We live in a world of constant flux, where nothing is truly stable and even the things that feel permanent haven’t been around that long. Yet Ephesians 1 takes us further back than any of it: God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, let’s begin tonight with a little quiz. See how well you know your history here. You ready for this? What is the oldest candy available in the United States? The oldest continuously manufactured candy available in the United States. Hard candy? Yeah, well, I mean, corn candy. Oh boy, yeah, because it just sticks around, right? You don’t need to manufacture it. How about brand? What’s the oldest continually manufactured brand of candy? That’s a great guess. Hershey? I don’t think I’ve heard it yet. Bronx? No. Long? Pardon? Long. No, no. Snickers? No. Honey, candy made from honey? No, well, no. No, these are great guesses. I mean, they’ve all been around for our lifetimes, right? You ready for it? Good and Plenty. Yeah, I don’t know that I even really think about it, except say if you go to the movie theater and you can mortgage a house to get one, right? I mean, but otherwise you don’t really think about it, but Good and Plenty has been around since, I believe, 1883, I think it was, 1886, something like that. There are older brands that have come and gone, maybe even had revivals, but it’s the one that’s been continually produced without interruption for the longest. And it was the first candy, as I understand, to really popularize the idea of having licorice in a candy. They’d been making licorice tea for a while, but someone thought, well, let’s put it into a candy, and off goes Good and Plenty, which has maintained its color scheme the whole bit for what, almost a century and a half now. Quite an accomplishment.
The interesting thing when you think about it though, we’re not even talking a century and a half, right? A while, a long while, no one here today lived during the time that Good and Plenty had not yet been thought of, but in the grand scheme of things, not that long. Yesterday was the 250th anniversary of the US Army. And of course, we do thank our veterans for their service. And that’s a good thing to do. And not to minimize 250 years, but 250 years. It’s longer than Good and Plenty. The Army’s been around longer, but it’s still not that long. It’s to defend our freedom, so we have Good and Plenty, right? That’s how it works. So you think about it. Our country hasn’t been around that long. You talk about even something, let’s go up another step. The discovery of the New World to the European explorers, in the grand scheme of history, it’s not that long, right? It sort of struck me a few weeks ago when the Roman Catholic Church chose a new pope. And they’re talking about, you know, this pope 1500 years ago did this or that. And it strikes you when you think that as far as we were concerned, unless we have any Native American folks with us tonight, as far as everyone else was concerned, this land wasn’t even known during the time that maybe the pope accomplished this or accomplished that, during the time that the church existed.
Go back to the New Testament, right? We’re talking 2000 years. But even 2000 years, in the grand scheme of things, isn’t that long, right? We can go back several thousand more years. We can keep going back. And so it’s sort of striking. I think that plays tricks with my mind a little bit, because if I think about something like a candy brand, it’s always been around, right? I don’t think a lot about Good and Plenty. It’s not something I think about every day, but it’s just sort of assumed, it’s there, right? It’s just one of those things. You’re going to walk into the movie theater or look at the candy aisle at the store, and it’s going to be there. I may never go over and pick it up on an average trip to the store or an average, if I’m getting something at the theater, it’s going to be popcorn. But it’s there, just supposed to be there. It’s not there for that long. Everything we look at hasn’t really been there that long. Everything you read about in history books really hasn’t been there for that long, especially compared to what we’re going to talk about.
We live in a world that has nothing in it, nothing in it that’s truly stable. Everything is constantly changing. Things fail, things come up and look promising, and then they fail. Nothing is stable. But Paul is going to take us tonight and call us to think about something that is stable, someone who is stable, and the time that he’s in, which is beyond time, eternity. We don’t even know how to exactly talk about that. But we’ve been called to eternity. We’ve been called from eternity by the only one who doesn’t change, by his grace. That’s what we’re going to be thinking about tonight. So let’s pray that God would help us in this world that’s constantly in flux, in this world where the things that have always been around aren’t even that old, that we could think about something more. Will you pray with me, please?
Father, we thank you for your grace. We thank you for your love. We thank you that you are indeed with us every day, and you’ve known us before we knew ourselves. You’ve known us before the foundations of the world. As we think about you and your grace, your love for us, would you help us to understand what that means, and to be assured and comforted and empowered by it? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We’re going to go ahead here and look at Ephesians 1, starting at verse four, picking up from where we were last week. If you recall, I mentioned we’re in the middle of a sentence. It’s going to take us several weeks to unpack this sentence because Paul wrote a really long sentence, but here’s the next part of it. Even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love, he predestined us for adoption to himself, the sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.
