True worship is in a known relationship, praising, adoring, thanking, blessing God, in the consciousness of His favor, in His presence as those brought in by the work of Christ, both cleansed and according to the value and savor of His sacrifice; but as in a known relationship of present favor and grace wherein we stand; so that we joy in God, and, I may add, are before the Father Who Himself loves us.
It is the outgoing of heart, delighting in God, and adoring Him for all that He has done when we think of that; but it flows from what He is to us. And we are actually in His presence, never forgetting surely how we got there; for He has been manifested. In that we have learned love and righteousness and holiness there, but as within, praising Him Whom we have found, in our present relationship to Him.
There is another thought connected with the Lord's Supper, besides its being that symbolically, in virtue and in the perfect savor of which we, risen and in God's presence, do worship. These are the sin-offering which comes first for the returning sinner, and the burnt-offering. In the peace-offerings the fat was the bread of the offering of the LORD. Jehovah fed upon it, and the priest, the offerer, and his friends fed upon the rest. Christ, Who was God's delight, is our delight: He feeds upon the perfect offering of Himself. “Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again.” We feed upon His broken body. We do feed with delight upon that which came down from heaven; but we cannot feed upon it as such without or separate from its being broken and its blood shed. And even when dwelling on Christ in His humbled life, it is always with the consciousness that the cross completed it and threw its character of perfectness over His whole path, besides the work that was wrought there. It is not a glorified Christ that we feed on then, but a sacrificed Christ; wherefore it is “in remembrance of Me.”
J. N. D.