1 corinthians 11:17-34

Pastor Jason Byler Sunday AM

Bible Studies from Calvary Chapel El Monte. May the Lord richly bless you as you study His Word!

Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. The main subject of the sermon is how we should highly esteem the Lord's Supper.

I. Centuries of Division over a Meal that Unites

I'd like to ask that you turn in your Bible to the text that Richard just read for us. As we continue in our study in 1 Corinthians, we reach 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. We come, I think, here to the second most famous part of this epistle probably superseded only by the love chapter which is coming up, God willing, in a few number of weeks before, it's 1 Corinthians 13. But if you've been in church any length of time, you've heard some of this passage again and again whenever we celebrated the Lord's Supper. Look at verses 23-25. They'll be very familiar to you. "The Lord Jesus on the night He was betrayed took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, 'This is My body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.' In the same way after supper, He took the cup saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood. Do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of Me.'"

This is one of the two ordinances the Lord established for the local church to do until He returned, ordinances linked to the word "ordain," something He established or set up, baptism being the one we just saw a few minutes ago. The Lord's Supper we celebrated last week. And so in this section in 1 Corinthians, Paul addresses some serious excesses and problems that the Corinthian, the dysfunctional Corinthian church, was having concerning this ordinance. But in so doing as he addresses problems they're having, he gives a timeless word that's gone out over 20 centuries now of church life of how every generation of Christian should understand and partake in the Lord's Supper. And so it's just very powerful for us this morning to look at it.

What's amazing to me is that there's been actually centuries of division and strife and conflict over a meal that was established to unite. I remember years ago, I read a book on The Lord's Supper, a doctrinal book on it, and it was entitled The Meal That Unites, but then it had a question mark in the title. So it'd be read like this: The Meal That Unites? And so, it was intended that way, but it's been very, a very divisive issue, and it's right here in the text.

Look at Verse 18. He talks about the divisions. "I hear that when you come together as a church there are divisions among you and to some extent I believe it." As we saw from the beginning of this book a long time ago, 1 Corinthians Chapter 1, this is one of the big problems that made this church dysfunctional: Factions and divisions. "I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, I follow Cephas." These divisions.

Amazingly though, division over the Lord's Supper went back to the very night it was instituted. In one of the most shameful displays among the apostles as they were gathered there for The Last Supper with Jesus, they were arguing amongst themselves as to which of them was the greatest. I can't imagine in the years that followed Christ's death and resurrection, ascension, how much they must have looked back on that with shame, arguing about which of them of the apostles was the greatest. I think this was the triggering moment that led to the washing of the feet as Jesus washed their feet to show them who the greatest was. It was Jesus, and then anyone who would act like that. And so... But in every generation in the church, there's been factions and divisions and even over the Lord's Supper. So I want to give you a little theological and historical background to some of that.

Four Views From the Time of the Reformation

It really kind of exploded around the time of the Reformation when Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door to the Wittenberg Castle, it began the Reformation, Protestant Reformation.

View #1: The Roman Catholic view: Transubstantiation

One of the battlegrounds early on between Protestants and Catholics was over the Lord's Supper, what the Roman Catholic Church called the Mass. At the center of Roman Catholic theology and Roman Catholic spirituality is the Mass, their weekly observance of the Lord's Supper, and at the center of the Mass is their view of transubstantiation. It's a big word. They actually believe that the bread and the wine become, in a mystical sense, the actual body and blood of Jesus. Now, the word transubstantiation doesn't come from theology, it doesn't come from the Bible, it comes from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who taught that everything in the universe has both a substance and an essential nature, philosophically understood, and then what they called accidents.

It's a different way than you would hear that word ordinarily, but it means the way that thing interacts with the five-sense world, namely what it looks like, what it sounds like, what it smells like, what it tastes like, what it feels like. So those are the substance and accidents. This is Aristotelian philosophy. Well, Catholic theologians that basically sat at the feet for centuries of Aristotle as saying he was the greatest human teacher, put that together with their understanding of real presence of the actual body and blood of Jesus being at the Lord's Supper, and the center of that was Jesus' statement, "This is my body." And they said, "Aristotle can give us some insights on how that could be," that what happens in the mystery of transubstantiation is the substances change of the bread and the wine, but the accidents aren't changed.

And so you actually have the real body and blood of Jesus, but it just tastes like bread and wine. But it's a mystery and it's to be accepted by faith. It's a matter of Roman Catholic dogma, and so it was unchallenged in the Western world for centuries until the Reformation. Now they taught that only an ordained Roman Catholic priest could perform this mystery, and that was the centerpiece of the Mass. He would hold the bread up and the altar boys would ring the bells. I used to be an altar boy. I was raised Roman Catholic in Eastern Massachusetts, and so I was trained to ring the bell. They never told me why.

That's a big part of the Roman Catholic Church. They don't tell you why, they just tell you what to do. And so the people for centuries really had no idea about the theology of transubstantiation. They just came when they were told and did what they were told, etcetera, and this is how they were saved, and if you turned your back on the Mass, you're turning your back on your salvation, your soul. This was essential to salvation. The worst part of this theology, however, was as the priest would hold it up, he would say, "This is my body," in Latin, never translated. Most of the people there didn't speak it, "Hoc est corpus meum." If it was said fast enough, the people out there heard something like hocus-pocus.

That's actually where that word comes from. It's like, "What did he do?" "I don't know. It's hocus-pocus." But then it is actually the change that happens and the bell gets rung. That's when it occurs. It becomes the actual body and blood of Jesus. But here's the worst part: The sacrilege of the Mass was that the priest was actually offering Jesus up to God on behalf of the people there. It was what they called a perpetual bloodless sacrifice repeated forever and ever at the Mass. And so in that way, Jesus was sacrificed again and again. I remember when I was converted to evangelical faith and started reading the Book of Hebrews and I saw that He was sacrificed once for all, I said, "What is this?" And I looked back at my experience at the Mass and repudiated it. Well, that's the center of Roman Catholic theology.

View #2: Martin Luther’s "Consubstantiation"

Along comes Martin Luther and he brings us the second view, what's generally called the Lutheran view of consubstantiation. Luther was an Augustinian monk who was trained to be a priest, and the high point of his training was the ability, once he was ordained, to perform the miracle of transubstantiation. This is before he was converted to evangelical faith, and he had such a trembling reverence over that moment that as he lifted up the cup and it became the body, or the blood of Jesus, he was literally physically trembling, and drops fell on the white table cloth and it was a shameful failure on his part. But that was the reverence he had for the Lord's Supper.

And he never lost his sense of that reverence or his belief in real presence. What he rejected was the idea that the Greek philosopher Aristotle should be brought in to help explain it. He believed in real presence fervently, he just denied transubstantiation. He just said that the body and blood of Jesus is there with and by and under and around the bread but in a mysterious way that we can never understand. That's the Lutheran view of consubstantiation.

View #3: Ulrich Zwingli’s “Bare Memorial” View

The third view came with another reformer, a Swiss reformer, a man named, Huldrych Zwingli. There'll be a quiz after worship today on all this. Huldrych Zwingli was also trained to be a priest. He was in Zurich, Switzerland almost about the same time as Luther, just began reading the Greek New Testament and started stripping away everything from the Sunday morning experience that wasn't simply clearly taught in the New Testament.

And so reformed or Zwinglian Worship was extremely austere, very simple, and he looked at the Mass, rejected it completely, rejected real presence, almost effectively rejected the Lord's Supper, reduced it to what he called a bare memorial, nothing mystical going on here. It's just helpful to help you remember. And he reduced it down to the point where it was celebrated as few as two times a year in Zurich. So that's the third view, the bare memorial view. Now in 1530, Luther and his entourage, and Zwingli and his entourage, got together at a place called Marburg, tried to work this thing through. It was a miserable failure. It was a disaster, two very strong-willed men. Luther writes the words, "This is my body" in chalk on a wooden table and keeps pounding the table, and Zwingli was not having any of it.

And it got so bad between the two men that Luther said right to his face, "You and I are of a different spirit," meaning, "I don't think you're born again." So it was really pretty tragic on the meal that unites, should have been united, but they had a very different view.

View #4: Calvin’s “Spiritual Presence” View

The fourth view, the one that I hold and I would espouse to you, was taught I think clearest at that time by a Reformer named John Calvin. Now John Calvin was a Frenchman who fled for his life from France when Lutheran and Protestant doctrine started taking hold. He was a little bit younger than Luther, came along as a second generation Reformer, ended up in Geneva, Switzerland. He rejected real presence but he had a fervent sense of the holiness of the Lord's Supper, the seriousness of it, as a matter of fact so much so that when a faction in the church called the Libertines, who lived profligate, immoral lives and were excommunicated by the church, rightly so for their sins, tried very boldly and brazenly to come and partake in the Lord's Supper, this little Frenchman, John Calvin, went out and physically stood in the way and put his arms around the elements lest they be defiled by clear unbelievers who wanted to partake in the Lord's Supper.

That's how fervently he believed, but what he taught was what I would call a spiritual presence view, a spiritual presence. And the idea is that as you partake hearing the words of Scripture, hearing the words of institution, as you partake, based on your faith in Christ, His death, His resurrection, and based on the imminent, immediate activity of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, you can have an encounter with the living God over the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, but it's just going to be in proportion to your faith. It's similar to a sermon. If by faith you hear and the Spirit's active, you can have an encounter with the living God or not. It just depends on your faith. But the Holy Spirit is there and active, and I personally expect, I expect to meet with the Lord at the Lord's Supper. I expect it. I look forward to it.

I have the privilege of sitting in a chair here while the elements are passed out and to look out over this congregation, to look in your faces and to think, "You know, I'm going to get to spend eternity with you." And I look forward to that. But meanwhile, we have this. So let's do this together. It's powerful. So for me, I think we should reject three of those views. I think the common evangelical interaction with the Lord's Supper is Zwingli's mere memorial, bare memorial view. The reason you know that it's frequently relegated to a Sunday evening service less than quarterly and you could be a member in good standing and go perhaps even years if you don't have a habit of going to the Sunday evening service, with taking the Lord's Supper. We, the elders of this church, believe that partaking in the Lord's Supper is an essential part of healthy membership of this church.

But I wanna go beyond that. I want you, when you do, to expect to meet with the living God by faith, not because the bread and the wine are actually the body and the blood. That's not needed, and it's contrary I think to Scripture. So that's some theological background.

II. The Context of the Lord’s Supper

Now, let's look at the Corinthian background and their dysfunctionality. Is it strange for us to just thank God how messed up that church was because it gave us 1 Corinthians so we could work through it? God in His wisdom allowed them to be that messed up so that Paul could remedy so many of the ills in that church because He knew that 20 centuries of Christian church would need to hear this. And so we come to the Lord's Supper. Now the context there is actually going back to the Old Covenant.

Jesus on that final night that He had with his disciples before His suffering and death, was performing a Jewish ritual, the Passover meal. And you know about this story, how the Lord in His sovereign power brought Israel out of Egypt, out of bondage to Egypt by means of a mighty hand and outstretched arm, and that was on display through the 10 plagues, the dreadful plagues that ravaged the land of Egypt, and the last one was the worst: The plague on the firstborn. And God had warned Pharaoh, "I command you... Israel is my firstborn son. I command you to let my son go but you wouldn't, so I'm going to kill your firstborn son."

And He said that right from the beginning. It's amazing. And that was the 10th plague, the plague connected with the Passover, and what God commanded the Israelites to do that night in order that their firstborn would not die, because they were sinners too, is He commanded them to be inside houses and within the houses that the Passover lamb would be slaughtered, its blood would be poured out and then it would be painted on the doorpost and the lintels by a hyssop branch, and the angel of death would see that blood and pass over that house and no one would be harmed. Again, teaching that lesson of animal sacrifice that all sin deserves the death penalty. The death penalty can be paid by a substitute. Now the substitute is only symbolically an animal.

And so Jesus gathered together because the Lord commanded through Moses that the Jews do this again and again every year and that they would remember what God had done in the past at the time of the Passover and it was a lasting ordinance. Jesus that night transformed the Passover forever. This has become for us the Christian Passover, and the reason, as Jesus said, "Take and eat, this is My body," and then took a cup of wine and gave thanks and offered it saying in Matthew 26:27-28, "Drink from it, all of you. This is My blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins." Essential to this transformation of the Passover from the Old Covenant and the New Covenant is the change of the covenants, the fact that the Old Covenant with the death, the physical death of Jesus, has become obsolete. Never again will God accept the blood of animals. It's done, finished, as the author to Hebrews made it plain. Obsolete is the word he uses.

And Jesus knowing that very well, established the New Covenant. "This is my blood of the covenant." This is the essence of the New Covenant, the blood of Jesus, because the author to Hebrews tells us in Hebrews 10:4, "It is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins." It was only ever symbolic. It was all pointing ahead to that once for all final sacrifice offered by the Son of God on the cross, His blood shed for us. And so Jesus fulfilled the imagery of the Passover by His death on the cross as John the Baptist predicted, I think, when he pointed to Him and said, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." The time of the Mount of Transfiguration, Jesus met with Moses and Elijah there and He was transformed before them and His face became radiant, His clothes became white, and in Luke 9:31, it says that He was talking to Moses and Elijah about the exodus He was about to work. That's the real exodus, isn't it? That's the real escape of we who are enslaved to sin out of bondage to sin into the promised land of salvation, used the word "exodus" and He paid for that exodus by His blood. Alright, so that's the Jewish backdrop.

III. The Facts of the Lord’s Supper

Now, let's look at the facts of the Lord's Supper. Look at verse 23 through 26 again, "For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you. The Lord Jesus on the night He was betrayed took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, 'This is My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of Me.' In the same way, after supper He took the cup saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in My blood, do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of Me.' For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes."

So, let's just walk through this and try to understand it. He begins by saying, Paul does, that he received from the Lord what he also passed on concerning the Lord's Supper. This is very much like the direct revelation he claims in Galatians chapter 1, saying, "No one taught me the gospel, but it was revealed to me from heaven by God directly." And so Jesus wasn't there, he wasn't one of the original 12 apostles, he didn't get to see it, so the Lord gave him a special revelation of the facts of the Lord's Supper. "What I received from the Lord, I passed on to you." And he passed it on to them, this is the work of the Apostle. The apostolic work, like the work of a prophet, is a relay race of truth. And so the Lord, through the Holy Spirit, gives it to the human author of Scripture, or to the apostle, and he passes it on to the people. And so he did to the Corinthians when he preached the gospel there.

Verse 23, it says, "The Lord Jesus... " He emphasizes the lordship. Whenever you see the word "Lord" in the New Testament, associated with Jesus, it's affirming and teaching the deity of Jesus Christ. He is Lord. "The Lord Jesus", he says, "On the night He was betrayed... " This reminds us of the wicked actions of Judas Iscariot, who Jesus said, "Have I not chosen you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?" He knew exactly who Judas was, there was no doubt in His mind. But still the betrayal was powerful and genuine and real. As it said in John 13:18, Jesus said, "This is to fulfill the Scripture. He who has shared My bread with Me has lifted up his heel against Me." So a sense of direct betrayal of a friendship. And this is, I think, a warning to us all. We should have an acute sense of betraying Jesus when we sin. We should have a strong sense of it. It should be very personal that we're sinning not against a law engraved in tablets of stone, but we're sinning against someone, who on Judgment Day, will look you in the eye and ask you to give an account for it. We should have a very strong sense of the personal side of sin. "On the night He was betrayed,"

Verse 24, "Took bread, and when He had given thanks... " The Greek word here for giving thanks is Eucharsteo, from which we get the word Eucharist. It's just a transliteration of the Greek word. "He gave thanks." Now this was Jesus' regular habit. At the feeding of the 5000, do you remember? He took the bread and He looked up to Heaven and gave thanks. I think this was such a known gesture that when He did it after His resurrection with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus... Remember, He shared a meal with them? And He took the bread, and He broke it, and gave thanks. They knew right away. They didn't know who He was until then, it was hidden from them. At that moment, through that gesture, they knew it was Jesus. And He looks up to His Father as if to say, "Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights", like James will say later. And so He took bread and He gave thanks. And so, the ultimate gift here, the body and the blood of Jesus, came down from Heaven as a gift from the Father. He gave thanks. And then He broke it. The breaking of the bread symbolizes the death of Jesus on the cross, just like the blood does, the wine does. So, the breaking there, that Jesus' body was broken on the cross.

However, it's important to note, as John does in his gospel, not a single one of His bones was broken, so that the Scripture would be fulfilled, not a bone will be broken. And so the Passover lamb, no bones were broken, but His body is broken for us. And then Jesus' words, "This is My body which is for you, do this in remembrance of Me." This is the giving of the body. I'm giving Myself to you. The Father is giving Me for you. I think about Romans 8:32, which says, "He who did not..." He the Father, God the Father, "Did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all." I can't even begin to put words to what that means. Romans 8:32 is a measure of the Father's priorities, a sense of worth and value. There is His only begotten Son, and there's everything else in the universe, and they don't even compare in the Father's affection. The Father's love for Jesus, it's incalculably strong, powerful, and He gave up His only begotten Son for you. And Jesus gave Himself for you.

John chapter 6, He says in Verse 51, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever, This bread is My flesh which I will give for the life of the world…" Once for all, He gave of His flesh so that we might live forever. Then He says, "Do this in remembrance of Me." This is a commandment, and we who want to be obedient, this is what we do. "Do this in remembrance of Me." The words carved into the communion tables around the world in every native language, there it is. "Do this in remembrance of Me." And so we desire to be obedient and do it.