All that flux, all that change, all that stuff that we look at, all the things we think about that really aren’t that old, when we’re reminded of them, relatively speaking, you know what’s older? The truth that God loves you, and that he chose you. Millennia before Good and Plenty ever came off the assembly line. Millennia before the army was ever formed. Millennia before the first map of the first part of some part of the world that was considered known was ever drawn. Before the first song of a bird or the first drop of rain, God chose you. So different from everything else we experience.
Why do things go away? Why is everything constantly in flux? Why is it that people have been busy doing various things for thousands of years, and yet everything we point to doesn’t last that long? Why is that? It’s, well, it’s sin. And everything that unfolds from sin, right? We have imperfect knowledge, but we don’t have perfect knowledge. We have imperfect knowledge. We make mistakes. We make errors. We’re fickle.
In other words, when we look at the fact that even the things that we would say, well, these are the pillars. These are the things, whether I interact with them all the time or not, that just are sort of part of the stable environment that I live in, when we realize that those themselves haven’t been around that long, and many of them will pass away in our lifetime. Why? Because sin broke things. We don’t make things to last.
Romans 5:12: Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned. Sin broke things. And when we wonder, well, why does this not last? Why does this pass? Why does everything seem to pass? What we need to do is say, why do I keep contributing to the brokenness of the world? And we can ask that question and then go right back to doing it, right? Because that’s what we do.
But what it really comes down to is this. We have a God who loves us. We have an eternal family. And yet, what do we do? We keep going astray, chasing after sin family instead, because we think somehow that’s going to be good. And we say, this is what’s going to make me happy. This is what’s going to last. And we stake our claim.
And I think about those who create things that do last, like the inventor of Good and Plenty. And I think about that candy maker, and it probably felt pretty rewarding years later, 20 years later, 10 years later, to see something that you made still going. And if we use our gifts, whatever gifts God gives us wisely, we may have the pleasure of seeing things that we initiate, things that we work on last for a time, maybe even through our lifetimes. But even so, they won’t last forever.
Someday, the last Good and Plenty is going to roll off that assembly line. Someday, everything that we make will stop. And yet, we keep straying. Every time we say an unkind word, every time we’re too busy putting our effort into those things that don’t last, and not paying attention to the person that God’s given us at that moment to show love to.
Every time we get all riled up about the state of our world, and the one thing that isn’t riling us up is the fact that too many people aren’t yet hearing the gospel. Because while we might know that, I think if we didn’t do an intellectual survey where we think about what the right answer is, but if we just actually measured what gets our blood boiling, what gets us to type something out on the internet, what gets us really going, I think for most of us, there are a lot of things that make us a lot more upset than the fact that there are still people that need to hear about Jesus.
Why do we keep running towards the sin family? And I say this as someone who’s guilty of this. Because even as I’m working on this text, I read about the news and I get mad about this or that. And it’s not the thing that God wants us to be focused on. Doesn’t mean I don’t get focused on it. It’s not going to last. The bad’s not going to last and the good’s not going to last.
The real question is, do we understand what does last? Because here’s the thing that we see. God not only chose us, he chose us for what? Verse five, he says, he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons. And you can add in daughters there. Paul’s using that generically, sons and daughters.
It is Father’s Day, but God didn’t only choose the men. Sorry, ladies, you have to wait till Mother’s Day to be chosen, no. God chose us. And he invites us to simply recognize what he’s already done for us, to come to that that won’t fade. Because all those institutions, all those things, good or bad, big and serious, or small and frivolous that we think are somehow going to last, those things don’t. But being a part of God’s family does.
And so, we’re going to have to be focused on that. And as he invites us in, even in this overview of him inviting us in and being told what God has done for us, Paul is helping us to understand that we’re not simply invited into something that lasts but can’t be relied upon. Because God not only chose us before the beginning of the world, God chose us and is stable and consistent and dependable.
How can I say that from here? How can I say that from here? Notice what Paul says here. Depending on your translation, it may be translated in different ways. The ESV translates the end of verse five according to the purpose of his will. Some translations simply translate it according to his pleasure. The point there is God chose us and he wasn’t coerced to do it.
