The Lord’s Supper

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Transcript:

Well, tonight we’re going to be in 1 Corinthians chapter 11. 1 Corinthians chapter 11. We’re going to look at what we believe about the Lord’s Supper tonight.

Last week we looked at baptism and the meaning of baptism, the importance of baptism. And what we’re going to look at tonight is similar in a lot of ways. The Lord’s Supper is a picture of some of the same things that baptism is a picture of.

They have similar meanings, but we use them in different ways. And Jesus gave both ordinances to the church as ways for us to show the truth of the gospel in a visible way to the world. We want to make sure that as we go through these ordinances, as we go through baptism, as we go through the Lord’s Supper, that they don’t just become something that we do.

And so that’s why I think it’s important for us to go back and understand the importance of them. There’s a lady that she belonged to a church that I pastored several years ago, contacted me on Facebook a while back. And we were kind of catching up, and she was telling me about her grandkids, that her children had gone to a different kind of church of a different denomination and had taken her grandchildren with them.

And one of the issues that she had with this church was that they practiced the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. And she said, is that wrong? And I said, well, no, that’s not wrong.

You know, the Bible says as often as we do it, that’s basically the only timing stipulation that the Bible puts on the Lord’s Supper. He just says, as often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me. So, I mean, theoretically, we could do it every day.

We could do it every week. We could do it quarterly. We could do it once a year.

The church I pastored in Arkansas, we didn’t have a set schedule. We just, whenever I started feeling the leading of the Holy Spirit, we haven’t done this. and it’s been too long since we’ve done this, we’d do it again, and it still came out to about four times a year.

But really the only stipulation the Bible puts on it as far as time is just as often as you do it, do it in remembrance of him. Her concern, and one which I understand, was she said, if my grandchildren grow up doing this every Sunday, is it going to become just part of their routine. And I totally understand that concern.

And if a church can do it and make it meaningful where it’s not just part of the routine and not just something else that we check off on our list in our bulletin, but they can actually put the effort into making it meaningful and they can do that every week, more power to them. Hey, there’s no complaint from me, but knowing myself, I’d be afraid that it would become, for me, it would become routine. And we can run the risk of doing that even just doing it four times a year.

I think it was at the beginning of this year we had, or I’m sorry, the end of, the very end of last year, close to a year ago now, that I think we had the Lord’s Supper scheduled for the very last Sunday in December, right there between Christmas and New Year’s. I think that was the end of last year. And we came in on a Sunday morning, And nobody remembered, which was fine.

I mean, I had bought the stuff, but just in the first few minutes I was here, several people said, oh, we have the Lord’s Supper today. Oh, I forgot we had the Lord’s Supper today. And even though I had remembered it, I hadn’t taken a lot of time in preparing myself, hadn’t taken a lot of time in examining myself and prayer and all that.

And so I remember saying to y’all, why don’t we just put this off? So I said, I don’t want this to be something we just get through. So let’s put it off for a couple weeks, and let’s come back and give it meaning.

So we can even, even when we just do it a few times a year, we can start to get to where it’s routine. But the Lord’s Supper was meant to be anything but routine. And I think if we, the more we remind ourselves of the meaning of it, and the more we make an effort to take it seriously, I think the more special it is.

And I think the better job we do of letting it be the picture that Christ intended it to be. So what we believe about the Lord’s Supper, if you have your copy here of the Baptist Faith and Message, it’s on page 14. It says, this is a lot shorter than most of the passages that I’ve been reading to you.

It says, the Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act of obedience, whereby members of the church, through partaking of the bread and the fruit of the vine, memorialize the death of the Redeemer and anticipate His second coming. Now, that’s awfully short for a Baptist statement on anything. And I think part of the reason for that, that they don’t go into a great deal of detail, is that there is disagreement, even among Baptists, about all the details.

You know, I’ve shared with many of you that I came from a Baptist church. I grew up in a Baptist church that taught closed communion, but I think kind of practiced open communion, because they weren’t going to knock it out of somebody’s hands if they weren’t supposed to have it. I pastored a church that was very, very closed communion, I found out when I got there.

And, you know, at that point, I believed closed communion, and I kind of went along with it. But I had to read a statement. They had adopted a statement that they wanted me to read before we observed the Lord’s Supper.

