“For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread; and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, “This is My body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of Me.” In the same way He took the cup also after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes” (1 Corinthians 11:23–26).
Every time we worship, together or individually, every time we pray, we should do it in remembrance of Jesus as our Mediator, as the perfect sacrifice of worship to the Father. It is easy to think about worship as something we must do as an offering to God, but our worship is a response to what God has already done. It is our response to the way that Jesus Christ offered Himself to the Father in a perfect manner as we read in the book of Hebrews.
“By this will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all” (Hebrews 10:10). We are not sanctified by what we can do, but we have been sanctified and made acceptable by what Christ has done. “For by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are sanctified” (Hebrews 10:14).
In short, Jesus Christ in his own self-oblation to the Father is our worship and prayer in an acutely personalized form, so that it is only through him and with him that we may draw near to God with the hands of our faith filled with no other offering but that which he has made on our behalf and in our place once and for all.[1]
When we worship and pray, we are aware that we are not perfect, but we present our worship and prayers to the Father because of the mediation of Christ which enables us to draw close to God. Every time we partake of the communion, we are reminded of what has already been accomplished at the cross. We do not partake of the communion repeatedly trying to get it right, but because do it in remembrance of the perfect offering and sacrifice done once and for all.
Hebrews 10:1-12
Romans 12:1-2
[1] Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ (Colorado Springs, CO: Helmers & Howard, Publishers, Inc., 1992), 87.
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