Communion Meditations

At Big Creek Church we celebrate communion weekly, you can read the theological and practical reasons are from this series of posts on the Lord's Supper, part 1; part 2; part 3.

These are our communion meditations that we post on the screen to provide an opportunity of meditation and contemplation during the Lord's Supper.


All right, Christianity will do you good—a great deal more good than you ever wanted or expected. And the first bit of good it will do you is to hammer into your head ( you won’t enjoy that!) the fact that what you have hitherto called “good”—all that about “leading a decent life” and “being kind”—isn’t quite the magnificent and all-important affair your supposed. It will teach you that in fact you can’t be “good” (not for twenty-four hours) on your own moral efforts. And then it will teach you that even if you were, you still wouldn’t have achieved the purpose for which you were created. Mere mortality is not the end of life. You were made for something quite different from that . . . . The people who keep on asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about,; if they did they would know that a “decent life” is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up. We are to be re-made. - C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock, “Man or Rabbit?”

If a man is centered upon himself, the smallest risk is too great for him, because both success and failure can destroy him. If he is centered upon God, then no risk is too great, because success is already guaranteed--the successful union of creator and creature, beside which everything else is meaningless. -Morris L. West in The Shoes of the Fisherman.

We're too comfortable to be spiritual…. We think we will be able to pursue God better without danger or hardship. And yet it works in just the opposite way. Nothing is more difficult than to grow spiritually when comfortable.

That's why the believer Alexander Solzhenitsyn's reaction to his exile to the Soviet labor camp was to bless it, because it was there that he discovered that "the meaning of earthly existence lies not, as we have grown used to thinking, in prospering, but in the development of the soul." - Tim Bascom, The Comfort Trap: Spiritual Dangers in the Convenience Culture (Intervarsity, 1993)

It is curious to realize that people like you and me, who set such store by being settled and secure, should worship a God whose revelation was to nomads and wanderers. We try to domesticate God, try to get God to settle down with us--but never succeed. - Barbara Moorman in The Other Side

As I studied the life of Christ, one impression about Jesus struck me more forcefully than any other. We have tamed him. The Jesus I learned about as a child was sweet and inoffensive, the kind of person whose lap you'd want to climb on. Mister Rogers with a beard. Indeed, Jesus did have qualities of gentleness and compassion that attracted little children. Mister Rogers, however, he assuredly was not. Not even the Romans would have crucified Mister Rogers. - Philip Yancey