When do we eat The Bread of Life?

(1) The Lord Jesus Christ gave his body to be the bread of life once for all on the cross.

(2) We are continually offered the crucified and living Christ as spiritual bread in the gospel and we receive Christ with all his benefits in by faith in the Word of God.

(3) The gospel is sealed to us in the Lord’s Supper when we receive bread as an outward sign of Jesus body broken for us and his life given to us as spiritual food. We again receive Christ and all his benefits spiritually by faith.

Here is Calvin saying similar things:

It remains for all this [the saving work of Christ] to be applied to us. That is done through the gospel but more clearly through the Sacred Supper, where he offers himself with all his benefits to us, and we receive him by faith. Therefore, the Sacrament does not cause Christ to begin to be the bread of life; but when it reminds us that he was made the bread of life, which we continually eat, and which gives us a relish and a savor of that bread, it causes us to feel the power of that bread…. it [Christ’s body] is offered to us to eat, when it makes us sharers in him by faith. Once for all, therefore, he gave us his body to be made bread when he yielded himself to be crucified for the redemption of the world; daily he gives it when by the word of the gospel he offers it for us to partake, in as much as it was crucified, when he seals such giving of himself by the sacred mystery of the Supper, and when he inwardly fulfils what he outwardly designates. (Institutes 4.17.5, Ford Battles edition p1364)

The Supper might seem unnecessary and dispensable since it communicates to us the same Jesus we already had by believing the Word of the gospel. But the outward signs are important. They are adapted to the fact that we are bodily creatures. The Supper is a ritual enactment of the gospel by which the promises of the gospel are dramatically offered to us. We make a conscious public declaration that we are appropriating Christ. We cast ourselves for all to see as Jesus hungry beneficiaries. Our faith is strengthened and we are assured that God gives us what he signifies to us in the Supper. The Supper is a formal communal affirmation of our union with Christ and with one another in the gospel.

To say that we don’t receive Christ in the Supper since we always receive him by faith is a bit like saying we don’t go to church to worship since we worship all the time with our whole lives not just when we sing. There are things about formal, public, special, corporate / communal / gathered worship that are important and distinctive. Receiving the Lord’s Supper isn’t exactly the same as reading the Bible and listening to a sermon (though both offer Christ to us) and nor is reciting the creed together in church on a Sunday the same as a silent prayer on the bus or witnessing to your neighbour (though all are worship). We need to receive the Supper to feed on Christ just as much as we need to “go to church” to worship, though we can receive Jesus without the Supper and we can worship without Sunday services.