it.
And so he walks in obedience. He walks in quiet, costly,
courageous obedience. He marries.
He marries Mary, he provides for her, he protects her, he raises
up Jesus as his own son. Jesus will be known as Jesus,
son of Joseph. Isn't he that guy who was the
son of the Carpenter? That's how he's going to be
known. He obeys not because he's got
all the answers to his questions, but because he trusts
the one who has made a promise to him.
When your world is falling to pieces, peace comes through
trusting God. Peace comes through obeying God.
Peace comes through doing what God has asked you to do.
We we think that peace is going to be found in US controlling
our circumstances. It's not because you can't
control your circumstances. You never will.
That's a fool's game. We have a world full of people
who are building audiences right now by promising certainty.
If anyone is out there that you're following that tells you
they know the problem and they've got all the answers and
solutions to fix all your problems, they are selling you a
bag of goods, right? If you, if you hear a politician
get up there and talk about how their party policies and
platforms are going to fix everything, that's broken.
Nonsense, absolute nonsense. They don't have that type of
ability and control. Religious leaders who promise us
with certainty if you do blank God will do this nonsense,
right? That is not the way that God
operates. There are lots of people in this
world who promise to fix your circumstances if you will just
follow them, if you will just trust them, if you'll just do
what they say. And it's super enticing in a
time like this where everything feels so certain to listen to
somebody who's speaking with boldness and confidence to tell
you just do A and you'll get B. But it doesn't happen that way.
It might work for a season, but it's only for a season.
And a lot of these people, what's interesting about them is
they'll use tactics to rob you of your piece, to make you put
their faith, your faith in them. They'll, they'll, they'll try
and stir up anxiety, they'll try and stir up rage.
The people who are trying to get you all fearful and trying to
get you all angry, they're not doing so to the goodness of
their heart. They're doing so for their
purposes. But God sends Jesus with a
promise, not that he's going to fix our current circumstances,
not that once you trust in Jesus everything is great, but that he
will be with you through all those circumstances and that he
will secure your eternal reality.
See, Jesus came to bring peace to a world that's fallen to
pieces. Let me read the rest of John
1633 for you. It starts out this way.
Jesus says I have told you these things so that in me you may
have peace, you will have suffering in this world.
I'm not going to fix it all. Trusting me, believing in me is
not going to make it so that in this world everything goes
swimmingly for you. But then he says this, be
courageous because I've conquered the world.
I know how your story ends, and I've assured it.
All of the problems in this world at their core are rooted
in one single problem, sin. When sin came into the world, it
shattered peace. It shattered the Hebrew word of
peace, Shalom, which means everything just as it was meant
to be, right? Sin comes into the world, and in
Genesis chapter 3, it all falls apart real quickly.
The world falls to pieces. Peace between people is broken.
Adam and Eve are no longer at peace with one another.
They feel shame with one another.
They're pointing fingers at one another.
Peace between US and creation is part of the curse that gets
brought about. We live in a broken world where
the natural world leads the heartache and suffering in a way
that it was never intended to. And most significantly, and at
the core of all, this peace between us and our Creator, us
and the God who brings life has been shattered.
And into this, this sin, sin brings fear and sin brings death
and sin brings us into a world shattered into pieces.
But Jesus comes to take those pieces and put them back
together. He comes to bring us peace.
He comes to bring us to a place of peace.
That's the promise that Joseph was given, that she will give
birth to a son and you're to name him Jesus because he will
save his people from their sins. That's why he's the Prince of
Peace. He came to save us from our
sins. He came us to save us from the
devastation to peace that flows from sin.
So peace starts by trusting that Jesus came to bring us into
peace with God. If you want to know where the
very foundation point of peace is, no peace is really on offer
until we are brought into peace with God through Jesus Christ.
That's what he came to do. He came, He was born, He lived,
and He died on the cross for our sins as the perfect atonement so
that we could be brought back into peace with God.
He paid the penalty for the sin that Adam and all of us who are
descendants of Adam own and have since that day that sin entered
the world. And he takes that on himself and
pays the penalty of death so that we could enter into life
and peace with God. And if you don't know Jesus, my
invitation to you today would be to place your faith in the One
who came to bring you peace with God, because that's where peace
starts. But what about those of us who
have been following Jesus for a long time and are struggling
with peace today? How do you rest in that type of
peace? The type of peace that we have
already had, provided and purchased for?
See, the peace is already there through Jesus.
The peace already exists, but some of us aren't experienced
it. So how do we get to a place of
experiencing it? First, let me encourage you to
do this. Name where your peace has been
shattered. See, trusting God starts with
acknowledging the thing that has shattered your peace.
Worry and peace are incompatible.
What is it that has you worried and anxious in your soul?
Name it, the Bible tells us we can cast all our cares on Him
because He cares for us. Take that to the Lord.
Second, listen to what God says, not just what you feel.
Again, I just want to encourage you.
Some of you would be so your your day would be so much more
peaceful if instead of scrolling social media or opening up the
news or turning on the television, you opened up the
word of God and allowed him to speak words of peace to you
instead of going to places that want to rob you of your peace.
So open scripture, slow down. Listen, if you're worried about
God's provision, here's a great passage for you to go to.
Go to Matthew chapter 6, verses 25 to 33, and keep going to it
until the Lord begins to take that thing that you know as you
read it and it is in your head and begins to settle deep into
your heart. If you're worried about the
future, the next verse in that passage is great, Matthew 634.
Don't worry about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry
about itself. Each day has enough troubles of
its own, or as your mother or grandmother used to say, don't
borrow trouble from tomorrow. The third is this.
Trust God enough to take that next step?
