"He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him”

(John 6:56)

The Lord’s Supper* can sometimes be such a familiar event that its very familiarity can sometimes obscure or lessen its awesome majesty.

That God Himself, whom “even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain” (1 Kings 8:27) should encase Himself in flesh and offer Himself as a sacrifice for us is utterly mind-exploding.

In Jesus Christ, God sacrificed Himself to set us free from our sins and our sinful nature. In doing this, He opened the way to offer us His very own Life. In other words, He gives each of us the opportunity to become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) through faith in what Jesus has done for us.

Jesus invites each of us to “partake” – ie to accept His invitation to receive His Life into our own bodies. The words He spoke to His disciples in the upper room, before His arrest and crucifixion, were intimate and personal. And He extends these same words to every one of us who would receive Him:

“Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.’ Then He took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you. For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins’” (Matt. 26:26-28).

This is, of course, a profound mystery, and I wonder how we can engage with it in our own prayer lives?

In response to this question, I would like to offer just a few ideas for bringing the Lord’s Supper freshly alive in our own prayers, and in our intercessions for other people and situations.

I imagine that there are an infinite number of ways to pray and meditate upon the Lord’s Supper. This is just one small, personal approach which I am sharing with you because my prayer partners have told me that they find it helpful. I hope that it may be helpful to you, too, and perhaps a springboard for your own thoughts and prayers.

A sample meditation on the Lord’s Supper

Using my God-given imagination, grounded in Scriptural truth, I begin by recalling that – because of Calvary – we have all been crucified with Christ and raised to new life in Him. We’re now members of His body and united all together in one Spirit.

I go slowly, and see the bread and the wine (or juice) in front of me as being saturated with the Presence of Christ – because Scriptures indicate that Christ is omnipresent (see Eph. 4:10, Col. 2:9-10, Ps. 139:7).

He is the substance of all things. Therefore, I ponder the truth that He is the Real Substance of the bread and the wine that I am about to consume. I pray and ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten the eyes of my heart and to ignite this profound truth within me.

In faith, I ask Him to quicken the bread and the wine for it to enter my body as the Real Body of Christ – as His DNA, His Righteousness and His perfect Life that has overcome separation, disease, decay and so forth (taking time to meditate on that as I consume it).

As I drink the wine – the blood of Christ – I pray and declare that, as it flows into my/our veins, it will dissolve and purify everything that is not of God; and that it will impart the fruit of the Spirit into every atom of our beings. For particular needs, for ourselves and others, I believe it is effective to visualise the blood of Christ coursing through specific, named areas of our bodies and brains, bringing healing and restoration. 

Throughout this process, I envisage my own body as a "cell" which is united with every other cell in the entire body of Christ, all connected one to the other. So when I consume the bread and wine, I believe that the Life of Christ is pouring out and blessing every single cell (person or situation) in His entire Body.

I give all my/our hurts, wounds, failures and confusions, and everything that is not God’s will for us, to Jesus. Then … and this is the most wonderful part! … I receive His Life, His Strength, His Love, His Peace, His Comfort, His Overcoming, His Joy into the little cell called “me”.

And I believe that this Divine Life is flowing out from me into every cell in all our bodies, unhindered, and powerfully restoring. No one – but no one – is left out. Everyone is enfolded in the loving embrace of Jesus in this time of prayer.

I’m sure I’m just one of many believers doing this quietly, and we all join together in the Spirit. We need each other! Thank you, Lord, for so lovingly uniting us all together in this way.

By Ann Shakespeare   28 May 2022

*Also known as Holy Communion, Eucharist, Mass, and the Blessed Sacrament, among other terms.

Photo credits:

The main image is a painting by James Tissot entitled "The Last Supper: Judas Dipping his Hand in the Dish".  Reproduced with permission from Brooklyn Museum / FreeBibleimages.org

Grapes on the vine photograph is from Pixabay.