The Lord’s Supper Is a Personal Encounter with Christ
This article reflects on the deeply personal nature of communion during gathered worship. While the Lord’s Supper is shared among believers, each Christian encounters Christ individually through remembrance, confession, forgiveness, and accountability.
- The Lord’s Supper is communal in setting but personal in spiritual encounter.
- Christ’s redemption and forgiveness apply personally to each believer.
- Each Christian is individually accountable before God.
By Lonetta McKee
A Personal Encounter at the Lord’s Table
When we partake of the Lord’s Supper as a part of our worship on Sunday, we do so with an assembly of other Christians. However, we are encountering our Savior personally. He sees each of us individually. It is only a communal experience externally, but internally it is a time of oneness with our personal Savior.
While we share this sacred sacrament of gathering around the Lord’s Table with our brothers and sisters, our communion with Christ is not a group activity. Rather, it is a deep personal introspection and intimate interaction with a Savior whose redemption is specific to each one of us.
Christ’s Redemption Is Personally Applied
We know that the death of Jesus on the cross was for all humankind. But it was not just a general, collective event. It had a very personal application. Paul emphasizes this in Galatians 2:20 (New International Version): “The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Note his use of the personal pronoun when he says the Son of God loved me and gave himself up for me.
This hallowed period is also when we privately confess personal sin seeking forgiveness. Just as our confession is personal, so is Christ’s cleansing pardon. First John 1:9 gives us wonderful assurance that as each one of us has confessed our sins, “he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
Individual Accountability Before God
Let’s remember, that as our commemoration of Christ’s death is one on one, so also the Lord holds us individually responsible for the way in which we conduct our lives. Paul’s admonition in Romans 14:12 highlights this when he writes, “each of us will give an account of ourselves to God.”
