LS-08-Till He Come

Till He Come For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink the cup, ye proclaim the Lord’s death till He come.--1 Corinthians 11:26.

Till He come! This Supper then is not among the things that shall abide for ever. We shall not need it when He comes. Now, we need a memorial. We are so constituted that it helps us to have some tangible token of remembrance. But we shall not need it when we see Him face to face. We cherish it now, just as we value the tokens of affection we have received from absent friends. But these tokens lose much of their significance when the friends come back to us, and we can see their faces and hear their voices and enjoy their fellowship. We then experience the reality of which the tokens were but the sign.

Now, we need a medium of communication. Perhaps it is a sign of our poor humanity that we do.

If our love were but more simple
We should take Him at His word,
And our lives would be all sunshine
In the sweetness of our Lord.

If our spiritual apprehension were clearer, maybe we should not need the many things that now help us in communion. Constituted as we are, a well-appointed church building, an act such as the ordinance of baptism, the subdued strains of organ music, help us in our aspiration after Divine things. So does the Lord’s Supper. It keeps us in touch with the Lord, whom we think of as absent, because He is invisible, though He is ever with us. But only till He come--we shall not need this means of intercourse then. We shall know Him then in ways that are not possible to us while we abide in the flesh.

Now, we need this means of grace. It helps us as we strive to attain to that standard of life and character which He has set before us as our ideal. We aspire, but we often fail. We are so much in contact with the material world, which has a strange power of lowering our spiritual vitality, that we are ever disappointed in ourselves. But we believe that when He is manifested, and the environment that now encumbers us is removed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is. "And every one that hath this hope set on Him purifieth himself, even as He is pure." But till He come, this Table of the Lord, which He has appointed for spiritual intercourse, will be one of the trysting places along the way of life.

Thus the communion of the Lord’s Supper is a well-spring of hope. It is a constant reminder that we have turned from the world to serve the living and true God, and to wait for His Son from heaven. It is a stimulus, renewed every week, to the great hope that we cherish, of the return of the Lord Jesus.