Good Friday Communion Meditation 4/3/2025

John 1:14–17 LSB

And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. John bore witness about Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me has been ahead of me, for He existed before me.’” For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace. For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

What an opportunity we have tonight to repent of our lack of amazement of God’s grace and, in the shadow of the cross, drink deep from the well of living water and rekindle the passion of the cross in our own hearts.

Is it not true that the essence of the Christian battle is to stay amazed by the grace shown to us in Christ? We are constantly being pulled here and there with the busyness of our life. Concerned with the road conditions, and weather alerts, and gas prices. We are consistently persuaded to fill our minds with science, and phycology, media, and politics trying to know how we are going to be the most healthy, most successful, the most politically correct and so on. We are trained from infancy to care about our goals, and put great weight and stock into our gifts, and talents, and being known…

And yet, there is a well. A well that bids you to come and drink it to the dregs. A well that is filled with the most amazing pleasures and riches and promises. A well that leads to a river. A river of life. A river that makes the city of God glad. It is a beautiful river teeming with attributes of God. Sights and sounds of heaven. Stories of the eternal. Hidden by the earth, yet the location of this well revealed to us by the cross.

My friends, how amazed are you tonight that Jesus Christ paid for your sin? Have you drank from the well, or just think you did? How amazed are you that, as Philip Henry says, we are born with our backs upon God and Heaven, and our faces upon sin and hell, but the grace of God came and converted us, turned us around to gaze upon them anew. DO you see the grace of God in your life? Grace that cannot be seen is no grace at all.

How amazed are you at the gift of grace that has raised you from the dead? BB Warfield said Grace is power. It does not instruct, it energizes and what dead men need is energizing, energizing to be raised form the dead.

This grace that has been freely given to you often gets compartmentalized. It gets brought out only upon the proper occasion. But my friends, every hour of every day is the proper occasion to remember the grace of God displayed at the cross of Christ. To recall and bask in the glorious grace that reconciled you with God.

This sacrament of communion was never menat to be a “proper occasion”. But was meant to propel you into deeper desire to drink from the well of God. To giveyou only a taste of the grace in the sacrifice of Christ, but to put a hunger and thrist for more . A sign you have received grace is a desire for more of it. It is the sweetest fountain.

Communion with Christ through the amazement of his grace transforms your life, from mechanical to relational. From a love that runs cold to a blazing passion. Have your heart right with Christ, says charles spurgeon, and he will visit you often and so turn weekdays into Sundays, meals into sacraments, homes into temples, and earth into heaven.

My friends, tonight we come to the table with the opportunity to turn our apathy into amazement of GOd’s grace. tonight we come to feed on Christ in sport and truth. We must come to the table to remember the body and the blood that has been broken and poured out for us. The love of God that was revealed through the cross, and that glorious well that was uncovered. Tonight, thank God that you know who he is at all. That you not only have heard the name Jesus, unlike many unreached people groups, but that you have access to him through your church, the scriptures, and this table. My friends, take this opportunity tonight to pray for the Lord to rekindle the fire in your heart, the fire of passion and zeal for the grace of God that we see displayed in Christ at the cross. Ask him to grow your amazement of His grace, that you may praise him more than you ever have, on into eternity… Lets pray…