Real Communion
The table of the Lord’s is a table of communion and fellowship. This is why we call it Communion. It is communion with God, and it is communion with God’s people. This is why Paul told the Corinthians that when they came together to eat this meal it was not really the Lord’s Supper. There were divisions among the Corinthians, rivalries, resentments, and elbows being thrown. You can’t celebrate communion while being out of communion with God or your neighbor, your husband, your wife, your parents, your kids, or roommates. It says that when the Corinthians tried to do that many of them got sick and some had even died.
In the Old Testament, when the Israelites complained against God that there was no meat to eat in the wilderness, He gave them quail, but that meat became poison to all those with evil hearts. Likewise, God told Israel that if a man suspected his wife of adultery, he could bring her to the tabernacle and the priest could give her a drink that would function as a jealousy test. In some ways, the Lord’s table functions like that. If you are in fellowship with God and one another, the bread and cup are grace and strength and blessing. But if you come to the table harboring secret sins, or grievances or out of fellowship with someone, you need to know that by eating and drinking, you are inviting Christ in. Christ is there, and it is communion with Christ. But if you eat and drinking communion while trying to preserve disunion, divisions, and strife, the meal will be a curse.
The answer is not to abstain from the table. If you are baptized, you really must come.
Don’t cling to your sin and abstain from the meal. Rather, let go of your sin now. Drop your sin now. Determine in your heart right now to kill that sin, to confess it, to forsake it, to be reconciled to your brother or sister as soon as possible. If you do that, then the Lord’s Supper will strengthen you for that fight, strengthen you to do what needs to be done to restore fellowship.
So consider your wife, your husband, your kids, your parents, your roommates, your friends. Is all well? Or do you need to go find them right now, call them, text them an apology and ask for forgiveness? Then do it. Then the Lord’s supper will truly be communion, communion with the Lord Jesus Christ, whose blood reconciles every sin.