In Remembrance of Me

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Transcript:

Well, my plan is, Lord willing, that next week we’ll return to our series of studies on the kingdom. But we took a detour last Sunday to look at the importance of baptism, study the meaning of baptism as we prepared to baptize some new followers of Jesus Christ. I’m glad we got to do that, aren’t you? Amen.

And this morning I thought we’d take a similar opportunity to explore the purpose of the Lord’s Supper as we prepare to participate in that. So if you’ll join me this morning in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, 1 Corinthians chapter 11, we’re going to take a look at a passage of scripture that is vital to helping us understand the significance of what we’re about to do. 1 Corinthians chapter 11.

1 Corinthians was written by the Apostle Paul as the Holy Spirit inspired him. It was written by the Apostle Paul and he was writing to a church that had a lot of problems. And throughout this letter, he was trying to correct those problems, wherever he found them. He was trying to correct those problems and show the church what they ought to do and how they ought to be.

And by the time he got to the latter part of 1 Corinthians chapter 11, he was dealing with the shameful way that they were carrying out the Lord’s Supper. It was absolutely awful what they were doing. Now the issue wasn’t over whether they broke up one loaf of bread or they used individual pieces.

It wasn’t about whether they used one big cup or individual cups. It wasn’t anything like that. Instead, the issue was a problem with the motivations of their hearts as they went about the Lord’s Supper.

There was a heart problem in Corinth. And this section of chapter 11 on the Lord’s Supper, it covers the whole latter half of 1 Corinthians chapter 11 from verses 17 to 34, and it breaks down into three different parts. And we’re not going to go through all three parts today.

But verses 17 through 22 deal with the mistakes that they were making in the way that they were taking the Lord’s Supper. Verses 23 through 26 deal with the motivations, the proper motivations for observing the Lord’s Supper. And verses 27 through 34 deal with the need to examine ourselves before we come to partake of the Lord’s Supper.

And time won’t permit me this morning to lead you through a thorough examination of all 18 verses there. So I want to focus on the middle section this morning. But to understand that middle section, we need to kind of summarize what happened in the other sections.

So let’s start with what they were doing wrong in Corinth, where they went wrong. They had taken the Lord’s Supper and they had turned it into a showcase for all of the sin and division that they had in their church. For some of the people there at Corinth, they had taken the Lord’s Supper and they had twisted it into a kind of a drunken party that resembled the pagan festivals that they were used to participating in before they came to Christ, much more than it resembled any kind of meaningful time of worship dedicated to Jesus Christ. They turned it into a big drunken pagan party.

They treated it as an excuse, as an excuse to return to the kind of wild behavior that they’d lived in previously that had no place in their Christian lives. Others didn’t go to that extreme, didn’t act like it was a big pagan frolic, but they treated it as an excuse for gluttony. I mean, what better excuse could there be for gluttony?

Your wife can’t get mad at you about pigging out if you’re doing it for Jesus, right? So might as well. Use church as an excuse to pig out.

They were treating it as an opportunity to stuff their faces. They were feasting. They were feasting while they were totally ignoring the fact that some of their less fortunate brethren, they were going hungry.

They had brothers and sisters in Christ sitting next to them, going hungry while they were stuffing themselves, all in the name of honoring the Lord. Some of you who’ve been around for a number of years might find it odd to believe that anybody looked at the communion elements and thought, hey, let’s pig out, but they did. What was supposed to be a gathering for worship, and that’s what this is, what was supposed to be a gathering for worship was repurposed, And it was transformed into an opportunity to satisfy their fleshly desires, whatever they might have been.

And so Paul needed to set them straight about the proper motivation for participating in the Lord’s Supper. Now, I don’t know of any church where these kinds of things are going on today. I don’t know of any church that’s turning the Lord’s Supper into a drunken party.

I don’t know anybody who’s chowing down on everything they can get their hands on while others are going hungry. I don’t know anybody that’s doing these specific things today. But these kinds of things do go on.

Christians today still struggle with doing the Lord’s Supper in the right way. It doesn’t look exactly like what Corinth did, but we still struggle with doing it in the right way and for the right reasons. So if we want to practice the Lord’s Supper in a way that honors the Lord, we should take to heart the things that Paul had to say about it.

So let’s read verses 23 through 26. He says, starting in verse 23, For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you. On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way, also, he took the cup after supper and said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Now, before we dive into this section, I need to say something about the variations in the text, because some of you may be looking at different translations than what I’m looking at. And in some translations, they contain a different set of words.

in verse 24, because some of the Greek manuscripts, some of the ancient Greek manuscripts, contain different sets of words. Now, some of your Bibles there in verse 24 may say something like, take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you, instead of simply saying, this is my body, which is for you. And sometimes we can get a little bit nervous about these differences, and I’m bringing it up just in case you’re reading a translation that contains those words, and you think that I’m just skipping over part of the text.

