In my relationship with my wife, I tell my wife that I love her, and that's an important part of our relationship, obviously.

But I also hold her hand. I also give her a hug. I also kiss her. And those two are really important ways in which my love for her is communicated.

If I only told her that I loved her and never touched her, then that would be a

strange relationship. And I think what's going on in communion is bread and wine are in the sense

of the touch of Christ. There are another way in which he communicates his love and his presence

and his grace to us. Welcome to the Crossway podcast, a show where we sit down with authors each week for thoughtful

interviews about the Bible, theology, church history, and the Christian life.

I'm Matt Tully, and today I'm talking with Tim Chester.

Tim is a faculty member of Crosslands, a ministry training organization based in the UK, and he's

a pastor with Grace Church in North Yorkshire.

He's also an author or co-author of over 40 books,

including Truth We Can Touch,

How Baptism and Communion shape our lives with Crossway.

Today, Tim and I discuss the Lord's Supper.

He explains why he thinks many evangelical churches undervalue communion, the significance of the fact

that Jesus gave us physical elements, actual bread and actual wine, and what it means when we say

that Christ is present in our celebration of the Lord's Supper. Let's get started. Tim, welcome to the

Crossplay podcast. Good, yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

So I think it's safe to say that for many of us, our experience as Protestant evangelicals is that the Lord's Supper can be somewhat of an enigma for us.

We might be in churches where it's practiced once a month, maybe a couple times a month,

maybe less. And sometimes it's hard to know what to do with it. We kind of, we're not really

sure what's going on or why it's significant. And it's, as you talk about in your book, if it were

...