Anonymous Asks (312)

“What does it mean to take communion unworthily?”

Today’s question comes from 1 Corinthians 11:27, which reads, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord.”

Let’s start with this: If fellowship with Christ required that every communion participant come into the presence of God with every new sin, active and passive, recognized, recalled and repented, then every gathering of Christians to remember the Lord would end in a smoking crater. Amazingly, it doesn’t. So then, taking the bread and/or drinking the cup in an unworthy manner probably does not mean “with any sin unconfessed”. Most of us make a regular effort to confess any known sins before taking communion, but years of walking with the Lord show us how little we recognize our own sinfulness and how much we have been forgiven.

So what does it mean to take communion unworthily? Somebody once told me that every time we read the word “therefore” in the Bible, we ought to ask ourselves what it’s there for. I have found that to be sound advice.

Paul spells out right in the context exactly what the sin is that incurs judgment: eating and drinking “without discerning the body and blood of the Lord” (see verse 29). That’s not a failure to consider the cross. That’s not a failure to meditate on bruises, crowns of thorns, nails and piercing spears. It’s a failure to consider that all Christ’s suffering was in order to unite believers of all races and stations in life into one body of which the risen Christ is now the glorious head. It’s the sin of writing off, looking down upon, humiliating or despising fellow members of the body of Christ for whom our Savior died. Not just our worth, but their eternal value is established once and for all in the bruising of the Lord’s body and the shedding of his blood.

To fail to discern that infinite value is to invite God’s judgment.

When Paul commands, “Let a person examine himself”, this is the issue he has in mind. An unrepented grudge. An unforgiven offense. A readiness to dismiss a fellow believer because he is not your kind of person. One look around the room in honesty will tell you who you like and dislike, who you prioritize and who you write off, who you are happy is there with you and who you wish had rather stayed home. To take the bread and drink the cup unworthily is to fail to recognize where the lines are drawn that one day soon will separate humanity into two groups for all eternity: light and darkness, death and life, saved and lost. It is to fail to recognize those for whom our Savior died; our brothers and sisters in the household of God.