But it also says something about us, doesn't it? And that is simply, we tend to forget. We tend to forget. Look at the Jews. The Passover was established and all that, all these things were established, but then the psalmist in Psalm 78:40-43 says this, "How often they rebelled against Him in the desert and grieved Him in the wasteland. They did not remember His power, the day He redeemed them from the oppressor, the day He displayed His miraculous signs in Egypt." They didn't remember. Now, lest you Christians think you're any better than the Jews of old were, you're not. We forget too. And so, this meal was ordained so that we would not forget what Jesus did for us. "Do this in remembrance of Me."

Then Verse 25, "In the same way, after supper, He took the cup…" The second element to the Lord's Supper, established at the same time. Jesus, with His hands holding it, Jesus with His voice speaking it, His eyes looking in their eyes, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood." This new covenant alone is what saves sinners. As we sang earlier, "What can wash away my sin?" Nothing but the blood of the new covenant. Shed once for all, but by this blood we are forgiven. The blood of animals could never cleanse us from sin, but the blood of Jesus Christ poured out once for all is infinitely effective, infinitely greater than all your sins. Do not imagine you can say to Almighty God that your sins are greater than the blood that was shed by His only begotten Son. It's just not true. Your sins are small, His mercy is great by comparison.

Now, our sins are many and they are mighty, I understand that. But the provision of grace through the blood of Christ is infinite. And He said, "Do this whenever you drink it." So the drinking of the cup, like the eating of the bread, means a full participation in Jesus. The actual chewing and swallowing... The bread does you no nutritional benefit, I'm just talking bread in general, unless you chew it and swallow it. So also the drink does you no benefit at all if it stays outside your body. This is a metaphor of personal participation in the death of Jesus by faith.

I remember years ago, I saw a movie about the life of Jesus, called Jesus of Nazareth. Been one of my favorites. And it's about six hours long, dear friends. That's why they show it on the networks on two nights during Easter week. You've probably seen it before, made in the 1970s. Roman Catholic director. But really, mostly, I think, faithful to the Scriptures, it stuck to the Scripture. And they zero in on the character of Mary Magdalene, and she is a woman with a past, a sinful past. And she's hopeless, she's crushed by her sin, feels totally guilty, but then hears about Jesus and little by little is drawn into His ministry, into His life. And she's portrayed in the movie as actually partaking in the feeding of the 5000. And she's quite distant from Jesus, but she can see Him. And then little by little, as everyone around is just hungry and people are... No one's going anywhere, it's hot, and she doesn't know why they're there. And then suddenly in her hands is some fresh, delicious, bread. I always picture it as hot, like fresh from the baker's oven, as only Jesus could do. Like when He changed the water to wine, it's like this is high quality wine. Read about it in John 2.

So this is excellent bread. And in the movie as she holds it and begins to chew it, she just starts to weep. "There is someone for me. There's a savior for me. There's a possibility of forgiveness for me", as she's chewing and swallowing, So no, I don't believe in real presence, but I believe in that kind of an idea that comes as you're chewing and swallowing, as you're drinking the cup. It's like I am personally connected with Jesus in His death and His resurrection. And He said, "Do it in remembrance of Me." So it goes to that memory, again. We have to think back, we have to look back at the history and know that "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins." So as you look at that at the grape juice that we use, and it's sparkling, and it's roughly the color of blood, and you look down and it's like, "The cost was infinite, the cost was high for my salvation." So we think of the painful death of Jesus, the Son of God, for us. And I think we should be moved, perhaps, even to tears by this. Feel it, feel what it costs. Because the more you meditate on that I think you will grow in your hatred of sin, your desire to be pure and holy, to keep the baptismal promise that you heard Bethany make, that we all made. That, "I promise, by the Holy Spirit, to walk in holiness and newness of life."

Verse 26, "Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death." There is a preaching element to this acted out ordinance. I think the words have to be spoken, which I'm doing right now, the words of institution read. There's a basic explanation. I'm going much more in detail now than usual. But whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death. So unbelievers coming from the outside in, if they understand what's going on, if they get an explanation, they will see acted out the Gospel. And then He says, "Until He comes." So there's a forward-looking aspect here. We're going to do this until the second coming of Jesus. So we're looking ahead to the coming kingdom when you are going to sit... If you're a believer in Jesus Christ, you're going to sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and a multitude greater than anyone could count from every tribe, language, people, and nation. You're going to sit in fellowship with brothers and sisters.

You're going to look them in the eye, and you're going to say, "How great is the Lord in His mercy to us?" And you're going to enjoy that fellowship. And what will you ask Abraham? What questions do you have for him? "What was it like when... " Something like that. But what an incredible time of fellowship. And Jesus was thinking about it because He said, "I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine again until that day I drink it anew with you in my Father's Kingdom." The mysteries, the physical supernatural mysteries of that, are beyond my ability to comprehend. I don't know what "drink it anew with you" means, but it's going to be awesome. So we look ahead to that.

IV. The Abuse of the Lord’s Supper

Alright, that's the doctrine that comes through it. Now, let's talk, sadly, about the abuse. What were the Corinthians doing that needed such correction? Look at verse 27. He says, "Therefore whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord." The Corinthian Church, the Corinthians, some Corinthians, were sinning greatly against this ordinance. They were actually guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. So you see the sacredness and the seriousness by what Paul's saying here. Well, how were they abusing it? Well, certainly there are factions and divisions. The fact that they were not one with each other, they didn't seem to love each other. Their prideful arrogance was harming them. We're going to see in the next few chapters on spiritual gifts that they were very arrogant about their spiritual gifts, and they were vaunting themselves over the others, and saying, "I don't need you," and all this kind of thing. So there was that kind of pride.

And Paul says, "Look, there have to be differences and distinctions among you. We're not all the same. There are different gifts, there are different genders." We just talked about that the last two weeks. Men and women have different roles in the life of the church.  There have to be differences among you. But not like this, not the factions and divisions and strife and conflict. But they were going so far in their prideful demeanor toward each other they were actually gouging themselves on communion bread and getting drunk... Some of them were getting drunk on communion wine. Look at verse 20 and 21. "When you come together it's not the Lord's Supper you eat, for as you eat each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else. One remains hungry, another gets drunk." Paul says, "You don't seem to understand what this is for. Don't you have homes to eat and drink in? Don't you have a good dinner when you get home from church? You're not here to fill your bellies." And it seems some of the bullies and the dominant ones were wealthy and privileged, maybe, in the community. And so they were jockeying for position and gorging themselves and leaving nothing for the poorer members of the church.

So Paul gives a shocking revelation here of the Lord's discipline, something that I think they would not have any way of knowing if Paul didn't tell them. Look at Verse 27. "Therefore, whoever eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord." Verse 28-30. "A person ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord, eats and drinks judgment on himself." Judgment. Verse 30. "That is why many among you are weak, and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep…" That means been killed by the Lord. Because he says, "That is why you have fallen asleep." There's a connection. Some of you have died. So if anyone eats the Lord's Supper arrogantly, or flippantly, or irreverently, or even perhaps as an unbeliever, they're guilty of sinning against the body and blood of Christ, and they're liable for judgment, which God may or may not pour out. He is merciful, gracious, and patient. But in this context, some of the Corinthians had died.

Now, I don't know that they knew why they died, but now they did once Paul said it, and he doesn't say who it is. This teaches us something about the Lord's discipline. Hebrews 12 says that the Lord disciplines everyone He accepts as a son or daughter. And if He doesn't discipline, you're actually not one of His children. And that discipline can go so far as to remove you out of this world. But it also could include before that being weak and sick. And here it's tied to the Lord's Supper, but it's actually connected to all aspects of discipline. So the fact that the Lord does that in connection with the Lord's Supper ought to move us to see how sacred and serious the Lord's Supper is.

V. The Sacred Observance of the Lord’s Supper

Alright, so the sacred observance of the Lord's Supper. How then should we properly partake? Well, first, make certain that you're a Christian. Make certain that you're born again. You've heard the gospel many times. Bethany did a great job, so I thank you, so now I don't need to do it. The basic facts of the gospel you've heard. All you need to do to know that your sins are forgiven is to trust in Jesus. No works will be accepted, no works welcome. We're justified, we're forgiven, by faith. Make certain that you're born again before you partake in the Lord's Supper. We also, as Baptists, believe you should testify to it by water baptism. We believe that the Lord's Supper is a church ordinance, so we would not recommend individuals... Like two good friends in Christ watching a beautiful sunset, and one of them hits the other and says, "Hey, let's do the Lord's Supper, let's... " Look, don't do that. Pray together, sing a song, but not the Lord's Supper. The Lord's supper is a local church ordinance.

And so that's why we do something called "fence the table." And what we do is we make certain to say words to the effect of, "Be certain that you're born again, that you've testified to it by water baptism," and we do it here in the context of a local church as Sunday morning worship.

Secondly, be serious about the Lord's Supper, take this seriously. But also be joyful. "Well, Pastor, how can I be seriously joyful?" Well, the whole Christian life is about serious joy. It's a serious thing, we're talking about Almighty God, we're talking about the fact that Almighty God is for you and not against you. There's your serious joy. So be serious about the Lord's Supper, come to it reverently, come to it seriously. And come to it joyfully expectantly, that God is going to bless you as you partake. Thirdly, examine yourself before you partake. Ask the Lord, say, "Show me if there's any sin in my life." "Search me, O God, and know me." Psalm 139:23-24. Do that. Before you partake, close your eyes, bow your head. Say, "Lord, show me. Is there anything that I'm not dealing with? Any sin in my life I've not addressed? Anything I've not confessed?" And resolve to address it.

Don't fail to partake. I heard a story years ago of a Scottish pastor. This is in the 1800s, and he was ministering the Lord's Supper, and he knew his flock, he knew this community. And there was a young woman there who had been in some sin and she was just broken by what was going on in her life. And she would not reach out her hand to take the Lord's Supper. And he said with the greatest tenderness, he leaned over and said quietly to her, "Take it, Lassie, it's for sinners." So all you need to do is examine yourself and resolve to put the sin to death, and then partake, because it's for sinners. But examine yourself. And then if there's a sin pattern in your life... This is a strong text here, apart from the Lord's Supper, on the Lord's discipline. If you want to avert being weak and sick or perhaps even falling asleep because of sin, that means dying. If you want to avert that, then get busy on yourself. Judge yourself.

Jesus used the metaphor of your right hand caused you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. Don't make the Lord cut off your right hand, you cut it off. Elders aren't going to do that, that's not our job. It's your job. You examine yourself. If there's a sin pattern in your life, address it. Deal with it vigorously. And if you do, the Lord won't have to do it. But if the Lord does do it and you are among those that are weak or sick, then just thank God that He's treating you like a son or daughter and He's not casting you off. Because He doesn't want you to go to hell. He doesn't want you to share in the judgment of the world, as Paul says here in the text.

And then finally, as you come to the Lord's Supper, remember your brothers and sisters as you do. We're told right in the text to wait for each other, look around, don't go ahead. I'll never forget my first Protestant Lord's Supper. It was at Grace Chapel in Lexington. And in the Catholic tradition when you go up, you go up to the priest, you get the bread, you eat it. It's linked to the transubstantiation because they don't want you to carry it back to your pew or something like that. But there I was in my first Protestant Mass, I called it, I had no idea. And along comes the bread, and what do you think I did with it as soon as I got it? The only one of a thousand people in that congregation that was done right away. It was later that I read this text where it said, "Wait for each other." I was like, "Sorry, Lord. Cover me." But we hold and we wait and we partake together. But you do that because you're mindful of the fact that you're part of a body of Christ worldwide. Close with me in prayer.

1 Corinthians 11:17-34

Andy Davis preaches a verse by verse expository sermon on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. The main subject of this sermon is the Lord's Supper.

sermon transcript

Holy Ground

When Moses was 80 years old, and at that point had become a very obscure person. He was raised in power and prosperity, but he fled after he murdered an Egyptian, and was at that point, at 80 years old, tending his father-in-law's sheep on the back side of the desert; an obscure man tending another man's sheep. He was trying to find pasture and water for the sheep. And at one point, he saw a sight he'd never seen before. He saw a bush that was burning, and it was a kind of a fire. I don't know if it gave off any heat, maybe it did, but he saw the light, the dancing flames, perhaps heard the crackle of it, but the bush wasn't consumed and he'd never seen anything like it. And so he turned aside and said, "I'm gonna go over and see this sight. I've never seen anything like this before." And as he approached, he heard, from the flames of the burning bush, he heard a voice that changed his life, and the first thing that that voice said is, "Do not come any closer, for the ground on which you're standing is holy ground." And then the voice identified himself, "I am the God of your fathers, I'm the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob." And Moses trembled with fear and did not dare to look upon God.

And this is how God called Moses away from tending his father-in-law's sheep to being the human instrument for leading the Jews out of bondage in Egypt into the Promised Land. Amazingly, however, though the Exodus journey from slavery through the Red Sea, through 40 years in the desert, crossing eventually the Jordan River into the Promised Land is worthy of eternal consideration. Nothing is more important than the personal encounter of a sinner with a holy God exemplified in that burning bush. And many of the Jews who made that physical journey never had that encounter by faith. They were not believers, and their bodies were scattered all over the desert. They did not know the God who was physically saving them out of slavery. They did not encounter the God who said, "The ground on which you're standing is holy ground." They didn't have an encounter with God. So what does that mean? "The ground on which you're standing is holy ground."

How can each of us come to a personal experience of that God who lives today? He is not the God of the dead, but the living, he is still our God, how can we stand in the presence of the Creator of the universe and not be consumed by the fire of his holiness? It's a great mystery. We are taught theologically in the Scripture that God, the God of the Bible is omnipresent, that means he is everywhere at once. And he's, in one sense, we could say no more in one place than he is in another. There is nowhere in the universe in which God does not fully exist with all of his attributes.

The psalmist in Psalm 139 teaches this plainly, he says, "Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there. If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I sat on the far side of the sea, even there, your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast." It clearly teaches the omnipresence of God; he is everywhere that we could go in the universe.

Jesus Christ made this even more plain in his conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. The Jews and Samaritans were divided and debated for centuries over the proper place of worship, where people should make pilgrimages and make their offerings, their animal sacrificial offerings. The Jews said the place was Jerusalem, the Samaritan said it was Mt. Gerizim in Samaria. And so they debated, and this woman wanted Jesus to weigh in on that. But Jesus revealed to her on an amazing level, way beyond I think anyone else's understanding of what he was coming to do. He told this Samaritan woman what was going to happen in the new covenant. There would no longer be any one designated place for worship. He said in John 4:21 and following, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father, neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. The time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth."

But God has always been omnipresent. And so even in the days of the old covenant, when there was a designated place for worship, even in the days before that of Moses, when Moses was standing there in front of the burning bush, what did it mean that there was a holy place or a most holy place? What did it mean that there was holy ground on which Moses was standing? Why was that ground holy and a quarter of a mile away wasn't holy ground?

We could ask the same thing of Jacob, when he was fleeing from his brother Esau, Esau wanted to kill him, so Jacob ran for his life and he came to a certain patch of ground, exhausted as he was from all of the exertions and his sorrow and running away from his home, he laid down with a rock for his pillow. I think how hard-headed do you have to be to need a rock for your pillow? Which is harder, his head or the rock? I'm not sure.

But God had a lot of work to do in Jacob's heart and he desired to do some of that work that very night, for as he slept with that rock as a pillow, his mind was aflame with light and with a vision, with a dream. And in that dream, he saw a stairway going all the way up to heaven with angels ascending and descending. And there above the stairway stood the Lord, and he said, "I am the Lord, I am the God of your father, Abraham, and the God of your father, Isaac." And God promised to give Jacob and his descendants the land on which he was lying, and to greatly multiply his descendants so that they would spread out to the west and east and north and south. And he promised him, all peoples on earth will be blessed through you and through your offspring. And he promised to be with him and to watch over him wherever he went. And when Jacob woke up from his dream, he was filled with awe. And he thought, "Surely, God, the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it.” The Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it. He was afraid, and he said, "How awesome is this place? This is none other than the house of God, this is the gateway of heaven." And he set up a pillar there, poured oil on it. So what is holy ground if God is omnipresent? Well, I think it must be tied to our sense of God in the place, our relationship with the God of the universe in that place, our experience of God. And it comes at his initiative, he is choosing to reach out and draw us close in that place.

He's choosing to reveal himself and to bring us closer and to pour his goodness into our souls. It's relational language, the relational distance, it's relational. It's not got to do with God being omnipresent, it has to do with his relationship with each of us. So it says in Psalm 138:6, "Though the Lord is on high, he looks upon the lowly, but the proud, he knows from afar." So there's a distance between God and the proud. So what does that mean, from afar? It's similar to Jesus' terrifying statement in Matthew 7:23. "Many will say to me, 'Lord, Lord on that day, and he says, 'Then I will tell them plainly, I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers." What does that mean, I never knew you? There, and we're not talking about omnipresence, but omniscience. What's he saying when he says, "I never knew you"? Is he saying, "I don't know anything about you, I don't know your name"? No, he actually, in the verse, he knows that they are evildoers. And another verse says, "He knows every careless word they've ever spoken.” He knows the thoughts and inclinations of their heart when they spoke those careless words, he knows everything about them.

What does he mean then when he says, "I never knew you"? He said, I didn't come into an intimate covenant relationship, a love relationship with you. That's what he's saying. So it is, I think with holy ground, God is everywhere, but especially and immediately and powerfully found in places he chooses, and there he reveals Himself directly to faith-filled hearers of his word, whose tied to his word and to faith and to the power of the Holy Spirit; he reveals himself in a memorable way there.

Now, Jesus was not saying to the Samaritan woman that there will never again be holy ground, he didn't say that. Instead, he's saying that God who is spirit can and will choose to reveal himself any place he wants to, any time he wants to. Anywhere on the planet could become holy ground now.

Now in the new covenant, so in the new covenant, there's no longer a physical temple, there's no longer a physical tabernacle, but there's a new holy place or even most holy place, or like the KJV used to say, "Holy of Holies" and that is the body of Jesus Christ; that's the new temple. So at the beginning of his public ministry in John 2, Jesus was there with a whip, cleansing the temple.

