Our task is to gather, to worship, to listen, to take, and to eat and drink. This is how God has determined to give the nations of the world to His Son, and so we should be about His business.
The world was conquered in the death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. The world was given to Jesus by the Father on that basis, and for that reason. Our worship, our evangelism, our commission is all part of the giving, and not part of the conquering. The conquest is done, and Jesus is Lord.
He is crowned as the King of all kings, and as the Lord of all lords. He is not campaigning for support. He is not angling for some parliamentary position. Jesus is Lord, I tell you.
Scripture tells us that every time we partake of this bread and wine, we are proclaiming His death until He comes again. That proclamation is authoritative. It is not seeking to make something so, but rather is seeking to make more manifest something that was accomplished outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, a glorious triumph which was, in its turn, grounded on the eternal decrees of our God and Father. This was all established before ancient times, and so we are not to go out into the world in a spirit of timidity.
You eat the manna from Heaven here. You drink from the Rock that is Christ here. You partake of the body broken here. You drink the wine of His sacrifice here. The emblems we handle—body and blood—are emblems of defeat, surely. But they display God’s ultimate wisdom. Jesus took defeat and death and destruction and despair, gathered them all to Himself, and sank down into the grave. And when He came back from the grave, He brought none of those things back with Him. He did not remain dead—but they sure did.
So come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.