What a blessing we derive from thanksgiving, from taking afresh the core of the Lord’s Supper, and from remembering him. May God bless us as his child at every Lord’s Supper service. It is for us, to the rest of our journey.
It is a great consolation to know that if we would judge ourselves we would not have to be subject to the Lord’s judgment. We must be tough with ourselves and scrupulously honest, and we must not spare ourselves both in searching out sin within and in putting it to death. Every imagination of the praise of men, every feeling of superiority, every unreal evaluation of self, every inclination to self-confidence must be destroyed as soon as it puts its head above ground. As we do so, God sees what we are doing and approves our informed and frank assessment of ourselves, and he will count that a sufficient correction to our bad conduct, to remove the necessity for him to have to judge us. Paul’s exhortation is based on the fact that it is much less painful for us to judge ourselves than for the Lord to have to judge us. But he will judge us for sins we have failed to deal with ourselves.
The world says all such negative thinking should be banished in the interests of self-esteem, but Scripture tells us that this is to our great good.