There are few things more enjoyable than good food shared with good friends. My family and I look forward to opportunities to gather around the dinner table with family and friends who are like family. There is something about the whole experience. The food seems to taste better and the conversation seems to flow easier. There is common grace present when we gather around the dinner table.
Which makes it all the more significant that Jesus has instituted a gathering around a table as a normal rhythm of the life of his church. We call it Communion. Or the Lord’s Supper. Or the Lord’s Table. While common grace is present around the dinner table, efficacious saving grace is present in the communion table. For the communion table pictures the reality of the good news of Jesus for those who believe. The bread and wine symbolize the body and blood of Jesus, broken and shed on behalf of his people to appease the wrath of the Father and bring many sons to glory (1 John 2:2; Hebrews 2:10).
As Jesus sat to eat the Passover meal with his disciples the night before he was betrayed, he transformed their reality by drawing attention to himself as the Passover lamb, the sacrifice that would atone for their sins. Drawing on the Old Testament imagery of the animal sacrifices, Jesus sets forth himself as the ultimate sacrifice for the sins of his people. He lived the perfect life we can’t live, died the death we deserve to die, and came back to life to prove his power over sin and death.
Resurrection power and saving grace are present in the Lord’s Supper. When we gather around the Lord’s Table, we rehearse the good news about Jesus by proclaiming his death and resurrection and awaiting the feast that is to come around the heavenly table in the new creation. There is so much grace baked into participation in the Lord’s Supper.
For many years, I didn’t see the grace that is present in the communion table. I saw it primarily as a ritualistic observance that I found a little bit weird. It seemed to have a focus on myself and my own sin. No doubt there is to be an element of reflection as we come to the table, but it seemed like my focus wasn’t primarily on Jesus because I was too busy worrying about whether or not I had confessed sin well enough to not drink judgment on myself (1 Corinthians 11:29).
More often than not, I walked away disheartened rather than emboldened. Communion became something that I didn’t really value personally, let alone in the life of the church. I was missing the point, and in the process, missing the realization of the grace that is present in the table.
Grace at the table—what does that mean?
It means that the Lord’s Supper is for sinners.
Sinners who realize that we can do nothing to reconcile ourselves to a holy God who demands perfection. We will never be worthy to come to the table of our own accord, but because of Jesus, we come to the table fully recognizing our need of a Savior. Our need of someone to die in our place to pay the penalty for our sin and absorb the just wrath of a righteous God.
It means that the Lord’s Supper reminds us of the gospel.
It’s a visible sermon. The tangible elements of the wafer and the cup that we hold in our hands as we contemplate, and then eat and drink in remembrance, gives us the gospel in pictures. Tim Chester calls them “truths we can touch.”1 They act as physical representations of the promises of God. When we gather around the table, we proclaim the truth of these gospel promises to ourselves and to each other.
It means that the Lord’s Supper shapes the life of the church.
It is easy to get frustrated with the sin of others in the church. I am quick to point out the sin of my brothers and sisters, but often that isn’t accompanied by love. Sure, pointing out sin can be done in a loving way, but it can also be done in a divisive way. When we gather around the table, we are reminded that the reconciliation that God has accomplished doesn’t just include our relationship with him. It extends out to our relationships with each other in the body of Christ. To proclaim the death of Christ and the reconciliation with God that flows from that, yet to harbor bitterness in my heart towards another member of the church, is to functionally deny the very gospel we’re proclaiming. The grace in the table shows up when it reminds me that God has redeemed my fellow brothers and sisters of their sin, just as he has done for me. It paves the way for me to repent of the bitterness and frustration that wells up in my heart towards them. It changes my interactions with them. It changes the way I view them. It shapes the life of the church.
It means that the Lord’s Supper reorients our perspective.
We walk away from the Lord’s table not focusing on all the ways we have come up short, but all the ways that Christ has been all that we could not be. Our perspective shifts. Instead of trying to do better and be holier next time we come to the table, we turn from our sin and trust in the reality about Jesus that is pictured in the table. Repentance and faith lead to a changed life, because our belief about God moves in line with what Scripture reveals to us about him. Rather than feeling condemnation for how poorly we have performed, we welcome the grace of Jesus performing on our behalf. We don’t come to the table to prove ourselves to God. We come to the table because we recognize his grace.
We walk away from the Lord’s table not focusing on all the ways we have come up short, but all the ways that Christ has been all that we could not be.
Our church gathers around the Lord’s table on the first Sunday of every month, and I look forward to that Sunday every time now. It didn’t used to be that way. I used to run past the grace of the table, perhaps not realizing my own need for it or understanding how it shapes the life of the church. Even now, these realizations come only as God’s grace reveals my sin and highlights my Savior.
What a Savior! A Savior who invites sinners to feast at his table, not because we’ve earned it, but because he did.
1Chester, Tim. Truths We Can Touch. Crossway, 2020. Buy from Westminster Books.
Gospel Awareness 
As the pansy, flower person that often leaves comments here because there is always something noteworthy to comment on, I am deeply grateful for the refocus. Many of us have gotten “stuck” on that very thing–searching out a particular sin that my prove us unworthy to participate in communion. I am not referring to unconfessed, repetitive sin. I AM referring to the absence of sin that too often we try to repentantly reach before we can participate in the Lord’s Supper. I love to be reminded that “THIS TABLE IS FOR SINNERS”. It means the only reason I have a seat at the table is because the Savior Jesus has made it possible and welcomes me EVERY time because of his shed blood already applied in salvation to my heart. The brokenness and the beauty washes anew at each Lord’s table because the focus is rightly on the sufficiency of Christ and not my insufficiency.
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