Frequent Communion
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
1 Corinthians 11:26 NRSV
The Lord’s Supper is precious: an encounter with the living Christ. Grace is poured forth, faith renewed, spirit-encouraged, healing released, and hope restored at the table of the Lord. At the table, the resurrected Christ meets the people of God as the heart of God makes known the love of God in bread and wine.
We do not receive these things as common bread or common drink, but as Jesus Christ our Savior who became incarnate by God’s Word and took flesh and blood for our salvation.
Justin Martyr, Apology
It’s silly to think that at one time we thought that if we took communion on a weekly basis we would somehow take it for granted, and the experience would become routine, even mundane. Yet, the opposite occurred, the more we partook of the Body and Blood of Christ, the more we yearned for his intimate presence, the more precious the receiving became. At the Lord’s Supper, we met the living Christ who was never boring, but was always a grace-filled God encounter.
Like many others, I had grown up with the idea that bread and wine, Communion, taken too frequently would grow old and become a mere ritual. But personal experience has proven just the opposite. I have found the Table, like the Word, to be a satisfying means of nourishment and spiritual growth. Far from becoming routine, it has become like an intimate relationship.
Robert Webber, Worship Is a Verb: Celebrating God’s Mighty Deeds of Salvation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 1992), 53.
HT: Robert Webber Quote of the Day