When Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me,” he was not simply saying, “Remember the historical facts of my death.” No, no. He was telling you to take hold of all that he accomplished for you by faith. He gave you bread and wine and the promise of the gospel. You see the gospel in the Supper. You also receive the gospel. Christ, through the minister, gives you bread and wine to taste, to eat, to drink, as signs and seals of his true body and blood.

Let’s think about the Lord’s Supper. Let’s try to better understand this incredible gift from our Lord. What’s God’s intent for the Lord’s Supper? Why did God give you and me the Lord’s Supper?
Heidelberg 67 asks, “Are both the Word and the sacraments, then, intended to focus our faith on the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross as the only ground of our salvation?” It answers, “Yes, indeed. The Holy Spirit teaches us in the gospel and assures us by the sacraments that our entire salvation rests on Christ’s one sacrifice for us on the cross.” God intends the public preaching of His holy Word to focus your faith on the life, death, burial, and resurrection of Christ as the only ground of your salvation. Through preaching, the Holy Spirit teaches you the gospel and powerfully works faith in your heart. But God has given you more than preaching. God has given you the sacraments. The Lord’s Supper, then, is intended to teach you as well. The bread and wine are visible, tangible, and physical signs and seals through which the Holy Spirit further declares to you the gospel and assures you of the benefits of the gospel. The Lord’s Supper shows you that the gospel is true and real for you, and through the Supper, the Holy Spirit nourishes and strengthens your faith.
The Lord’s Supper is not a complicated ceremony. It’s pretty simple: bread and wine are served to eat and drink. In this Supper, Jesus himself communicates or gives or imparts himself to you (WSC 88). He said, “This is my body . . . this is my blood of the covenant.” As much as you receive the Supper by faith, Christ is giving you himself and all the benefits of salvation. The Supper is not magic. It possesses no power or grace apart from Christ (WSC 91). Nor does its grace and helpfulness depend on the minister giving it. Christ gives you himself and the benefits of salvation by his Holy Spirit working in you. Christ graciously blesses you, a believer, through the Supper. The blessing only comes through faith. In fact, one who participates in the Supper without faith eats and drinks God’s judgment and wrath against themselves. So faith is the means by which the soul feasts on Christ. Faith is the soul’s mouth.
What is the Lord’s Supper then? I mean, what are we talking about? Westminster Shorter Catechism 96 explains:
The Lord’s Supper is a sacrament, in which by giving and receiving bread and wine, according to Christ’s direction, His death is shown forth; and the worthy receivers are, not after a corporal and carnal manner, but by faith, made partakers of His body and blood, with all His benefits, to their spiritual nourishment and growth in grace. [1]
You need to get this. Christ gives you bread and wine. That’s what he commanded. The bread and wine are signs and seals for you; they truly show you Christ’s sin-atoning death. When you receive, you are eating and drinking substances with your mouth: bread and wine. But as you believe in Christ, you are actually eating and drinking Christ spiritually by faith. You are eating and drinking with the mouth of your soul, which is faith.
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Jesus says of the new earth, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). This means he will restore creation to its former pre-curse glory, and likely give it greater beauty and wonder than the original. We, and the new world, will become far better and in that sense far different. But we will be the same people, without sin; and it will be the same world, without evil and suffering. All will be made glorious.

Resurrection — Christ’s and ours — is a cornerstone of the Christian faith. Yet how many of us ponder what our resurrected selves will be like? You might think Scripture doesn’t say much. In fact, it tells us a lot, and gives us solid reasons to deduce much more.
For instance, Paul wrote, “[The body that] is sown is perishable; [it] is raised imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. . . . It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:42–44). The term “spiritual body” doesn’t mean an incorporeal body made of spirit — there is no such thing. Body means corporeal: flesh and bones. A spiritual body will still be a body. But it will be spiritual, under the holy control of a redeemed and righteous spirit.
God made Adam from the earth to live on it, not float on the air. He joined spirit and body to make us completely human. He did not design us to be disembodied spirits as Plato taught, yet sadly, many Christians believe just that. To be with Christ in the present heaven is better by far than living on earth under the curse. But Paul teaches in 1 Corinthians 15 that we will not be eternally complete until our resurrection.
Was Jesus Only a Ghost?
“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). Christ’s post-resurrection actions offer us a preview of what resurrected people will do — including preparing and eating meals, conversing, and traveling. If Jesus had been a ghost, we would become ghosts. More importantly, if Jesus had only been a ghost, redemption wouldn’t have been accomplished.
The risen Jesus told his disciples,
“See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. . . . [Then] he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them. (Luke 24:39–43)
Jesus didn’t just say he wasn’t a ghost; he proved it. Likewise, he “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). Whatever else a glorified body is, it is first and foremost a resurrected body.
In Acts 1:11, an angel explained, “This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way. . . .” The resurrected Jesus who lived among them forty days before ascending is the same Jesus in soul and body who will return to raise his people’s bodies from the grave. Why didn’t Jesus immediately ascend to heaven? Perhaps partly to show his design for resurrected people to live on a physical earth.
You Will Still be You
Bible-believing Christians often ask me, “Will we become angels when we die?” Somewhere they have gotten the idea that whatever we may be after death, we won’t really be human. No wonder so few Christians look forward to heaven. Humans are not drawn to the idea of becoming inhuman.
Scripture portrays resurrection as a matter of continuity from our present into our future lives. The Westminster Confession says, “All the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies, and none other . . . united again to their souls forever.” Selfsame and none other unequivocally mean we will still be us.
When I became a Christian in high school, my mother saw many changes, but she still recognized me. She said, “Good morning, Randy,” not “Who are you?” My dog never growled at me — he knew exactly who I was even though I was a new person in Jesus. Likewise, this same Randy will undergo another significant change at death, and yet another at the resurrection.
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Find a faithful, Biblical, and local church to be a part of. Interview it well, understand their doctrine, treat that process with sobriety and wisdom, and when you have found the place you can be committed to, commit to the glory of Christ! Be active, faithful in worship, and engaged in the life of the Church. Help that Church grow to accomplish God’s mission.

