Our Puritan and Reformed forebears rightly understood that one of the greatest joys of the Christian life should be found spread before us at the communion table. In the Lord’s Supper, we are given a foretaste of the wedding feast of the Lamb, a veritable banquet of assurance and communion with the bridegroom. Desiring others to know this joy experientially, many ministers left behind a legacy of communion meditations designed to focus the mind and rouse the heart to lay hold of Christ as the bread is broken and the wine poured. One such minister was John Beart, a pastor of congregations consecutively in Ipswich and Bury, England, at the dawn of the eighteenth century. In his Divine Breathings: or, Spiritual Meditation Suited to the Occasion of Breaking Bread, or Communicating in the Lord’s Supper, we find those delicacies with which he had fed his “little Flock” in order to stir them up to the exercises of the soul at the Lord’s Table. It was his hope that the work might be of some broader use, finding “acceptance among those, who have tasted that the Lord is gracious, who have known his dying Love, and do often solemnize the memory of his death in his Supper.”
Too often we find our physical frame to be present at the Lord’s Table while our mind and heart are absent and cold. Let this morsel whet your appetite for such meditations that will inflame your heart with love for Christ. Consider how you might better approach that close communion with Christ so that His passionate love meets with a warm reply.
That Christ so loved us as to give his life for us, this is the quintessence, the glory, the excellency, and highest attainment of love. Love exceedingly delights in laying forth itself in acting, in doing and suffering for its object. It loves to express itself, and strongly desires to be taken notice of by its object. It rejoiceth in greatest difficulties for the pleasure of being observed by the person beloved, to win a return of love. For love is not satisfy’d merely with loving; but the thing it aims at is, to be loved again. Nothing makes an agreeable harmony with love but love. Christ loved us first, and contrived how he might shew it, what he might do to make us believe it. For this he pitched upon the most astonishing methods. He would be humbled, abased, obedient to death, he would suffer and die in our stead to shew he loved us. In all this he had a design both to save us, and to gain our love. And what is heaven itself but eternal mutual love?
In the mean time, let us come with love inflamed to him, kindled by his love to us. Let it shame us of our weak and feeble love, when the love of Christ is strong and ardent. Surely our Lord Jesus Christ intended by this ordinance to increase his children’s love. And let our desire and aim be, to get such a sight of his love, that we may love him who first loved us. Good Lord! that it should be once a question with thy children, whether we do in truth love Thee! Strong love feels its own fires and soon determines the question: Lord, Thou that knowest all things; knowest that I love thee. John 21:17; Canticles 8:6-7.
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