Basically, members come sit up front, visitors, if you’ll stay in the back. And that was problematic for me. And the more I studied into it myself, I thought, you know, I still have this closed communion background that I can’t really shake, but I can’t make the case for it in Scripture that I thought I could.

And so I kind of came around to the point where if the church practices open communion, that’s fine. I’m only going to practice communion with my church, so I’m closed communion for myself, but I’m not going to tell anybody else they have to be. And you all have been very gracious in, I mean, I’ll say accepting that, but it doesn’t make a difference for you because it’s just me saying I’m not going to go take it elsewhere.

But there’s all sorts of debates, even among Baptists, about some of the details of communion that we can easily get hung up on. But what we’ve come together and said, what’s really important is what it represents. And that’s what this is.

It’s an act of obedience. We can all agree on that. It’s an act of obedience.

It’s something that Jesus commanded us to do. It’s a symbolic act. It’s a memorial of Jesus’ death, And where we come together, we partake of the bread and fruit of the vine, excuse me, to memorialize, to remember, to commemorate the death of our Redeemer and anticipate His second coming.

So He said we do this until He returns. And I know that there are some Christians out there who think it’s more than a memorial. And they’ll point to what Jesus said, take it, this is my body. Take this and drink it, this is my blood.

And the question becomes, well, what do you think he meant when he said this is? Well, I think he was speaking metaphorically, as he often did. He spoke in parables.

He used metaphors. There’s nothing in Scripture that explicitly states and makes me believe that that literally or symbolically becomes his body and his blood. I think it’s a representation.

It’s a reminder. It’s a picture. And God dealt in pictures a lot all throughout the Scriptures.

So tonight we’re going to look at 1 Corinthians chapter 11, just a few verses here, and what it tells us about the Lord’s Supper. Starting in verse 23, 1 Corinthians 11, 23, it says, Paul writing to the church at Corinth, he says, For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you. So what he tells them here, what he’s saying to them, he prefaces this by saying, this is what God has told me about this, that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you.

Do this in remembrance of me. In the same manner he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do as often as ye drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Therefore, whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

All right. So there’s a few things that the Apostle Paul is telling us here about the Lord’s Supper. And there are other places in the scripture where it talks about the Lord’s Supper.

I’d encourage you to go read some of those. But this is one of the classic passages where the Apostle Paul straightens out some of the problems that they were having as the church in Corinth, where this church was meeting together, and they were having the Lord’s Supper on a weekly basis, maybe even on a daily basis. There are some passages in the book of Acts that talk about the early churches meeting daily and breaking bread, and some people, as I’ve mentioned to you, interpret that as them observing the Lord’s Supper together.

I think it was more about them having a time of fellowship, but I don’t know. Maybe they were observing the Lord’s Supper every day. But the church at Corinth was coming together, having the Lord’s Supper on a regular basis, or so they said, and yet that’s really not what they were doing.

It became everything but what it was supposed to be. For them, it became what we worry about. It became just another thing to get through.

And so they had turned it into a party, and so you had some people coming and feasting and getting drunk, and it was Thanksgiving for them, and others in the church had nothing to eat, So they’re sitting here watching while others were taking their massive feast, and they have nothing. And it highlighted some of the divisions in the church. There were divisions in the church along the lines of people’s income and people’s background.

There were also theological divisions in the church that Paul pointed out. He said there were heresies among them, and there was unconfessed sin. And the church was divided.

The church was not healthy at all. And so the Apostle Paul comes in, and in this letter, he straightens them out about the Lord’s Supper and what it’s supposed to be. And he does, you know, throughout this chapter, throughout chapter 11, he does deal with their problems. Tonight, rather than go into all the problems that they had and deal with those in great detail, I want to just focus on what he said the solution was, the focus on what the Lord’s Supper was supposed to be.

And that’s what we see in these few verses. We see, first of all, that the Lord’s Supper is supposed to be a picture of Jesus’ death for us. And we see this in the first few verses, where he talks about the Lord on the night that he was betrayed.

He refers back to that Passover supper that Jesus and his disciples enjoyed together, that they experienced together, on the night before Jesus’ crucifixion. He said, Again, I don’t know how to say that other than he’s speaking metaphorically. You may think, well, preacher, I thought you interpret the Bible literally.

I do. Meaning, I interpret it as literature. I interpret it the way the writers would have intended and the original audiences would have understood.

