When we come to this Table, we do not believe (with some) that Jesus Christ is locally present in the elements in a crude physical way, or that the bread and the wine have been in any way transformed into something else. The physical body of Jesus Christ is at the right hand of God …
Feeding Them Two Ways
God has never, in the history of the world, called a people out from the world in order to starve them. It sometimes looked that way, but this was because it was God’s intention to not only fed their bodies, but also to feed their faith. This is why the manna fell from the sky. …
Baked Into A Loaf
It is no accident, and no coincidence, that the elements of the bread and wine here will in just a few moments pass over your lips and tongue. It is also no secret that we all fail in many ways, as James tells us, and not least with our speech. The elements of the sacrament, …
The Whole Person Comes
The Christian faith is not divided, because Christ is not divided. There is no division here—whether Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, black or white, young or old. Neither is there a division between internal and external. There are those who seek to introduce such distinctions, just as there have been those …
Gladness and Strength
God delights to feed His people. In Psalm 104:15, we learn that wine has been given to make glad the heart of man. We learn in the same verse that bread was given to strengthen the heart of man. Strength and gladness are therefore here on this Table before us. God has given us the …
Only Grace
We serve and worship a merciful God. One of the central lessons to learn as we approach this Table is that God loves us and wants us here. This is a hard lesson to learn—sinful men know how to flatter themselves, and they can readily believe (in their own conceits) that God loves them just …
Resting Upon the Sacrifice
What you see before You is a table, and not an altar. It is a sacrificial meal, and apart from the sacrifices of praise we offer, it is not a sacrifice. In the Old Testament, after the sacrifices were offered, the worshipper was invited to sit down at a sacrificial meal which depended on the …
Showing the Lord’s Death
In the words of institution that we use, the apostle Paul says that as often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we show the Lord’s death until He comes. Now the verb show here means to proclaim or declare. This means that the entire communicant Church preaches or announces or declares. What …
Burgundy Dishwater
This Supper is not a covenantal meal in the midst of a non-covenantal world. Everything we do is covenantal, which is another way of saying that everything we do is a form of fellowship, or a form of partaking. This even includes our sin. When we sin, we are trying to eat at another table …
Inexorable Kindness
We are partaking of the Lord’s Supper on Pentecost, the time when we mark the pouring out of the Holy Spirit into the world, the fulfillment of the glorious prophecy of Joel. This gives us opportunity to reflect that the Lord’s Supper, although it was instituted at Passover, is not simply the fulfillment that one …