Week 41—Friday Hebrews 6:1-3
Hebrews 6:1-3
HOLDING TO CRUSTS
We are looking at the fact that the Christian faith, interpreted as the Word become flesh, is God’s eternal Yes to us. And our response should be an attitude of Yesness—a Yes to God’s Yes. A cowboy was converted late in life and brought over into his Christian life his cowboy language and attitudes. He was asked by a pastor with whom he was taking breakfast to say grace. He prayed, “Lord, I ain’t askin you for nothing, but I’m a-thankin you for everything.” He had passed the stage of asking to the stage of receiving, continuously receiving and continuously thanking, a state of Yesness. His attitude was not achieving but receiving. The achieving came out of the receiving and not the other way round.
A man was arrested in Ceylon and brought before a court for digging up a grave and removing a skeleton. Asked why he did it he replied, “I wanted it for meditation.” He wanted to meditate upon a skeleton! But before we smile at the man in Ceylon, let us ask ourselves how many Christians meditate upon dead Bibles, dead doctrines, dead rituals. They don’t expect to receive anything from a living Christ. Inwardly dead with an open Bible in their hands. They don’t take it—they take it in their hands, sleep with it under their pillows—anything except taking it as their very own.
Or they cling to some outworn doctrine instead of receiving the living Christ. A child was taken from a war area where he had been going into garbage cans in search of scraps of food. He was taken to a home and washed, but his hand was clenched; they had to pry it open and found a crust of bread—this clenched crust with abundance of food next door. We hold on to our moldy doctrines, clenching desperately, when if we would open our hands and heart we could have the Living Bread.
O Living Bread, help me to throw away my moldy crusts and to eat forever of you. For without feeding upon you we are lean and empty. Feeding on you we are satisfied to our depths. Evermore give us this Bread. In your name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My good is often the enemy of God’s best; my crusts keep me from God’s loaf.