Make people ask about your life "Is it live, or is it Memorex?"
Ephesians 5:1-2 (NET)
Therefore, be imitators of God as dearly loved children 2 and live in love, just as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us, a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.
Listen to passage & devotional:
Belgic Confession of Faith, Article 35: The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (Part 2)
This banquet is a spiritual table
at which Christ communicates himself to us
with all his benefits.
At that table he makes us enjoy himself
as much as the merits of his suffering and death,
as he nourishes, strengthens, and comforts
our poor, desolate souls
by the eating of his flesh,
and relieves and renews them
by the drinking of his blood.
Moreover,
though the sacraments and thing signified are joined together,
not all receive both of them.
The wicked person certainly takes the sacrament,
to his condemnation,
but does not receive the truth of the sacrament,
just as Judas and Simon the Sorcerer both indeed
received the sacrament,
but not Christ,
who was signified by it.
He is communicated only to believers.
Finally,
with humility and reverence
we receive the holy sacrament
in the gathering of God’s people,
as we engage together,
with thanksgiving,
in a holy remembrance
of the death of Christ our Savior,
and as we thus confess
our faith and Christian religion.
Therefore no one should come to this table
without examining himself carefully,
lest “by eating this bread
and drinking this cup
he eat and drink to his own judgment.”
In short,
by the use of this holy sacrament
we are moved to a fervent love
of God and our neighbors.
Therefore we reject
as desecrations of the sacraments
all the muddled ideas and damnable inventions
that men have added and mixed in with them.
And we say that we should be content with the procedure
that Christ and the apostles have taught us
and speak of these things
as they have spoken of them.
Summary
If you're as old as I am you might remember the old ads with the tagline "Is it live, or is it Memorex?" Back in the day when the only way to record sound was on cassette tapes, Memorex branded itself as being the best at reducing the audio flaws common to tapes.
I always think of those ads when I read the opening line to Ephesians 5 commanding us to be imitators. The word is mimētēs in Greek, so you can see where Memorex got its name. The point is that our lives must flawlessly reflect God's character since we're His dearly loved children.
This means you must live in love, which is a nice sounding but somewhat abstract instruction; after all, love is an emotion, isn't it? What does it really look like to live in love? Since this is the way we're commanded to live, we need a concrete example of what living in love looks like.
Thankfully you don't need to go searching to get such an example. You are to live in love just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us! Christ's love is far more than just a feeling of affection. His love was self sacrificial and its sole purpose was to restore us back into a right relationship with His Father.
This is what it means for you to live in love. Be willing to sacrifice yourself by putting others first, with your primary goal being to help them understand how it is they too can be restored to a right relationship with God.
Dig Deeper
Thankfully we don't need to rely on a faded, fuzzy cassette tapes to see Christ's love live in action. Certainly the words recording it come to life by His Spirit each time we read them, and especially when we hear them preached, but we've been given even more than that.
Remember how we began this study of our sacraments a few weeks ago, being reminded that God knows our crudeness and weakness; He knows that your memory and even imagination fades over time, so He ordained sacraments so that all of your senses would be involved in experiencing Christ's love so that you could imitate it in our lives.
This is especially true of the Lord's Supper, and it's why why we've been commanded to do this in remembrance on a regular basis until the Lord returns. In short, our Confession says, by the use of this holy sacrament we are moved to a fervent love of God and our neighbors.
In other words, as you participate in the Supper, you become an imitator of God, fulfilling the very purpose you were created for.
ACKNOWLEDGE WHO GOD IS: Our Father, who created us as His image bearers to imitate Him.
ALIGN YOUR LIFE WITH GOD'S WILL: Pray that as you participate at the Lord's table, you'll be moved to a fervent love of God and our neighbors.
ASK GOD FOR WHAT YOU NEED:
Read the New Testament in a year! Today: 2 Peter 1
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