Some of you right now God has shown up to you.
He's telling you what you need to do.
He's telling you that what the next step of obedience is.
And you wish that He would tell you 5 steps ahead.
You're sitting there and you're like God.
The next step is great, but could I see the whole plan
before I decide to take this step?
But that's not the way God operates.
You take the next step, Joseph, he says, take Mary as your wife
and name the baby Jesus. That's what Joseph gets.
God, how am I going to deal with all the no, just just do what
I'm asking you to do. Take Mary as your wife, name the
baby Jesus. Do the thing that God has asked
you to do instead of worrying about the 10 questions that God
hasn't given you answers to yet. Peace often arrives when we take
that one step of obedience and then four, expect that God will
keep His word, that the promises that God makes to you are yes
and Amen forever. He is faithful to His promises
always, even when we struggle to believe it.
Like, I don't know when God's going to bring peace to your
circumstances that you're in right now.
I don't even know the circumstances that you're facing
right now, but I know that He can bring peace to your heart
regardless of your circumstances.
The peace God offers is not a peace that comes from having
everything under control. It's a peace that comes from
knowing that God is the one who is in control over all things.
And the very best thing that we could do together collectively
church this morning is to come to the communion table and
remember that the peace that we really long for in our hearts
and in our circumstances and when our world is falling apart
right now has been secured for us.
It is true. And just as we begin to take
this, I just want to remind people the elements that we take
the bread and the cup. These are elements for those of
us who have already said we believe.
I believe that Jesus body was broken for me, that his blood
was poured out on the cross for me.
If that's you today, I would encourage you.
Maybe today was even the first day that you placed your faith
in Christ. That's fine.
Join with us for the very first time and take communion.
But if you're not there yet, that's fine.
Don't feel any pressure to have to participate in this.
This is something that we take as an acknowledgement that yes,
this is true. For me, it's a reminder to our
hearts to say, yes, this is truth.
If you haven't received a cup yet, we've got some people
around you. Just put your hand up and
they'll come and they'll bring you one.
Just say to you this as we get ready to take it.
If peace is found in certainty, and in this certainty in
particular, then no matter how much uncertainty is swirling
around you, you can know peace. First Corinthians 1123 to 26.
Apostle Paul writes to the church in Corinth.
He says, For I have received from the Lord what I also passed
on to you. On the night when he was
betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, and when he had given
thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for
you. Do this in remembrance of me.
And in the same way he also took the cup.
And after supper he said, This cup is the new covenant in my
blood. Do this as often as you drink it
in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this
bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until
he comes. These elements remind us that
while life may be uncertain, our salvation is not.
Life may be incredibly uncertain for you, but if you're in Jesus,
you can be certain of a few things.
You can be certain that the body of Christ was broken for you.
And if you can be certain that there is a God who would step
down out of the glories and majesty of heaven, out of the
perfection of that place, and enter into all of the brokenness
of this world for you, that He would go to the cross for you,
then you can be certain no matter what your circumstances
are right now, that He loves you, that He so deeply loves
you. The blood of Christ.
If you believe that Jesus blood was poured out for your sins on
the cross, it means that you are reconciled to God.
And if Jesus sin is enough to wash away all our sins, if Jesus
death, if his blood can just wash away everything, then you
are held fast. You're never forsaken.
You never have to live in shame. You're never beyond God's mercy
and grace. And when we eat and when we
drink, Paul says we don't just proclaim his death, but we also
proclaim his return. We proclaim his death until he
comes again, when His peace will reign fully, where there will be
no more brokenness, where all things will be restored and made
right and somehow even more beautiful than they would have
been if nothing was ever broken in the first place.
I don't know what you're going through.
I don't know what you're struggling with today.
I know what's robbing you of your peace.
But if you belong to Jesus, whatever that thing is is far
too small to separate you from him.
It's far too small to keep you away from His love, and it's far
too petty for you to allow it to rob you of the peace that He
purchased for you on the cross. So let's take these elements as
a confession of these truths. Let me pray over the wafer and
then we'll take it together. Father, Father, thank you for
the bread. Thank you for your body broken
for us. Thank You for this fixed and
certain reality that we can look to is an absolute declaration of
Your love for us. God, some of us right now, our
circumstances are screaming so loudly, but help us to hear your
word that promises us that Christ's body was broken for us,
that we are loved, that we're accepted, that He paid the
fullness of the penalty for our sin.
That if we're going through something right now, we belong
to You. It is not punishment, it's not
discipline. Christ took all the punishment
on his body. We may be disciplined in this
moment. We may have have strayed off
course. You may be using some things to
lovingly correct us, but you will not punishment punish us
because Christ has take the punishment for us.
Father, thank you for this true and certain promise.
Let's take an eat. Let's pray over the cup, Father.
Thank you for the cup. Thank you for the New Covenant,
which supersedes the Old Covenant, what we were incapable
of doing, of keeping all the laws Christ did on our behalf.
Thank you for Christ's perfection applied to us.
Thank you for Christ's forgiveness poured out by his
blood on the cross. Thank you that we get to come to
you right now without fear, with no shame, that if we're in
Christ, we have been reconciled to you.
We've been named sons and daughters of the King.
That all of the promises, all of the good things, all of the
blessings that were due Jesus have been offered to us as Co
heirs with him. God, that includes the promise
that you are going to come again, that Christ will come
again, that all things will be renewed and restored.
And so, God, in the midst of the circumstances that feels so
uncertain and chaotic for us, God, would you give us a real
sense of peace that washes over us knowing that we know how the
story ends and it's certain. Let's take and let's drink.
Let the worship team lead us in one more song of worship
together.