He would do it again at the end of his public ministry, cleansing the temple. But there in John 2 at the beginning of his ministry, the Jews demanded of him, "What miraculous sign can you show us to prove your authority to do all this?" Jesus answered, "Destroy this temple, and in three days, I will raise it up." The Jews replied, "It's taken 46 years to build this temple. You're gonna raise it up in three days? But the temple he had spoken of was his body.” John 2:21. And so when Jesus cried out in a loud voice on the cross and gave up his Spirit, the curtain in the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. And that was a physical symbol of a new and living way open for us into the Holy of Holies, into the presence of God. That time was over. The physical temple time was done, it was fulfilled in Jesus, fulfilled. But now the author of Hebrews tells us in Hebrews 10:19-22, "Therefore brothers, since we have confidence to enter the most holy place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, open for us through the curtain, that is his body."

Do you hear? Blood, body. By the blood, by the body, we have a new and living way into the presence of God. And since we have a great high priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. So, brothers and sisters, that is precisely where the Lord's Supper comes in for me. Done properly, it's holy ground. It's encounter with the living God. We draw near to God. He draws us near to him by faith in the Word, by understanding the significance of the once for all body and blood sacrifice that was made for us, we can today, right now, draw close to God and he draw near to us. It can become for us an experience of Almighty God. It can be holy ground.

Now, in order to do that, we're gonna turn briefly to 1 Corinthians 11, and just walk through it. Just setting the context, the Corinthian church was a talented, gifted, but fractious and divided church, lots of sin problems in that church, lots of carnality, immaturity, sin going on, all kinds of doctrinal issues Paul had to walk through with them. But he comes at last to this practical issue of the Lord's Supper. Reading the lines and reading between the lines, we can see some of the problems that are going on with the Lord's Supper. It seems that the Corinthians were acting very irreverently toward the Lord's Supper, didn't take it seriously.

They were behaving carnally, they were even getting drunk on the wine served at the Lord's Supper. Incredible. So Paul drops a theological bombshell on them concerning the significance of what was actually going on for them that they didn't even realize probably, didn't know why certain things were happening. So look at verses 27-30, he says, "Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord." Verse 28, "A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord, eats and drinks judgment on himself.

Verse 30, look at it. "That is why many among you are weak and sick and a number of you have fallen asleep." That's New Testament language for dead. They've died because of their unworthy observance of the Lord's Supper. That's incredible. The Lord takes this ordinance so seriously that he was willing to afflict some of his own people with illness and weakness, and even with death, because they had eaten and they had been drinking in a manner unworthy of the Lord.

So Paul moved with compassion for them, moved by zeal for the Lord, moved by the Spirit of the Lord himself, he wrote these verses to warn them of danger concerning the Lord's Supper, but that's only part of it, that's not even the greater part of it. Speaking positively, he wanted them to come into the fullness of blessing the Lord intended in the Lord's Supper. He wanted them to richly experience the beauty of the Lord's Supper with the sin removed, that's what he wanted. And so it is also for us today, the Lord's Supper. This ordinance was meant to be a river of blessing for us as Christians, but it has also been throughout 20 centuries of church history, a source of division in the body of Christ, sadly. Right from the very beginning it is here in the Corinthian context, but it continued. 

Historical Context

It's good to understand some history, I was raised personally Roman Catholic. I was an altar boy, so I took part in the Mass, and the center piece of the Mass is the offering, so they believe, of the actual body and blood of Christ, they...I wasn't taught all this theology, I learned it after my conversion, but they believed in the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is a complex Greek philosophical basis for how it could actually be the body and blood of Jesus. And so they argued from Aristotle that the substance had changed and had become actually the body and blood of Jesus, even though it still tasted like bread and wine. I didn't know all that, I was just told to ring the bell at a certain point, and when the priest offered up the host, I rang the bell. I'd been a Christian for 10 years before I figured out that that was the moment they thought transubstantiation happened, and the bell was rung so you would know that it had happened.

Martin Luther, the great Reformer of the 16th century, was first a Roman Catholic priest, trembled so violently at the moment that he performed his first Mass, "I'm actually holding the blood, the cup of the blood of Jesus," that he spilled it on the tablecloth there. Even after his evangelical conversion and understood the Gospel, he never gave up on the concept of real presence, that the body and blood were actually there in the Lord's Supper, though not by transubstantiation, he rejected that, he said, "I don't have an explanation, I just believe it's true."

Now, Ulrich Zwingli, who also began as a Catholic priest, he was in Zurich, he was a Swiss Reformer, he had a whole different take on it. Every bit as much born again, strong, powerful Reformer in the Swiss context, he minimized the Lord's Supper rather completely, just maximized the preaching of the Word and said, "It's just a memorial, it's just a way to help us remember, that's all," what some called the bare memorial view of the Lord's Supper. Many evangelical churches follow that bare memorial view. They denigrate the Lord's Supper or diminish it, have it on Sunday evening service quarterly, something like that and to minimize it, not everyone, but many.

Now, Luther and Zwingli, these two powerful Reformers met at a colloquium, meeting together in Marburg in 1529 to try to reconcile their differences on the Lord's Supper. But it only made them worse enemies. Very sad, very bad moment in church history, when they couldn't get along over the Lord's Supper, a meal that should have united them. Half a generation later, John Calvin, a Reformer in Geneva, came along and had a different view. And it's a view that I hold and I want to espouse to you. It’s what I call the spiritual presence view, the “we're standing on holy ground” view. In that way, it's just bread, it's just juice, it's all it is. It does not change, but it's not a bare memorial, not at all. If you take this seriously, if exegetically, you read through 1 Corinthians 11 and you understand how seriously the Lord takes it, and then think positively, 'cause a meal of thanksgiving, you come expecting a spiritual blessing, you come expecting to be fed by it based on your faith in the Word of God.

Modern Context

So what I wanna do here is, I wanna just walk through some things. And this outline I got years ago, from Mark Dever, and I preached it once here in this church about six years ago, and it has to do with the word, "look". And what I want us to do is, I want us to, based on the text, look in different directions, it's gonna come right up off the text. We're gonna look in different directions, and this has always stuck with me, six different directions of looking. Ultimately, we're gonna look to Jesus, we're gonna look to him by faith, we're gonna try to see Jesus spiritually in the Lord's Supper. So the idea of looking to Jesus, we get that from Hebrews 12, it says, "Since we're surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with endurance the race marked out before us, looking to Jesus, the author and perfect or of our faith.”nThe same book of Hebrews says, "We see Jesus at the right hand of God."

We don't see him except by faith. That's why there's a whole chapter on faith in that book. So by faith, we're looking to Jesus, that's what we're gonna try to do, and so we're gonna look in different direction, we're gonna look back in the Lord's Supper, we're going to look up, we're going to look within, we're gonna look down, look around and then look forward. All of these flow right from the text. So we're gonna look back at history, at key things in redemptive history, at the time of the Lord's Supper, we're gonna look up to God with thankful hearts, it's a meal of Thanksgiving, we're gonna look within, we're going to examine ourselves like the text tells us to do and see if there's any sin in us, and we're gonna do business with God, looking inward. We're gonna look down at the actual elements and realize how physical they are. And there was a time that Jesus was physical, too, for us dying on the cross, we're gonna see the physicality of it and embrace that.

We're gonna look around, maybe even literally in the sanctuary to other brothers and sisters in Christ who are partaking. But then in our minds, look around the world, and know that we're part of a body of Christ, we're part of a church, worldwide movement of Christians, we're not alone, we're not islands, but we're part of a body. And we're gonna look forward to the Second Coming of Christ and to the new heaven, new earth, all of these just flow from the Lord's Supper. 

Looking Back

So let's begin. First, let's look back. First and foremost, this was a Passover, that Last Supper was a Passover, and so the Jews had built into their calendar a once-a-year remembrance of the Passover deliverance, and the Passover was part of the final trial, the final plague that God brought on Egypt for their enslavement of his people. And so at that time, the Angel of Death moved through Egypt and everywhere that did not have the blood of the Passover lamb sacrifice and painted on the doorpost and lintels, he would go down and kill the first born in that house. But if he saw the blood, he would pass over. And so the Jews were instructed to sacrifice the Passover Lamb and apply the blood, but then they were commanded that this would be a lasting ordinance, and that every year they would go through and remember what God did that night. Passover. In the same way, the Lord's Supper is a time of remembrance. Look at verse 23-26. Jesus said, "This is my body, which is for you, do this in remembrance of me." 

In the same way after supper, he took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me. For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." It's a meal of remembrance, so we're looking back, we're gonna look back to the Passover and how Jesus is the fulfillment of that Passover. We don't do the Passover anymore as Christians, we do the Lord's Supper. We also look back, historically, to the night that Jesus was betrayed. Look at verse 23, "The Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed, took bread." So this obviously reminds us of Judas Iscariot, who sat with him at the table and no one knew that he was a devil except Jesus, and how he betrayed Jesus, you can only betray a friend, and so there had been an intimate love relationship between Jesus and all his apostles, and Judas was one of them, but Jesus knew who he was, he knew that he was a devil. But they, he had extended friendship, and so he was betrayed, and so we think about that, and just the events recorded in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the events that led to Jesus' dying for us, we remember them, we look back, but then especially friends, we look back to the cross.

We look back to the giving of the body and the blood of Jesus for us as sinners. The bread symbolizes Christ's physical body. The wine symbolize symbolizes Christ's literal physical blood, and the body and the blood were given for our redemption, and so we think about that, it's a clear recognition. I'm gonna talk more about the physicality of it in a minute, but Romans 6:23 says, “the wages of sin is death.” The soul that sins will die. We deserve to die, the death penalty for our sins. And so Jesus' identification of the bread with his body and of the wine with his blood, focuses our attention on the need for a substitute who would sacrifice himself in our place to pay the penalty for our sins. So we look back and we look back to the new covenant. The Passover was an old covenant animal sacrifice. Leviticus 17 says that the life of the animal is in the blood and is to be poured out, a life given in death for atonement of sins in the old covenant pattern. But the blood of bulls and goats never took away sin. It couldn't do that, it was just a foreshadowing of the actual blood that could take away sin, and that's the blood of the Son of God.

And so, look at verse 25, Jesus institutes a new covenant in his blood, thus ending forever the need for animal sacrifice. In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of me." So there's the new covenant. So by this new covenant in Christ's blood, the wrath of God is totally satisfied. We are actually forgiven, not just symbolically forgiven, like animal blood, but actually forgiven by the blood of Jesus; it's a new covenant. And then we look back to our personal faith in Jesus. Look back to your own story. Remember how you came to Christ. Examine yourself to see if you're in the faith, and if you are, thank God that you're in the faith. Remember what Jesus did to bring you to himself, remember your own story. And look at how he has sustained and protected your faith from the moment you believe until this day. Think about that. 

Looking Up

Secondly, we look up to God the Father. Whenever Jesus gave thanks for food, he looked up to his Heavenly Father, like in Matthew 14:19, when he fed the 5000, he took the five loaves and the two fish, and then he looked up and gave thanks. We look up. The Last Supper, Jesus took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, "Drink from it." So as we look up in our hearts, we think God the Father crafted before the foundation of the world, a salvation plan for a sinner like me. This whole thing comes from God the Father, so you look up with a heart of thankfulness to God for your salvation, and you look up and you see Jesus, like the author of Hebrew says, "At the right hand of God, your great high priest, interceding continually for you, pleading the merits of his blood shed once for all." We don't believe like the Catholics do, that we're repeating the sacrifice here. No, no, know once for all it was offered, and Jesus is pleading the merits of his blood on your behalf at the right hand of God, see him there, he's praying for you, if you're a child of God. And look up and see the activity of the Holy Spirit, that the spirit is delivering, administering grace to his people all over the world in the name of Jesus, the activity of the Triune God. And as you do, as you look up to Jesus, you're going to do a kind of spiritual eating and drinking. Now, this is a hard concept, but this is what John Calvin taught, there's a spiritual eating and a spiritual drinking.

What does that mean? It says in John 6, Jesus taught that he, his flesh is bread. And he says, "I tell you the truth. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day, for my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him." So I do not believe that the bread and the juice will actually be changed into the body and blood of Jesus, I don't think we need that. But there is a spiritual partaking, or a spiritual eating, or a spiritual nourishment that comes mentally in your soul by recognizing the body and blood of Jesus given for you, in a sense that you need ongoing ministry from the cross to continue you to feed your soul. You're not ever gonna be independent. He's the vine, you're the branch, a different image with the same teaching. So you're gonna be spiritually eating of Jesus. I know it's a hard teaching, it was hard back then, but we can embrace it. And you say, as I eat this and chew this and swallow it, as I drink this and swallow it, it's a symbol to me of a need for ongoing ministry from Jesus to myself. I'm never gonna be independent.

Looking Within

Thirdly, we're gonna look within, we look within to our own sinfulness first and foremost, look at the ugly sinfulness of that Corinthian church. Look at their factions and divisions. Look at them getting drunk. Look at them selfishly rushing ahead and eating more bread than they should have, and others who go without, and feel a sense of shame and guilt that we all share. Don't think, "Oh, I would have been better than those Corinthians. I'm a better man, better woman," I wouldn't do that. Instead, we have to look inward to our own sinfulness. We complain. We murmur. We fail to thank God for his many blessings. We just assume them. We go into patterns of idolatry and lust that are shameful and addictive. We are selfish toward people that we love. We bicker and argue with them. We are not zealous for the kingdom of God. We don't lay down our lives for lost people. We’re not generous with our money toward the poor and needy like we should be. There's so many sins of omission and commission that we should be confessing to God, and this is a good time to do that, to look inward and confess, and we're going to have an opportunity to do that in a moment.

We should do it in light of the seriousness of sin. Look at verses 27- 29, "Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord. Look at verse 28, "A man, a person ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup." I'm just saying, look inward and examine. "For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself." So we don't eat flippant or lightly, we bow in our hearts and search our hearts for sinfulness, and we bring out those sins and allow Christ's all-sufficient blood to cover everyone. We're told in this text, "Judge ourselves so that God won't have to do it." You should take that seriously. If we judge ourselves, then the Lord won't have to do it. So Paul says in another place, in the same epistle, "I beat my body and make it my slave so after preaching to others, I won't be disqualified." So get serious about whatever sin is in your life and judge yourself in reference, and God won't have to discipline you. You won't have to become weak or sick or fall asleep.

We also look inward to repentance and faith, which are graces of God. If you are a repentant sinner, that's a grace that God's worked in you, so thank God for that spirit of repentance and that faith that you know that Jesus is the Son of God, and he died for you. Find that repentance in faith. Look to the testimony of the Spirit that you actually are a child of God, the Spirit testifying with your Spirit that you are a child of God. So therefore, we're looking inwardly to ensure that we are eating in a manner worthy of the Lord. This is especially true of a gospel hypocrite, an unconverted church member able to play the game and deceive elders and other people, but you're not really converted, going through the motions, and you live it out through the week. Pastor needs to warn people about gospel hypocrisy. Let this be an opportunity to look inward and say, "Am I genuinely in the faith?"

And certainly true of unbelievers. Unbelievers are not welcome at the Lord's table. You'd be eating, drinking judgment on yourself. Instead, what I want you to do, hear the Gospel, God sent his Son for sinners like you and me. We're all sinners. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” we are sinners. God sent a Savior, trust in him. Don't partake of the bread and the juice, but just believe in Jesus, look to him for the forgiveness of your sins, and then testify to it by water baptism, and then next time partake.

Looking Down

Fourth, we look down, you're gonna have in your hand, bread and a cup, these physical elements tell you that you needed a physical savior. We're not like the Greek philosophers that think, "Body is evil, spirit is good." “The Word became flesh.” And Colossians 1 says plainly, "Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior, but now he has reconciled you by Christ's physical body, through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation." Now, that physical body and blood, the flesh and blood, was given once for all, never to be repeated. The author to Hebrews is so clear about this. But it did happen once. And as you eat the physical bread, chew it and swallow it, and you drink the juice and you swallow it, you should think of the physicality of your Savior and how he once for all died for you, went through agony for you, shed real blood for you. And with your physical hands, look at your own hands, some day God's going to give you resurrection hands, a resurrection body. You're gonna actually be in a resurrected physical world, in a resurrected physical body, seeing a resurrected physical Savior someday.

Looking Around

Fifth, look around to the body of Christ. You're not the only person God is saving. He is working in brothers and sisters. And isn't that beautiful? There won't be any loners or hermits in heaven. We are part of a beautiful mass body of Christ around the world, and this local church is a physical, visible sign of that. So sneak a peek at someone in the pew. Look down, look left, look right, they might be looking at you. All right? Looking left, looking right, we're surrounded by people. It says in verse 33, “So then my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for each other.” First time I as a new convert in Christ partook in a Protestant Lord's Supper as a Catholic, you eat it right away, as soon as you get it, you eat it, so I did that. I was so embarrassed, I was the only one who ate in the entire sanctuary. I didn't know this verse, verse 33, "Wait for each other." But there's a reason we wait till everybody has...

We try to harmonize it and synchronize, so we look, give nods to the deacons, they come and when we're all ready, then we eat together. And it's just a symbol of, like it says in 1 Corinthians 10, "We partake of one loaf, so there's one body." So there's that sense of unity that we have, look around, and look around to the fellowship that we have with each other. If you're aware of any sin going on your life, any dis-fellowship, anything going on, make it right. We're also aware, as we look around to an unbelieving, watching world, we are proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes by this, but also by the Gospel. We've got a responsibility to the watching, unbelieving world to proclaim the Lord's death. 

