The Lord's Supper is a simple ordinance. Men have tried to complicate it with ritualism, shrouding it in mystery, making it so
obscure that the average Christian hopes no one will ask him what it really signifies. Ritualism and mysticism have spiritualized away into a fog the meaning of the gift our Lord has given to His Body, the Church.
The communion of symbolically receiving him into your body, just as you received Him into your soul, is fellowship of the highest order. Such fellowship is eternal. No power upon earth, no devil of hell, can take from you the piece of bread which you eat in the Lord's Supper; it is ingested and becomes tissue and blood and bone. It becomes an inseparable part of you, as does the wine which courses through your bloodstream throughout every fiber of your body.
It is all a picture of your eternal security with Christ. The bread and wine symbolize what is in our hearts, a union of Christ with us, so we know exactly what the Apostle Paul meant when he wrote in Gal. 2:20, "I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me."
Just as no power on earth or in hell can separate your body from that bread and wine, receiving them is an outward act illustrating an inward truth: neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom. 8:38-39). |
