Mission/Vision

KING’S CROSS CHURCH exists to glorify God and enlarge His Kingdom by gathering regularly to proclaim and celebrate the Gospel of Jesus Christ, yielding to the authority of God’s Word as illuminated by the Holy Spirit and summarized in the historic Christian Creeds and Reformed Confessions, partaking together of Christ’s presence in the Sacraments, providing opportunities to love and serve one another in Community, equipping the saints for Ministry to those who are lost and hurting, both locally and globally, and preparing them to cultivate Shalom (peace and well-being) wherever God calls them to serve.

Monday, October 15, 2018

The Lord Be With You


(Ruth 2:4) And, behold, Boaz came from Bethlehem, and said unto the reapers, The LORD be with you. And they answered him, The LORD bless you.

Although this greeting sounds a bit foreign to our ears. It has only been in the recent history of God’s people that these sorts of salutations have been superceded by the mundane likes of “How’s it goin’?”, “Hey”, “How ya doin’”, the slightly more formal, “Hello”, or the vapid just saying nothing at all.

Evidently, in Boaz’s time, even the everyday/ordinary greeting uttered by a master to his servants in the field was considered an opportunity to invoke a blessing of unspeakable worth and inestimable value: “The LORD be with you.” To which the sweaty reapers joyfully replied with a benediction no less glorious than their master’s: “The LORD bless you.”

Indeed, all of Scripture contains similar greetings. The angel of the LORD hailed Gideon with a “The LORD be with you” as did the angel who announced God’s wondrous plans to the virgin Mary. The newly resurrected Christ greeted his apprehensive disciples with a “Peace be with you” and the epistles of Paul are fairly well interspersed with the likes of “The Lord be with you all”, sometimes as a greeting, and sometimes as a farewell.

For the last two millennia, our own generation excepted, the saints have delighted to greet one another, and to call one another to prayer with some form of the biblical and beautiful responsive “The LORD be with you…And also with you.” A higher blessing one cannot imagine, and a more fitting way to exercise one’s office as a New Testament priest is difficult to conceive. For God has made us a kingdom of priests, a royal line of clerics imbued with authority to call down upon, and to convey to one another the very blessings of Almighty God. One has to wonder how we can be so content with the parched dryness of silence, or the insipid grape juice of “How’s it goin?” when the potent wine of “The LORD be with you” is so near at hand?