Looking Forward

And then finally, looking forward to the future coming of Christ. Look again at verse 26, "For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." Now, we're learning all about that in the book of Revelation. I intend, God willing, to resume that study next week, but we know Jesus is coming back, and this homely symbolic feast saturated with powerful ministry of the Spirit will someday give way to the reality of a returning king and a banquet in heaven, and we're gonna feast in the kingdom. "Many," Matthew 8:11, "are gonna come from the east and the west and will take their place at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. We're gonna sit and feast. I don't think that's all we're gonna be doing, but I just think... I see regular feasting in our future. All right, we're gonna come back together, the new Jerusalem, and then go back out to the new earth and work, and then come back and feast some more, and we won't get fat, we don't get... That'll be really good. Well, just feast and feast, and we won't have to work it off. It'll be wonderful.

Ultimately, we're looking ahead to our own resurrection, to the feast of our resurrection, as it says in Isaiah 25, "On this mountain, the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine, the best of meats and the finest of wines. On this mountain, he will destroy the shroud that unfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations, he will swallow up death forever." So the destruction of death and the resurrection is portrayed in Isaiah 25:6-8 as a banquet, and we're gonna feast. 

Summary

All right, summary. I desire that your experience by faith in the Word of God would be like on holy ground now. I've invited you to look back to the history of the Passover and Christ. I've invited you to look up in thankfulness to God and to see the activity of Christ, your mediator. I've urged you to look inward to your own sins, to deal honestly with your sins, and to be certain that you're born again, but if you are to be thankful for that, and to know that the Spirit is in you; to look down in an understanding way to the actual bread and actual juice, knowing that a body was broken for you, blood was shed for you; to look around to the body of Christ, the fact that you are part of a worldwide movement of Christians; and look ahead to the second coming of Christ.

So what we're gonna do now is have a time of prayer that I'm gonna lead in three parts, briefly, just 30 seconds, 45 seconds in each one, of silent prayer, and then I'll end that time and go to the next one, and then we'll partake in the Lord's Supper. So let's pray together. First, I'd like to call on you to worship God, so this is like looking upward, I want you to be mindful of the greatness of the Triune God and pray, worship prayer first and foremost, so quietly in your heart, reverence and worship God.

Prayer of Worship

Almighty God, we recognize that you are holy, holy, holy, and that 100 million angels stand in your presence and they cover their faces, and they cry out about your holiness. Oh God, you are a great God, you are a consuming fire, and you are also the father of the prodigal, who comes back broken and sinful. We thank you for your infinite greatness and majesty and your infinite kindness and grace to us.

We worship you, God, and praise you and thank you. Now we're gonna go to a time of confession of sin. Look first and foremost toward your conscience, if there's anything that you've been doing, any habit, any pattern, any addiction, anything that you've done, anything that conscience is saying to you that needs to be dealt with, and also look horizontally, if there's anyone that might have anything against you, if there's any brokenness in a relationship, confess it now and resolve to repent and to make things right. Let's confess our sins quietly to God.

Prayer of Confession

Father, we acknowledge that we have sinned in what we have said and done and what we have should have done and didn't do, and we are mindful of the depth of our brokenness and our sinfulness. We ask your forgiveness, we confess our sin to you, O Lord, knowing that you are faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Oh God, wash us and cleanse us. Father, if there's any unforgiveness or broken relationships in our family or in the church or any others that we're aware of, God give us the determination to leave our gift at the altar and go, be reconciled. Oh God, I pray that you would help us, help us oh Lord, to be pure and to fight sin by the power of the Spirit in Jesus' name.

And now thirdly, finally, we want to lift up our hearts in thankfulness. Think first and foremost of the fact that every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms is yours in Christ. Thank God for your forgiveness, thank God for Jesus, thank God for your adoption as a son or daughter of the living God, and then be thankful for lesser blessings. 

Prayer of Thanksgiving

Father, we know that Scripture teaches us that every good and perfect gift is from you, every gift we've ever received, but we also acknowledge some gifts are infinitely greater than others, you give them all, but some are unspeakably valuable and precious. You are the God who did not spare your own son, but gave him up for us all; there is no greater gift. Thank you for sending Jesus. Thank you, Lord, for dying for us. Thank you, Spirit, for taking the blood of Jesus and applying it to us for the forgiveness of our sins, and thank you now for the chance we will have to partake in the Lord's Supper, in your name, we pray. Amen.

I'd like to invite the deacons to come now and help serve the table.

sermon transcript

Part of Our Inheritance Stipend…. But the Checks Are Uncashed

 Some time ago, I was reading about a Major League baseball player who was something of a flake, weird guy, strange in his thinking, but a tremendous hitter, and they'll pay good money for good hitters. And so, this guy had a contract paying him over 150 million dollars over a number of years to hit a baseball. At the end of the season, an orderly was cleaning out his locker and found at the bottom of his locker, multiple uncashed paychecks, tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars, just in the bottom of the locker, never cashed. He was doing fine financially, don't worry about him. All of his needs were met, but there were these checks uncashed. What a weirdo. [chuckle] Except that I've done it once, actually, thank God for our financial secretary, found one that I hadn't cashed and she re-cut the check. Praise God for Clarissa Bacon. [laughter] So, how weird is that? Beware, lest you be exposed as a hypocrite!

Scripture talks about the Holy Spirit as a deposit, a down payment guaranteeing our full inheritance. And it tells us that through the Spirit we are ministered some foretaste of heaven. Some, if you could put it this way, some checks out of a trust fund that's been set up until we come into our full inheritance in Heaven, and that these checks, so to speak, come to us by the ministry of the Word, by the power of the Spirit, and they give us a foretaste of heavenly life that is vital to our spiritual health. And by means of this, we are filled with hope and energy and joy and power in the Christian life, and we are able to serve Him, we're able, as we were just talking in Bible For Life, we're supposed to live so filled with hope that non-Christians ask us for a reason of the hope that we have. We're supposed to be so radiantly filled with hope that it's just so unnatural. It's supernatural.

And I think some of the Lord's checks are going uncashed when it comes to the Lord's Supper. I feel that in the evangelical world, we do not receive the full benefit of the Lord's Supper that we should. And I'm praising God that here at FBC, we do take the Lord's Supper seriously, I feel very refreshed. I come expecting to be blessed by the Spirit every time, and it never fails, and I think many of you do as well. But it could be that even some of you are leaving some of your checks uncashed, because you haven't really looked at 1 Corinthians 11, you haven't looked at the Scripture, you haven't attended to this topic, and therefore you underestimate the Lord's Supper and come, not really expecting much, except that you know you're gonna get let out of church late a little bit, which may not happen this week, I don't know, maybe, maybe not, doesn't matter. What would you do with the extra 11 minutes anyway dear friends?

But the fact of the matter is that because you don't come with that expectant heart, because you haven't attended throughout the week to say, "Hey, the Lord's Supper is coming up," you've underestimated and you don't receive the full benefit. You may receive some benefits, you don't have the full benefit. And I think there are other churches in the evangelical world that's even worse. This problem is even worse. Some churches, some mega churches I was reading about, have the Lord's Supper quarterly on Sunday evening. Now, you just must know as a pastor, you're only gonna get a percentage of your people back on Sunday evening, and to do it quarterly, I think you can go years in that church as a member in good standing, I think, I don't know, maybe they address it in their by-laws and never partake in the Lord's Supper. Those checks are going uncashed.

There are some advantages that could be flowing into their lives, and it's because the leadership of that church has minimized, has underestimated, the Lord's Supper. Why is that? Well, there's sadly a long history from the reformation on, of squabbling and fighting over the doctrine of the Lord's Supper among people who claim to be Christians. Some people that teach a doctrine called “real presence”, that the actual incarnation, the incarnate Lord is present in some mysterious way, in the actual bread and the wine or the juice that it becomes in some way the actual body of Christ, or as the Lutherans would put it, he is present in, with, by and under the actual elements of the... in the doctrine of “real presence”. Others, following the Reformed churches in Switzerland, Ulrich Zwingli said, "No, it's just a memorial," sometimes even add an adjective like a “bare” memorial.

And if you run along that road long enough after a while, you're gonna have a quarterly in the evening, because it really isn't worth much in that view. And it's interesting, as we come to 1 Corinthians 11, we find that the Lord's Supper has always had controversy and misunderstanding and issues surrounding it, from the very beginning of church history. So, Satan seeks to rob us of our down payment checks. He doesn't want us to have that full joy and ministry that the Lord's Supper could be giving to us if we just came to it with understanding and with faith. And so, we come to 1 Corinthians 11 and I'm seeking to give a careful exposition of this text, to strengthen your faith, so that you may understand, and so that from this point on, again and again, the Lord's Supper may be just an avenue of blessing, a river of blessing to you as it should be. And so, in Verses 17-22, we see Paul addressing these abuses of the Lord's Supper, the Lord's Supper was being abused in Corinth.

The Lord’s Supper Abused in Corinth (vs. 17-22)

Look at Verses 17 and following, in the following directives. He said, "I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good. In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent, I believe it. No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God's approval. When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat. For as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else, one remains hungry, another gets drunk. Don't you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the Church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not." So clearly, big problems in the observance of the Lord's Supper at Corinth. Strong rebukes. He says, "I have no praise for you in this area," so that's a strong rebuke. He says, "When you gather together, your meetings actually are doing more harm than good." That's another very, very strong rebuke.

And he speaks of divisions in the church. If you know anything about 1 Corinthians, you know that that is one of the central problems they were facing. I follow Apollos, I follow Paul. There was just factionalism and different things. I follow Jesus. Those are my favorite people, the Jesus people. You can say, Well, aren't they... Yeah, it's when you say, I'm following Jesus and you're not, that's when there are problems. I don't know, but I guess that that was some of what was going on. So there are these factions, these divisions, he says in Verse 9, "No doubt there have to be differences or divisions among you to show which if you have God's approval." Hard verse to interpret. Some people think he's speaking plainly and saying, “There are reasonable distinctions in the body of Christ.” I actually don't think that's what's going on there. Paul frequently speaks sarcastically to the Corinthians, he does. In 1 Corinthians Chapter 4, he says, "Already, you have become rich. Already, you've become kings. You've become kings and that without us. I wish you really had become kings."

Okay, so you don't think they've become kings. No. Why did you say it? For effect. He's trying to shock them, and so he's saying, “Yeah, no doubt, there had to be these kinda divisions to show, which one of you God approves of, and he doesn't improve any of the others." Divisions, factions, and the divisions in the church were coming down to roost when it came time for the Lord's Supper. And there were selfish practices that he's rebuking here. For example, eating without waiting for anyone else, people just kinda came and ate right away, saying, “I'm all that matters, as long as I get mine, that's all it really matters,” without having any sensitivity of the body of Christ. And so, he really works on unity a lot of times with the Lord's Supper, one-loaf-for-all eating. At the end, he says, "Wait for each other." So “we all eat together” is a sense of unity. And along with that, allowing poor members to get completely shut out, it became kind of hierarchical by economic prosperity.

You know, the wealthy ones were getting advantaged and the others were not, and so, it was... There were divisions in that regard. It was a hierarchy based on material wealth and power, and even worse, the ultimate disgrace, drunkenness. They were drinking so much at the Lord's Supper, they were actually getting drunk. It's really shameful, if you think about it, it's really sad, and it's really disgusting. And in some way, they were despising the church of God, they were looking down on the church, they were underestimating the church. They didn't see the church rightly. The church, he says in another place, is the pillar and the foundation of the truth to a lost and watching the world. I like that statement, he says, "Don't you have homes to eat and drink in?" [chuckle] It's not what we're doing here at the church.

By the way, I find that an interesting statement, I don't know if I should go too far with it, but there's a lot of emphasis placed on there not being church buildings back then, and house churches... There clearly were house churches. This implies that maybe there was a place that they used to meet. And so, they would come there when they came there, he said, "Look, don't you have homes?" The home is where you're supposed to take care of those needs. When we come here, there's a different thing. I'm not gonna push the point too far. But at any rate, the church is the assembly of the people of God, and they were despising it by how they were behaving. And that's a big problem. And so, he gives them this rebuke in Verse 22, “What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you for this? Certainly not.”Well, what's the remedy? Well, the remedy to these excesses, the remedy to any problem in the Christian life is sound instruction pressed into the heart by the power of the Holy Spirit, bringing about repentance and a change of life.

But without the sound instruction, there cannot be the repentance and the change of life. We won't know an accurate diagnosis of our problem. We have to have that doctrine. And so, Paul gives them instructions, and at the end of this section, and when I come, I'll have further instructions for you, it's doctrine, he wants to give them solid doctrine. Now, I praise God again at FBC, I fully expect when we come for the Lord's Supper, that it's going to be a time of blessing. I don't see these kinds of excesses and these kinds of sins and divisions here in our church. I'm not preaching this sermon now, because I say that FBC has the exact same kinds of problems. Not at all. But my desire is that through the rightly dividing the Word through teaching and preaching and through the ministry of the Spirit, our experiences with the Lord's Supper will be greatly enhanced. That we'll have an intense experience of the living God through the ordinance without going off into false doctrine. And so, we have to have this right instruction.

The Lord’s Supper Instituted by Christ (vs. 23-25)

And so, in Verses 23-25, he begins to give that instruction. "For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you. The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, 'This is my body, which is for you do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of me.'" So this doctrinal section begins with the word “for”, links it back. He says, “Shall I praise you? No. I'm not gonna praise you for”, etcetera. The reason I'm not gonna praise you is, I wanna set you straight on how you should think, and he goes back to the history of what actually happened, the institution of the Lord's Supper. “What I received from the Lord, that's what I passed on to you.” This is the apostolic ministry where the apostle takes directly from Jesus and then makes it known to the church, “what I received from the Lord.”

Now, Paul was no eyewitness of the Last Supper. He wasn't converted yet at that point, as you know. He says, he was as one untimely born. And so, what he was doing that night, he probably was in Jerusalem, maybe at the home of Gamaliel, his mentor, or maybe with the Synagogue, members of the Synagogue of the Freedmen. He was observing the Passover, not thinking a lot perhaps about Jesus at that point, although he probably was aware of the triumphal entry. I don't know what was going on in Saul's life, I just know he wasn't converted and he wasn't an eyewitness of the Last Supper. And neither were any of these Corinthian Christians, they weren't either, and neither are any of us. But Paul is an apostle and then the others who were the source of the information from Matthew, Mark, and Luke - they were eye witnesses, and they received from the Lord this thing that he did. Paul as an apostle, received this doctrine directly from heaven, directly from Christ.

As we'll talk about Easter Sunday, 1 Corinthians 15, the gospel, he said, "For what I received, I also passed on to you, the Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, he was buried, he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. “So what I received, I passed on to you.” He said, I didn't make this up. The Lord's Supper wasn't something that man made up. It wasn't something that we thought would be a good idea. As he says of the Gospel in Galatians 1, "I want you to know, brothers, that the Gospel I preach is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ." So, he passed on these things he received it from the Lord, “I passed them on to you.” He's already instructed them, they were doing the Lord's Supper, but they had gotten into some problems.

So “what I received, then I passed on to you”, and now I'm trying to remind you of what it was. And so, also from us, if we wanna have a right understanding of the Lord's Supper, we have to go back to the apostolic teaching. We have to go back to the Scriptures and try to understand what the Lord intended in giving us this Last Supper. And then he immediately gets into the timing of the Last Supper, "For what I received from the Lord, I also passed on to you, the Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed." So he brings us, in our minds, back to that night, the last night that Jesus was alive before he was betrayed, before he was killed, that Passover meal that he ate with His disciples, with His apostles in the upper room. You remember, and you've read about it, back to that night. And he's identifying it this way, “the night he was betrayed.” Actually the Greek word for “betrayed” here is the same word that's frequently translated “delivered, delivered over,” that kind of thing. And so, it's a powerful meditation to consider: who delivered Jesus over to death?

And let's go right to the heart of the matter: it was God the Father who delivered His Son for us. It's very powerful. Romans 8:32, "He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how will He not also along with Him graciously give us all things?" So God the Father surrendered or delivered Jesus over to death for us. It's the same word. And then again in Romans 4:25, "He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification." This is the Gospel that Jesus was delivered over to death. But most of the translation, all of them, I don't actually know any translation that doesn't go with betrayal here, on the night that he was betrayed, and this word is translated sometimes betrayed, and I think that's what Paul had in mind. So it's speaking really of His betrayal by Judas Iscariot, one of the 12. Judas betrayed Him to His enemies, on the night he was betrayed. And so, Judas was one of the 12, he was one of Jesus' inner circle, he was in one of the Psalms prophetically, he was his friend, his close friend, whom he trusted.

Now, don't misunderstand about Jesus, he always knew who Judas was, it's not that. But he had given him a position of importance, he had entrusted some things to him, like the money bag, for example, and certain aspects of ministry, and he was in that circle of friends. And so, that Psalm, Psalm 41, which is quoted in John 13:18, to fulfill the Scripture, "He who shares my bread has lifted up his heel against me." There's a strong sense of betrayal, you can't betray a stranger. And so, there's got to be relationship, that trust, that friendship, in order for there to be betrayal, and there was. And I just meditate on this, this issue of betrayal, and I think about it, not everyone who sits at the table with Jesus is a true believer in him. Not everyone who partakes in the Lord's Supper is going to heaven. Not everyone has a genuine faith in Jesus Christ. And the people that don't, they're just in many ways indistinguishable from those that do. God knows the difference. But Judas... I mean, the other 11 didn't know he was the one. They didn't know who it was. But it was in receiving that actual piece of bread that Jesus dipped into the dish, it was by taking that he accepted the role of betrayer. Satan entered into him. It was betrayal, dear friends. There's a strong sense of betrayal.

