The body and blood should not be treated as one. There are two elements because there is a two-fold application in the Communion. The wine, which is His blood, is for our forgiveness. And the bread, which is His body, is for our healing.— Joseph Prince
Imagine sitting at a table where the meal set before you has the power to heal your body, forgive your sins, and connect you to eternity. That is precisely what the Lord’s table is. Yet somehow, over the centuries, this extraordinary gift has been quietly domesticated into a monthly ritual. Even worse, it has become a spiritual minefield that many believers tiptoe around, more afraid of eating wrongly than expectant of the life it carries.
It does not have to be this way.
Many of us grew up in churches where Communion Sunday carried a certain heaviness. Perhaps you remember sitting still as a child while the elders filed to the front, wondering if you were holy enough, old enough, or baptized enough to participate. Some were told to wait outside. Others held back voluntarily, quietly nursing a guilt they had not yet brought to God.
And so, week after week, month after month, one of the most powerful gifts Christ left for His people sat largely unclaimed. Not because it lacked power, but because we lacked knowledge. As God Himself lamented through the prophet Hosea, “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge” (Hosea 4:6a).
A Meal for Every Household
It is worth going back to where it all began. When God instituted the Passover in Exodus 12, He did not address only the priests or the spiritually elite. He spoke to every household. Every family that applied the blood of the lamb to their doorpost was shielded from death, children included. That was always God’s intention: a covering for the whole house.
Fast forward to the upper room, and we find Jesus doing something remarkably intimate. He was not in the temple. He was not surrounded by religious ceremony. He was at a table with His disciples, breaking bread and sharing a cup, saying simply, “This is my body… this is my blood” (Matthew 26:26-28, TPT). No lengthy conditions. No exclusions. Just an invitation to remember Him and receive what His broken body and shed blood were about to make available.
Because Scripture declares that we are all priests and kings before God (Revelation 1:6, 1 Peter 2:9), every believing household carries that same priestly right. Some pastors understand this so deeply that they administer Communion daily to their own families. When did you last pause at your own table, break bread, and receive this gift as the priest of your home?
There is a question worth sitting with: what exactly are we remembering when we come to the Lord’s table? Smith Wigglesworth, the great apostle of faith who saw remarkable healings throughout his ministry, gave a stirring answer. He said we do not need to live on the cross or even in the memory of the cross. What we must remember is “It is finished” (John 19:30). Not the suffering alone, but the triumph. Not the breaking alone, but what the breaking released.
Think about what Jesus’ body went through: pierced, crushed, scourged, broken. His body was, in a sense, ploughed like soil so that seeds of healing could be sown for every person who would ever come to His table in faith. The Apostle Peter echoes this: “Our instant healing flowed from his wounding” (1 Peter 2:24, TPT).
This is why Joseph Prince’s observation is so illuminating. The two elements are intentionally distinct. The wine speaks to the forgiveness of sins; the bread speaks to the healing of bodies. When Jesus said “Unless you eat the body of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have eternal life” (John 6:53, TPT), He was not speaking in abstract theological terms. He was describing a living, ongoing participation in His very life. “My body is real food for your spirit and my blood is real drink” (John 6:55, TPT). This is a meal with actual, tangible, life-giving power.
No wonder Paul could write that those who discern His body rightly are made strong and full of life, while those who eat without understanding experience weakness and sickness (1 Corinthians 11:29-30). The power is real in both directions. How much more intentional, then, should we be about coming to this table with faith and understanding?
Here is where many of us have quietly accepted a tradition that Scripture does not actually teach. Paul’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 11:26 uses the phrase “as often as”. Not once a month, not once a year, but as frequently as you choose to come.
Someone once made this pointed remark: “If it is ‘daily bread,’ why do you take it once a year? Take daily what is to profit you daily.” That question is worth letting linger.
Just as we do not pray once a month because we love the Lord, we need not restrict our access to His table to a calendar date. This meal is available to you today, in your home, at your table, as often as you need its grace.
Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding surrounding the Communion is Paul’s warning about eating unworthily. For many believers, this single passage has become a door that stays permanently closed, because they never feel quite good enough to walk through it. But consider the context.
The Corinthian believers were not being warned away from the table; rather, they were being corrected for turning a sacred meal into a selfish, disorderly feast. They ate greedily, left others hungry, and brought their petty divisions to the Lord’s table. David Guzik captures the intent well: “This is not written with the thought of excluding ourselves from the table, but of preparing us to receive it with the right heart.”
Self-examination, rightly understood, is simply an invitation to come clean before you come to the table. If a sin comes to mind, even moments before Communion, the right response is not to step back, but to repent right there. And then, receive God’s forgiveness as promised in 1 John 1:9, and come forward with a clean heart. Staying away from the table because of a sense of unworthiness is, quietly, one of the enemy’s most effective ways of keeping us from the very grace we need most.
What truly makes the meal unworthy is arriving with unresolved bitterness toward a brother or sister, or eating without any thought of what Christ’s body and blood represent. We are the body of Christ, and love for one another is the very atmosphere in which this sacred meal flourishes.
A Table Always Set for You
This one meal spans all of time. When we eat the bread and drink the cup, we look back at the cross with gratitude, we receive life and healing in the present, and we lean forward with hope toward His return. It is, as Paul says, a proclamation: “you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26, NKJV).
It is also a preparation. As the Israelites ate the Passover meal with sandals on and staff in hand, ready for the journey, so we who partake of Christ, our Passover Lamb, are reminded that we are pilgrims headed somewhere glorious.
So come to the table. Come often. Come with faith, not fear. Come remembering that His body was broken so yours need not remain broken. Come knowing that His blood sealed a covenant that heaven itself honours.
And if you have never thought of taking Communion outside of a Sunday service, perhaps today is the day to begin. Quietly and reverently at your own table with Christ, as the priest of your household, receive what He so dearly purchased for you.