He’s God. No one held a gun up to him and said, God, you need to pick some people now. He said, okay. It wasn’t even like a group project at school where you’re told you can either pick a group or I’m going to assign, the teacher says, a group for you and you say, okay, okay, I’ll pick a group because I don’t want, you’ll give me all the slackers. I’ll do everything. It’s not even that. God chose us because he wanted to choose us. God chose us because of his pleasure, because of the purposes of his will.
God chose us and as he does, he’s revealing who he is because nothing forced God to do it. He simply chose to. And you know, if you’re trying to understand a person, one of the most revealing things about any person is what they choose to do when no one forces them to do otherwise. When there’s no shame in doing otherwise, when there’s no penalty, no obligations, nothing. It’s simply, I want to do this. Tells a lot about somebody, doesn’t it?
When someone helps us out and we know that they know, we wouldn’t have thought anything if they hadn’t because we didn’t even know they knew that we needed help. Friend finds out about some situation we’re in, friend shows up and is ready to help and we didn’t even know they knew there was a crisis. It means a lot, right? Because the friend could have just pretended complete ignorance and not had to do it.
And even then there’s some pressure there, right? Because the friend could be thinking, well, I’ll help out now because I don’t know if I can help out next week and at least I’ll seem helpful this way, right? There are all these different calculations we make in our heads, but God isn’t doing any of that. God simply chose because in his pleasure he wanted to.
And so when you’re told that God chose you, and if you believe in Jesus, if he is your Lord and Savior, you can take that home, you can take it to the bank, you can hold on to it the rest of your life. That truth is not going to go bankrupt. God chose you from the foundations of the world and he did so because he wanted to.
Depending on your translation, the words in love at the end of verse four may go with the previous sentence or the following sentence. Commentators have debated, but I really think, and I like that the ESV went with this, that it makes the most sense that it goes with verse five. In love he predestined us.
So what’s Paul talking about here? He’s talking about God. He’s not talking about us. Yes, we should be holy and blameless, but his focus isn’t on us, it’s on God. And so I think clearly here, Paul is talking about God and what he does. And what does God do? He chooses us in love.
He doesn’t choose us because he’s a mad scientist and thinks, well, I need some unwilling victims here. I’ll take them in and I’ll do something with them, right? God thought of you before you ever existed, before anything existed, and loved you. The heavenly Father looked into this creation that hadn’t yet even been made that he was going to create and said, I want that person to know me.
Reveals exactly who God is. Does this willingly, he does it with love. Now we might try to justify that love. And in fact, people have wrestled with this very passage and tried to wrestle with, well, why did God love me? Well, maybe I do something that makes God love me. Even he knew that I would do something that would make him love me.
Why does he love us? Why does the Father love us? Because of the Son, Romans 8:1. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. That’s it. Father looks at us and sees his perfect Son and sees us as well with the righteousness of the Son.
I think that’s incredibly—I don’t think, I know that is incredibly hard for us to process. It doesn’t feel real, but it’s the truth. God didn’t love you because he thought you would earn enough points to be worthy of his love. God didn’t love you because you were going to do something useful for his kingdom. God loves you because he loves you, period.
And he loves you because of the righteousness he gives you. We couldn’t deserve it. And instead of trying to play tricks to try to figure out some way that God could know that we were going to deserve it, even though we didn’t exist yet, we just need to come back to the point of verse four.
And that’s where we’re going to go. Back to the point of verse four. He chose us in him before the foundation of the world. We don’t need to play acrobatics and say, well, maybe somehow God knew. No, he could if he wanted. But Paul could have said that if he wanted. Paul wants us to understand something. God loves us because he loves us, because that is him. That is his nature.
And everything else we search for, everything people try to add in there, all the asterisks and small print and explanations, they miss the point, which is that we keep bringing the focus back to ourselves. And this is what God does in his love. And we’re not going to add anything to it. We’re not the reason. He is.
My grandpa loved growing tomatoes. He loved growing all kinds of plants. He had a wonderful garden. He had a little greenhouse he put up so he could get the plants growing early. I mean, he was serious about it. And he would plant all these tomato plants. And if you try to grow a tomato, especially from seed or from a small plant, and you’re trying to get it to grow, you know it’s hard, right? It doesn’t always bear fruit. It takes a while. The weather doesn’t cooperate.