So, as a result of this theme that I'm opening up for us, one of the big issues when it comes to the Lord's Supper is the theme of self-examination. Someone ought to examine himself. We should examine ourselves when we come to the Lord's Supper. We'll get more to that later on, but because of this issue of betrayal. So this is when it happened, the night he was betrayed, a certain specific night in history. Well, what did he do? Well, he took bread in his hands and he gave thanks for the bread, and he broke the bread, and he gave the bread to them all. And then he established the significance of these actions. "This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." And then in the same way, after the supper, he then took the cup, and he made a similar statement. He said, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this whenever you drink it in remembrance of me." So we have a simple command, "Do this.

Do you see, by the way, the power of the Holy Spirit? The church has done this now for 2000 years, the church has done this. The Holy Spirit would not let this thing fall by the wayside. The Spirit does his work. Now, we don't always rightly understand it. We don't always get it right. We're always messed up, but we're doing it. But this was a command given by the Lord to do it. Now, what is the theological significance of this? This is clearly meant to be a significant thing. I wanna bring out four themes just right from the text here, there are many others we could get. The first four doctrinal themes, the first is the theme of thanksgiving. He took the bread and he gave thanks. He gave thanks. The Greek word for give thanks, eucharisteo, from which we get Eucharist, it just means to give thanks. And so we come to the table, we should, filled with thanksgiving. It is very sweetly others-centered to be a thankful man or woman. Amen? To just live your life filled with thankfulness, it's a happy occasion. When you come and you're able to say to God, "Thank you. Thank you for saving me. Thank you for all that you've done for me. Thank you for sending your only begotten Son for me. Thank you. And thank you for the good things that are yet to come," just to be filled with thankfulness.

Paul can't write an epistle without thanking God for the salvation of the people he's writing to, whether the Romans or the Corinthians. He's just thankful to God, always. My favorite verse on thankfulness, in that regard, Romans 6:17. I love that verse. "Thanks be to God that though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed that form of teaching to which you were entrusted." I preached a whole sermon, the sermon title is... I love that title. It's one of my favorite titles. “Thank God, You Obeyed.” That will blow your theological circuits. You'd be thinking about that the rest of your life, and you'll never figure it out. Thank God, you obeyed the gospel. To God be the glory, that you're not sitting here as some atheist, some unbeliever, you're sitting here as a believer in Jesus. You obeyed the gospel. Thank him for it, 'cause he should get the credit. And not only that, but thank God your brothers and sisters obeyed too. Amen? 'Cause Paul's doing that in Romans 6:17, "I thank God that you obeyed." So thankfulness.

Secondly, the necessity of the incarnation. Very physical here. He took bread in his hands, and he broke it. I had the picture in my mind of little tiny bread crumbs falling as he breaks it. It's very physical. When I was an altar boy in the Roman Catholic Church, I was supposed to hold this polished brass patent kind of plate under the mouths of people so that if any crumbs would fall they would be caught. It was a way that they thought, I think, of giving reverence to what was going on there. But I'm just saying on the night of the first... I think there were crumbs that fell down on the table. I just think it was physical, it just happened. He had hands, there was a physical bread, and all of this points to the physicality of our salvation. We were saved by a body. We were saved by a dead body. You see what I'm saying? And we have to believe in the incarnation to believe the gospel. Colossians 1:22, "But now he, God, has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight without blemish and free from accusation." Trace it all back, because of the body, that's what you have. Because of the body of Jesus, given over to death, you are free from sin.

The physical nature of our salvation, physical. Jesus was really human, didn't merely appear to be human. It was foundation, the foundation of the gospel the apostles preached. 1 John 1:1, he says, "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched, this we proclaim to you concerning the word of life." But this does not mean I espouse a doctrine of real presence, still less of transubstantiation. I don't think that the words, "This is my body" or, "This is my blood," mean that we as Christians have to believe in real presence, that that's literally the body or literally the blood, or that if I had priestly skills laid on me by the archbishop that I would be able to transubstantiate it into such. I don't believe in that. I don't think it's required. And I actually think it's not what the Bible teaches, that the incarnation was centered on Jesus' body. His hands were touching bread that night, not his body that night. And so those words themselves would have been incomprehensible to the apostles that night. Real presence would have meant nothing. Now, I know that there are many that believe it. I don't wanna get into that debate, I just don't think that's what it means.

Thirdly, doctrinal theme, the necessity of substitutionary atonement. He said, "This is my body, which is for you." Do you see that? "This is my body, which is for you." I took on a body for you, I am going to lay down my body for your sake. Galatians 2:20, "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I now live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me." He gave himself in my place, he stood in my place. As the hymn put it, "In my place, condemned, he stood." Took our place. So this is my body, which is given for you. Isaiah 53, "He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities. The punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His wounds we are healed. We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all." Substitutionary atonement. Jesus took on a body, and that body was nailed to the cross in our place. And that if we trust in him, if we believe in him, the transfer of guilt moves from us to him, and he is our savior by his physical body. This atonement is especially spoken of as having been done in his blood. There's a focus on His blood, the blood atonement, through faith in his blood. So “without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness.” Hebrews 9:22.

And so that brings me to the fourth, final theme I wanna bring out doctrinally, the establishment of a new covenant in his blood. A new covenant was established. The old covenant was in the blood of bulls and goats, animals. It never took away any sin, symbolic only, covered that in Hebrews. But now there is this new covenant, and it was also established in blood, once for all time, never to be repeated. That's part of the problem with the Mass, is the repetition of the sacrifice given again and again. It's not needed. Once for all offered in his blood. And through that, we have a new covenant. And we talked in Hebrews 8 about the elements of the new covenant. “This is the covenant I will make with them after that time,” declares the Lord. “I'll put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts.” That's a transformed nature; heart of stone removed, the heart of flesh given; regeneration. “I will be their God and they will be my people.” That's adoption through faith in Jesus. “No longer will the man teach his neighbor, a man, his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,” perfect knowledge. “Now, this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God.” We'll have intimate knowledge. “For I'll forgive their wickedness and remember their sins no more. Complete forgiveness of sins, it's always been by this eternal covenant, the blood of Jesus. And this reminds us of all of that. And so the theology of the Lord's Supper: It's a meal of thanksgiving. It's a meal focused on the incarnation, not in any way believing in real presence or transubstantiation, but remembering that Jesus took on a body for us and that it was necessary for our salvation. Substitutionary atonement, that's why the body was given, bringing about a new covenant in his blood.

The First Purpose: Proclamation for Remembrance (v. 26)

All right, so why do we do it? Well, the first purpose that Paul mentions is proclamation for remembrance. Look at verse 26. "For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes." It also says, "This is my body, which is for you, do this in remembrance of me. This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me." So we come to this issue of remembrance. In a way, it's astonishing that we would need to be reminded of Jesus. Isn't that a bit strange? It's like, "Oh yeah, Jesus." But you know, how many of us, being honest, don't have "Oh yeah, Jesus" moments every day? It's really a tragedy of the flesh that we are just constantly forgetting the things that God wanted us to remember. He said it would happen to the Jews when they entered the Promised Land. "When you enter this land," Deuteronomy 8, "Be careful that you don't forget all that God has commanded you and all that he's done in view of you." When you get in that Promised Land, and you start eating all of those crops you didn't plant, you live in fine houses you didn't build, and you drink from grapes you didn't plant, when all of that happens your hearts are gonna become proud and you'll forget me.

Well, the Lord instituted this so that we would not forget him, that we would not forget him, that we would remember what he did, and that it would be intense, that remembrance. And not only would we remember, but we would by doing this, proclaim, proclaim. The word is used 11 times in the Book of Acts for the proclamation of the Gospel. So, in some way, the death of Jesus is being proclaimed by this. We are proclaiming the Lord's death until he comes. So we're proclaiming a past history and a future reality that we're looking forward to by faith, filled with hope, the second coming of Christ. And so we are proclaiming the Lord's death, and we're gonna keep doing it until he comes, looking ahead. So this proclamation looks backward, and it looks forward, the past and the future. That's the first purpose.

The Second Purpose: Self-Examination in Light of Christ (vs. 27-32)

The second purpose of the Lord's Supper, the reason we do it, is for self-examination. I already mentioned this, but look at verses 27 through 32. "Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord." "A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord, eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment. When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world." These are serious words of spiritual warning centered around the Lord's Supper, very serious. And the press of all of them, all, if we could boil it all down to one thing, it's "examine yourselves." That's what it's all about. So we proclaim the Lord's death, but we also examine ourselves. We look inward to see, "How does it stand with me and God?" It says that if we eat or drink without recognizing the body of the Lord, we will eat and drink judgment on ourselves. What does it mean then to recognize the body of the Lord? I don't think, again, it means real presence, that by looking at the bread, you say, "That's the body of the Lord." I think instead, the same word is used in verse 31, same Greek word, if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged.

So recognize, truly, Jesus, recognize that he is the only begotten Son of God. That means have a saving faith in Jesus, recognize him, assess it properly by sober judgment, by faith, a serious, weighty, joyful thing. It is for this reason that we believe that only baptized believers in Jesus should partake in the Lord's Supper. We do not open it to anyone from the community to come and take, but you have to have believed in Jesus, trusted in him as your Lord and Savior, and testified to that by water baptism. Because I think that an unbeliever could only possibly be eating and drinking judgment on themselves, 'cause they cannot recognize the body and blood of Jesus. They're not believers yet. If they become a believer, as I prayed this morning that some would become believers as a result of listening to this sermon, if that is happening to you, the first thing you need to do by ordinance is water baptism, not the Lord's Supper. And that way you're standing in front of the world and saying, "I am a believer in Jesus. I'm a believer in Jesus," and you're willing to be baptized, then the Lord's Supper comes.

I don't think simply being an unbeliever is the only way, however, to not recognize the body and blood of Jesus. Clearly, these Corinthian people were being disciplined by God because they were eating in an unworthy manner. So remember what they were doing. They were coming, it's a raucous thing, eating quickly, not looking to anybody else, getting drunk. And as a result of that, God was disciplining them. Pretty soon, in Hebrews 12, we're gonna talk about the Lord's discipline. God has power to discipline his children. And here it says the discipline's linked to the Lord's Supper. If you don't see the Lord's Supper properly, you don't come with a referential attitude by faith, you're open to the Lord's discipline. And that's why he says, "A number of you are weak." Think about that, your weakness comes because you haven't recognized the Lord's Supper properly. A number of you are sick, you have a sickness in your life. There are some sicknesses that come from sin, they are disciplines of God. And a number of you have fallen asleep, that means they've died because they did not recognize properly the Lord's Supper. It's very serious, if you think about that. So these are serious words of warning, and there's a need for faith. So as we come to this, we come by faith.

Remember how Jesus said to the two blind men by the side of the road, "Lord, we want our sight." He said, "All right, according to your faith, it will be done to you." So it is with the Lord's Supper. So it is as you come here, according to your faith, it will be done. If by hearing this sermon, your faith is expanded, it's stronger, you have a sense of the body and blood of Jesus, according to your faith, it will be done to you. If not, it will be bare memorial, to use that language. Maybe not even that. But if you have a strong, vivid faith through the ministry of the Holy Spirit as he's moving through this sanctuary even now convicting, strengthening, working in your hearts, then this will be a very powerful and meaningful time. And therefore, this is a time, verse 28, to examine yourselves before you eat and drink. Ask, number one, “Am I truly a Christian? Am I born again, really?” It says in 2 Corinthians 13:5, "Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith." Test yourselves. It's not a wrong thing to do. Do that, test yourselves. Don't you realize that Christ Jesus is in you, unless of course you fail the test? So do you believe that Jesus is God in the flesh and that he died on the cross in your place for sin?

Are you trusting in Christ's death, in his death alone, for the forgiveness of all of your sins? Not your own righteousness. Do you see evidence of the Holy Spirit's ministry in your life? Is the Spirit testifying with your spirit regularly that you are a child of God? Does God pour out his love into your heart by the Holy Spirit whom he has given you? Does that love, through the Spirit, extend to other brothers and sisters in Christ? You're loving the brothers and sisters because they're Christians. Do you see a principle of spiritual vitality in your life so that you are by the power of the Spirit putting sin to death, the deeds of the body, regularly? I'm not talking about sinless perfection. Do you hunger and thirst for the things of God? Do you yearn for God's word? Do you yearn for heaven? Do you yearn for righteousness? Are these the desires of your heart? Do you see spiritual warfare going on in you and around you as the devil battles what you're trying to do? Do you yearn for heaven and to see God face-to-face? Well, listen, all of these questions really should be in front of you every day, but at the Lord's Supper, especially so. You should come and ask those kind of questions.

Secondly though, not just Am I a Christian, but, Am I healthy? Am I doing well in my Christian life? Am I growing? Am I actually growing? Am I more like Jesus than I was a year ago? Five years ago? Is there a principle of growth in my life? Or are there increasing patterns of idolatry, entrenched sin that's taking root in my life, and I need to fight better? Are there broken relationships horizontally? Do I have some unforgiveness in my heart, some bitterness toward another brother or sister in Christ? You know, is there brokenness? Am I drifting spiritually? Am I drifting? Am I not so sharp in my spiritual disciplines as I used to be, not reading the Bible like I used to be or praying like I used to be, or memorizing Scripture? Am I drifting or am I getting stronger? Am I healthy? Am I growing? And so the Lord's Supper is a time to examine yourself. And he says, "If you will discipline yourself," God's saying, "I won't have to do it." Isn't that what he's saying? If we discipline ourselves, if we judge ourselves, we will not come under judgment. So you take care of it, and I won't have to.

So what he does is he gives you time, he gives you time to repent. If you won't, he will act. We'll talk more about that in a few weeks on discipline, but he'll act. And you saw what happened in the Corinthian church: Weak, sick, some had fallen asleep. You don't want that to happen. And so head it off at the pass and bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance, that's what he's urging. Examine yourself. If something comes up, address it, deal with it. He'll give you time, and then you won't have to come under judgement. But even if you are judged by the Lord, keep in mind it's still different than the non-Christians. He's doing that so that you will not be condemned with them. So even when he brings strong smitings on you, he's doing it so that he can save your soul. Does that makes sense? So there's still love even if there is discipline. So in sum, the Lord's Supper is a powerful time to reflect on Christ, past, future, present. It's a time to give God thanks for our salvation. It's a time for the unity of the body, a time for serious soul-searching and killing of sin.

In a few minutes, you'll have a chance to partake. I'm gonna pray now for the blessing. We're gonna hear a song, and then we'll be able to come to the table. Father, thank you for the Word of God. We thank you for the things that we've learned. Father, I ask that you would take your Word now and press it home to our hearts. Help us to understand this incredible gift you've given us in the Lord's Supper. Bless now this song. And Lord, as we come to the table, we pray for your blessing, in Jesus name. Amen.

Andy Davis preaches a verse by verse expository sermon on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. The main subject of this sermon is the Lord's Supper.

Andy Davis preaches a verse-by-verse expository sermon on 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. The main subject in this sermon is preparations for the Lord's Supper.

             

- SERMON TRANSCRIPT -  

I. The Corinthian Context

This morning, I would like for you to open your Bibles to 1 Corinthians Chapter 11.  We were to have had the Lord's Supper, and I'm going to preach a sermon in preparation for the Lord's Supper, it is just going to be next week.  I actually think this is a benefit to us to have a week to prepare for the Lord's Supper.  I also think we tend to underestimate the significance, the spiritual significance of the Lord's Supper, and I don't want us to do that.  I want us to understand how significant spiritually the Lord's Supper should be for us as a congregation, should be for us individually as Christians, and so let's look at 1 Corinthians 11.  

I am going to read Verses 17 through 34, and God willing, the Holy Spirit will unfold these verses to you and help you to understand.  “In the following directives I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good.  In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it.  No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God's approval.  When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat, for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else.  One remains hungry, another gets drunk.  Don't you have homes to eat and drink in?  Or do you despise the Church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?  What shall I say to you?  Shall I praise you for this?  Certainly not!  For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you.  The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’  In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’  For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes.  Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.  A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.  For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself.  That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.  But if we judged ourselves, we would not come under judgment.  When we are judged by the Lord, we are being disciplined so that we will not be condemned with the world.  So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for each other.  If anyone is hungry, he should eat at home, so that when you meet together it may not result in judgment.  And when I come, I will give further directions.”   

So, we are going to look to Christ next week as we assemble for the Lord's Supper and so I want to focus on this concept of looking.  I think the Lord has given us through faith, spiritual eyesight.  The Book of Ephesians talks about the eyes of our heart being enlightened, and so we can close our physical eyes and we can see Christ.  Christ can be clearly portrayed as crucified in the Book of Galatians, just through preaching.  Through the ministry of the Word of God, we can see Him.  And so, we want to see Christ in the Lord's Supper.  We want to have an experience with him by faith.

Now, the context in 1 Corinthians 11, the Corinthian Church was a gifted, a talented church, they didn't lack any spiritual gift, but they were split by divisions based on human pride.  They were immature spiritually, and they were dealing with many doctrinal and practical problems.  There was sin in the church, and there needed to be church discipline.  As a result, there was sexual immorality, and of a kind that didn't even occur among pagans.  There were questions about marriage and celibacy, and questions about divorce.  There were issues concerning food sacrificed to idols and how that Corinthian church should mingle with their pagan context.  There were questions about financial support of the ministry and how elders should be supported financially.  There were questions about the role of women in the ministry life of the church and questions about spiritual gifts, especially about speaking in tongues, the question of tongues and the superiority of tongues and Paul arguing for the superiority of the gift of prophecy.  These are the things that just fill up the pages of 1 Corinthians, and then finally, Paul focuses on the importance of the resurrection, the physical bodily resurrection that we Christians can anticipate in Christ.

