"Christianity 101: The Sacraments"

Man, a lot of our people seem to be going through a lot of stuff right now -- it’s amazing how often difficulties can at least appear to clump like that.  But as I often tell people when they come for counseling sessions, everything in your life can pile up on your plate until it seems like there’s no way that you could ever deal with that much, and you feel completely overwhelmed by it all.  But try thinking of it like those old TV dinners, where the Salisbury steak is in one compartment, the peas are in another, etc.  Just deal with each part discretely, in turn, and don’t let it all pile up in your head and seem like one giant, unmanageable plate of food that you could never hope to get through. 

I mean, when you think about it, your plate is never too full to get through, if you’re trusting God to help you to deal with even the most horrendous tragedies in your life.  It’s not like He’s never going to let you have to deal with more than you can handle in life -- He frequently lets you have to deal with more than you can handle in life -- but rather that He’s never going to make you have to deal with all of that on your own.  There’s always more going on in life than just the tangible details of life.

We chatted about that a bit in our message this Sunday, as we continued looking at our “Christianity 101” series and talked about the sacraments (or ordinances -- whichever word you prefer, depending on whether you’re stressing that these are actions that we do because they’re holy and special, or actions that we do because they’ve been commanded by God and we’re trying to be obedient). 

I mean, on one level, we’re talking about eating bread and drinking a cup, or about getting dunked in some water -- just tangible, physical things that every Jew would’ve been familiar with.  But in point of fact, every Jew would’ve known that these actions more than just eating, drinking, and washing -- they were familiar with the Passover seder meal that reminded them every year about how God saved them not only from slavery in Egypt, but also from His own righteous wrath that “passed over” them because they’d covered their homes with the blood of a lamb; and they were familiar with being immersed in the mikvah as a literal rite of passage that marked the end of a Gentile life and the beginning of a new, Jewish one, or the end of a secular life and the beginning of a new life as a priest, etc.

In the same way, when we eat the Lord’s Supper or commit ourselves in baptism, we as Christians focus ourselves on remembering Christ’s death for our sake, and we also remember that though we are connecting ourselves with His death, we’re connecting ourselves with His resurrection as well.  We’re reminded of being saved not only from slavery to sin, but also from God’s righteous wrath that “passes over” us because we’re covered with the blood of the Lamb.  And we’re reminded that we’ve died to the sinful life we were living before we were saved, and that we’re now living out a fresh, new, forgiven life in Christ.  There’s more going on in these seemingly simple actions, and there’s a genuine spiritual power in remembering what God has done for us and in us and through us.