"Your Christmas Meal"

December 27, AD2011

Your Christmas Meal:
Did You Drink Wine And Eat Bread
In Remembrance Of Him?
Frank Allnutt

Christmas Day brought Christian families and friends together to celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Like so many others, did you share a Christmas meal?

Did you drink and eat? Of course, you did!

And when you drank of the cup did you remember that the cup represents the new covenant of His blood which was shed for you? Or, when you ate the bread, did you remember that bread represents His body which was broken for you?

Perhaps you remembered. Perhaps all who partook of the meal with you remembered.

But, perhaps that was not the case.

After our family’s Christmas meal, I engaged in conversation with a guest with whom I was scarcely acquainted. She had been filling a few moments of being by herself, thumbing through a Christian book. She mentioned to me the name of her favorite Christian author. Then she revealed she was attending a new evangelical church. So, we conversed on those things for a while. In the course of our conversation I let her know that I had written several books, and in the past I had been very much a part of the Christian publishing community.

“Do you still write books?” she asked.

I hesitated for a moment, then said: “Yes and no. I mean, I don’t write for the popular Christian trade anymore; I write primarily to a very targeted and relatively small group—pastors, Bible teachers, Christian counselors, and other serious students of the Bible.”

Still probing, she asked: “What do you write about?”

“I've pretty much narrowed it down to writing about the Church in the world and the New Covenant.”

“New....?” she fished for me to repeat.

“New Covenant,” I responded.

Still, she had a quizzical look on her face.

“The New Covenant of Christ’s blood that He referred to at the Last Supper,” I prompted.

“Oh,” she said, nodding her head in acknowledgement. But her countenance suggested she didn't have a clue to what I was talking about.

Sensing it wasn't the time or place to dig deeper into doctrine, I invited her to visit my web site, and I silently prayed that she might actually read The Missing Message of Christmas—an autobiographical booklet I wrote that focuses on the biblical teaching that Jesus came not only as the Savior, but in a much broader sense as the mediator of God’s New Covenant with His chosen ones.

Earlier in the day, before my brother Dan and I had left our house to join family and friends for a Christmas meal, I told him: “If I should be asked to bless our food and fellowship, I will—and I’ll mention the wine and the bread and for us to drink and eat of it in remembrance that the wine represents the New Covenant of His blood which was shed for us, and that the bread represents His body which was broken for us.”

But I was not asked to pray. Neither was an ordained pastor among us. Rather, a child was asked, who then recited a memorized prayer.

The woman I have mentioned is a delightful Christian, and I enjoyed becoming better acquainted with her.

Actually, the entire afternoon was wonderful—the fellowship, the food, and the celebratory ambience of Christmas decorations and the sharing of gifts.

But my heart aches for that woman and so many other women and men who, like her, have attended churches for most of their adult lives and yet have such vague understanding of the New Covenant.

If they are not taught the New Covenant—God’s Everlasting New Covenant with His chosen ones, and all of it—, what are they taught?

The thought of it makes me shudder.

And it strengthens my resolve to keep on writing, to help feed His sheep.
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