And so, 1 Corinthians speaks to all of these issues.  And in the midst of all these swirling issues, Paul takes up the topic of the Corinthian church's behavior when it comes to the Lord's Supper.  Reading between the lines and reading the lines themselves, it seems that some of the Corinthians were acting very irreverently with some impiety toward the Lord's Supper.  They were underestimating the Lord's Supper.  Some were looking on it as an opportunity to eat their fill, some of them it seemed scandalous and were even getting drunk.  And though the Lord's Supper was meant to unite the church around the death and resurrection of Christ, it actually was a source of shame, putting their disunity and their carnal selfishness on full display for all to see.  And so, in the midst of all of the issues with the Corinthian church, Paul wants to address this issue of the Lord's Supper, and in the middle of all of this, in the middle of his teaching, he dropped somewhat of a theological bombshell.  In Verses 27-30 he talks about some of the excesses and some of the sins, and he tells them that basically the Lord has killed some of them because of the Lord's Supper, some of them have fallen asleep because of sins in connection with the Lord's Supper.

I don't think it's possible then for us to overestimate the importance of the Lord's Supper.  I do think it's possible for us to think about it wrongly.  It's possible for us to think about it with doctrinal error.  But I just tell you, I don't think it's possible for us to overestimate the importance of the Lord's Supper, because the Lord put some to death because of how they were behaving, and so he takes it very seriously and I think we ought to as well.  I guess my desire is that you would spend this week in a unique way, perhaps in a way you never have before preparing for the Lord's Supper next week, that you would get yourself ready, and I would want you to do it very positively, very sweetly, expecting to encounter Christ in it by the Holy Spirit.  I want to talk about that.  

Paul moved by compassion for the Corinthians and moved by zeal for the Lord, really moved by the Spirit of the Lord himself, he wrote these verses about the Lord's Supper.  His purpose is to warn them to take the Lord's Supper very seriously, to understand it doctrinally, properly, lest they be judged by taking it in a wrong manner.  But more than that, it's just that the Lord who is good and who loves us, wanted to give them and wants to give us a gift, just like, "Man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for man."  So, also, it is with the Lord's Supper, it was made for us.  It was made to benefit us and to be a blessing to us, and so the Lord wants to give us a blessing, a rich river of blessing for the church of Jesus Christ, and so it has been.  But, it has also been traditionally a source of division and disunity and doctrinal debates across history, so we should understand where we are in historical context as well.  

II. Historical Context

Myself, I was raised a Roman Catholic; I was an altar boy.  I used to dress up when it was my time, and I was maybe nine, 10 years old, and we were trained what you're supposed to do in a particular moment in the mass.  The focal point of the mass is the Eucharist, the Lord's Supper, and the high point of that is this moment in which the priest takes the bread and raises it up, and at that moment as an altar boy, I was supposed to ring the bells.

And so, I would ring the bells, I didn't know why, but we rang the bells when he did that, we did all these things without really knowing why, which I think is one of my big problems with the Catholic church, that they don't explain things to the people.  But, what was happening, doctrinally, according to the Roman Catholics at that moment was transubstantiation, the actual bread and wine were being changed, changed into the literal body and blood of Christ, and they believe this, by this concept of transubstantiation.  The idea came from Aristotle, he was a philosopher, a Greek philosopher, ancient Greek philosopher, and he had this concept of the world that we live in, that everything in the world has two things, basically substance and accidents.  The substance is what the thing really is in its essence, kind of like before God, and the accidents, not the way we would like a car accident, but just the way that that thing relates to the physical world, the way we would connect with it by our five senses.  Its sight, its aroma, its taste, that kind of thing.  And so, in the doctrine of transubstantiation, I think the scholastic theologians kind of put it all together.

And so, "Oh, I get it.  Now, I know the meaning of Jesus's words when he says, ‘This is my body.’”  They brought in some Aristotelian logic and said, "Okay, we get it. The bread, the substance of the bread and the wine are changed to that of Christ, His body and His blood, but the accidents, the way it interrelates to the outside world doesn't change, so it still smells like bread, tastes like bread, like wine, etcetera.  But it has actually become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, transubstantiation."  Now, I learned all that as a Protestant, I didn't learn all that as a Catholic, but that is their doctrine, that's what they teach.  And the moment of transubstantiation is that moment when I rang the bells, when the priest would raise up the bread.  Well, Martin Luther, the great reformer of the 16th century, when he was training to be a priest and when he celebrated his first mass, perhaps you've seen the movie where he is so overcome with fear at actually handling Jesus Christ, that he's holding the cup and he shakes and he spills the cup, and He is just overwhelmed with fear in the presence of God.  As he came to an evangelical understanding of the gospel, he never lost his respect for the Lord's Supper, and I think his false understanding of it as well.  He believed in the doctrine of real presence, in other words, that Christ was physically present there, but he denied transubstantiation. 

He said, "We don't know how it happens."  So, forget Aristotle, there's nothing in the Bible about all that, but there is something in the Bible about real presence, at least, so there was Luther, “This is my body.”  And so, therefore, I don't know how it happens, but it happens.  It really is the body of Christ.  It also really is bread, it really is the blood of Christ, it really is wine, it's the same.  It happens at the same time−so Luther.  Another man, Ulrich Zwingli, a reformer in Switzerland, had a different view, and his view was that we should take nothing into worship except what we find in Scripture, and there's nothing in Scripture about real presence, or transubstantiation of any of this.  He opposed the old Catholic ways entirely.  He rejected the significance of the Lord's Supper that had been so central in the mass.  He went the other way and made it almost of no consequence at all in the life of the church.  He had what is known as the Memorial view of the Lord's Supper, it's completely for us just to remember what Jesus did.  It's really almost a matter of indifference.  

III. Modern Context

Now, in my opinion, in our modern context, most evangelical churches tend to be Zwinglian.  We tend to minimize the Lord's Supper.  It's just a memorial.  It's not that important.  We know it's not that Catholic thing.  And so, often, especially in larger churches, they are going to relegate it to Sunday evening, once a quarter, and so, my goodness, you could easily go years as a member in good standing of a church like that and never take the Lord's Supper.  Now, of course, that would have been unheard of to Protestant churches in the centuries that preceded but I'm just telling you where we are.  I think for myself, I think we have to correct this view, we have to come to a different view.  I think Zwingli is at one extreme and Luther, and then beyond him, the Catholics at the other.  I think John Calvin probably has the best view of the Lord's Supper, and that's the view that I embrace, it is what I call the Spiritual Presence view.  Basically, God has made us a promise, Jesus has made us a promise to be in a special way, present in the Lord's Supper.  He's making us a promise and if we trust Him in that promise, if we believe that promise, we will benefit from the promise.  So, if you come next week expecting something from God in the Lord's Supper, you will get it.  And I do, every time.  I expect that the Lord is going to bless the Lord's Supper.  We are going to have a sense of the presence of the Lord.  It is still bread; it is still grape juice.  It hasn't changed in any way, but I've changed, I can grow, I can have my faith renewed, I can be strengthened, I can be blessed you see, and so that's what I expect, and I'd like you to do that this week.  I would like you to get yourselves ready to be blessed by the presence of the Lord spiritually, that is the view that I take.  So that is historical context.   

Let's look at 1st Corinthians 11. We are going to look in different directions as we come to the Lord's Supper.  This idea of looking has to do with take your mind and focus on something, so we are going to look in different directions and we are going to begin by looking back.  

IV. Looking Back

 The Lord's Supper enables us to look back in history, back in time, and so we ought to do that when we come to the Lord's Supper, we ought to look back.  First of all, we can look back to the Passover, the Last Supper was a Seder, it was a Passover celebration, and there are five key parallels between the Passover and the Lord's Supper.

First of all, both the Passover and the Lord's Supper were established as lasting memorials for the people of God, to be commemorated from generation to generation.  In this way, they are very similar.  The Passover, of course, commemorated the exodus of the Jewish nation from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.  The night of the Passover was the dreadful, tenth and final plague.  The terrifying plague on the first born.  Each Jewish home sacrificed to a Paschal lamb, a Passover lamb, and painted the blood on the door posts and across the top, and the angel of death as he moved through the land would see the blood and just passed over.  And so, the Jewish first born were spared because of the blood of the lamb.  The Lord’s Supper was established to replace the Passover which Christ was about to fulfill.  Jesus fulfilled the Passover.  Never again would a Passover lamb need to be sacrificed.  Never again would the sacrifice of a Passover lamb be pleasing to God.  God put an end to it when he identified through his prophet, John the Baptist, when he pointed to him and said, "Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world," and I say also takes away the need to sacrifice an animal. 

Jesus established instead, the Lord's Supper to take its place.  So, both of these are commemorated in lasting ceremonies and they were to be passed on from generation to generation.  Exodus 12:14, “This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord−a lasting ordinance.”  Also, in our text today, look at Verses 23-26, “. . .The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.’”  So, He has established this as a lasting commemoration.  “In the same way, after supper he took the cup saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.'  For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes.”  So, this is a lasting commemoration, something established by the Lord.  Secondly, there are parallels between the Passover and the Lord's Supper in that both services involved bread.  Thirdly, both services involved wine.  Fourthly, both services involve the community as a whole coming together, and fifthly, both services commemorate redemption.  These are five points of connection between the Passover and the Lord's Supper. 

So, at the time of the Lord's Supper, we look back to all that Jewish history, we look back to the Jewish roots of our faith, and what happened at the time of the Passover.  We also look back to the night that Jesus was arrested.  Look what it says in Verse 23, “. . .The Lord Jesus on the night he was betrayed, took bread.”  We should remember how Jesus was with his disciples that night, how He spent one last time with them and how He was betrayed by someone who sat at the table with him.  We should remember how his betrayer dipped his hand into the bread, into the dish with him.  A close associate, a friend of Jesus, and then left to betray Him.  We should remember how sad and troubled Jesus's disciples were, and yet how glad Jesus was to eat this one final meal with them.  We should keep these things in mind.  

 

We should remember the events of that sovereign somber night, we look back, but we look back also, even more significantly I think, to Christ's death, to his body and blood given for us, for our sins, the bread symbolized Christ's body, broken for us on the cross.  The blood symbolized Christ’s blood, the wine symbolized Christ’s blood shed for us on the cross and this death is the center of our redemption.  It is a clear recognition of one central fact, and that is, the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.  Christ's identification of the bread with his body and of the wine with his blood focuses our attention on the need for a substitute who would sacrifice himself in our place to cleanse us of our sins.  

 

We will also look back to the establishment of a new covenant.  The Passover was an Old Covenant ordinance.  The center of the Old Covenant was the need for animal sacrifice, for blood sacrifice.  In Leviticus 17:11, it says, “For the life of the creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one's life."  Hebrews 9:22, looking back on the Old Covenant, said here, ". . .without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness."  But Christ, here, is instituting a New Covenant in his own blood, thus ending forever the need for animal sacrifice, as I've already mentioned.

Look at Verse 25, “In the same way, after supper He took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.’"  Now, this new covenant was predicted in Jeremiah 31, when God would establish a New Covenant.  It would not be like the Old Covenant, because the people didn't keep it, they violated it.  But he would establish a New Covenant in which the sins of the people would be taken away and they would be given a new heart, and God would write His laws on their new hearts, and He would be their God and they would be His people.  That is the essence of the New Covenant.  Jesus is establishing it, He says, "In my blood."  So, this is the blood of the New Covenant.  

We look back and very personally, we also ought to look back to our own experience with Christ, our own faith.  We ought to look back at the fact that we have come to faith in Christ sometime in the past, remember your own personal testimony of faith in Christ, how you first believed, how you first came to trust in Christ, what were the circumstances going on at that point?  And think about what the Lord has done with you since then, just how graciously God has dealt with you, how much God has sustained your faith, how much He has filtered your temptations and not allowed you to be tempted beyond what you can bear.

How God has protected you, providentially, how God has cared for you and fed you and clothed you and loved you, all of that time in Christ’s name.  You should remember with a great thankfulness, your own walk with Christ, your pilgrimage, how you have grown since that first time you trusted Christ, and all the things you’ve learned of the Bible, and all of the ways that the Lord has answered prayers.  And the sweetness of your relationship with Jesus Christ, you should look back to your own personal history as well.  So, we look back to the Passover, the night Jesus was betrayed, to Jesus’s body broken and his blood shed on the cross, to the New Covenant established in his blood and to our personal faith in that blood, looking back.  

V. Looking Up

Secondly, we should look up.  We should look up to God the Father.  Remember that in the Gospels, whenever Jesus would take bread into his hands, He would look up and would give thanks.  I find that interesting.  He did it when he fed the 5,000, He would look up.  I’ve marveled at that because I believe in an omnipresent God.  He’s as much down as He is up and left as He is right.  There is nowhere you can go and not find him, and we also know we are kind of here in the middle of space and there is no bottom, and there is no top.  It’s as far down as you want to go and as far up as you want to go, but yet, again and again, Almighty God is displayed as high and lifted up.  He is above us, and I think it just has to do with relationship, it has to do with how great He is and how He is above us, and mighty and powerful and awesome.  And so, Jesus would take this bread into his hand and He would look up and He would give thanks to his father, and He did it that night as well.  In Matthew 26, it says, “Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you.’”  And so, He focused on his Heavenly Father.  He said, “I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father’s Kingdom.”  It was God the Father who crafted this salvation plan, it was God the Father who was delighted to crush his Son on your behalf.  It was God the Father who did not spare his only begotten Son, but gave Him up for us all.  It was so that Christ might bring us to God the Father and safely into his Heavenly Kingdom that Christ came.  The Lord’s Supper is part of the Father’s sweet efforts to reconcile rebellious sinners to Himself in Christ.  So, look up to God the Father.  

Secondly, you should look up to Christ, our faithful high priest.  The Lord's Supper should be for you, a constant reminder of your need for Christ's ministry on your behalf.  Now, please don't misunderstand this, Roman Catholic theology posits that Jesus has to be offered again and again, and that priests, when the moment of transubstantiation happens and it becomes the actual body and then the actual blood of Christ, when they lift it up to God, they are offering Jesus again, much as an Old Covenant priest would have done.  I consider this blasphemous.  I think it's completely wrong, because the Book of Hebrew says that Christ died once for all and He never needs to die again; however, we should not lose sight of the fact that you need him every hour.  You are in constant dependence on Christ's ministry as your great and faithful high priest. 

You need him at the right hand of God interceding for you.  Don't you?  And so, we look up to Christ and say, "Lord, keep praying for me.  Please keep praying for me.  Keep filtering my temptations.  Keep being my faithful high priest, keep pleading your own blood to the Father on my behalf.”  And so, we eat and drink spiritually, much as we need to do physically.  In John Chapter 6, Verses 53-56, Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.  For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him.”  Now friends, it would be the easiest thing in the world to slip from those words right into transubstantiation.  It would be easy to do.  Don't do it.  First of all, the Lord’s Supper hadn't even happened yet, when Jesus spoke those words in John 6.  He wasn't thinking of the Last Supper there.

Well, what was he thinking?  He was thinking about his own death on the cross, and He was using a metaphor, He was using an analogy.  Just as you have to take physical food into yourself to live physically, so you must take the effects of Jesus’s death on the cross into yourself spiritually in order to live spiritually.  He even says plainly, “The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.”  He is not saying you have to eat me physically.  The early Romans thought that the Christians were cannibals.  We are not cannibals; we don’t need to eat flesh.  Jesus told us how to think about his words, they are Spirit, and so we must rely on Jesus.  Look up to Jesus as you eat and say, “Just like I need food to live, I need you in order to be alive spiritually, too.”  We must also look up to the Holy Spirit.  He is our power, though the Spirit isn’t mentioned in this particular passage, 1 Corinthians 11, yet, you know that Paul never moved far from the doctrine that it is only by the ministry of the Holy Spirit that we partake in Christ.  It is the Spirit’s ministry to apply Christ to you.

That’s what the Spirit does, He takes of Christ and gives it to you, whether insights or word or just the spiritual presence of Christ.  He ministers Christ to you.  And so, the Lord’s Supper won’t mean anything to you.  That’s why I say it’s a spiritual view.  I have the Lord’s Supper, it is by the Holy Spirit that the thing becomes effective in your life, and so we must look to the Holy Spirit.  You look up to the Spirit and you ask him to seal you again in Christ and to testify to your heart that you are a child of God, and to uncover your sins in all of the ministry that the Spirit does, you just bask in the ministry of the Spirit, but look up to the Spirit.  So, at the time of the Lord’s Supper, we look up to God the Father, to God the Son and to God the Holy Spirit.   

VI. Looking Within 

Thirdly, we look within, we look within.  And here, we look within to our own sinfulness, dear friends.  We look within to the residual effects of the wickedness and in the flesh in us.  And the Lord's Supper is a good time to think about those things. 

Look at Verses 17 through 22 again, I've already read them, but it's just shocking.  “In the following directives I have no praise for you.”  Well, that's not good.  It's like uh-oh, here it comes.  You're reading a letter, it's like, oh, here it comes, it's like, okay, let's skip this part, the no praise part.  Well, let's skip that part.  Well, no, we don't skip this part, we must listen to what the Apostle Paul would say, “I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good."  It would be better if you didn't come together.  That is what he is saying.  “In the first place, I hear that when you come together as a church, there are divisions among you, and to some extent I believe it.  No doubt there have to be differences among you to show which of you have God's approval.  When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper you eat, for as you eat, each of you goes ahead without waiting for anybody else.  One remains hungry, another gets drunk.  Don't you have homes to eat and drink in?  Or do you despise the Church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?  What shall I say to you?  Shall I praise you for this?  Certainly not.”  So, we have to look into our own sinfulness.  We complain, we fail to give God thanks for his many good gifts, we lust, and we stumble into sinful idolatry, we argue and bicker and reveal our selfishness.  We fail to live for God's glory and for His Kingdom and have our own selfish agenda for our lives and for our careers.  We fail to witness when we have opportunities to speak up for Christ, we fail to give what we have of all of our wealth, we fail to give appropriately to the needs of the poor, we do not live up to the calling that we have received.  And you know what I'm talking about.  If the Spirit's in you, you know that it is true, what I'm saying, the flesh is strong.  We all stumble in many ways, and we need to have periodic times to look inward and see it and be honest about it, and so every Lord's Supper is a time to do, I think, serious business with God.  You ought to look inward and find the sin within, the specific patterns of sin, the habits of sin that are in your life, and we have to acknowledge the seriousness of sin. 

