This holy communion

What picture comes to mind when you think of communion? I know that several come to my mind, and most are proper uses of the word. But there is a particular holy communion that God is inviting you and I into that is beyond our wildest dreams.

Paul looked at communion this way…

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.” (2 Cor.13:14)

Here, we see our communion is with the Trinity in this way…

Through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
In the love of Father God
We receive this grace and love via communion with the Holy Spirit, revealing this to our spirit. This is the framework for the Divine Dance that we’ve been invited into.

So it stands to reason that, within this divine encounter, the Spirit is constantly revealing deeper and deeper realms of God’s grace and love to us. For grace and love are the very heart and essence of our relationship with God.

And this kind of grace and love is totally other-worldly. It’s counter-intuitive to anything we find in our human experience and can only be revealed by the Spirit. While you can try to explain it, you cannot go to seminary to obtain it. No, God invades our heart and changes us from the inside out. And then we know it.

But, as it’s been said, it’s so much more than revelation, it’s transformation. And this transformation becomes our incarnation. We’re forever changed and cannot go back to who we were before. This is what is meant by this holy communion with Grace and Love.

Grace

First, we embrace this grace by our believing instead of our behaving. And it can only be embraced by faith, which has nothing whatsoever to do with you, but everything to do with agreeing with Him.

No sin, other than unbelief, can separate us from it. But our behavior does affect our consciousness of God and how we feel about ourselves. You see, the difficulty in obtaining it is all between our ears, not from God. He seems to think the work is finished.

We also don’t embrace it by identifying with who we were or by our unrenewed thinking. We’re not sinners saved by grace, we’re saints saved by grace. We’re not confused, schizophrenic Christians with two natures. We’re royal sons and daughters of the most high God. We wear His righteousness, not our own.

The only question we must answer is whether the blood of Jesus is enough to satisfy God.  If it is, end of story. Case closed. You are who He says you are. And He says you’re dead to sin and your life is now Christ’s life (Rom.6:2-11; Gal.2:20; Col.3:3). That’s grace.

So, we’ve cleansed ourselves from an evil conscience of religious unbelief and have come with great courage to this communion table with Him (Heb.4:16; 10:19-23). We have come to Mt. Zion, the city of the living God (Heb.12:22).

And we don’t “get right” in order to ascend this Hill of the Lord like in the Old Covenant. We’re already there because He made us right. Welcome to the New Covenant!

Love

Secondly, we learn how to open our hearts to this Father, the Source of all love. What amazes me about this in religious Churchianity today is how much time and money is spent on teaching us how to study about God, but almost nothing on how to simply open our hearts to Him.

Why is this so? I believe it’s because we think like orphans, full of fear, and because it’s more familiar to us to live outside of His constant embrace. So we try to act like Christians disconnected from this Love.

But the truth is, we’re suffering from an illusion of separation. God is “up there” and we’re “down here.” We don’t believe Jesus when He said He wouldn’t leave us as orphans (Jn.14:18), that He would come to us.

Our evangelical upbringing is partly to blame. We’ve made Jesus the only way to a place instead of a Person (Jn.14:6). So millions are waiting to go to heaven when they die instead of going to this Father of love while they live. I think we’ve missed Jesus whole point here. That, too, is orphan thinking.

The Truth that makes us free is that this Father of love paid everything to win us back to Him. He’s not some moody tyrant Jesus has to hold back from throwing us into the flames. No, this Father bankrupted heaven for us because all He ever wanted from the very beginning was a family. We wants His kids back. This is love.

The danger is, if we’re not open to this love, we become cold-hearted, stoic Christian Pharisees who love the Word of God more than loving God. This is ugly, empty religion; this is idolatry. But we don’t know what we don’t know, so we call it Christianity.

But when we do take the courage to open our hearts and let down our orphan walls, we see that this Prodigal Father has been waiting for us all along. And He’s already made His home in us (Jn.14:23). And in this Divine embrace, all our orphan fear is cast away (1 Jn.4:18-20).

We finally understand that God loves us exactly like He loves Himself (Jn.15:9; 17:23, 26). We learn to sojourn this life in His arms of love, and here is where we find what we’ve been looking for all along. We find peace, we find freedom, we find joy. We find we’re finally living for the first time. This is eternal life (Jn.17:3).

Beloved, this is the truest holy communion that you and I have been invited into. This is Jesus’ “flesh and blood” we’re to eat and drink. Not physical flesh and blood, not the types and shadows of communion we rightly observe in remembrance of Him. For He said “The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.” (Jn.6:53-58, 63)

Related articles

• The Disconnect (cindypowell.wordpress.com)
• Taking a fresh look at holiness (melwild.wordpress.com)
• You and I were made for intimacy (melwild.wordpress.com)