Church, how you approach the living God is quite literally the difference between life and death. Modern, watered-down Christianity has peddled the dangerous lie that God does not care about your posture, your reverence, or how you conduct yourself in His courts. Look at Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5: God struck them dead on the spot to instill a righteous, terrifying fear into the assembly. When Paul writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 11, he does not commend them. They turned the Lord’s table into an occasion for selfish indulgence, division, and drunkenness, despising the church and humiliating the poor. There is a right way and a wrong way to worship, and when you treat holy things with casual flippancy or unrepentant sin, you bring judgment upon your own head. Make no mistake: spiritual irreverence carries severe physical consequences. Paul warned that because people took communion unworthily, without discerning the Lord’s body, many were weak, sick, and some had even died. At the Lord’s Table, we do not hold to the empty memorialism of modern evangelicalism, nor the error of Roman transubstantiation. In historic Reformed true presence, we believe that by the Holy Spirit in conjunction with our faith in the Lord, we are spiritually imparted the body and the blood of our Lord and by it are granted participation in his death, his burial, his resurrection and ascension on high. Christ is truly and spiritually present from faith by the Holy Spirit. In the bread and the wine, we spiritually feast upon Christ, participating in His body and blood as a true means of grace. That is why the table must be hedged, why you must examine yourself before you eat, and why you must lay down your petty household feuds, confess your sins, and approach the table clothed in Christ’s righteousness with reverent fear and awe.
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