Five Days With Spurgeon: Baptism and the Lord’s SupperSample

The Lord’s Supper

When Spurgeon moved to Cambridge in the summer of 1850, he joined St. Andrew’s Street Baptist Church. In one of his first communion services there, nobody spoke to him. But Spurgeon believed that the Table signified spiritual fellowship. So he talked to the person sitting next to him. This would lead to a lifelong friendship. In future years, these two would look back on this event “and laugh at the fact that I should have dared to assume that Christian fellowship was really a truth.”

Spurgeon believed that Christian fellowship was really a truth. It was no invention of man or idealistic dream. No, through the gospel, God’s people have been united to the Son and adopted into the family of God. Through the gospel, the church is the body of Christ and Christians are members of it. And the expression of this fellowship is found in the Lord’s Supper.

Spurgeon’s theology of the Lord’s Supper stood within the Reformed tradition. Unlike baptism, he preached many sermons about the significance of the Lord’s Supper. Much could be said about his communion theology, but let me highlight three points. First, he held a memorialist position. The communion table allowed Christians to remember Christ’s broken body and shed blood for their sins. The best way to remember Christ was not by trying to bring something to the Table but by receiving his finished work by faith.

As a memorialist, Spurgeon did not want his people to remember Christ abstractly or academically. He urged his people to remember Christ personally. Preaching on Luke 22:19, Spurgeon declared, “The pith and essence of your business at his table is, ‘This do in remembrance of me,’ that is, of himself—of his own blessed person.” It is Christ that we are to remember, not a doctrine, or a theological truth, or a promise, but Christ himself. In that, Spurgeon’s memorialist position blended with a strong belief in the spiritual presence of Christ at the Table.

This brings us to the second aspect of Spurgeon’s communion theology, namely that in the Lord’s Supper, Christians commune with Christ by faith. Spurgeon repudiated the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation for how it minimized Christ’s finished work on the cross. Christ’s physical presence was not at the Table but the right hand of the Father in heaven. Spurgeon did believe, however, in Christ’s spiritual presence with His people, which could be grasped by faith, especially at the Lord’s Supper. It is no surprise, then, that many of Spurgeon’s communion devotions are taken from the Song of Songs, meditating on Christ’s communion with the church, his bride. By faith, the elements of the bread and the cup became tokens of His presence with His people for their joy and comfort.

Third, Spurgeon understood the Lord’s Supper as a meal for the church. Just as the baptistry was reserved for believers, so also the Table. In the one loaf and one cup, in the use of a table, in the acts of giving and receiving, the Lord’s Supper was filled with symbols of the church’s unity and fellowship with one another. In a gathering where hundreds of visitors, maybe thousands, mixed in among the church members, Spurgeon was concerned that unbelievers might partake of the Table and bring judgment upon themselves. The elders had to carefully consider how to fence the Table appropriately so that their celebration might continue to be a visible expression of the fellowship within the church.