A Special Communion Sunday
April 19, 2026
CENTRAL TEXT: Luke 22:14-15
And when the hour came, he reclined at table, and the apostles with him. 15 And he said to them, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer.
CALL TO WORSHIP: Psalm 63:1-5
LEADER: You, God, are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
I thirst for you, my whole being longs for you,
in a dry and parched land
where there is no water.
ALL: I have seen you in the sanctuary
and beheld your power and your glory.
Because your love is better than life,
my lips will glorify you.
LEADER I will praise you as long as I live,
and in your name I will lift up my hands.
ALL: I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods;
with singing lips my mouth will praise you.
CELEBRATION OF THE LORD’S SUPPER
CONFESSION OF SIN:
LEADER: Let us confess our sin to the Lord.
ALL: Most holy and merciful Father,
we confess that we have sinned against You
in thought, word, and deed;
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved You with our whole heart, and we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us; that we may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen
ASSURANCE OF PARDON: Based on 1 John 1:9 and Romans 8:1
LEADER: Hear now the good news of the gospel:
“If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just
to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
And again,
“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”
All who are trusting in Christ alone for their salvation are forgiven, cleansed, and received into God’s favor.
ALL: Thanks be to God!
QUOTES:
An illusion is not the same thing as an error… what is characteristic of illusions is that they are derived from human wishes. . . .The gods retain the threefold task of exorcising the terrors of nature, of reconciling men to the cruelty of fate… and of compensating them for the sufferings of life. . . .
- Sigmund Freud
Religious ideas are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind.
- Sigmund Freud
“The refusal to look up to God as our Father is the one central wrong in the whole human affair; the inability, the one central misery: whatever serves to clear any difficulty from the way of the recognition of the Father, will more or less undermine every difficulty in life.”
- Excerpt From “ABBA! Father,” in Unspoken Sermons, George MacDonald
This may perhaps seem a rather unextraordinary episode, albeit a moving one. But therein lies its peculiar grandeur. To us today it seems only natural that a narrator should pause to record such an incident, and treat it, with certain gravity; but, in the days when the Gospels were written, the tears of a common man were not deemed worthy of serious attention. They would have been treated by most writers as, at most, an occasion for mirth. Only the grief of the noble could be tragic, or sublime or even fully human. The tears of Peter were therefore indicative of a profound shift in moral imagination and sensibility. Something had become visible that had formerly been hidden from sight. For Christian thought, God had chosen to reveal himself among the least of men and women, and to exalt them to the dignity of his own sons and daughters. And, as a consequence, a new vision of the dignity of every soul had entered the consciousness of the Gentile world.
- David Bentley Hart, The Story of Christianity
You’ve spent fifty years listening to people in the secrecy of the confessional, what have you learned about the human soul?” The priest: “Two things. First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks. And second, there is no such thing as grown-ups.”
- André Malraux
Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. . . . If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them, for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.
- C.S. Lewis
I saw, you see
But you did not see me
You were going somewhere
Time was all I had
But the timing was bad
When I looked your way
You neglected to stay
You were going somewhere.
“You were goin’ somewhere,”
- David Wilcox