You get to the end of the season, the tomatoes start to ripen up, but they’re not even going to make it before the first frost. It can be really hard sometimes. Well, he and my mom had a race to see who could grow a tomato the fastest. And here’s what we did. When I was a little boy, we’d go to the supermarket.
And inevitably, late May or so, they had these beautiful patio tomatoes that had been grown in these hothouses over the winter. And they were, you know, like up to my waist or so already. They’re big, tall plants with tomatoes already on them. And we get one of those. And it’d be sitting on the deck growing. And that was probably, I don’t know, probably about Father’s Day. Maybe it was Father’s Day. Maybe my grandpa would come over. We’d have a barbecue, you know, he’d be over. And well, we had to wait for him to show up to pick the tomato. Inevitably, he would lose every year because that tomato, that tomato was already speeding along. It just drove him crazy. He’d been working for months on these tomatoes. He couldn’t get there in time.
But it wasn’t because, you know, we had this secret recipe, ultra fertilizer at home. It wasn’t something like that. It really came down to simply getting a tomato that already had been chosen. It had been given the ability to do this by at least a greenhouse more sophisticated than anything any average person has. And that was the truth behind it. And you could go into, well, you know, we cultivated these tomatoes for two whole weeks, three weeks, right? No, no, it was already there. And that’s sort of what we do with God and his choosing of us, I think.
We forget the fact that we didn’t grow it. We start to tell God, well, you know, I’ve done all this. Start to even talk to other people. Look at how I’m living this faithful life. You know, so God loves me and he’s blessing me, and so on and so forth. And we miss the fact that we’re like that supermarket tomato. The only reason we’re producing fruit is because God is the ultimate gardener who’s enabling us to produce fruit.
When we see ourselves turning to him, when we see ourselves living, following Jesus, what we need to do is give God glory for the fact that he does that in our lives. And feel the comfort of the fact that means he loves us. He didn’t love us because he saw we were the prized tomato growing. He loved us and made us the prized tomato.
Doesn’t that change how we understand God’s view of us when we hold that in? And a lot of times we might hear a message like this and we hold onto it for a little bit and then we go right back to thinking, but maybe I can tend the garden and then God will really love me. But what Paul is telling us here is that was already established. That is already true. That has been true and it will be true. Don’t forget that the plant was already well-established. Our fruit was already well-established before we took our first breath.
Who gets the credit? God. And that can sound a little self-defeating. Oh, you mean I’m worthless in my own right? No. It means that he loves you. That he actually thinks you are of worth because he enabled you to do everything you’re doing. He is with you.
And here’s the critical difference. If we’re bringing it to God and somehow God is choosing us as worthy of being in his garden, that also means we might get tomato worms and not be worthy of his garden any longer. But God wants us to know there’s nothing that we can do to separate ourselves from his love.
He loves us because he loves us. Doesn’t mean that we have nothing to do though. That can be the other thing we conclude. Oh, well, who cares? Bring on the tomato worms, right? Let them devour me. It doesn’t matter if sin worms are all over me because God’s already chosen to love me. No, God has a purpose for us. He has a purpose for you.
Verse six. Why did he do this? To the praise of his glorious grace with which he has blessed us in the beloved. He’s called us from eternity for his glory. He has called you for his glory. Salvation isn’t about a better world, a better life, a better job. Salvation is about pointing to a better God.
He chose us before the beginning of the world. Why? We’re showing him to the world. That those who already know him would show him to those who don’t yet know him. And he uses that fruit that he brings up in us to keep passing along his love from person to person, from generation to generation, until whatever time he returns.
So we have a very important purpose. The purpose isn’t to point to ourselves or somehow fix the ailments of the world and somehow make things right on our own power. No, it’s to point to him, for people to know him.
We do get pulled into the worldly. We think, if I get into this particular worldly project, I’m going to make this world better. There are ways in which we can help people, right? We show love to people, and that may even in some sense make the world better. So I don’t want to dismiss everything we do and say, you will never make the world a drop better by what you do. But if we’re talking about the big picture, none of us is ever going to fix the world.
I can say that with confidence. There is no one here and no descendant of anyone here who’s ever going to be the person who makes the world good. It’s what really matters. It’s not those things that get us all stirred up. Unless the thing that’s stirring us up is the gospel.
