The Lord’s Supper

When the "Lord’s Supper" is rightly understood and humbly received, it is a living and dynamic experience in Christ. It must not be touched by the unconverted because its spiritual content is death and life. If you take it with unconfessed sins in your life, its death will only add to your existing death. It must be received by the pure heart, in which sin has been rightly judged and put away because it aids that life in this continuing death to sin. At the same moment, it multiplies the new life because the cup is living and is our extension of the resurrection. To turn this "Supper" into a reoccurrence of His crucifixion is to deny the finality of the Resurrection and to glory only in the death.

Yes, the bread is death; it is prepared without leaven and has no content of life. It is dead bread because it represents His broken body – beaten, slashed, and nailed on a cross until He gave up His ghost. The Son of God had to pass through the garden where every aspect of life was prepared unto death. The Rock had to be smitten because it was to become a hiding place for the sinner. The Rose of Sharon had to be crushed so that its aroma of grace could satisfy the nostrils of the great Father and God. The bread of the Lord’s Supper is the extension of His death to His saints so that our death with Him might be remembered and reaffirmed regularly. We must die daily if life is going to arise.

But the cup is life out of death. The cup is living, filled with organisms of life and fermentation. The life left alone will stand upright in the cup and become a living cup, strong and intoxicating. Its resurrection out of death and it is the victory of the "Lord’s Supper." We dare not eat the bread without drinking the cup. The religious system that reenacts His death in the bread and does not serve the cup to the worshippers is confessing that the system is dead. This cup rightly understood is like the emergence of spring where sleeping life springs forth in dazzling colors. The cup of the Lord is the life of the Lord and His Spirit serves that life to every pure worshipper.

Abraham was the first "man of faith" to receive this cup. Melchisedec, the King of Salem (Heavenly Jerusalem) and the priest of the most-high God, descended to the valley of Sodom and Gomorrah where this worshipper had defeated the ungodly in battle and was returning in triumph. Melchisedec brought forth bread and wine from the cupboard of God and served communion to the lesser. Abraham brought forth his tithes as a token of total surrender as he worshipped. The Father was manifesting grace out of His prophetic promise of the sacrifice yet to be offered. The cross and resurrection was so set in stone that it could cast a shadow of repentance backward as well as forward.

Joseph was a captive in Egypt and saw this offering of bread and wine in the dream of two high-ranking officers of Pharaoh. The butler’s dream of a three-day shadow with his return to the cup of Pharaoh was contrasted with the baker’s dream of a three-day cloud. The three-day cloud would end with the baker broken in death. The cupbearer had to live because the cup is life, but the bread server had to die because the bread is death. Joseph, the heir of Abraham, was indeed living in the backward shadow of the cross, as did every First Testament saint.

The "Lord’s Supper" is indeed a living experience. We dare not to allow it to become a dead system or ceremony of religion. Jesus plainly said, "It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." (John 6:63). To tolerate a system of death without the living presence of the risen Lord is hypocrisy of the worst degree. He is alive and at the Father’s right hand and is ever ready to shed forth grace and resurrection life. Eat the bread in death to self, drink the cup in life to your soul, and shout aloud, "Because He lives, I live also!"