I said last week that God provides for His people. Open your mouth, God says through the psalmist, and “I will fill it.” As parents and grandparents, it delights us when a child in a high chair sees the spoon and dutifully opens his mouth. God delights to feed us. He delights to provide for us. He is the one who sets abundance around us on every hand, and we are the ones who struggle far too much as we try to understand how intent He is on giving to us, and how doubly intent He is on teaching us how to receive what He gives in all gratitude.
Unbelief in the Scriptures revolves around the strange inability we have to believe that God is going to be good to us, provide for us, and give to us what He promised to give. Even when God calls us to give something up for His sake, it is always because He intends to give us something far more valuable in its place.
Now for many Christians, this meal has come to symbolize the times when God takes things away from us, or we voluntarily surrender them. We think that piety is expecting the hard things with a resigned dread, instead of looking to God with joyful expectancy. But God intends good for you, and not ill. He meets with us at this Table in order to nourish us, strengthen us, and establish us.
And whenever He makes you let go of what you have in your fist, it is because you have nothing but pebbles from the gravel in your driveway. He intends to replace them all with diamonds.