Verses 27-29, “Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.  A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.  For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself.”  We don't eat flippantly, we don't eat lightly, we bow in our hearts, we search our hearts for sinfulness, we bring out those sins that the Holy Spirit convicts us of, we allow Christ all sufficient blood to cover everyone, we judge ourselves right in this passage so that the Lord won't have to judge us.  Do you realize the significance of that?  Just ponder that for a minute.  In effect, your Heavenly Father, if you are a child of God is saying, “You can take care of this or I will.”  What a warning that is, isn't it?  Do you realize the resources available to God to discipline you?  I mean we have one, the extremity of discipline is right here in the text.  You die.  That's the extremity of discipline.  Would God actually take it to that degree?  He did, right in the text.  He would do that.

And so, we have an invitation from the Lord to cut off the Lord's judgment by judging ourselves and say, "Lord, I see, I understand, I see what you are telling me about myself.  I repent, I will bring forth fruit and in keeping with repentance, I am doing serious business with you now, I will live a new life."  The Lord's Supper is a good time for that.  Don't you think?  It's a good time for that?  Isaiah 66-2 says, “‘This is the one I esteem.’ says the Lord, ‘He who is humble and contrite in spirit, and trembles at my word.’”  We ought to tremble, I think, when we come to the Lord's Supper.  

We also look inward to our own repentance and faith, not just to our sinfulness, but to the fact that we repent and we trust Christ.  This, dear friends, is a meal of thankfulness, not of morning.  It's a meal of thanksgiving, that there is forgiveness available, that we don't have to stay in the Slough of Despond, you don't have to be down in the mud of guilt, that's what Satan wants to do, but you come up through the clean scalpel work of the Spirit in repentance and into a new way of living.

And so, it's a meal of thankfulness.  We look in and say, I do trust in Christ, I do hate my sin, I am hungry and thirsty for righteousness, I want to live a new kind of life.  There is full provision made, there is a feast of grace for you.  I remember some time ago, I have never been able to find where the story is, but I read it and I remembered it.  A Scottish pastor was serving the Lord’s Supper to his congregation when he saw a young woman who was trembling and weeping over her sin, and she dared not reach forth and take the bread.  The pastor, knowing her genuine faith in Christ and also knowing the reasons for her inner grief, leaned forward and whispered to her, "Take it Lassie, it's for sinners."  I've never forgotten that.  “Take it.  It's for sinners.”  It's not the healthy who need a doctor.  It's the sick.  So come to the table as a sinner and feed on Christ, that's what it's for.  We look inward.

 

We look inward also to the testimony of the Spirit that we are children of God.  It's the Spirit's work to assure us of Christ's full forgiveness, it's the Spirit's work to comfort us as we grieve over our sinfulness, it's the Spirit's work to testify with our spirits that we are God's children, and, therefore, we must look inward to be certain that we are eating worthily.

Please hear me on this.  If we eat in a manner unworthy of the Lord, we are guilty of sinning against the body and blood of Christ, this is especially true, dear friends, of a gospel hypocrite.  This is somebody who is not genuinely born again, but who comes to church week after week, faking it.  They know how to fake Christianity at certain times, but the Lord is not deceived and He knows the difference.  And so, it is dangerous for a gospel hypocrite to take the Lord's Supper, very dangerous.  It is also true of any unbeliever who partakes in the Lord's Supper for earthly reasons to impress or please some other person while despising the Lord whose blood paid for the feast, and it's vital that you be a believer in Christ, that you be a believer, and that you have testified to that by water baptism.  It's vital that you not partake of the Lord's Supper as an unbeliever, and so I think it's essential that we look inward, lest anyone for a moment think this as some slight memorial, some inconsequential ritual.  Think of the severity of the penalty the Lord enacted on some Corinthians who died because they ate in a manner not worthy of the Lord. 

VII. Looking Down

Fourthly, we look down at the actual bread and juice, look down at it, look at your hands as you hold it, look at the cup, look at the physical piece of bread and the actual cup filled with grape juice.  These are physical elements, they have an aroma, they have a flavor, they have an appearance, they have a weight, the physical nature of this ordinance reminds us of the actual body and blood of Christ.  We are not docetists who believe that Jesus only seemed to be human.  We know that he was human.  The word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.  It was no theory.  It was no philosophy; it was no theology that was nailed to that cross.  It was the body of Jesus, and when He was nailed, his blood flowed down his body.  And that's how you are forgiven and so am I.  We should never forget that.  Colossians 1:21-22 says, “Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior.  But now He has reconciled you by Christ's physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation.” 

Hebrews 10:19- 22 says, “Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God. . .”  The body and blood of Jesus is how you get into the presence of God.  And so, we should look to the physical body of Christ given once.  No, the bread is not the actual body of Christ, neither is the grape juice the actual blood of Christ.  This doctrine, as I have said, demeans the once for all sacrifice of Christ, that offering never needs to be repeated again, but when your physical hands hold the physical bread and cup of physical grape juice, we are reminded of a certain place in time on this physical planet, when the Son of God died for you.  And, they remind us to the time when our hands and all things will be made new in a coming world, we'll get to that in a moment, but God created the physical and the physical is good when redeemed by the work of God.   

VIII. Looking Around

Fifthly, we should look around to the body of Christ, the one true church.  Look at Verse 33, “So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for each other.”  There are other people in the room.  I am really against private celebrations of the Lord's Supper, like just little things, I think it's something to be done in the church, friends.  I'm not so much talking about the church building.  If we are in Haiti and our building has been destroyed, we could gather on the rubble and have the Lord's Supper.  You don't have to have a building, that's not the point, but it's a church ordinance friends.  It's a church ordinance.  The loaf symbolizes 1 Corinthians 10-17, the body of Christ, we are members of one body, one loaf.  

And so, Jesus that night, He looked around and said, “Take and drink all of you,” and He wanted them to do it together and so, we look around in our fellowship with one another.  Isn't it a marvelous thing to belong to the body of Christ?  Isn't it a marvelous thing to know that there are brothers and sisters that believe what you believe all over the world, you haven't even met them, but you'll be friends in a moment? 

Have you ever had that happen?  Somebody from another culture, and just in an instant, you are friends because you have got the Holy Spirit in common and the Lord's Supper reminds us of our unity.  

 

And we look around to the watching unbelieving world.  If the pastor does his work properly, all unconverted persons in the sanctuary will be suitably warned not to participate.  I already did that a few minutes ago.  If you're not a believer, you should not participate in the Lord's Supper.  They can observe, they can look on, but until they commit themselves to the Lord Jesus Christ and in the abandonment of faith, trusting in His blood to atone for their sins, all they are doing is eating and drinking judgment on themselves.

But the Lord's Supper itself, according to Paul here, is a proclamation of the Lord's death until He comes.  To whom are we proclaiming it?  Well, to each other, we should keep proclaiming the Lord's death, but also to the unbelievers in our midst.  1 Corinthians 14 says, “They were unbelievers that would come in and say, surely God is among you.”  Maybe the Lord's Supper is one of those times.  And so, we proclaim the Lord's death to a watching unbelieving world, and then finally we look forward.

IX. Looking Forward 

At the Lord's Supper, we look forward to the second coming of Christ.  Yes, dear friends, Christ is coming.  Look at Verse 26, “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.”  Jesus is coming back someday and this holy little feast, this bread and juice thing will give way to a banquet where we sit at table with the King.  Jesus is coming back, Revelation 19, “He is riding on a charger for war, he's going to clean up this planet.  Everyone that doesn't believe and all the demons and Satan himself, they will be gone and the world will be made new.  Everything will be made new.  Behold, I'm making all things new.”  Look at what Jesus says in Matthew 26:29, don't turn there, just listen.  He says, “I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father's Kingdom.”  Wow.  I believe that the world is going to be resurrected much like our bodies, and so we are going to drink anew.  And that word “anew” is a mystery word to me.  I don't know what it means.  I don't know what eating and drinking is going to be like in the kingdom.  I think it's just going to be wonderful; we are going to sit at table with the King and we're going to feast, we are going to banquet.

Many will come.  In Matthew 8:11, “. . .many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom.”  You are going to pull up a chair, I guess.  Or maybe we will be able to float then, I don't know what, but we are going to sit and we are going to eat, and we are going to eat in mysterious ways, and we are going to enjoy it, and it's going to be delicious, and it's going to be a time of fellowship.  So, He says, I'm going to drink it again, I'm just going to drink it anew in my Father's Kingdom, with you.  He earnestly desires to sit at table with you and me.   

And so, we should look ahead to that day, we should look forward to the day when that feast, that banquet comes, and look forward to the day when you yourself will be resurrected from the dead, when you will receive a new body and you will be made new.  What a banquet that will be, that's exactly the language that Isaiah 25 speaks of on this mountain, Isaiah 25:6-8, “On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine− the best of meats and the finest of wines.  On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples. . .”  They have seen a lot of that in Haiti recently, a body covered with a shroud.  On this mountain, He is going to destroy that shroud, the shroud that enfolds all people, the sheet that covers all nations.  He will swallow up death forever.  That's the resurrection, friends.  We'll never die again, and we will be in a kingdom and will feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the redeemed with Jesus.  I don’t think it is going to be like an eternal feast.  I don't think so.  I think there is going to be rhythms to our heavenly life in the new heaven and the new earth, but regularly, we are going to sit at table with Jesus and we are going to feast with Him in the kingdom.

X. Summary 

Let's summarize, then we will be done.  In the Lord's Supper, we are invited to a comprehensive, spiritual look by the Spirit of God.  We are invited to look back in remembrance, to the Old Covenant and the Passover, the night Jesus was betrayed, to Jesus's body broken and his blood shed on the cross, to the New Covenant He established in his blood, and to our own personal faith in Christ, and our history with him.  We are invited also to look up in dependence on God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.  We are invited to look inward in repentance, to our own in-dwelling sin and the patterns of sin that have so easily entangled us, and to our repentance and faith, which God has worked in us by His spirit as a gift, and to the testimony of the Spirit that we are children of God, and to be sure that we are eating worthily, that we are taking it seriously and eating in a manner worthy of the Lord.  We are also invited to look down, understanding that the elements are physical, and so also was the redemption by Christ's body and blood, physical body, physical blood, and that someday we will ourselves be spiritually physical, redeemed in our resurrection bodies. 

We are to look around in commitment to the body of Christ, the one true church united all over the world and to our own local church, too, and the pledge we have horizontally to be brothers and sisters to each other, to love each other.  So, we wait for each other and we care about each other, and to an on-looking world who's watching us with curiosity, wondering why they can't be included, and hopefully a spirit of jealousy, a good spirit of jealousy.  And they are like, I want to be part of that.  I want to be in.  Well, it's a day of salvation.  Come on and come to the banquet by faith, you don't have to be on the outside, come on, come and eat without money and without cost, and then look ahead in hopeful trust to the second coming of Christ and to the eternal kingdom of his Father, where we will feast forever and ever in resurrection bodies.  Close with me in prayer.

Andy Davis preaches on the topic of the Lord's Supper, as seen in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34. 

             

- SERMON TRANSCRIPT -  

I. The Corinthian Context 

Well, this is an unusual week for me.  Usually, I know weeks in advance what I am going to preach on.  I am a very slow-moving target across the radar screen, you know where I'm heading.  But this week, I felt led by the spirit to change the message and the message I was going to preach, God willing, I'll preach next week.  I wanted to preach this morning on the Lord's Supper.  I wanted to preach from the most important text in the New Testament on the Lord's Supper, which you heard Tom read, 1 Corinthians 11, because it occurred to me that in my almost nine years of preaching here, I've never preached a sermon on the Lord's Supper.  I have made comments on it at the time of the Lord's Supper, I have taught on it in seminars and other times, but never on Sunday morning have I preached.  And so, I thought it was reasonable for us to look at the Lord's Supper from the Scripture and to go in an expositional manner through 1 Corinthians 11 and understand this ordinance.  We have a great privilege this morning, a joyful privilege to sit at table with Jesus Christ by the power of the spirit.  In some mysterious way to partake in Him and to have our hearts strengthened in our faith and to grow and develop and to be made ready, more and more ready for that final banquet that we are going to sit down with, that eternal banquet.  Oh, what a joy that is going to be, but to have our hearts stirred toward that, to be strengthened in our trials, to be encouraged in the faith and built up, so that we can fight the good fight of faith against our flesh and against the world and the devil, all of these things I fully expect are going to happen when we partake of the Lord's Supper.  I can't think of a better passage as I've mentioned, than 1 Corinthians 11, to understand it.   

The Corinthian Church was a talented but troubled church.  They were talented, they were blessed with spiritual gifts, all of the spiritual gifts were active in that church, they were blessed with an apostolic ministry, we can hardly even imagine the blessing of having the Apostle Paul plant your church for you, and to minister and to teach.  But, they were troubled as well, they were troubled by divisions, factions based on human pride and a party spirit, some following Apollos, some Cephas, some Paul, and some following Jesus; they are my favorite ones.  We are the Jesus group.  All the others, I don't know who they are following but we are following Jesus, those are the dangerous ones. 

But there were problems, sin problems in the church, too, there were difficult issues that Paul was working through, there was immorality, there was a need for church discipline, there was misunderstanding about a sanctified lifestyle, a lifestyle of sexual purity, there was a misunderstanding about marriage and its significance, and there were problems with food sacrificed to idols.  There were all kinds of issues going on in this church, even to the point of not really understanding the resurrection body and some saying that there would be no resurrection.  And so, Paul has to deal with all of these different issues in 1 Corinthians, but one of the issues he has to deal with are problems concerning the Lord's Supper.  In the middle of dealing with this problem with the Lord's Supper, he drops a bombshell on them.  These people were acting very improperly at the time of the Lord's Supper to the point of some even getting drunk.  It's a scandalous thing.  And the Lord's Supper meant to be a display of the unity of the Body of Christ was instead the display of their local church's disunity and problem, and it was a shameful thing, and he said, "I should be commending you, but for this I cannot commend you because of your problems," and so he drops a bombshell on them concerning the significance of the Lord's Supper.  

He says in Verse 27 and following, "Therefore, whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.  A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.  For anyone who eats and drinks without recognizing the body of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself.  That is why many among you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.”  They've died over this.  Now, that is a sharp word, a stunning word, that anybody could actually die over eating and drinking in a manner unworthy of the Lord, that is the highest form of church discipline when God Himself intervenes and acts, so this is a serious matter.  But more than this, more than a warning concerning judgment, which is clearly in this passage, there is also a yearning for blessing, that the church would be blessed by the ordinance of the Lord's Supper, and that is in my heart as well, that we would receive the full blessing that Jesus clearly intended by setting this up, and that we would not through misunderstanding or through false doctrine miss the blessing that is available for us in the Lord's Supper.  

II. Historical Context 

Now, there is a historical context to this.  I was myself raised a Roman Catholic, and for many many centuries in the Catholic Church, they had one view of the Lord's Supper based on the doctrine of transubstantiation.  They believed, and based also on the words when Jesus said "This is my body," that the priest, through the supernatural powers endowed on him by the church, was able to transform the bread and the wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus, though it still tasted like bread and wine, it had become mysteriously the substance of the body of Christ.  I was raised in that though I didn't understand the doctrine.  I was raised in that; I was an altar boy.  I'll never forget when the priest would lift the bread up, and at that particular moment I was instructed to ring a bell and I found out years later in Protestant seminary, that that was the moment of transubstantiation when it actually became the body and the blood of Christ. 

Well, that was their view for many, many years.  Martin Luther, when he was being ordained as a priest, at that high and holy moment when he was actually lifting up the cup, was so overwhelmed with the sense of the majesty of God and the greatness of Christ, was trembling and actually spilled some of the wine on the white linen table cloth.  That was a big fault because of the sacredness of that moment, but you can have a sense also of the awe and the wonder and the reverence that Martin Luther had and before he understood the Gospel concerning that.  He never really got far away from that understanding of the Lord's Supper, although he didn't accept transubstantiation, he still believed in what we call the real presence, that Jesus is physically present in the elements of the bread and the wine.  Another man, Ulrich Zwingli, who was a Swiss reformer went very much, completely the other way.  He said, it is none of the things that the Catholics were teaching, it is a bare memorial, that's all.  And he diminished it and diminished it to the point where they might celebrate it, if you could call it that, once a year.    

III. Modern Context 

I fear that many American evangelical churches fall more into that camp, denying as I think they ought, the doctrine of real presence, denying that Jesus is physically there with the bread and the wine or the grape juice.  They've gone so far the other way as to say, "This really isn't that big a deal.  It's not a big issue in the life of the church."  Some larger churches consign the Lord's Supper to the evening service once a quarter, so they are getting only a fraction of their people actually partaking in the Lord's Supper. 

I think this is a big problem for a church.  I believe the Lord's supper is meant to be an incredible avenue or river of blessing for the church.  I fully expect when I come here for the Lord's Supper, to be blessed by God.  I fully expect it.  I expect that God is going to move by His Spirit in a powerful way and while I know I'm holding actually bread and I'm drinking grape juice, and they are nothing more than bread and grape juice, this is something more than a bare memorial, but that the Spirit of God is going to be active in our midst, in the body of Christ, as our minds are turned in various directions that I'm going to discuss this morning.  We are going to be enriched by this experience as the Spirit of God moves through this room.  I have prayed for it this morning, and I am trusting him to do it in your hearts.  I trust him to do it in mine as well.  So, what are we going to do and how are we going to understand the Lord's Supper?  Well, I think the best thing to do is to look to Jesus in the midst of the Lord's Supper.  And really, it's various kinds of looks. 

