What’s Happening to Us Spiritually during the Lord’s Supper?

It is a great privilege to approach the Lord’s table as sinners saved by grace. Today, W. Robert Godfrey helps us orient our focus on the Lord Jesus Christ as we consider the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

NATHAN W. BINGHAM: This week for the Ask Ligonier podcast, we’re recording live from Ligonier’s 2023 National Conference, and we’re joined by one of our teaching fellows and the chairman of Ligonier Ministries, Dr. W. Robert Godfrey. Dr. Godfrey, what happens to us spiritually during the Lord’s Supper?

DR. W. ROBERT GODFREY: Well, I suppose it depends a little bit on the state to which we come to the table, but we always need to remember in the first place that the sacraments are instituted with the promise of God—that we need to focus in the first place more on God and His promise in the sacraments than on ourselves. We really will lose the spiritual blessing if we’re only looking at us and not adequately looking at the promise of Christ.

Calvin, I think, expressed what goes on in the Lord’s Supper very beautifully when he said, “By the Holy Spirit, we are lifted up to heaven to commune with Christ.” And that is a wonderful spiritual blessing. Calvin makes the Spirit important in our understanding of the Lord’s Supper.

And Jesus Himself, of course, instituted the Supper to connect us to Himself: “This is My body; this is My blood.” It’s interesting how many Protestants spend all their time saying what Jesus did not mean by those words. And at some point, we have to get to what He did mean by those words. And John 6, I think, helps us in that: “My flesh is real food,” Jesus says. He offended a lot of people in the crowd at the time when He said that.

And so, what does He mean that His flesh is real food? What He means is that His body and blood are where redemption was accomplished for us, and therefore we have to look to His body and blood to understand the redemption. The cross was the place where the wrath of God was satisfied. The cross was the place where He was broken as the substitute and sacrificed for sinners. And in the Supper, we’re drawn back to the cross. We’re drawn back to the work of Christ. We’re drawn back to the critical character of His humanity suffering for us as humans.

And so, what happens spiritually in the Supper is, when we hear the words of promise, when we’re drawn to Christ in faith, we are nourished in Him. We draw closer to Him. We have communion with Him. And so we are built up in the faith. We are drawn closer to Him.

We are so prone to be forgetful, and that’s why the Lord instituted the sacraments, so that not only do we hear the Word preached, the Word of promise preached, but we can see the gospel displayed. So, sacraments, Calvin said, are given for us in our weakness. We are prone to be forgetful. We’re prone to be distracted. And the sacraments come to focus our attention and to reiterate the promise both to the ear and to the eye so that we are drawn to Christ and to His saving work, and to recognize that our whole life, which needs to be constantly renewed and fed, is only fed by Christ Himself and by His work.