On the Lord’s Supper and genuine, Biblical Christian fellowship

I am shamelessly lifting this from Alan Knox, but I love what Spurgeon said about the Lord’s Supper and how it relates to Christian fellowship. From his sermon on Acts 2, Additions to the Church…

I want you to notice this, that they were breaking bread from house to house, and ate their food with gladness and singleness of heart. They did not think that religion was meant only for Sundays, and for what men now-a-days call the House of God. Their own houses were houses of God, and their own meals were so mixed and mingled with the Lord's Supper that to this day the most cautious student of the Bible cannot tell when they stopped eating their common meals, and when they began eating the Supper of the Lord. They elevated their meals into diets for worship: they so consecrated everything with prayer and praise that all around them was holiness to the Lord. I wish our houses were, in this way, dedicated to the Lord, so that we worshipped God all day long, and made our homes temples for the living God. A great dignitary not long ago informed us that there is great value in daily prayer in the parish church; he even asserted that, however few might attend, it was more acceptable than any other worship. I suppose that prayer in the parish church with nobody to join in it except the priest and the usher is far more effectual than the largest family gathering in the house at home. This was evidently this gentleman's idea, and I suppose the literature which he was best acquainted with was of such an order as, to have led him to draw that inference. Had he been acquainted with the Bible and such old fashioned books, he would have learned rather differently, and if some one should make him a present of a New Testament, it might perhaps suggest a few new thoughts to him. Does God need a house? He who made the heavens and the earth, does he dwell in temples made with hands? What crass ignorance this is! No house beneath the sky is more holy than the place where a Christian lives, and eats, and drinks, and sleeps, and praises the Lord in all that he does, and there is no worship more heavenly than that which is presented by holy families, devoted to the fear of the Lord.

That is a far cry from how we break bread with one another today. I think that the problem with the prior post on denying the table to Christians is that we are not talking about the Lord’s Supper in the same frame of reference that the Bible speaks of the Supper. We see the Lord’s Supper, the fellowship, the breaking of bread as being something that is reserved for formal, organized meetings “at church”, on schedule and in the proper format. Nothing could be further from the Bible. We have lost the sense of the Supper being an act of worship, of fellowship, of community among the redeemed. It is now a ceremony, a function, a sacrament. We are poorer as a people for it and the Supper is less meaningful because of it.

Again, this is not to discount the need for and the value of corporate gathering and worship. We have been in fellowship with other believers in a corporate setting every Sunday since we moved, often multiple times on Sundays. But we as the Body of Christ have so modified the idea of Christian fellowship and the breaking of bread and worship from how it appears in the Bible that I fear that we are doing a lot more tradition following than we are Bible following. Especially from those of us who are Reformed, who believe in the inerrancy, perspicuity and sufficiency of the Bible. We, of all people, should seek in the spirit of semper reformanda to constantly test what we believe and what we do with the words of Holy Writ and not let our theology and practice be dictated by tradition or culture or confessions, but instead be guided by the Word of God. What is tragic is that being “Reformed” seems to require greater and greater form and structure. What is ironic is that being “Reformed” is looking less and less like a reformation and more and more like what Christians were trying to reform in the first place.