Lord’s Supper- Remembrance & Examination
1 Corinthians 11:23-235:
23″For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’ 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.'”
One of the things we’re supposed to do when we take the Lord’s supper is remember Jesus. The reason we need to do this is because we are forgetful. By forgetful I don’t mean we have amnesia. I’m not saying our knowledge of who Christ is passes out of our memory, rather it passes in our memory – namely from the forefront of our thoughts and minds where it is ever present, guiding our thoughts and actions, to the rear of our minds – where it is ineffectual, inconsequential, imperceptible. I would argue that if that is where your knowledge of Christ resides, then you have forgotten Him.
You see, unless there is a force or a mechanism keeping something in the forefront of your mind, it is natural for that thing to pass from the forefront of your mind to the rear. That is the natural flow of cognition. Have you ever heard the phrase “use it or lose it”? This is true in so many areas of life but it is also true in this instance. Our minds are like a river that gently, gradually, moves things that are not used backwards in our minds where they exert less influence and cannot consume valuable cognitive resources. Unless we apply energy to the system and push against the flow of that current to deliberately keep what we know is important at the forefront of our minds, they will not stay there.
The Lord’s supper is the mechanism Christ gave us for counteracting this tendency.
There is nothing more important than our knowledge of who Christ is and what He has done for us. The Lord’s supper is our time, every week, for remembering Christ and pushing Him from wherever we have let him drift in our minds to the front where He reigns, where He influences, where He transforms, and where He belongs.
— Harry Lehman, Mobile, AL