SACRAMENTS
OF LOVE

Topics: Assurance; Body of Christ; Communion; Doubt; Fellowship with God; Grace; Intimacy; Perseverance; Presence of God; Sacraments; Security; Self-worth; Trust

References: Matthew 26:26–29; Luke 22:19–20; John 3:16; 15:13; Romans 5:8; 1 John 3:16

My aunt died some time ago, having lived to be eighty or so. She had never married. While clearing out her possessions, we came across a battered photograph of a young man whom my aunt had loved. The relationship had ended tragically. She never loved anyone else and kept for the remainder of her life a photograph of the man she had loved.

Why? As she aged, she knew that she would have difficulty believing that, at one point in her life, someone had once cared for her and regarded her as his everything. It could all have seemed a dream, an illusion, something she had invented in her old age to console her in her declining years—except for the photo. The photo reminded her that she really had loved someone once and was loved in return. It was her sole link to a world in which she had been valued.

Communion bread and wine, like that photograph, reassure us that something that seems too good to be true—something that we might even be suspected of having invented—really did happen.

—Alister McGrath, Doubting: Growing through the Uncertainties of Faith (InterVarsity, 2006)