Our confession of faith, the Westminster Confession, describes this meal as “the sacrament of His body and blood.” The first purpose they list for the observance is the perpetual remembrance of His sacrifice on our behalf. We have already addressed this, noting that the remembrance is for both God and His people. But there is …
Perpetual Remembrance
When it comes to marked events, there are two ways to remember them. One is to avoid forgetting, and the other is to enact what you have never forgotten. We mistake when we think that the first kind of remembrance is the only kind there is. But when the Bible says that the Lord remembered …
Partaking of Him
God loves matter. He invented it, He created it. God is the God of heaven and earth, which means that He is the God of earth and heaven. This means that He is Lord over all that is earthy. When we are coming to this Table, we are feeding on bread and wine, not abstractions. …
He Quickens the World
Life is a mystery that turns inanimate matter into animate matter. Death is a disruption of this glorious gift, turning animate matter back into inanimate. But life is always God’s default option. He is the God of all life; He is the living God. Death entered this world only through sin and rebellion. When God …
Restoring Our Frame
When our first parents fell, the occasion of their grief and ours was food. Not only was it food, it was food that was good. The prohibition of the tree of knowledge of good and evil was clearly a temporary restriction. God did not create an evil, and place it in the midst of the …
His Mercy Endures Forever
God is the God of food. He created food, and He created it in order to bestow it on his people. He made a world full of food, and has invited us to partake of all that He has set before us. This is His character; this is what He is like. As it says …
Life to the World
In the gospel of John, Jesus feeds the five thousand in a staggering miracle—a rare miracle that is mentioned in all four gospels. He immediately follows this up by teaching His disciples that He is the bread of heaven, and that his flesh is life for the world. Now what this means is that the …
Especially For You
Something we have said here many times is that this meal is not a reward for being good. This is not an awards ceremony. We sometimes draw this false conclusion from the practice of church discipline—if someone can be excluded from this meal, which excommunication most certainly does, then weren’t they excluded for being bad? …
Love Throughout the Week
Jesus taught us to take and eat, not take and speculate, or take and quarrel. And not only did He tell not to quarrel, He specifically told us not to quarrel. This covenant bond is designed by God to draw us closer and closer together in love for one another, and to deal with those …
And So We Come Gladly
You have perhaps heard the admonition that the “family that prays together, stays together.” This is quite true, and families should pray together. But it is also true that families that eat together stay together. One of the signs that our culture is fragmented is that it is so easy to eat alone—in the car, …