Church Hopping and Serial Dating
When we think about the Church as the “bride of Christ,” we must remember how easy it is to bring our anecdotal images, ideas, and societal expectations to bear. For instance, how does one get married in twenty-first-century America? Sadly, the ethics of dating in the Church do not differ drastically from the ethics of pagan culture.
In this culture, you generally meet someone who gives you a mystical spark. Then, after no time at all, you have fallen head over heels in love with that person as they develop an unhealthy emotional obsession with you. Then, the two of you bypass good old-fashioned common sense for a season, only to find out you are not who you thought each other was. So you break up, rebound, and move on, rack up a few dozen of these relationships until you find “the right one,” Then you enter into marriage with more baggage than a fully loaded 747.
Not only does that sound like a recipe for disaster (and a major contributing factor to high divorce rates among Christians, rampant infidelity even among believers, commitment issues, carnal expectations, and a host of other marital toxins) it also explains why so many Christians have a low view of the Church and a base view of commitment to the body of Christ. If the Church is Jesus’ bride, and we have ignorantly bought into the lie that brides don’t come about until the tenth or eleventh lover, then trends like church shopping, church hopping, and church dating make all the more sense.
But we have to ask ourselves the question. Is this culture of “dating the church” a good thing? Should we “try before we buy?” Should we play Church until we are ready to make a commitment? And does that behavior produce the kind of men who will build Christendom or the ones who will pursue their preferences and lusts? Does it create the type of women that raise the next generation of saints? People, who love the Church? Are faithful to the mission of Jesus Christ?
I plan to explore that in this short little article, and we will do so by drawing a comparison between hookup culture and church hopping.
The Plague of Serial Dating
As a man or woman stockpiles intimate relationships, the expectations for a perfect spouse will increase, while the likelihood of finding a suitable partner will inevitably decrease. For instance, Person A may have had the best eyes but no personality. Person B had a great personality but wasn’t all that attractive. Person C was mean to you but was sexually gratifying. Person D was smart but had the body of a muffin top. Person E was witty but tremendously self-absorbed. On and on this cycle goes.
And guess what? The longer this list of relationships becomes, the more certain two things will be to happen. First, you will never find someone who meets all your carnal preferences. You will have created a “perfect spouse” like your own personal Mr. potato head that is the amalgam of all the “best” parts from all your previous lovers when no such person exists. I want to be optimistic that Christians are not dating and treating relationships this way, but I have seen far too much carnage in this area to pretend it doesn’t exist.
Second, when you hold onto such a superficial standard, you will either remain single forever, leaving you discouraged, or marry with significant sacrifices, feeling like you have “settled.” Again, this could have been avoided if we had prepared ourselves (and our children) for dating Biblically.
If we treated dating as the Bible does, then romance, intimacy, and pleasure would follow deliberate platonic assessment. We would not give our hearts or bodies away until we were with our covenant spouse. We would not use erotically charged dating methods to discover if someone had lifelong potential. We would not move in with them and play house to see if we could be married. Instead, we should discover those things first by interviewing them, examining their doctrine, inspecting every nook and cranny of their life, and inviting the parents and our churches into the process.
If that is how we approach things, men and women could freely and joyfully enter into the sexual, relational, spiritual, and emotional intimacy they long for within covenant marriages as God designed. And they could do so without all the scars, wounds, and baggage that come from following the world. If we treated potential suitors as our future spouses, or at the least as brothers and sisters in Christ, we would enter marriage Biblically prepared, with no regrets, no unrealistic expectations, and an overwhelming sense of security, satisfaction, pleasure, and joy.
The Example of Adam
Think about the first man and husband, Adam. Here we have a man who was prepared for his wedding day in a way few could ever dream. He had never seen a female body, so he had nothing to compare her to and nothing to be disappointed with. Her body was exactly what he wanted because it was all he had ever known. He did not have a thousand expectations of waist size, leg length, hair color, nose shape, or anything else clinging to his prefrontal cortex.
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