Bro. John:
When I read Vince’s reply to the excerpt from your book, Jesus reminded me of what he spoke to me one morning recently about ceremonies:
“Symbolism is NOT Me!”
How much clearer or simpler could Jesus be than that?
🙂
S~
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Sister Sandy,
I think that comment from Jesus to you is one of the most important truths that we, and all God’s children everywhere, need to take in. O! would to God that all His children could just understand that simple word from the Lord! They would “come out of her” in droves.
The question is simply this: “Ceremonies: Do we want them or Him?” They are NOT the same thing! And we are not living in the OT time, when God’s people had no choice! All they had was ceremonies. What a golden opportunity is ours, to have the choice to serve God “in spirit and in truth”!
jdc
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From Vince’s email:
“The communion ceremony was one of those ceremonies that I had a hard time understanding the reasoning behind, probably because I was not fully understanding Jesus’ real meaning by drinking his blood, and eating his flesh. But when you were speaking to the folks in Louisville about the time when you were young, and you didn’t know what the little cups of wine were for, so you and your friend just drank them and pretended to be drunk, that stood out to me. And then later on you said that’s what you have to do without God’s life in you; you have to PRETEND to drink of the Spirit, and PRETEND to have fellowship with the Father, the Son, and with each other. Anyway, this really helped to clear things up for me.
After reading through the Law for the first time a while back, what really struck me is how detailed the ceremonial works of the Law were, and how precisely God required them to be performed. I just could not believe that God would go to so much trouble teaching Moses exactly what was required of Israel in the Old Testament (15 chapters on building the tabernacle alone!), and then give seemingly vague hints at ceremonies to be performed for His new Covenant. Makes no sense, and rebellion really does seem to be what is necessary for someone to insist on forcing what Jesus said into a box and making a ceremony out of it.”