In the congregation where I grew up, we had a youth rally every year, called YES Weekend. Over the course of the event, we hosted hundreds of young people from Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and South Carolina. Before our new church building was completed in 2003, we had to move the Sunday morning worship service on YES Weekend. We rented the city auditorium because it was large enough to hold the congregation and all of our guests. The auditorium was designed similarly to a movie theatre. The floor sloped upward from the stage to the rear. There were carpeted aisles, but concrete floors under the theatre-style seats. As you might imagine, the place had great acoustics.
The young men of the congregation always served communion on YES Weekend. Preparing communion in the city auditorium presented a challenge since the building was not equipped with a kitchen. Because of this, and the convenience of offering communion to 750+ people, we served prepackaged communion. It took a dozen or so young men to wait on the three large sections in the auditorium.
I was one of those you men waiting on the Lord’s Table at YES Weekend in 2002. After one of the older teen boys led a prayer blessing the bread, the tray slowly made its way to me, where I promptly dropped it on the very hard floor. The clang and clatter of the metal tray reverberated off of the walls, stage, and floor. It still rings in my mind to this day. Dropping the communion in front of 750 people is not the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, but it was probably the loudest!
No matter how hard we try, we all make mistakes. No matter how much we may have grown in our walk with the Lord, we’re all going to stumble from time to time. If the process is advancing in our lives as it should, we may not be sinning as much as we once did. And we likely feel the weight of our sins, even the “little” ones, far more than we did in the past. Even so, on this side of heaven, we will never reach perfection in our thoughts, words, or actions.
That’s why I love Malachi 3:6. Malachi prophesied to the southern kingdom of Judah at the end of the Old Testament timeline. God’s people had returned from captivity in Babylon, only to fall into many of the same sins that had led them there in the first place. Malachi condemns the people’s sins at every level. In spite of all of this, God tells His people, “For I the LORD do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.”
If we, or any people, got what we deserved, God in His righteousness would consume us. Instead, He sent His only Son, who gave His body and blood to cleanse us. We remember this special sacrifice every Sunday in the Lord’s Supper, even on Sundays when we drop it on the floor.
Clay Leonard
