Daily devotion – The Lord’s Supper
The Lord’s Supper
1Co 11:26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes.
Jesus on the night of His betrayal, during the meal in the upper room Jesus took bread, broke it, and gave it to His disciples saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.” – Luke 22:19
After the meal He took a cup of wine and gave it to them saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.” – Luke 22:20
There are three truths we will examine at this amazing moment in the life and teaching of our Lord:
1. The centrality of His death – Jesus was giving instructions for His own memorial service. They were to eat bread and drink wine in memory of Him. In addition, the bread would stand not for His living body but for His body given for them and the wine for His blood shed for them. In other words, death would speak from both the elements of the bread and the wine. So it was by His death that He wished to be remembered.
2. The purpose of Jesus death secondly – According to Matthew, the cup stood for “my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins – Matthew 26:28. This is the wonderful claim that through the shedding of His blood in death God would establish the new covenant promised through Jeremiah Chapt. 31 – one of whose greatest promises was the forgiveness of sins.
3. Lastly, the Lord’s Supper concerns the need for us to appropriate personally, the benefits of Jesus’s death. For in the drama of the upper room the disciples were not spectators only but participants. Jesus not only broke the bread but gave it to them to eat. Similarly, He not only poured out the wine but gave it to them to drink. Just so, it was not enough for Christ to die; we have to make the blessings of His death, our own. The eating and the drinking were, and still are, a vivid acted parable of receiving Christ as our crucified Savior and of feeding on Him in our hearts by faith.
So, to summarise, the Lord’s Supper, as instituted by Jesus, was evidently not meant to be a slightly sentimental “forget me not”; it was rather a drama rich in spiritual significance for each of us!
As we celebrate Communion this coming Sunday, may we have a full knowledge and understanding of how wonderful this blessed sacrament is.