On Good Friday when we remember the crucifixion of our Lord, Jesus Christ, we also remember how bleak the hope of eternal life in Christ must have seemed to the disciples on that day. What the disciples didn’t yet know that day was that Jesus would be raised from the dead on the third day, forever dismissing the notion that the life of every soul ends with death. We now live with the knowledge (and hope) that our relationship with God in Christ is permanent. And yet, that hope is fragile, and we easily question God’s love for us when we feel alone and in pain. So the author of Hebrews reminds us that we are a community of faith and need each other. We must “provoke one another to love and good deeds,” and we must meet together for the purpose of “encouraging one another.”
God gives us grace to meet God’s demands upon us, but God does this through a community of faith. We owe it to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters in Christ to “be there” for one another, to be agents of God’s grace for one another. Wednesday Night Connect, Wednesday Evening Worship, Saturday Worship, Sunday Worship, Bible study groups, Presbyterian Women, choirs, Focus, Covenant groups, Shawl Ministry, “Dinner for Eight,” and other gatherings of believers present opportunities to give and receive God’s grace as we “see the Day approaching.” Individually, we tend to feel inadequate to the task of being faithful to God, but together we become the body of Christ in the world.
Prayer: God of grace, forgive our self-centered resistance to being the body of Christ. Continue to call us into communion with you and with one another so that we might “hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering.” Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who has saved us from ourselves to be members of his body, the Church. Amen.
Ernest Krug
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