It has been a while since I wrote my personal observations but the activities these past few days brought to mind what the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans in chapter 10:
13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” 14 How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? 15 And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” 16 But they have not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” 17 So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
I had the privilege of engaging, together with a brother, someone at Facebook who proposed that ‘holy communion’ (the term used by Roman Catholics for the ‘Lord’s Supper’) is a sure and quick means to heaven.
The biblical explanation for the Lord instituting this ordinance is to let His people be continually reminded of His death, resurrection and return (Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:22-25, Luke 22:14-21, Acts 2:42 and 1 Corinthians 11:22-26). There was no explicit teaching that the bread and wine becomes the literal flesh and literal blood of the Lord. Even the Jews in John 6 thought they were being commanded to eat His flesh and drink His blood literally. To take that literally is to misunderstand the whole point of John 6 that as the bread in the desert sustains physical life, so the Lord shall give eternal life through His death (a sacrifice of His body and blood) to those whom God shall give Him to save through faith in Him.
The discussion went on for almost the whole morning and our sole objective was to point Him to the Person of Jesus Christ as the only means of salvation through faith – a gracious gift and working of God. But each time, the person we engaged in would appeal to every conceivable wordly intellectual issue and church tradition that when placed side by side with Scriptures will not hold water at all. We avoided what is called in evangelism “pandora’s box” – this is getting into all sorts of discussion by address every point of view thrown at us that the Gospel gets buried in the heap of secondary issues. I recall the words of the Lord in Mark 7:6-9:
And he said to them, “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, “‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’ You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.” And he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition!
Nevertheless, our objective is to preach the Gospel. In the end, we can only pray for that soul that the eyes of his heart and his mind be opened by God to see the light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ so that he may repent and turn to the Lord, and may receive the propitiation for his sin and escape the wrath that is to come.
Much in Facebook today is the relentless exchange of information that feeds the self. Two friends succinctly said that this is the cheapest form of entertainment and the place to be noticed – all directed to the pleasures of self. Christians should continue to take advantage of this media platform to preach Christ. Otherwise, many people will not hear, neither will they know who nor why nor how to receive eternal life as clearly expressed by God through the Gospel of His Son.
EmmausTrekker 