This Sunday, my church community group (or Bible study group or fellowship group) is hosting visitors to our Sunday worship service.  I personally look forward to my pastor’s administering of the sacrament the Lord’s Supper as part of my support of the church by hosting endeavors with the Lord.  The Lord’s Supper is a powerful testimony about Jesus’ brokenness and grace for believers, signified by the bread and the cup.  When I participate in the Lord’s Supper in my church with the Lord, I want to remember Jesus’ first humility, His first love, at the cross for me, for my own counting of my life and my merits as nothing to the grace of the cross of Christ with the Lord.

The Gospel is a powerful testimony of grace and brokenness for the secular city.  In the fall of man, we love to build ourselves up to maximum boasts and radical displays of self-sufficiency apart from the Lord.  This display is visibly featured in the city: we love to invest in highly lucrative businesses or build up lavish homes in our cities.  This is especially true in the city of Arlington.  People here love to spread their names among tightly connected friends and networks for landing top notch jobs in political offices or lucrative commercial enterprises.  As an example of this radically built self-sufficiency, Arlington was recently rated by MSNBC as one of the top cities to live in for riding out the current recession.  Our mentality in Arlington is that we don’t get ourselves in bleak situations and trouble spots; we know how to avoid them.  And we know how to invest in just the right things that keep us steady and prosperous through any bleak economic circumstance.

But the Gospel does not testify to self-sufficiency; it testifies to radical brokenness, real humility, rooted in grace.  Jesus counted His life as nothing in a saving way for sinners, so that their faith in Him would be a sound faith, a justifying faith.  This is the life of the Gospel: justification by faith alone.  Knowing the faith of the Gospel with the Lord means counting personal merits and personal pride to death to the grace testimony of the cross of Christ with the Lord, and knowing this mortification of pride and merit to the cross of Christ as a powerful Gospel-rooted counterculture to the high merits of unbelievers with the Lord.  Arlingtonians get by on massive pursuits of self-made achievements and self-actualization apart from the Lord.  But the life of the Gospel, the life of justifying faith, is the life of putting away these self-actualized achievements to the cross of Christ, in knowing a new and better life in His name.

Knowing the life and faith of the Gospel with the Lord also means putting away personal pride to the cross of Christ with the Lord and reaching out to self-actualized unbelievers for winning them over to the faith of the Gospel message with the Lord.  Arlingtonians don’t evangelize each other as a general rule.  Everyone has their own spiritual interests, and to intrude on another person’s lifestyle is to practically be asking for trouble, and asking for alienation.  But the Gospel is rooted in power from on high, the power of the Holy Spirit, based on the Spirit’s raising of Jesus from the dead, even in Jesus’ raising of Himself by His own power, His own initiative, from the dead.  Arlingtonians ask for spiritual relativism; the Gospel deals with blunt reality, in addressing the real world dysfunctionality of sinners by Jesus’ death and resurrection from the dead.  Knowing the life and faith of the Gospel with the Lord means putting away personal merits and self-protectionism to the cross of Christ with the Lord, and knowing the cross of Christ as the foundation for preaching the Gospel message as a victorious message over the dead for unbelievers’ ears with the Lord.

And knowing the life and faith of the Gospel message with the Lord means putting away personal pride to the cross of Christ and partaking the Lord’s Supper within the body of Christians, the church, with the Lord, in remembering the cross of Christ, Jesus’ penal substitution and propitiation and imputed righteousness, in the symbols of the bread and the cup with the Lord.  And preaching the Gospel message of Jesus’ atonement as grace for unbelievers with the Lord means applying the testimony of Jesus’ substitutionary sacrifice onto the heart in remembering this testimony from the Lord’s Supper with the Lord, and trusting the Lord’s power to use His Gospel message about lowly grace to bring self-actualized unbelievers into lowly conversion to Christ.

“And when Gideon had come, there was a man telling a dream to his companion.  He said, ‘I have had a dream: To my surprise, a loaf of barley bread tumbled into the camp of Midian; it came to a tent and struck it so that it fell and overturned, and the tent collapsed.’  Then his companion answered and said, ‘This is nothing else but the sword of Gideon the son of Joash, the man of Israel!  Into his hand God has delivered Midian and the whole camp.’ “  (Judges 7:13-14)

Gideon had to learn to count himself as nothing in abiding with the LORD God and hearing of his future conquest of the camp of Midian, the city of Midian.  Gideon had to count himself as a mere loaf of barley bread, insignificant bread, to know victory over idols with the LORD.

Knowing the faith and life of conquest of sin in the Gospel message with the Lord involves knowing Jesus’ sacrifice as the central point of conquest for the idols of the city with the Lord, and preaching this cross onto unbelievers’ ears with the Lord, and trusting the Lord’s power to bring these unbelievers to humble new faith in Christ.  The Gospel message is an idol-shattering message for self-sufficient cities.  The root problem of self-achievement for unbelievers and their cities is the problem of idolatry, the problem of self-worship and self-justification.  We gratify ourselves by building up our names in vast networks of financial success and prosperity.  And we justify ourselves by defending our names against our rivals, shutting down our intellectual competitors in the marketplace by harsh words and self-defense mechanisms and lawsuits.  This is certainly true in the city of Arlington: along with a vast array of commercial outfits, we have also accumulated for ourselves a vast array of law firms for dealing with various lawsuits and disputes.

But knowing the Gospel message with the Lord means knowing the Gospel as a very different language, a countercultural language, for unbelievers’ ears, and preaching this countercultural language onto unbelievers’ ears for winning them to a new beginning in Christ with the Lord.  Arlingtonians are focused on self-justification; the Gospel speaks about new justification, God’s justification from on high through the virgin birth and substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus.  Arlingtonians are focused on self-worship; the Gospel speaks about new worship, and ultimately a new foundation for worship, in God’s gift of His Son Jesus as the Mediator of worship, and God’s direction of believers to worship of God based on Jesus’ atonement for believers.  Knowing the Gospel message with the Lord means coming to expression of awe and wonder toward the Lord for His first grace, His first love, for sinners through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus.  God shows Himself as worthy of worship and sovereign in glory and mercy through His Son Jesus.  God conquers all false gods by God’s lowly sacrifice of His Son Jesus as the Word born in flesh to the cross.  And communicating this Gospel message of new justification and a new goal, the glory of God in the Gospel, onto unbelievers with the Lord will lead to breaking unbelievers’ pride toward their conversion to new lowly faith in Christ and new satisfaction of their hearts with the Lord.