Written by Kevin P. Emmert |
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Because we belong to the Lord Jesus and are made to be like him, we cannot find our true identity by looking inside ourselves. The Lord’s Supper subverts the notion that identity is an individualistic enterprise because in this meal we participate with Christ. “The cup of blessing that we bless,” Paul writes, “is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). Thus, many Christians rightly call this meal Communion. By it, we fellowship with Christ and remember that we are people who live in vital connection with Christ.

Identity — it is one of our society’s greatest obsessions today. Even we Christians can preoccupy ourselves with knowing who we are and what our purpose is. This pursuit is not altogether bad. The desire to understand who we are and what we are here for is natural and God-given. The problem arises when we look in the wrong places to discover our identity and purpose.
Many look to social media, self-help resources, life coaches, models of the psyche — you name it — for direction and affirmation. We may even naively accept mantras like “Be true to yourself” and “You do you,” thinking we can determine our own identities and express them however we want. But such paths lead only to more confusion and despair.
If we as Christians want to understand who we are, we must look to Jesus Christ. As the God-man, he is the true revelation of both God and of humanity. He alone can reveal to us who we are. And one concrete way he reveals our identities is through his appointed Supper.
People Who Remember
The Lord’s Supper, along with baptism, is one of the most debated Christian practices. Believers from various traditions disagree over what exactly happens during the meal; we also disagree over how frequently it should be celebrated. Despite such disagreements, all Christians agree on at least this: the Lord’s Supper is a meal whereby we remember who Christ is and what he has done for us (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24–25).
Many of us do not realize, however, that the Lord’s Supper is also a time when we remember who we are in Christ. In a key way, the Table strengthens our identity in him. Indeed, Christ himself forms and fortifies our identity in this meal because he is present to us and lives in us (John 14:20, 23; 17:23, 26). Just as food and drink strengthen the body, so Christ’s body and blood, received by faith, strengthen our souls in a way that helps us understand ourselves.
The Lord’s Supper shapes our identity in part because the meal is analogous to the Passover. The Passover was a ritual feast whereby the Israelites meditated on God’s saving actions and reassured themselves of who they were as God’s people. They identified themselves with the exodus generation every time they celebrated the rite.
When Jesus celebrated the Passover with his disciples on the night before his death, he did far more than identify with the exodus generation; he gave the meal greater significance because he was about to accomplish his mission as the true Passover Lamb. Just as the historical exodus and old covenant defined Israel’s existence, so Christ enacted a new exodus and a new covenant that now defines our existence in him — our very identity and way of life. And when Jesus commanded us to eat in remembrance of him (Luke 22:19; 1 Corinthians 11:24–25), he was not instructing us to simply ponder past events, just as he was not simply recalling the exodus when he celebrated the Passover with his disciples.
Many today think that to remember is to merely think about something from the past. But biblically, to remember involves bringing the past into the present and allowing the past to actively shape the present.
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Written by Christine M. Chappell |
Tuesday, September 5, 2023
Taking the time to connect a depressed mother to lament is an act of patient compassion (1 Thess. 5:14). She needs reassurance that “spiritual power and growth feel like weakness, as if we just barely make it through the day.”[3] Indeed, there’s a special kind of strength God gives when we are free to feel weak (2 Cor. 12:9-10). But just as we help her to take comfort in the realism of lament, we explain that these God-given prayers mean to serve a redemptive purpose in her life: the deepening of her dependence on the Lord and the purification of her faith in Him (1 Pet. 1:6-7).

Are you counseling a mother who feels depressed, discouraged, and desperate to feel better again? Those are common sentiments to hear from a woman wPreview (opens in a new tab)ho feels imprisoned by the darkness she’s in. Maybe she yearns to be strong and stable, but she can’t shake the sense that she’s failing at life. She’s not “rising to the occasion” as she hoped. She’s frustrated with herself for not “suffering well.”Among all the other mental, physical, relational, financial, and circumstantial loads she carries, she also feels crushed by a burden to perform—as if faithfulness means faking her way through her feelings.
It’s hard for a mom to be a pillar of strength for her family when she feels like she’s falling apart.
As we seek to better understand a depressed mother’s experience (and the hurt and confusion that go with it), we may find that she doesn’t feel free to feel weak—to feel any other way but “fine.” So how can we counsel the weary woman who thinks she should always feel strong and steady? How might we begin to lift the burden of performance off her back? To be sure, we could escort her to many places in the Scriptures. But connecting her with the realism and redemption of biblical lament is a conversation that ought not be overlooked.
The Realism of Biblical Lament
When a melancholy mother thinks she ought to feel better than she actually is, we, as biblical counselors, have a tremendous opportunity before us. Namely, we get to meet her in the midst of her weakness—just like Jesus does (Heb. 4:15; 1 Thess. 5:14). We invite her to hear the laments of afflicted Psalmists and sit with her in the tension of those desperate prayers for a while (Ps. 88, 102). We explain that to groan our way to glory is not only human,“[it’s] Christian, for now.”[1] We let the official songbook of God’s chosen people debunk the “myth that faith is always smiling.”[2] Then, together, we ask the Spirit to steady her as He gives voice to her distress through His Word (Ps. 77).
Real life is really hard for God’s people—we hurt ourselves when we think it shouldn’t be (Matt. 7:14).
Another way to connect her to the realism of biblical lament is to lead her to hear Christ’s own cries. We revisit the realities of His miseries (Isa. 53:2-6; Matt. 27:27-31). We see that Jesus wasn’t always strong and smiling (Matt. 26:37-38; John 11:35); His human nature needed strengthening and steadying, too (Matt. 4:11; Luke 22:41-44).
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We know that heaven will be a wonder for all who are admitted, a place of perfect peace and perfect satisfaction for all who enter its gates. But surely heaven will be a greater wonder still for those whose joys were fewest, whose sorrows were deepest, whose earth was most distant from heaven.

The man who lives in the Swiss Alps is probably not terribly impressed when he visits North America and strolls through the Adirondacks or the Smokies. The woman who has spent her life snorkeling along the Great Barrier Reef is probably not too enthusiastic about snorkeling off the East Coast of Canada. The person who has grown up on the beaches of Maui is probably not going to break the bank to vacation on the beaches of Lake Superior. There is nothing wrong with the Adirondacks or the Smokies, nothing wrong with the East Coast of Canada or the beaches of the Great Lakes. It’s just that they are not nearly as good, not nearly as impressive, not nearly as awe-inspiring as the alternatives.
It does us good at times to ponder heaven, to ponder the future God has promised to those who love him. He has promised that we will be with him forever in a new heaven and a new earth—a re-creation of this world in which all sin and sorrow, all pain and danger will have been removed. Here we will live out the purpose for which God created us—to spread out over the earth and enjoy it with him and for him.
As we make the pilgrimage from here to there, as we endure this long journey, we expect that it will be difficult. We expect that we will experience the consequences that have come with mankind’s fall into sin. We expect that we will endure sickness, bereavement, persecution, chastisements, and so many other forms of suffering. This is all inevitable in a world like this one.
While we do not wish to suffer, we must be confident that God always has purposes in it.
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