The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Wine

28 February 2010

As with bread, we are tempted to impose our own personal meaning on wine. Wine means excess and wild parties and losing control; wine means your drunk father who beat you; wine means scandal and appearing like a sinner; whatever. But no.

Wine means what God says it means. Lack of wine is either a form of fasting or a curse from God. God says wine is our labor blessed by His hand—which is to say it is the result of man having dominion over the earth, which is fulfilling his role as the image of God. It is God’s blessing. It is the gift with which Jesus blesses a wedding, the drink served by Wisdom, part of the Ascension offering lifted to God in the morning and evening sacrifices, the drink that Melchizedek the royal priest brings to Abraham and the drink that Christ serves to Abraham’s children by faith at His Table. Wine is rejoicing and fellowship.  Good lovemaking is better than wine—but not much else is.

As with any blessing, wine can be abused, and Scripture is filled with warnings about that; it is a wicked mind that turns God’s blessing into an occasion for sin. It’s an equally wicked, pinched, joyless mind that thinks rejecting God’s good gift is a holy thing to do. Both of these sins stem from a lack of gratitude.

My charge to you is to think of wine in this way, and to behave as Moses and Solomon instructed: Go and drink your wine with a merry heart, for God has accepted your labor. Do this that you may learn to fear God and keep His commandments, because that is your whole duty.

(Further reflections here.)

17 Comments | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Lord’s Table: The Meaning of Bread

21 February 2010

When we consider the question of what bread means, we face constant temptation to sidetrack the question into areas that are more comfortable:

  • “What does bread mean to me?” – a question of individual emotional association, or
  • “What does bread symbolize in the Bible?” – part of our question, an important part – but to ask the question this way is to stop with the academics, which is missing the whole point.

We live in a meaningful world.  Everything means something; everything is a message from a loving, majestic Triune God.  Only when we begin to ask what each thing means do we begin to understand the world and our place in it.  So what we’re asking is what bread means in the world itself.  When you see a loaf of bread sitting on the counter in your own kitchen, what does it mean?  The Bible does speak about the meaning of bread, not just because bread symbolizes something in God’s Word, but because bread symbolizes something in God’s world—the only world there is.

Bread is provision, it is blessing, it is strength.  It is the product of dominion, a cooperation between God’s blessing of the crops and man’s labor in the fields, the mill and the bakery.  Every loaf of bread is God’s kindness, a demonstration of the image of God, of God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven, and when we eat this blessing, we receive strength.  And so, of necessity, every loaf of bread is also a call to thank God.

Knowing this about bread, begin to ask yourself what the other things in your life mean.  Don’t be afraid to find that you don’t know.  God wants you to know; He will teach you if you will trust Him.

2 Comments | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Lord’s Table: Passover and the Last Supper

14 February 2010

Christ is our Passover, and in the supper we eat and drink the ultimate Passover feast. Or maybe not quite the ultimate. One of the lessons of Passover, and of the Supper, is that we are pilgrims in this world. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to be a pilgrim.

If we think of ourselves as pilgrims in space—now we’re here on earth, but we’re on our way to our home in heaven—then we will behave like rats on a sinking ship. That is, we won’t care at all about the ship. But this is exactly the wrong lesson.

You see, we are pilgrims in time. Heaven is important, but it’s not the end of the world.*  We wait for the coming of Christ’s kingdom, and then what a feast we will have—the Lord’s Table, with Christ himself drinking the cup with us in His Father’s kingdom. That kingdom will not be in a far-off heaven, but right here on earth—the very same earth we are commanded to cultivate and protect.

Therefore, we live not as pilgrims who are going away, but as pilgrims who are waiting for this world to be turned into our home. And this is the good news that we carry out to our neighbors: this world is passing away, and its lusts. Stand apart from it, and seek the Kingdom of God. Christ died for us so that we need not fall in love with the temporary; He has freed us to seek a home in His eternal Kingdom.

