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Lest I Forget

On one of Insight for Living’s tours of the Holy Land, Chuck Swindoll led a Communion service at the garden tomb in Jerusalem. Here are a few excerpts of Chuck’s teaching from that memorable morning.

“It was so different than the disciples had thought it would be. Instead of looking into the face of their master—as they had three and a half years earlier, standing alongside their boat as they pulled in their nets on the quiet shores at the sea . . . they now stared with their mouths open at a limp corpse at Golgotha, the Place of the Skull.”

“Everything within us urges us on to rush past the torturous scene of death and the burial and to move quickly to this tomb where the triumph is announced as we focus on the resurrection of Christ and life everlasting. But the Lord would have it another way. He established a memorial—the Lord’s Supper—that would force us to return again and again and again and again to the cross.”

“There are times when the maddening pace of life must screech to a halt and we deliberately stand or sit or kneel in awe of our Savior’s sacrifice and reconsider the cross, the price He paid for us, the awful sacrifice made on our behalf.”

John Bunyan wrote in The Pilgrim’s Progress:

“Thus far did I come laden with my Sin;
Nor could ought ease the grief that I was in,
Till I came hither: What a place is this!
Must here be the beginning of my bliss?
Must here the Burden fall from off my back?
Must here the strings that bound it to me crack?
Blest Cross! blest Sepulchre! blest rather be
The Man that there was put to Shame for me!”¹

“Our Father, on this cool morning in Jerusalem, we want You to know how much we love You . . . and how grateful we are for Your Son who gave Himself for us. Thank You that in giving His body to be beaten and bruised, in releasing His life to death, He had us in mind. Thank You for the cleansing blood, that magnificent detergent that washes away all our sins. . . . We worship Him now in His magnificent name.”