God delights to feed His saints, and yet His family, like all families, contains children who are fussy about their food. One of the perennial problems that parents have is that is getting children to eat what is set before them, gratefully and simply. It can be discouraging for parents when children won’t eat, or they want something else, or they just play with their food.
We are the children of God, and it sometimes appears that we are children in every sense. He sets before us a simple meal of bread and wine, and He tells us to eat and drink.
And so we go out to the cupboards and substitute elements on our own authority, thinking that grape juice is somehow godlier than what Jesus drank, and we desire a better testimony than He had.
And we don’t want to simply take and eat, take and drink. We want to do so quarterly, or annually, or rarely, at any rate, in order to keep it special. But we don’t do that with our ordinary food. No husband here declined breakfast this morning, postponing that happy event until July, in order to help keep it “special.”
And we play with our food too, pushing it around on the plate, thinking the whole time about what miserable sinners we are. We mutter to ourselves that we don’t deserve this kindness, and how can we just partake? Well, we should partake because this is what we were told to do. We are not pleasing God by arguing the point with Him. If He had wanted to save somebody else instead of you, He could have done so easily, but He didn’t. So that should be settled.
When we come to this Table, we are to come with a glad and settled heart. God has invited us, we have every right to be here, and we have no right to not be here. We have no right to show up at His dinner, and try to turn it into our dinner. This is about Christ, and about His body, the Church. It is not about me, the individual. It is not about you, the individual. This Table is set by the kindness of God, and it is set with the kindness of God. Eat. Drink.