In the Old Testament, God revealed his glory. That’s the phrase that was used throughout when God would show something of his presence, right? The Israelites, they see God’s glory and they cower and they say, Moses, you need to go for us because we don’t want to face that. It’s too frightening how powerful and awe-inspiring God is.
But when we’re told here that the reason he chose us from the beginning of time was to the praise of his glorious grace, what it’s saying is that God chose us to reveal himself in a way that people can actually understand.
Yes, if just the full majesty of God is revealed, who could stand? But when those who are broken vessels, those who are enslaved to sin are set free from that slavery to sin and made whole, what changes? People say, wow, something’s happening in that person.
And if we testify to what God is doing in our lives and we share the fact that it’s Jesus that’s the one who’s doing the work in our lives and people can look at our lives and say, I really do see something changing and I sure can’t explain any other reason. And if I were God, I wouldn’t have bothered with that bum.
Maybe that means that God would bother with me too. When in our unworthiness and in that unworthiness, we’re open about our unworthiness. We don’t try to look somehow worthy. We’re not constantly trying to say, yes, we really are the award-winning gardeners who have, we have tomatoes in March that we planted in March and it’s just, these plants just grow like crazy. We’re not trying to do that.
When we’re saying, no, it’s the master gardener God that’s doing it, we get to reveal that incredible love that God has. That there’s no reason. There’s no thing that we can hold up and say, here is why God did this for me. And that tells others that God’s love is so true and so full and so complete that they don’t have to have something to hold up either.
Here’s what God told the Israelites, as flawed as they were, Exodus 19: And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the people of Israel.
The purpose of God’s people has been and always will be to be a nation of priests, a holy nation. Our job is to represent God to the world.
Most fully that happened in the ultimate leader, the ultimate King of Israel in Jesus. That’s what we see here at the end of verse six, blessed us in the beloved. The beloved is Jesus. But the phrase, the word beloved was used in the Old Testament to talk about God’s people. And so Jesus is the fulfillment of that.
But then what are we told even here? That we’re blessed in the beloved. And so when we act in Jesus’s calling for us, when we live as followers of Jesus, we’re taking the only one who actually deserves the title beloved and the only one who can really represent the Father because he is the Son. And we’re passing along who he is.
And we’re taking the fact that God loves us because of Jesus’s righteousness. And we’re passing that along to others who need to hear it too. You have the Father’s infinite love revealed in the Son. But we receive that love in Christ. And we show that love in him.
The beloved makes the sacrifice for us. He’s the one that does what we can’t do. And our job as Christians isn’t to look like somehow we can do it. It’s to make it very clear that we aren’t deserving so that all the glory goes to God, that everyone knows that the only reason there’s goodness in our lives, the only reason we have hope in our lives is because God loves us, not because of anything that we’ve done.
There are so many things that will pass, so many things that seem to offer hope, so many things that seem to offer some hope and seem to offer some chance of redeeming ourselves, but they are going to pass. I think sometimes we think that God’s care for us will be like that. We’re fickle as human beings.
One of my dad’s favorite candies is the maple nut goody. Anyone had a maple nut goody ever? Anyone? Yeah, a few hands up. Well, don’t get too excited because you can’t find them. They don’t make them any longer. They are not America’s oldest brand of candy. It used to be a hunt to try to find them. They got rarer and rarer, trying to find them for his birthday or for Father’s Day or for Christmas, trying to find these candies that he loved that you can’t get everywhere. Well, eventually, you couldn’t get them at all.
Why? Well, apparently at some point, people thought these were really great because they were all over the place. And then people found other things they liked. They got focused on this candy or that candy, this other thing that they wanted to do. Eventually at some point, the assembly line stopped.
God’s going to do that with us. They’ll get tired of us. Yeah, you know, those people, that church, they were good for a while, but I’m tired of them now. I’ll go get something else. No, God isn’t going to do that.
And it’s so hard for us to get our mind around because in this world and in our experience, that happens over and over again.
I was working on this text and I started reading about the history of Good and Plenty. And I thought, okay, now I wonder if I can still get it. Because I haven’t been to the movie theater in a while. And I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on candy aisles. I don’t know. I can’t even remember the last time I had one. So I started to look. And you know, a lot of stores don’t have them. They are somewhat rare. And so you can start thinking about this licorice flavor. Your mouth might start watering.