Years ago, I heard a sermon by my good friend, Mark Dever, on the Lord's Supper, and he followed this paradigm of looking to this and looking to that.  I don't remember the sermon, but I remember the headings.  And I added some headings, and I think it's a good way to cover 1 Corinthians 11, namely that we are going to look in various directions as we partake in the Lord's Supper.  In Hebrews 12:1-2, it says, "Let us also lay aside every weight and the sin which so easily clings to us, and let us run with endurance, the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the founder and perfector of our faith."  I believe the Lord in His wisdom has given us the Lord's Supper to help us do precisely that, to look to Jesus the author and perfector of our faith, so that we can finish our race.  And so, we're going to look back, we're going to look up, we're going to look inward, we're going to look down, we're going to look around and look ahead, based on the words of 1 Corinthians 11.    

IV. Looking Back 

Let's start by looking back.  And we look back to the Passover, the night that Jesus was betrayed was a Seder.  It was a Passover meal.  And Jesus, earnestly, He said, desire to eat that Passover with His disciples.  There are many key parallels between the Passover and the Lord's Supper.  Both were instituted to be lasting memorials set up from generation to generation.  The Passover commemorated the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, released from bondage to slavery by the mighty hand and outstretched arm of God, 10 dreadful plagues judging Egypt and their gods.   The last plague was the most terrible of them all, it was the plague on the first born in which there was not a house in Egypt, among the Egyptians, that there wasn't someone dead.  What a terrifying night that was.  But, the Israelites were spared because God had commanded that they sacrifice the Passover lamb, and that the lamb's blood would be painted around the door.  The Angel of the Lord as he passed over, would see the blood and not kill the first born in that house, a clear picture of the saving work of the blood of Jesus Christ and how we deserve judgment, but it does not come upon us because of the interposing blood of Jesus Christ.  The angel just moves right over and we are not judged though we deserve it. 

Well, this was a Passover meal, and Jesus was about to die as the final fulfillment of the Passover.  He is going to shed His blood as the lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world, and He is going to fulfill the Passover and it will never need to be done again.  I didn't say it was never done again, I'm just saying it was never needful again, because Jesus fulfilled it.  And so instead, He instituted the Lord's Supper, both of them instituted to be lasting memorials or ordinances from generation to generation.  In Exodus 12, Verse 14 it says, "This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord−a lasting ordinance."  And Jesus says here in our passage, "Do this in remembrance of me."  In Verses 25-26, "Do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.  For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup. . .” this was a lasting ordinance.  Both of the services involved bread, both of the services involved wine, both of the services involved drawing the community together around these spiritual realities, both of the services commemorated the work of redemption, God's work of redemption, and so there are clear parallels.  We look back to the Passover, we also look back to the very night, the historical night that Jesus was betrayed.  We think about the history of that night, we think about what happened.  

Look at Verse 23, "The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread."  So, we're thinking about that.  We remember how Jesus was with his disciples the night he was betrayed.  We remember how his betrayer, Judas, dipped his bread into the dish with Jesus, identifying himself as the betrayer, how when he took the bread from Jesus in John's Gospel, Satan entered into him.  We remember that night.  We remember how sad and troubled Jesus's disciples were and how they didn't understand the things that were going on, and yet how Jesus earnestly desired to eat this meal with them, He said.  We remember that night and what happened.    

We also look back to Christ's death, to the body and blood of Jesus Christ.  The bread symbolized Christ's body nailed to the cross; the grape juice, the wine, symbolizing Christ's blood shed on the cross.  And this death on the cross is the center of our redemption, it's our only hope for freedom from the wrath of God that we deserve for our sins.  We remember the body and the blood of Jesus, "For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord."  And so, we remember the death that Jesus paid and the free gift of life.  So, Christ's identification of the bread with His body and the wine with his blood focuses our attention on the need for a substitute who pays the penalty for our sins.    

We also look back at the institution of the New Covenant, the establishment of a New Covenant which Jesus mentions.  The Passover was an Old Covenant ordinance, but the Lord's Supper, a New Covenant.  The center of the Passover, the Old Covenant, was blood sacrifice, animal sacrifice, that's the center of it.  In Leviticus 17:11, the Lord said, "For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.”  Never forget that phrase, "I have given it to you."  Thanks be to God that He gave us a way to be atoned..  Thanks be to God for that, "I have given it to you, the blood, so that there might be an atonement."  He set up the animal sacrificial system and He fulfilled it in Jesus.  For it says in Hebrews 9:22, "without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” of sins.  

Who said that?  It was God that set that up.  He established it.  And so, Christ here instituted a New Covenant in his own blood, thus ending forever the need for animal sacrifice.  Look at Verse 25, "In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.'"  By this New Covenant in Christ's blood, the wrath of God is fully averted.  Wrapped up in the new covenant is the taking out of the heart of stone and the giving of the heart of flesh, that we are actually transformed to love God's law and obey it with all of our being.  This is part of the New Covenant spoken clearly in Jeremiah’s prophecy and in Hebrews Chapter 8.  We are brought into perfect eternal fellowship with God, “I will be their God, and they will be my people.”  This is the New Covenant, and it’s done in the blood of Jesus and we remember that at the time of the Lord’s Supper, the New Covenant instituted in his blood.   

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"Christ here instituted a New Covenant in his own blood, thus ending forever the need for animal sacrifice." 

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We also should look back when we are sitting, and when the bread is passed and the juice is passed.  We should look back to our own experience of faith in Christ, think of how good God has been to you to save your soul, think about who it was that God used to bring you the Gospel, thank God for them.  Thank God for the sacrifices that were made before they were even born, to get you the Gospel and all of its truth, thank God that you repented.  Thank God that you had faith.  These things are gifts of God.  Look back to how He has protected you all these years, how He has protected and nurtured your faith, look back at that, that He has got you this far by faith and He is not going to let you go.  Don't commend yourself thinking, "Boy, I've been a good believer all these years, I'm still believing in Jesus."  Don't give yourself credit.  Luke 22:31 says "Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat.  But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith may not fail."  And, if your faith hasn't failed in decades of walking with Jesus, then give Him the glory and give Him the praise.  So, look back.   

V. Looking Up 

We also look up.  We look up to God the Father, first and foremost.  I noticed in Scripture how regularly Jesus looks up when he takes bread into his hand.  Have you noticed this?  Consistently, He does this.  He takes bread and looks up, and he gives thanks.  Now, it's not mentioned here in 1 Corinthians 11, but I think it's very vital for us to look to God the Father at the time of the Lord's Supper, to realize it was God the Father's plan that Jesus enacted and fulfilled. 

It was God the Father who sent His only begotten Son into the world.  It was God the Father who set his love on you before the foundation of the world, and it was God the Father who did not spare His only begotten Son, but gave Him up for us all.  And, it was so that Christ might bring us to the father that He went through all of those things.  "I am the way and the truth and the life, no one comes to the father except through me."  That is his goal, He wants to bring you to the father.  And so, we look to the father, saying, "The father is the destination of all of the saving work of Christ, that we would come to the father.  And it is with thanksgiving to the father that we take the bread and the juice."    

We also look upward, as I've already mentioned, to Christ, our faithful high priest.  It is so important that we understand this.  Christ's priestly ministry in one sense is finished forever, and in another sense, it is ongoing until the end of time.  He offered Himself, His blood, once for all.  The Book of Hebrews could not be clearer about this.  I do not understand the Catholic doctrine that the priest is offering Jesus again and again and again, I can't reconcile that with the Book of Hebrews. 

Jesus doesn't need to be offered again and again.  He finished the work on the cross.  When He spoke, “it is finished,” it was finished.  It was done.  Oh, how glorious is that.  But his priestly work isn't finished because He is at the right hand of God and interceding for us as our great high priest.  As I've mentioned, were it not for that intercessory prayer ministry of our great high priest, we would have been lost a long time ago.  Satan would have concocted a series of temptations that would have laid us out and do not imagine you would have been immune.  But Jesus is constantly praying for your faith that it may not fail.  So, when you take that bread, and when you take that juice in a few minutes, look to Jesus, your great high priest, and thank Him that He's praying for your soul, and that He will not let you go.  

You may be weak in prayer; you may forget to pray.  You may tell a friend you'll pray for them and then you don't pray, and the Lord later convicts.  Jesus isn’t like that.  He is not like that.  He never forgets to pray for you, and the Father never forgets to listen to his Son, and the Son never fails to get what he asked for.  And what is he asking for?  That your faith may not fail.  And so, look to Jesus, your great high priest, and look to the Holy Spirit, too.    

Look to the Holy Spirit, who I have already said and I trust will be active and involved in the body of Christ here this afternoon.  Is it afternoon yet?  It will be soon.  Alright [chuckle].  See, now you're looking at your watch, I shouldn't have done that.  

But the Spirit of God is going to be moving through this place, uniting our hearts, drawing us together, taking things that could be dry, dead text on the page.  Black and white characters on the page, dusty old doctrines and ideas.  They are none of the kind, but rather he makes them alive in your heart and you feel the presence of Christ by the power of the Spirit of God it says in Corinthians.  So, the Holy Spirit is not mentioned in this text.  In another place in 1st Corinthians He says, "You cannot even say Jesus is Lord, except by the Spirit of God."  So, neither can you celebrate rightly the Lord's Supper, except by the Spirit of God.  So, look to the Father and look to the Son, and look to the Spirit. 

VI. Looking Within 

We also look within.  It's right for us to look within and be realistic about what is really happening in our life right now.  We look within and we examine ourselves.  Look what it says, "A man" in Verse 28 "ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup."  You heard Tom read the problems in the Corinthian church, how some were going ahead and gorging themselves, others were getting drunk.  There was strife and conflict, and bickering, and difficulties.  And what a shameful thing, but you know it isn't long you're thinking, "Oh, those bad Corinthians."  Well, that's not a very fruitful thought, brothers and sisters.  What about us, do we not bicker?  Do we not quarrel?  Do we not lust?  Is there not pride in us?  Are we living up to the calling that we have received?  Are we failing to present our bodies to God as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God?  I think some days we do, and I think some days we actually present the members of our body to sin as instruments of wickedness.  We ought to repent and I think the Lord's Supper is a good time to repent. 

 

"Search me, O God and know me.  Try me and see if there's any offensive way in me."  So as the trays are being passed, take the time to do that, say, "Lord, show me my sin, teach me what I'm doing wrong."  And you think, well, this is kind of a morbid introspection.  It's not morbid.  Morbid means death producing.  It's actually life-giving to do this kind of introspection, just like the work of a dentist getting that nidus of infection, that bacteria, you got to get it out.  We don't want it in.  And so, search me, O God, and you confess your sin and you renounce it, and you turn away from it, and you prepare yourself to receive the holy bread and fruit of the vine; you receive it with a commitment to a holy lifestyle.  It may be that some of you need to refrain because you don't think right now, today, you can partake, you won't partake in a way worthy of the Lord, it's possible that the Lord may deal with you in that manner, but not for most of us.  I think we look inward, not just to our sin, but we look inward to the fact that we do repent, we hate the sin, we are hungry and thirsting for righteousness.  

The Spirit himself is testifying with our spirits that we are children of God and that we should partake.  I'll never forget reading about a Scottish pastor, godly pastor, who was administering the Lord's supper.  There was a young woman there sobbing so deeply and felt such a heaviness in her soul about her sin.  He knew her situation, he knew that she was a genuine believer in Christ, he knew what was going on, but she just felt unworthy.  He leaned over and whispered into her ear, “Take it, Lassie, it's for sinners."  You don't have to be sinless and perfect to take the Lord's Supper, just confess your sin, and if you confess your sin, He is faithful and just and will forgive you your sin and cleanse you from all unrighteousness.  And then partake gladly.  It's meant for sinners.  That's what it's for.   

And so, we look inward, we look inward at our sin, we look inward to faith and repentance into that internal testimony of the Spirit, that we are children of God, and we do all of that to be sure that we are eating in a manner worthy of the Lord.  We must look inward.   

VII. Looking Down 

 I'd also like to urge that you look down, just take a minute when you get the bread in your hand and just look at it.  I don't believe in transubstantiation.  I think it feels like bread, it smells like bread, and it tastes like bread, because it is bread.  That's it, it's bread.  And Aristotle is not going to help us understand it differently.  He may have been a very smart man, but we don't need any help from him here.  

Talking about substance and accidents and how it tastes like bread, but it really is the Body of Christ.  It is bread, but it is physical, and Jesus set it up for this reason that we might be mindful that there was a time on this planet in space and time, that there was a body of Christ, and He had actual blood, and that body was nailed to the cross and that blood was shed for you.  It was physical, it hurt.  It was a real death in your place, keep that in mind when you touch that bread, think about it, look down and look at that element and say, this is physical, it's not a metaphysical theory that was nailed to the cross that day, it was the body of Jesus.  And it says in the Book of Colossians that God redeemed you by Christ's physical body to present you holy in His sight, because he, in Colossians, is dealing with another heresy there, that Jesus didn't really actually have a physical body.  Yes, he did. 

The Lord's Supper is ordained to help us remember that.  It is also good to remember that your hands, as you are holding them someday are going to be remade into the image of Christ's resurrection body, and you are going to be physical for all eternity, too, remember that.  Some day you are going to have a resurrection body.  More on that in a moment.   

VIII. Looking Around 

We also need to look around.  As we partake in the Lord's Supper, I want you to notice as you look around that you are not alone in this room.  That's good.  We are very individualistic in this country of ours, we are very individualistic, but the Lord is not saving us into individualism.  He is saving us into a marvelous body of Christ, made up of people from every tribe and language and people and nation, from all of the generations of the church.  That's the body of Christ.  And how beautiful is that, as we sang earlier, how beautiful is the body of Christ, and so we are drawn together into one body.   

It says in Verse 33, "So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for each other."  So, when the dish goes past, we take and we wait, we wait until we are all ready to eat together.  And because it says in 1 Corinthians 10:17, "Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf," and Jesus said, "Drink from it all of you."  So, there's a sense of unity and a fellowship, there's a fellowship together.    

When we look around, not just to the believers, but we look around to the unbelievers.  There are unbelievers watching.  Look at Verse 26, "For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes."  We preach the Gospel until He comes.  Just by doing this, the church is by acting out this drama, we are in some sense preaching the Gospel to an unbelieving world.   

Now, a pastor, if he is wise and does a good job at this moment, will urge people who are in this sanctuary who have not repented and trusted in Christ, to not partake of the Lord's Supper, for then you would be eating and drinking judgment on yourself.  And we are urging people who are Gospel hypocrites, who the Spirit of God is not testifying with their spirits that they are children of God, but they go through the church motions and they are fooling everyone, but they are not fooling God, we are urging them not to partake.  

We are proclaiming the Lord's death, but you know even here, I want to speak to you, if you have not been converted, there is a Gospel for you.  Though you ought not to take from the bread and the juice today, you can partake of something far better today, and that is faith to the salvation of your soul, that you can have today.  For Jesus Christ died on the cross in the place of sinners just like you.  He shed His blood, paying the penalty that God demands for your sin.  It is available simply by repenting and trusting in Him, you can have full forgiveness of sins for your soul right now.  You don't need anything else.  Just hear and believe the Gospel and you can be forgiven.  So, we look around to an unbelieving world as we do this, and we proclaim the Lord's death.    

IX. Looking Forward 

Finally, we look forward.  We look forward.  Are you looking forward?  I am looking forward.  I am looking forward to the second coming of Christ.  We proclaim the Lord's death until He what?  Until He comes.  He's coming back, Revelation 19, He's coming back with the armies of heaven.  He's coming back, riding on a horse.  He's coming back, conquering, and to conquer.  He's coming back to set up an eternal kingdom..  And there is written on Him, the name King of kings and Lord of lords, He is coming back.  And we are nearer to that day now than when I began this sermon and then the day you first believe, we are getting closer and closer to the second coming of Christ, and these are just homely symbols of a future feast that we're going to have in the presence of the almighty God.   

We are going to eat with Him, we are going to feast with Him.  This is not really a physical feast, you know that, don't you?  It may be and ought to be a spiritual feast, but we are looking ahead to a physical and spiritual kingdom, and we will sit at table with God Almighty, and we will look at him in the face, and we will look to the left and the right, and we will see, as Jesus said in Matthew 8, "Many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven." 

 

It's coming, and we get to sit there through faith in Christ, we're looking ahead to that, anticipating it, we're looking ahead best of all to our final future salvation through the resurrection of the body.  There is a banquet that Christ will lay for us, that is the resurrection of the body, listen to Isaiah 25:6-8, "On this mountain the Lord Almighty will prepare a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine−the best of meats and the finest of wines.  On this mountain he will destroy the shroud that enfolds all peoples, the sheet that covers all nations; he will swallow up death forever."  

That's a feast I can't wait for.  To be free from death and mourning and crying and pain, and to be in a body that will never perish.  That's the future, and we proclaim that by the Lord's Supper. 

 So, we look back in remembrance of the Passover and the night that Jesus was betrayed to Jesus's body, broken and His blood shed into our personal faith in Christ.  We look up, in dependence on God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.  We look inward to our own sinfulness and to repentance and faith into that internal testimony of the Spirit that we are children of God.  We look down at the elements that we're holding reminding ourselves that the physical body and blood of Christ were given for us that we might have eternal life.  And we look around in commitment to the body of Christ, that we are members together of one body and to an unbelieving and watching world that to whom we proclaim the Lord's death until He comes.  And we look ahead and hope to the second coming of Christ and to the great resurrection day, when we will eat and drink anew in our Father's kingdom.  Won't you pray with me?