You know, even as somebody who interprets the Bible literally, when Jesus talks about gathering Jerusalem under his wings, I don’t assume Jesus had feathers. You know, he was speaking in metaphor. And so I can interpret that literally, meaning I can look for what meaning the original writer would have intended and what the original audience would have understood without saying, oh, well, it’s all just symbolic.

It’s all just symbolic. And abandoning things from Scripture. but still leave room here to say Jesus was using a word picture.

Now, not everything. There are some things that Jesus said that we have no reason to think it meant other than what the words actually mean. But there were other times just like we all do.

There’s idiom, there’s metaphor, there’s symbolism, there’s all these sorts of things. And when he said, this is my body, I don’t think for a minute that if the Scriptures said this specifically, If the scriptures gave any other reason to believe it, I would have to say, okay, he turned that into his body somehow that I don’t understand. No, what we see is a picture of, the Bible says he took bread and broke it and said, this is my body.

And that tells me Jesus was teaching with a picture. Here’s you an image of what’s about to happen to me, because they still didn’t really understand. I mean, Peter, the night, right after this happened, they go out, and Peter’s ready, he He draws his sword and takes somebody’s ear off rather than let Jesus be arrested.

He still doesn’t understand that God’s plan was for Jesus to be crucified for our sins. The disciples still didn’t get it. And so Jesus is trying to put this in words that maybe they’ll understand.

And he takes that piece of bread. And we think of it as a loaf. It probably looked more like a pita, a flatbread.

He takes it and he rips it into pieces and says, this is my body. Trying to show them what is about to happen to him. And he says, take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you.

For you. He’s not only trying to show them what’s about to happen, he’s trying to explain to them the significance of what’s about to happen. That this body that is broken is broken for their sins.

That every bit of violence he undergoes on the cross is going to be for their sins. It’s for the justification of their sins, for the payment for their sins. God’s wrath and God’s justice being satisfied at the same time God’s mercy is being displayed to mankind.

And when he says, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, again, he hasn’t sliced his finger and literally drained his blood into the cup. He’s using a picture that they would understand. That’s a common metaphor, blood being for wine.

That’s the only thing I remember about reading A Tale of Two Cities in junior high, is them talking about the wine and it being a metaphor for blood. That’s a fairly common metaphor throughout history. And so he hands them this wine and says, this is my blood.

Again, for them to understand, this cup full of wine represents all the blood that’s being drained and poured out. And he says, for them. This cup represents, this cup is a new covenant.

That where the old covenant was symbolized by the blood of bulls and goats, the new covenant is going to be purchased in his blood. And so the Lord’s Supper is a picture of Jesus’ death and how his death is for us. My body broken for you.

The new covenant in my blood. He said, this do as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. As often as you do this, do it focused on remembering what I did for you.

Do it focused on my death. And again, none of this tonight is meant as an attack on other denominations. I would love it.

I don’t mean to sound like it’s a party atmosphere or anything, but I love observing the Lord’s Supper with my church. It’s always been such a meaningful experience. And if I thought we could do that every Sunday and us be able to maintain the same level of focus and reverence on it and not just let it become something to check off the list, I would love if we were able to do that.

But I have visited other churches where they have observed the Lord’s Supper every Sunday morning. And maybe there are some out there who can do it, but the ones I’ve visited where they did this every Sunday morning, it was usually done at the end of service. The last thing is we’re checking off the order of worship in the bulletin.

The last thing we’ve got, people are getting their stuff ready to go home. They know the Lord’s Supper means it’s almost over. Let’s go home.

It’s something else we do on Sunday mornings. And as I recall, his sacrifice was not really even mentioned. And it wasn’t really the Lord’s Supper at that point.

It was communion. It was more about our communion together than it was about what Jesus did for us. And my fear, again, my fear, even doing it just as often as we do, my fear is that it would ever become anything less than a picture of Jesus’ death on the cross.

God forbid we ever treat it as anything less. The Lord’s Supper also calls us to remembrance. It’s not just a picture of his sacrifice.

It calls us to remember that sacrifice. Not just to remember it during that time when we observe it, but to remember the sacrifice as we go throughout our daily lives. As we come to that point of, you know, I know we’re going to be preparing to do the Lord’s Supper soon.

