06/11/2026
6/11/2026:
Until He Comes
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. 1 Corinthians 11:26 (CSB)
Opening Thought
Every time the church takes Communion, it makes a visible statement to heaven and earth: Jesus died, he rose, and he is coming again.
Message
Paul does not describe the Lord's Supper as a moment of quiet personal reflection. He describes it as a proclamation. "You proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." The word he uses — katangello — appears throughout Acts and the Epistles to describe the church's public announcement of the gospel to the world. Paul is saying that what happens at the Lord's Table is the same category of act as preaching. It is a declaration. The elements are the words. The gathering is the congregation. And the audience is anyone with eyes to see.
The content of that proclamation is the whole arc of redemption compressed into a single shared act. The bread announces his body given. The cup announces his blood poured out. The gathering itself announces that his death produced a people. And the phrase "until he comes" stretches the act forward in time — every Communion is not just a memorial looking back, but a marker post in the church's ongoing waiting. We will keep doing this until we don't need to anymore. We will keep proclaiming his death until the one who died walks through the door.
This is the temporal frame that gives Communion its distinctive texture. There is grief in it — Christ died, and we are people who know what that cost. But there is also joy in it — he rose, and that changes everything about what his death means. And there is hope in it — he is coming, and every Lord's Supper is one fewer Lord's Supper before the feast that never ends.
John Piper puts it well: the Lord's Supper should not be either purely solemn or purely cheerful — it should be both at once. Solemnity with explosive joy. Sweet cheerfulness whose eyes are brimming with tears. That combination is possible precisely because the proclamation runs in two directions: backward to a death that is finished, and forward to a return that is certain.
Before Sunday's sermon, let this verse do its work on you. When you next take Communion, you are not merely remembering a historical event. You are stepping into a living proclamation — made with your body, in the company of the church, in full view of the watching world — that the cross happened, that it worked, and that the story is not over yet.
Reflect
When you participate in Communion, which direction do you find yourself looking most naturally — backward to the cross, or forward to his return? What would it change about your experience of the Lord's Supper if you held both equally in view at the same time?
Pray
Spend time meditating on the phrase "until he comes." Thank God that the story is not finished — that every Lord's Supper is a step closer to the moment when the proclamation gives way to the presence. Ask him to rekindle in you a genuine anticipation of the return of Christ, and to let that anticipation make Sunday's gathering feel like what it is: a foretaste of something far greater.
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