____

*I am indebted to N. T. Wright for this lovely turn of phrase.

Comments Off on The Lord’s Table: Passover and the Last Supper | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Lord’s Supper: “Do this unto My remembrance”

7 February 2010

This week draws together several threads we have been considering recently. The need to pray without ceasing; the need to think of things as the Bible thinks of them, and not in the sterile terms so common in theology; the significance of the Lord’s Table to us.

Jesus tells us it is His memorial, and in biblical terms this means not just that it is for us to remember Him, but also that it is a reminder to God of what Jesus did for us, a reminder to God that we partake of Christ’s body and blood, and that we are what we eat. Theology tells us that God needs no reminders, and as far as it goes, this is true. Jesus tells us to remind God regularly. “Why?” we want to know. Perhaps for the same reasons that we pray without ceasing even though God knows our requests before we ask. Perhaps for other reasons. The most pressing thing, however, is not to know why, but to obey God’s command.

This is one of the necessary lessons of worship that must spill over into the world: the mysteries are many, our understanding is weak, and we obey in spite of it all. Not because we understand, but because we trust the God who guides us. In that trust God answers our prayer: “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

2 Comments | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Psalm 104: A Meditation

31 January 2010

The psalm we considered this morning covers a lot of territory, from the forces of nature to human culture, from the food the animals eat to the thoughts that men think.  In all of these things, the psalmist points to some common themes:

  • First, there are no ‘forces of nature’ in the way we commonly mean it, any more than there are ‘creations of man’ in the way we commonly mean that.  All these things come from the hand of God.
  • Second, there is only one proper response to this: to praise the Lord, and to make your thoughts sweet to Him.

We find it difficult to do this, because we focus on the things we do not like, and so zoom in on those tiny things that we refuse to see anything else.  You must praise God even for those things, and my charge to you this week is to follow the strategy of the psalmist.  Back off, look at the whole world, and praise God for all of it.  Then, in that context, re-examine your discontents, and praise God for those things too.

4 Comments | Meditations, Preaching | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Lord’s Supper, Part 2: What’s Actually Happening?

24 January 2010

Last week, we saw that the Corinthians had permitted their actual practice of the Supper to become a way of reinforcing divisions in the Body of Christ.  For this, many of them were weak and sickly, and some of them were killed.  This week I’m offering you a similar warning, not about the practice of the Supper, but about our understanding of what is happening in the Supper.

God requires us to believe His word, and sanctified imagination is absolutely necessary to faith.  But there are temptations here that we must avoid.  When you allow your imagination to carry you so far that in doctrine or in practice, you are contradicting Scripture, you have gone too far.  Even if you don’t do that, if you allow your particular way of imagining the thing to become a point of contention so that the argument divides the body, you have sinned.

There is a parallel temptation in the other direction: the temptation to say “It’s all a mystery” and then ignore the things the Scripture does say.  You must subject yourself to the discipline of the Scripture; you must believe what it says, not cultivate a sort of devotional ignorance.

And so the charge is this: Submit to the Scripture.  All of it, straight up the middle, with no fancy footwork.  Whatever the Bible teaches you to believe and do, make it a part of you.  Let your sanctified imagination roam free on the mountains of the Bible—but stay within the limits that the Bible prescribes for you. Sanctified imagination is only sanctified so long as it is obedient.

1 Comment | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

Introduction to the Lord’s Supper

17 January 2010

The Corinthians’ worship was lacking. The flaws in their practice of the Lord’s Supper in particular were very real, and glaringly obvious. Paul does not sugar-coat any of this; he tells it exactly like it is. But he does this for a purpose, and the purpose is to restore them so that they will stop dividing Christ’s body, and instead unite with each other and worship God together in a way that glorifies Him.