You might find out there’s nothing there. Our mouths might be watering for redemption. And what if it’s not there?
But the beautiful thing about God’s love is that as we live and people see us munching on the Good and Plenty love of God that’s always there for us, they can have it too. It’s not going to run out. It’s not going to be discontinued.
And so it tells us what you and I need to be doing. Our lives need to be making other people’s lives, other people’s mouths water for redemption. We want people to look at us and say, I want that. I can’t stand it anymore. I’ve been watching him. I’ve been watching her eating that for some time now, and I can’t take it. I have to have some. Not for candy, but for God.
The beautiful thing that we get to do with our lives is we get to remind people of that and not worry. Not worry that it won’t be available.
Maybe I’ve reminded you of an old friend talking about Good and Plenty tonight, and you thought, well, I’d kind of like to have one now after this, and you’re thinking, I don’t know if I’ll be able to find one. Well, I do have good news for the guys here tonight. It is Father’s Day.
And so Jerry and Jamie are going to help me out. And there is plenty of Good and Plenty for every guy here tonight. So make sure as they come around to get one, there’s one waiting for you here. Jerry and Jamie, if you want to go ahead and pass those out.
But guys, as you enjoy those, and ladies, too, you can remember this truth. You don’t get one, sorry, but you can remember this truth. God’s love is always available. It will not run out. No one can drain it away. There is always plenty.
And so we can make people hungry. Oh, hey, thank you. And we can pass it along. Ah, hey. I’m holding on to this.
And the beautiful thing about God’s love, right? You know, if I start eating these and I set them down, maybe one of you says, oh, I’m going to take that. The beautiful thing is if we are walking around with the Good and Plenty love of God, there truly is plenty of it. It’s plentiful beyond imagination. So if someone picks up our box and takes it, what do you know, the box is still there. They can’t take it away, but they can enjoy it too. That’s the beauty of what God does.
And so this Good and Plenty God that we have, not this box of candy. But I hope the next time you walk in the theater and you see this, you think about God. And every time you walk into the store, you think about him. Because God’s love is good, and there’s plenty of it for all who believe.
And so our job, our calling, our joy, is to help other people have a box to enjoy themselves. Would you pray with me, please?
Father, thank you for your love that truly is good and plentiful, far better than the best tasting things of this world, far more plentiful than the most produced things of this world. Lord, your love will not run out. No one can drain it away. You won’t change with the changing times and decide that you want something different. You always call us to yourself. You always call us as your people. And Lord, we pray that you would make our lives lives that draw more people in, that people’s mouths would water for redemption, for the refreshment that comes only through Jesus. And we pray it in his precious name. Amen.
Thank you, Chris. As the communion tray goes around, the inner ring is gluten free, the outer ring are not. And in a sense, you might think about communion. It’s sort of like that display of candy. I don’t mean the sacrilegiously, but in this sense, if you haven’t yet believed in Jesus, it’s sort of like seeing that display of candy, but not having any money at the theater. You shouldn’t take it, right? You don’t take it. Because you’re not going to get to enjoy the movie and the candy, you’re going to be dismissed from the theater in short order. And it’s not because I’m going to send Rob after you. He’s over there by the door. If you don’t know Jesus, though, you take this and it doesn’t do anything. If anything, it feeds the death in us because we think we’re doing something and it’s not what we need. But here’s the good news. As you see this, this good and plentiful love of God is there for you tonight. And you can ask him to forgive you. You can say that Jesus, I need you as my Lord and Savior, and he will answer that prayer even tonight. If you’re online, one of our online church family members would love to pray with you; if you’re in person, I would love to pray with you or anyone here would love to pray with you.
So it was on the night he was betrayed that Jesus took the bread and he broke it and gave it to them saying, this is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And in like manner after supper, he took the cup and said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood poured out for you unto the remission of sins. Do this, as often as you drink of it, in remembrance of me.
Let us pray. Father, we do come before you not as those who are worthy, but as those who need your plentiful love, and we do pray that you would strengthen us as we come to this table, that by the power of your Holy Spirit you might nourish us with the very body and blood of our Savior Jesus, that we would be ready to show a life redeemed, a life made right by you, that others would know that you are the God who loves, that you are the God who offers forgiveness. We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
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