Our daily prayers

First of all, let us think of our daily morning and evening prayers.  You will remember that in our morning prayers we should always thank God for our night’s rest and also for his goodness to us all through our life.  And in our evening prayers we should thank him for the past day.  We should also in our prayers give to God our adoration and praise.  The last thing we do is to ask him for anything, and even then our asking should be a preparation for making a further gift to him.  That is to say, whenever we pray to God for anything, it should be with the purpose of being able to give him more worthy service than we could do if we did not have it.  If we pray, for example, that we may be successful in an examination, it should be with the purpose of being more useful to God as a result of passing it.

The Eucharist

And just as in our daily prayers we should give to God, so also should we in the public services of the Church, and above all in the Eucharist.  For the Eucharist, unlike any other service, has been given to us by Jesus himself and is the only perfect act of worship there is.  At the Offertory, when we offer the bread and wine to God, we also offer ourselves, a very poor offering and completely unworthy of him, for only perfection is good enough for God.  But is the best we can do at that point because it is all we have to offer.

But at the Consecration Jesus takes possession of our offering of bread and wine and he and it become one, so that what we now have to offer to God is no longer bread and wine, but Jesus himself in his Risen and Ascended Body on the altar.  And because Jesus is completely perfect, so our offering of Jesus in the Eucharist is completely worthy of God.  That is why no other services can possibly take the place of the Eucharist.