THE LORD'S SUPPER NO. 2

THE LORD’S SUPPER NO. 2

As to your question, I do not think that it would help you to institute a comparison between the worship in the assembly and the worship in heaven. The only scripture I know of, alluding to worship hereafter is the worship of the heavenly company with reference to the Lord on the earth as Redeemer and Creator, and not simply as Head of the church. If I am right as to this you would not gain anything from the comparison. I shall try and explain to you, as well as I can, the true state of heart towards Him in the assembly. You come to meet the Lord; He is Son over God’s house. Properly your first thought is to remember Him as He left this earth. You are in company with Him risen from the dead (Hebrews 2: 12). You are in the efficacy of His accomplished work; the more you are in the consciousness of your acceptance, the nearer you are to Him, the more deeply affecting it is to your heart that He died where you are. It is His death which engrosses your heart; it is not your gain; you are in the gain of His death, and the more you are, the more is your heart affected in recalling His death. It is not His sufferings you recall but His death; He died where you are, you live where He lives. The effect is that you are severed from the place where He died and correspondingly attached to Him where He is. The Lord’s Supper and Table is brought before the Corinthians because they had lost all sense that they were in the place where Christ had died; they were reigning as kings. You shew forth the Lord’s death until He come. There is no relief to your heart from the fact of His death here until He comes;

^[p. 30] you are identified here with His death. He has borne your death, and has freed you from it, but now your heart is so attached to Him that, like Ruth, you can say, “Where thou diest, I will die”. If you think of your own benefit at such a time, I am sure you will weaken your remembrance of Him. If you think of any one near and dear to you among men, it is not his acts, however great, that you think of, but of himself, and as you do, you are in heart severed from the place where he is not; his death is ever before you in that place. But with regard to the Lord, your consolation is that you see Him alive from the dead, as He is in the assembly: then you know the peculiar worship consequent thereon. “I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you” (John 16: 22).

I trust I have now conveyed my mind to you. The pious in Christendom do not go beyond the Passover in Egypt: we are really over Jordan to remember Him. If we were not in the benefit of His work, we could not reach Him. We must be clear of that for which He suffered, before we can enjoy His presence as the One risen from the dead.