So Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ: A Morning and Evening Devotional

by Douglas Wilson

720 Daily Morning and Evening Devotions for the Entire Year

At the root of God's faithfulness and lovingkindness to us is the invitation to a great banquet: the Lord's Supper. Gospel-centered Communion is an all-encompassing sacrament, and So Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ takes inspiration for each day's grace and obedience from eating and drinking the bread and the wine.

These 720 succinct and powerful readings come from the past fourteen years of Douglas Wilson's pastoral ministry, and deal with the many applications of the Lord's Supper that are suited to personal devotions. These include gospel encouragement, pursuit of sanctification, motivation and exhortation, observations on the church calendar, family life and community, daily bread, means of grace, and much more.

For daily devotions in the morning and at night, So Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ will lead every evangelical Christian to think about and meditate on the transformative implications of eating and drinking the body and blood of the Lord Jesus.

Genres: Theology, Christian, Devotional, Nonfiction

742 pages, Paperback

Published January 24, 2017

About the author

I write in order to make the little voices in my head go away. Thus far it hasn't worked.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I normally don't post about Doug's new books, partly because I work for Canon Press and partly because I read a lot of his stuff years ago, and already get a lot of him every week. However, I read this book and was surprised at how good it was, and I wanted to offer some praise on Doug Wilson and this little book, which comes straight from the pulpit.

One of the best things about Doug's metaphors is that they themselves seem to be pastoral. Time and time again, I was not shocked or blown away, but gently moved by how he pulls out so many modern stories or phrases or commonplaces to show who God is. So many others fall into trite analogies, which are about as good as translating "God is love" as "God's totally chill now dude." Doug will use down to earth language like "chill out, dude," but it is never because God is chill, but because God cares and continues to care, and sent His Son to take care of it and ultimately to take care of us.

One really good bit is where he recommends people with big sins--abortion, fornication, etc--come to the table in preparation for busting themselves. It's a fascinating analysis of the kind of mundane problem that applies to many smaller sins. Doug does not draw attention to himself in his preaching, and unlike many Evangelicals, I have no idea what sins he struggles with. This is a great virtue, and he always deals with sins in a practical, lets-see-if-it works sort of way. I still recall one time he was talking about how in the navy there was all sorts of pornography on the wall and he said, "What's a guy gonna do? Feel his way through the engine room with his eyes shut?" It's the kind of thing that if an Evangelical asked it, he would probably do so with embarrassed shame and perhaps even get the application wrong. Doug is confident pastorally, which is important if you are trying to get down to business.

This is great: "There are two kinds of unbelief. One doesn’t want the new world to come at all—and tries to keep or retain the old ways. The other is the revolutionary form of unbelief, which demands that its particular fevered utopia must come by this time tomor­row. The first error is that of the pagan past, the second error is that of the futuristic heretic. Both of them hate wisdom, and therefore are worldviews that love and embrace death."

Doug used to emphasize more the middle way, and the way we must avoid to errors. After Obama and rumblings within the CREC, I think he feels the need to push strongly against particular errors, but the same themes remain within his work. He hits both Protestant intellectualism, Evangelical ritualism, and Papist superstition, and very much sees the former as doing away with the baby with the bathwater (but he dislikes the toxic bathwater more).

And there are simply comforting passages. Doug, like Paul, is always thinking about people in trouble: "While you are in trouble, God gives you lesser deliverances to give you confidence that a greater deliverance is coming. Rise up, stepping on the kindnesses He shows you in the midst of your difficulties. But you may wonder what lesser deliverance I could be talking about . . . you still have that debt, your child is still wayward, your friendship is still being threatened . . . what lesser deliverance? What token do you have that God is with you, and that He will in fact deliver you? What token? Here—it is the broken body of Jesus (broken for you) and the shed blood of Jesus (shed for you). The only problem with this image is that of calling this a “lesser” deliverance. Call it an earlier deliverance, and trust Him for the final deliverance." When I began this book, I was cast down in my soul, not sure what to do about something in my life. I read some words like these, and the complaining spirit left.

I warn the reader that if he reads it cover-to-cover, he might get overload. There is a lot of repetition, and Doug has never minded. He very much believes that wide distribution is more important than creative variation, and he can enlist Paul and most theologians into agreement, though he doubtless has more venues than they did. Virtually all of the family series books began in the pulpit, and I think they suffer a little bit in style. Doug would not care so long as they did the job, and that very much is a principal of theology.

[Archie Herrema · Rating 5 out of 5]

So come and welcome to Jesus Christ

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Communion, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. If each of Douglas Wilson’s short readings about communion constitute one of the ways he loves it, it adds up to 730 ways. This book is a compilation of invitations to the Lord’s supper that Wilson delivered up week after week after week in his service as a minister of the gospel. Each one of them ends with the phrase “So come and welcome to Jesus Christ,” a phrase he admits borrowing (with thanks) from John Bunyan. My husband and I read through this twice daily, morning and evening, to much profit and enjoyment. We missed some here and there, so we can’t technically say we finished it completely. The devotions were well written and came from so many different angles that it never felt repetitive - and with 730 devotions on the same topic, that’s really saying something. Highly recommend!

[Caleb M. Powers · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of communion homilies made into a devotional book—most of which are solid and helpful pastoral thoughts on the Eucharist. There are a few however, that go a bit off the rails, and of course the paedocommunion ones make little to no sense (even to many in the paedobaptistic tradition). Still, as a whole, they make a thoughtful collection of communion messages that were certainly edifying for the discerning reader.

[Cole Feix · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it is an unconventional topic for a devotional, I went through this each day of 2017 and really loved it. I'm sad to be done with it!

[Emily Dixon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Terrific.

We need more heavy joy in our communion.

[Terry Feix · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of Doug's short invitations to communion. The book is arranged so that it can be used as daily devotions. Solid priceless insights.