Dr Paul Allen

Is there any essential importance or even spiritual significance of the Lord’s Supper either to a Christian or the church? Is it only a church ritual, or is it really a means of grace? The Lord Jesus Christ gave His church two sacraments: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Baptism signifies our spiritual union with God through Christ’s death and resurrection so that we might walk in the newness of life.  The Lord’s Supper is the ordinance of communion with God by continuance in the grace that we received from Christ by faith. It is also called Holy Communion or the Eucharist. But a preferable designation is “the Lord’s Supper” since that name separates it from all other meals. It is the supper of Christ with His bride, the church while here on earth. Christ instituted it by giving us its menu—that is, the elements of the bread and the cup, with the former signifying His body and the latter His blood. It is the Lord’s supper because the Lord commanded its observance (Matt. 24:26–29; Mark 14

One of our Scottish preachers used to say that the believer has three looks at the Lord's Table. There is, first, a retrospective look. The sacrament of the Lord's Supper is a commemoration, a celebration of an event in the past. It is an aid to us in remembering the pivotal, redemptive point of history, the point at which the Son of God died for his people. It is not a re-enactment of the sacrifice, but it is a dramatic visual aid to faith as it looks back over history to the point at which the sacrificial lamb died for us. Second, there is a prospective look in the sacrament. It looks forward as surely as it looks back. It anticipates the return of the Lord. It belongs to the design of the Lord's Supper that it is a temporary arrangement "till he comes." The bride of Christ does not remember the death of her bridegroom as a widow but as one who longs for the day when the bridegroom will return to take her home. But, third, there must be an introspective loo