The evangelical world is filled with bad worship. Many believers are disregarding what they do know about God’s requirements for worship, utterly ignorant of the rest, and terribly arrogant in their disobedience—which is to say, they are like the Corinthians. Do not dare to think that this is not your problem. Christ is not divided; these people are wounded and disobedient parts of the same body that you are a part of.

At the same time, do not dare to approach the issue in an arrogant, divisive way yourself. If you do this, your reformation in worship will drive other people away from whatever you are doing—and the more truth you are applying, the more truth you will drive them away from, and the more damage you will do to the body. We must not allow our obedience to become a weapon that further fragments the body. Listen to the Lord’s leading, look for an opening, and be very, very wise. The goal is to stir people up to love and good works, not to alienate them from the very good works they should be doing.

Comments Off on Introduction to the Lord’s Supper | Preaching, The Lord's Table | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Image of God: Principles and Rescue

10 January 2010

We have been looking for the past few weeks at being God’s image, and at Paul’s stunning statement, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.”  We must continue to seek that practical, day-to-day salvation that comes from Christ living in us.

The Bible gives us principles to live by, and those principles are reliable and important.  But apart from Christ, those principles become instruments of death in our fleshly hands.    We got principles at Mount Sinai; if that was all we needed, Jesus didn’t need to come and die.

We needed rescue.  Jesus provided it for us, and He continues to provide it, if we will walk with Him.  My charge to you is to do just that.  Do not make your life a Pharisaical concoction of divinely revealed principles and fleshly application of those principles.  Rather, seek the rescue that Christ provides, abide in Him, and through Him those same principles will become life-giving tools in your hands, which you can incarnate in the world as Christ’s Body, the very Image of God.

Comments Off on The Image of God: Principles and Rescue | Preaching | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Incarnate Church

3 January 2010

We are sinful people living in a broken world; the days are evil.  Evil days bring many temptations: some people are just waiting for it to be over, just hanging on by their fingernails until they die or the rapture comes.  Others delude themselves into a false cheer, a Pollyana view of the world where they pretend that the days are not evil at all.  Others—especially political conservatives—fall into the temptation perfectionism.  They proceed to take the evil days as an excuse to complain about everything, and their shrill voices fill the airwaves.  If we succumb to those temptations, we are fools who use the evil days as an excuse not to redeem the time.  The charge this week is simple enough: be wise.  Redeem the time because the days are evil.  Now is our chance to sing heartily, to each other and to God.  Now is the time to be grateful for everything.  Now is the time to submit to each other’s needs and care for one another.  Whatever we do, let’s do it thankfully, caringly, and singing to each other and the Lord.

We can do this because we are Christ’s body, connected to our Head who has already won His victory on the earth, which will one day be covered with the knowledge of God’s glory like water covers the sea.  The question is not how we can sing, but how can we not?

We are Christians; we are Christ’s body, and Christ’s body sings.  So sing!

2 Comments | Preaching | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

The Incarnation and the Church

27 December 2009

As we have pursued a more formal approach to worship, I have had occasion to formulate a compact charge to the congregation at the close of the service.  Barring the necessity for some specific application to be kept in-house, I will be sharing these charges here.  Below is the charge from this week:

When we sit at the Lord’s Table, Christ teaches us that we eat and drink Christ: He says “This is My body; This is My blood.”

You are what you eat.  To eat and drink the body and blood of Christ is to be the body and blood of Christ in the world.

As Christ allowed His body to be broken and His blood to be shed to purchase life for the world, so He will allow His church to be spent for the life of the world.  Your job—and my charge to you this week—is to reflect that mission in your own life.  Go out and minister the healing of Jesus of Nazareth, first to your brothers and sisters in the body, then to a world that is sick unto death in body and soul.  Do not delude yourself that this will have no cost.  It will cost you your life. But you have already died with Christ.  It is no longer you who live, but Christ lives in you, and you cling to Him, trusting Him to love you, and love others through you.

Comments Off on The Incarnation and the Church | Preaching | Permalink
Posted by Tim Nichols

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »