When we compare the Reformed and Lutheran view, we see there really is no disagreement about the reality of a communion with Christ. The difference is in the nature of that communion. For Lutherans, the communion happens by Christ coming down to earth and into the bread and wine. By contrast, the Reformed view is that our souls are in union with Christ by His Spirit, because His humanity remains at the right hand of the Father until His second coming. The ultimate purpose of the Lord’s Supper is that it unites us with the Lord. 

How do Reformed Christians understand the Lord’s Supper? How is the Reformed understanding different from what Evangelicals and Lutherans believe? Do we believe in the true presence of Christ in the Supper? In this post, I will be drawing a great deal from the Reformed Confessions and John Calvin, as I seek to articulate the Reformed view of the Lord’s Supper.
The First Lord’s Supper
“When [Jesus] had given thanks, he broke [the bread], and said, “This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
1 Corinthians 11:24–25
On the night Jesus was betrayed, he gathered with His disciples to celebrate the Jewish Passover. This was a sacrament of the Old Testament that celebrated Israel being saved from the angel of death and the tyranny of Egypt. Jesus took the Passover elements of bread and wine and instituted the Lord’s Supper. The original Passover found its ultimate fulfillment in the sacrifice of the lamb of God—Jesus Christ.
Why was the Lord’s Supper Instituted?
Why was the Lord’s Supper instituted? It was to “nourish and support those whom” God “has already regenerated and incorporated into His family, which is His Church.”
Just as God gives us natural food for our natural life, He also gives us spiritual food for our spiritual life. He “has sent a living bread, which descended from heaven…Jesus Christ, who nourishes and strengthens the spiritual life of believers when they eat Him, that is to say, when they appropriate and receive Him by faith in the spirit” (Belgic Confession, Article 35).
Because we’re still frail and weak human beings, Jesus provided tangible earthly elements to teach and reassure us “that, as certainly as we receive and hold this sacrament in our hands and eat and drink the same with our mouths…we also do as certainly receive by faith (which is the hand and mouth of our soul) the true body and blood of Christ our only Savior in our souls, for the support of our spiritual life” (Article 35).
The Real Presence of Christ
Unlike the majority of Evangelicals, Reformed Christians believe in the true presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. It’s more than a commemorative memorial meal. Paul says, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? (1 Cor 10:16).
In a way, that’s mysterious; there’s a true communion with Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Herman Bavinck said, “The Lord’s Supper is above all a gift of God, not our memorial and confession. The Lord’s Supper signifies the mystical union of the believer with Jesus Christ.”
As Reformed Christians, we can even say that we feed on Christ in the Lord’s Supper, if we understand it like this: “what is eaten and drunk by us is the proper and natural body and the proper blood of Christ. But the manner of our partaking of the same is not by the mouth, but by the spirit through faith” (Belgic, Article 35).
Like Lutherans, Reformed Christians believe in the true and real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Calvin taught that “Nothing is more absurd than to call that a sacrament which is void and does not really present to us that which it signifies.” The question comes down to not IF Christ is present, but HOW He is.
While Martin Luther staunchly taught “is means IS,” the Reformed position is that “This is my body” should be taken in the same way Jesus said He is “the door,” or in the same way He is “the good shepherd” and “the vine.”
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Slowly but deliberately drip the truth into our children’s minds and hearts. By reading and re-reading the Bible together, we have introduced them to its primary themes, its main characters, and its central truths. By explaining the Bible as we go, I’ve been able to teach them how to personally apply the Bible’s truths. We aren’t just reading history or poetry together, but hearing divine truths that are meant to change the way we think and the way we live. 

We don’t have little kids around here anymore. In fact, most of the time we now just have one kid around here, and she’s well beyond the little years. We’ve moved past parenting tiny children and into parenting young adults. Toilet training, bike-riding, and grade school drama have given way to navigating graduate programs, assessing romantic relationships, and even planning wedding ceremonies. Our family life has changed dramatically.
But one habit that has stuck is the habit of family devotions. Whenever two or more of us are under this roof, we stumble down to the living room first thing in the morning to read and to pray together. It’s a habit we developed when the kids were tiny, and it’s one that has endured through all the years, through all the change.
I was recently challenged with this question: What’s the point of family devotions? Though the question was asked in the abstract, I thought about it through the lens of my own experience. While I can’t speak to how it may function in someone else’s home, I can tell about the purpose it has served in ours. And maybe in its own way, that will prove helpful to someone.
Before I do that, though, I ought to be honest about a few things. We have never really attempted to do family devotions more than five days a week, so it’s not an every day habit. Sometimes when routines are disrupted we’ve neglected it for weeks at a time. The kids have often been far less than enthusiastic about participating (and sometimes the parents haven’t been a whole lot better). And we’ve rarely been successful at making devotions much more than simply reading and praying together. We have pretty much stuck with a simple formula of dad reading a passage, dad explaining that passage for a minute or two, then dad praying for the family. We’ve kept it consistent and consistently simple. So if I’ve got any authority or expertise to offer, it’s the kind that’s related to experience—to having done this thing many thousands of times.
So what’s the point of family devotions? I wonder if it would be helpful to first consider the purpose it hasn’t served in my family. Family devotions has not been a means through which we have obeyed a specific law or fulfilled an explicit command. There is no commandment in either the Old Testament or the New that tells Christian families they must spend time reading and praying together each day.
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As long as men desire to be as god they will find themselves disappointed, unable to receive the place they want for themselves. However, when we hear what Jesus is teaching His people, that recognizes who we truly are, sinners saved by grace, those who have received by gift and grant the benefits won by the Messiah who humbled Himself, even to the point of the cross, and was obedient not out of hope of gaining back His place, but knowing that the promise had already been made. Not my will, but thy will be done summarizes the difference at a foundational level between those who go back to their house justified, and those who continue to, in anger, lash out against the love of God found in Christ Jesus the perfect Son and Redeemer.

The blessings of God include clarity of mind and soul. There is freedom from the oppressing power of sin, and its influence to destroy. While the old man within us yearns to drag us back into the clutches of death and Hell the assurance we receive in Christ is that if we are united to our Lord by faith no created person or affect can separate us from the love of our glorious Redeemer. These truths allow us to receive an understanding of the world around us that should change the way we see the fallenness of man and all that takes place downstream from sin’s wages. In some measure this has the possibility of increasing our lamentation for the reality of the world as it is. When you know the way things ought to be it exacerbates the bother when men choose to do otherwise. There is a meme around that images a Ph.D Historian sitting in a comfy wingback that contains a tagline which reads:
Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.
As we continue to look at and consider paganism and all its tricks and trades there is a need for Christians to read and learn about these things with discernment. We need to not only take honestly their teachings, but warn with wisdom those caught in the thought patterns which inhabit the blindness operating within false religions. As has been noted before that begins first with better comprehending what the true religion teaches. I’ve heard catechisms referred to in the past as the skeleton upon which to hang the meat of the word, and there is a lot of truth to that.
To illustrate this let’s take a look at what the Children’s Catechism does when it declares to our elementary kids in questions 4 and 5 the reasons why we are to love what God loves:
Q. 4. How can you glorify God?A. By loving him and doing what he commands.
Q. 5. Why ought you to glorify God?A. Because he made me and takes care of me.
Training the minds of young ones to see the relationship they have with the one who made the Heavens and the Earth, and how He made them to be His, is helpful in then teaching them why because of this mercy our response is to first love and then obey. Getting things in that order is what really maintains the wall of separation between paganism and Christianity. While we can make the love of God for His people into a saccharine humanistic mess it doesn’t need to be so. When the apostle John defines Jehovah as love it is in the context of him saying, “. . . and everyone that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God”.
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