I find myself thinking more along those lines, thinking more about what Jesus did for me, thinking about what I ought to do, not as a requirement because we live under grace, but what I ought to do out of gratitude because of what he’s done. I think differently about the way I live. I think differently about the way I act when I know I’m preparing to observe the Lord’s Supper.

We’re told to examine ourselves, okay? And I know when I’ve just observed it for days and even weeks afterwards, I find myself more focused on the sacrifice that he made for me. Verse 26 says, as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup.

You proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. And so it’s meant to be a reminder of his sacrifice, a reminder of his death, not just in that moment, but a reminder of his death for all time. The fact that we do this periodically is meant to be a reminder to us throughout all of our days of the sacrifice that Jesus Christ made for us.

And I’m going to scratch that thought and move on. But it’s meant to be a reminder to us. Not just a picture that we, you know, there’s a difference in between those two thoughts.

I said it’s a picture of his death. It’s really easy to have the picture of what he did in that moment when we’re observing the Lord’s Supper and then just go on. It’s like when I tell my kids things and they remember for that three seconds that they’re in the room and then it falls out of their heads, you know.

We’ve got a broken John Deere lawn tractor in the yard that I, Brother Ken and I have both spent more time than is reasonable trying to fix that thing. And it finally broke down in the backyard in the mud, and now the tires are flat, and I can’t move it. When I die, that tractor will still be there.

It’s in the yard, and the kids climb on it, and they’ve been told don’t play on the tractor, and they seem to think that was just for that day, because the next time they go out in the yard, That rule has fallen out of their heads, and we have to tell them all over again, you’re not supposed to play on the tractor. Oh, yeah, forever don’t play on the tractor. It’s not just a picture to us while we’re doing it that should fall out of our heads when we leave the building.

It’s supposed to be a picture. It’s supposed to be something that we remember after we’re done with it. Then finally tonight, we look at verses 27 and 28 again.

It says, Therefore, whoever eats this bread and drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. And that tells us that the Lord’s Supper is a call to examine ourselves in our walk with Jesus.

It’s a call to examine ourselves. Again, not that we somehow earn God’s favor or earn a relationship with God through being good, but this is presupposing he’s talking to Christians, to people who have long since come to the realization that we are not good according to God’s standards and realize we don’t have a relationship with God and can’t apart from Jesus Christ. That the only way we have a relationship with God, the only way we’re reconciled to him is because of what Jesus did for us on the cross, because of the body that was broken and the blood that was shed. And through faith in his sacrifice, we have a relationship with God.

We’re called on to examine it, to examine that relationship. Not because we lose it, but because we sometimes lose sight of it. Don’t we?

We sometimes get complacent in how we live. We sometimes get distant from God. And he’s not the one who moved.

Sometimes we wander further than we should. And so this is one of those times that calls us back again to examine ourselves. Calls us to examine the fellowship that we have with God.

Because it should be a solemn thing when we come together to eat the bread and drink the wine. It should be a solemn thing. And I don’t mean depressing solemn.

I mean something taken seriously solemn. That’s the opposite of what the church at Corinth was doing. They were treating it like a party.

And Paul wrote to them and said, you know, some of you, because you’ve done this, because you haven’t taken this seriously, it’s like you’re dishonoring the sacrifice that Jesus made. And I think we can dishonor the sacrifice by how lightly we take this, even though it’s not the literal body and blood. We can dishonor his sacrifice by treating it like a party atmosphere or treating it as something other than what it is.

And so he calls us to examine ourselves. Because Paul told, further on in the passage from what we’ve read tonight, Paul tells the church at Corinth, some of you have gotten sick as a result. He says, some have even died.

Now, that doesn’t mean we get food poisoning from the elements of the Lord’s Supper. What that means is that God judges these things. And we as believers can send to a point where God, I think this is what the Bible teaches in some passages like, I believe it’s 1 John 5.

There comes a point where God says, all right, that’s enough out of you. You’re coming home before you get too far out in left field. I think God sees out in our future and knows where we’re headed and knows where we’re going to get hurt, and God calls us home before we hurt ourselves or others too severely at times.

And there were some in the church at Corinth who were showing the direction they were headed by the disrespectful way they treated the sacrifice that Jesus had made and the disrespectful way in which they observed the Lord’s Supper. You have to be pretty messed up in your spiritual walk to look at the sacrifice that Jesus made and say, I can do what I want because of that. The right response to the sacrifice that he made is to realize that’s my fault.

