What Does Taking Communion Worthily Actually Mean?

From the sermon preached on March 15, 2026

Taking communion worthily means coming to the table with an honest heart — free from unresolved division, unchecked sin, and the kind of rushing that leaves people behind. According to 1 Corinthians 11:17–34, the Apostle Paul defines an unworthy manner not by ritual failure but by relational fracture: when we hold grudges, ignore the needy sitting beside us, and treat the table as one more thing to get through on a full schedule. If that description lands somewhere uncomfortable, that's exactly where this is worth reading.

Taking communion worthily starts with understanding what taking it unworthily looks like — and the church at Corinth was a case study. The Apostle Paul opens 1 Corinthians 11:17 not with encouragement but with a blunt assessment: when the Corinthians gathered, things were not getting better. They were getting worse.

The specific problem wasn't heresy or flagrant immorality. It was something more ordinary and more cutting: people were eating without waiting for one another. The wealthy members arrived early, ate the common meal and drank the wine freely, and by the time the working poor showed up — those who couldn't leave their obligations until later — there was nothing left. The table meant to signify union with Christ and with one another had become a mirror of every social division already present in the room.

Paul's language is sharp here. He asks the Corinthians: do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? That's not a rhetorical softening. He means it. When someone at the table is hungry and you are full, and you didn't wait — that is the sin. Communion is about union. If you are holding a grudge, carrying a faction, or simply moving too fast to notice who got left behind, Paul says plainly: you are not eating the Lord's Supper. You are just eating.

The actionable step today is a simple one: before you come to the table next time, pause long enough to ask who in your life you have been too busy to wait for.

If you want to know what Trinity believes about the Lord's Supper, explore it here.

The second thing Paul addresses is harder to sit with, because it isn't dramatic. It's the quiet, cumulative effect of looking past people in need — not out of cruelty, but out of momentum. You're moving forward and someone else is not keeping up, and it feels easier to keep going than to stop.

Lead Pastor Ryan Mustered shared a story from a trip to the tribal highlands of Papua New Guinea that pulled this into focus. His son Zach and daughter-in-law Victoria serve there as missionaries, and during a visit, the village community prepared a dinner — spending an entire afternoon on it, offering up half the food the whole village had to their three guests out of pure generosity. The family tried to insist everyone eat together. The village leader, who had no bowl himself, gently asked them to honor the custom. So they ate, showed appreciation, and set the bowls down. The village immediately poured what was left back into the communal pot and fed everyone else on what remained.

It was a church in a jungle eating their guests' leftovers out of joy. Paul's question to the Corinthians — do you despise those who have nothing? — has a living answer in a cast-iron cauldron over an open fire. The people with the least gave the most, and they did it without making a scene about it. The question for the rest of us is what we do with what we have when someone around us is short.

The actionable step today is to look at one concrete need in your immediate circle — at work, on the road, next door — and simply not walk past it this week.

You do not have to figure this out alone — find out how Trinity shows up for real needs and connect here.

Paul's most arresting statement in 1 Corinthians 11 is one that tends to get read quickly and moved past: "that is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died." He is not being metaphorical. He is saying that taking communion without discerning the body — without recognizing what the table means and what it costs — carries real consequence. Coming to the table with unconfessed sin, with grudges in hand, with pet sins held close — Paul calls that eating and drinking judgment on yourself.

The phrase "pet sins" is worth sitting with. Not the dramatic failures, but the ones you've kept close enough to reach on a hard day. The ones you've decided are manageable. The kids in the Stanford marshmallow experiment who did worst weren't the ones who ate immediately — they were the ones who kept handling it, smelling it, holding it just at arm's length. The ones who did best were the ones who simply put it out of sight. Distance, not willpower alone, was the variable.

Paul's prescription is examination — not self-condemnation, but honest self-appraisal before the table. Let a person examine himself, and so eat. And the tool he commends, implicitly and through the whole arc of his letters, is the word of God hidden in the heart. Lead Pastor Ryan Mustered memorized Psalm 1 over eight days apart from his wife — not as a discipline project but as a way to let something true occupy the space where the anxious and the hollow thoughts usually go. Psalm 1 describes a person whose delight is in the law of the Lord, who meditates on it day and night, who is like a tree planted by streams of water. That tree doesn't rush. It just stays rooted and yields fruit in its season.

The actionable step is one passage. Not a reading plan, not a program — just one passage you carry with you this week and let work on you.

If this hits close to home in Watseka or Iroquois County, you're not alone in it. There are people in this community — people who grew up here, came back here, or never left — who carry the weight of things they haven't said out loud to anyone. Trinity Church at 1658 East Walnut Street exists for exactly that person. The C.A.R.E.S. ministry is there when a practical need is real. The support groups are there when the hard thing has a name. And if you just want to know what it means to come to a table where you're actually known, a visit is the simplest next step.

Taking communion worthily is not a standard of perfection — it is a posture of honesty. Paul's command in 1 Corinthians 11 is simple: examine yourself, see the people around you, and wait for one another. The table was never meant to be rushed through. It was meant to be the place where union — with Christ and with the people beside you — becomes real enough to cost something.

As you wait on the Lord, the Spirit will remind you of things in your past that will give you courage and faith in the present. That is what the table offers, if you come to it slowly enough to receive it.

If you are ready to take a next step, plan your visit to the Ashkum, Goodland, or Watseka Campus at the button below — no pressure, no expectation that you have it all together.

If you are not quite ready for that, take the next step here and connect with Trinity Church so we know how to pray for you.