It's important for every individual
to have a relationship with Christ
because salvation is a personal, individual experience.
We do not save people by congregations.
We are, ourselves, saved one individual at a time.
This is a very personal relationship with Christ.
The Savior understands this because He's not
an abstraction, because He is a living, breathing,
real Son of God--the living Son of the living God.
People who think they have sinned too much or gone too far
or been away for too long and somehow can't come back
into the circle--my declaration is,
no one can fall lower than the light of Christ shines.
That isn't possible.
I think by coming to participate in the sacrament, the Lord's
Supper, is the most dramatic way, weekly,
that we can show that we want to identify with Him
and that, in fact, there will be a reciprocal gift
and power that comes back from that.
As we come to participate and be solidly with the Savior
in that act, that solidity and that engagement
comes back to us, and we leave that congregation,
we leave that meeting, with a strength and a power
and an understanding from Him that we didn't have before.
Part of it is because we understand Him better,
but clearly it represents the fact that He understands us.
My personal experience, as well as my apostolic calling,
is to declare personally that Christ does know us.
He has walked the thorny, difficult, rock-strewn path
of our lives.
How He did that, I don't know.
I don't know.
He didn't have a divorce.
So you could say, "Well, how does he know about me?
'Cause I had one."
I don't know how He does that.
But if somebody out there has had a divorce, He understands.
This sounds awkward to say, but God loved me, in a sense,
almost as much as He loved His Only Begotten Son.
At least I can say this: He gave His Only Begotten Son for me,
and that says something about my worth in His eyes
and my worth in the eyes of the Savior
and His willingness to go to Gethsemane and Calvary for me.
I'll never have to do that.
I don't have to bleed, and I don't have
to die for somebody else's sin.
And I don't have to be that lonely.
But I understand it, and I love it, and I appreciate it.
And what it means to me is that He understands me,
that He loves me, and that He reaches me.
So I can't explain how that happens.
I just know that it does.