He went through all of that because of what I did. And even realizing we’re never going to be perfect, still to look at that and say, you know what, with his help I want to do better. Now again, I want to be very clear.

Nothing about this is meant to suggest that we have a relationship with God because we can be good enough. What he’s really looking for is for us to examine ourselves and say, have we been faithful? Have we been focused on him?

Yeah, we’re going to sin, but is there anything that we haven’t confessed to God? Is there anything that we haven’t dealt with God about? Because sometimes we can take the forgiveness for granted.

It’s there. We received it. He granted it.

It’s there. We’re forgiven. But sometimes we take that forgiveness for granted, and we just kind of go on and we sin and we never deal with it.

Now, as believers, are we forgiven before God? I believe we are. That relationship is there regardless, I believe.

Once we’re truly saved, I believe we’re saved. End of story. Just because the relationship is there doesn’t mean the fellowship is always right.

It’s like if I did something wrong, I didn’t want Charlotte to find out about. And I didn’t tell her, we’re still married, but there’s some kind of tension there. There’s something not right in the fellowship between us until I come clean.

Or with our kids. You know, I’ve told you before that we had one that was going through a lying phase. And I think, at least for now, we’re on the other side of that.

Until the other one has started. Well, I told Charla last night, I said, you know, the other one did this in kindergarten. I wonder what they’re teaching in Mrs.

Yacht’s class. And I say that with her mother and grandmother sitting here. I know that has nothing to do with her.

I said, what is wrong with her? And that’s when I said, well, if you remember Benjamin, Benjamin went through this in kindergarten too. It’s normal. All right.

Where I’m going with this. There are times she will look right in our face and lie like a politician. Okay?

He did the same thing. She’ll look right at us. We’ve caught her.

We saw her. We have cameras all over our house, inside and out. Not everywhere inside, but we have cameras.

We know what’s happening in our house. Besides which, Charlie’s just on top of everything. Can’t get anything by on her.

We saw you. We have it on camera. We know you did this.

No, I didn’t. we know she’s lying she knows she’s lying she knows we know she’s lying and sometimes I’ll tell charla you know we’re not getting anywhere just cut her loose for now we’re still parent and child but the relationship or the fellowship is not quite right until she comes back to us a couple hours later and says I’m sorry I lied I’m sorry yeah we we know you lied but thank you for thank you for feeling bad about it. You know, up until then, there’s a hindrance in the relationship.

I don’t know any better way to say it. Because there’s this thing between us. That’s still my child, but there’s this thing in between us in the fellowship.

I know what you’ve been up to. You just won’t admit it. Folks, I think it’s the same way with God.

I think scripture bears this out. That we’re still his children, but there are things that we do and don’t want to admit, even though he knows. And we know he knows.

We don’t want to admit it. And the Lord’s Supper is one of those times where we, it’s healthy for us to go back and examine ourselves and say, are there any of those things that I’ve just been going along that are hindering the fellowship with God and I’ve been pretending like he doesn’t know? And it’s our time to go back and deal with God about those things if we haven’t already.

As my pastor used to say growing up, it’s important that we keep a short list of accounts with God. Have those receipts been entered in balance yet? Now, God’s already forgiven them, but the problem’s on our end, letting it stand in the middle of the fellowship.

And the Lord’s Supper calls us, examine ourselves. Examine ourselves. And it’s important that we do that at the time of the Lord’s Supper.

It’s important that we do it all the time. It’s important that we do it frequently. But this is a special time when we’re called on to examine ourselves and our walk with Jesus.

And you know what? If it’s not what it ought to be, thank God it’s covered under his grace and we can confess it. And God has already forgiven it, but the fellowship can be restored to what it ought to be.

And we can go on living in light of the clean slate that Jesus has already bought us. Because what we do when we hold on to that sin, again, it’s forgiven under the blood. It’s already been forgiven.

But we try to hold on to it and hide it. And we try to live like it hasn’t been forgiven. So at the time of the Lord’s Supper, we come and we confess it and we get everything out in the open with God.

And we try to walk with Him the way we should have been walking all along in the light of His forgiveness, which was purchased through His death on the cross, through that blood that was shed for us and that body that was broken.