It’s not what I’m doing. We have over 20,000 ancient manuscripts of the New Testament books. That’s far more than any other ancient work.

Far more textual evidence for the New Testament than any other ancient work. And it allows us, hear me on this, that body of manuscripts, it allows us to have the highest possible confidence in the reliability of Scripture, in the fact that the New Testament has not been tampered with over time. Now, among so many manuscripts, there’s a large number of variations in the text.

You just get 20,000 of anything together and you’re going to find some differences. But scholars tell us that the texts, all of these bodies of text, they’re in agreement 99. 9% of the time.

99. 9% of the time, there’s no question over what it said. And even when there is some question, it’s never enough to change the meaning, it’s never enough to undermine anything about our Christian faith.

The theologian Ron Rhodes has written that no doctrine of the Christian faith or any moral commandment is affected by any of the differences. Now, in this case specifically, some of the ancient manuscripts say, take eat, this is my body, which is broken for you. Some of the others say, this is my body, which is for you.

Now we see there’s a little bit of difference there, but with or without the phrase take eat and the word broken, the meaning of this passage doesn’t change. Again, if you’re wondering, why is he going into all this today? Because I noticed the difference when I was studying it this week, and I don’t want you to think, hey, they’re changing the scriptures at our church, or the pastor’s just skipping things, okay?

the meaning doesn’t change the context of this passage tells us that either way jesus was using the bread to represent the offering of his body and and that bread was broken he broke it whether or not he said it’s broken for you he broke the bread before he handed it to them and he distributed it whether or not he said take eat he he was giving it to them to eat because they were observing the passover supper together now somebody again somebody’s bound to notice the slight difference in the wording, and I want you to know you can trust your Bible. The Bible you hold in your hand, unless you got a hold of the New World Translation, the Jehovah’s Witnesses made up, and were seen under court records to have made it up, unless you got a hold of that, or you got a hold of, what do they call it, the Queen James Bible, where they reworked everything to make it LGBT friendly.

Unless you’ve got a hold of something like that, I want you to know you can trust your Bible. Some translations are more accurate than others, but there’s no question about what the Bible actually says. So they may translate from different manuscripts.

As long as you’ve got a reliable translation, some of you have King James, some of you have NIV. I know I’m using the Christian Standard Bible. Some of you have ESV.

All of these are good translations. And the manuscripts may be different, but the meaning is ultimately the same. Now, as we look at the text, we can see, though, that Paul was explaining to the church at Corinth that the Lord’s Supper was not their celebration to tamper with.

It wasn’t theirs to just do what they wanted to. They didn’t have the right to change it into something else. The Lord’s Supper, off limits from us doing that.

But by turning it into some kind of drunken party, some kind of gluttonous party, they had ceased to celebrate the Lord’s Supper altogether. They had changed it into something different. It was only the Lord’s Supper if it was done according to the Lord’s will.

That same thing is true for us today. It’s only the Lord’s Supper if we do it according to the Lord’s will. Now there are some things that the church does that are human inventions, and those aren’t necessarily bad things.

A lot of our methods and our programs are human inventions. They can be used to the glory of God, but they’re not explicitly commanded in Scripture. Wednesday night services, you’d be surprised if I had, are not mandated in Scripture.

Sunday school, also not mandated in Scripture. Vacation Bible school, definitely not mandated in Scripture. Now, these are all good things.

These are all valuable things, and they can and should be used to the glory of God. But they’re tools that people came up with to help us advance the kingdom, but they’re just human inventions, and we can adjust those things as we need to. We can adjust them as needed.

For example, I’ll give you another example. We have a greeting. Some of us talked about this this morning with flu season coming up.

We have a greeting time in the service where everyone shakes hands. Do you know we were never commanded in Scripture to do that? We can change that.

And during flu season, we’ve been known to do away with it altogether because we’re tired of everybody passing the same virus around. All right? We can do that.

We can occasionally get rid of the greeting. And all the introverts said amen, right? We can do that.

We can make adjustments like that because God didn’t specifically, he didn’t give us a specific command either to do those things or how to do those things. All right, but there are some things that we do as the church that we don’t get to adjust because they’re God’s designs, not ours. All right, and when the Lord commanded us, excuse me, as we did last week, to baptize new believers as a public profession of their faith in Jesus Christ. We don’t get to turn baptism into a baby dedication or a cultural rite of passage for young people who show no evidence of being born again.

We don’t get to change that into something else just to suit our purposes. When the Lord told us to gather together for public worship and teaching and mutual accountability, we don’t get to turn the church gathering into a country club instead that caters to everybody’s preferences and whatever makes us feel good. We don’t get to transform the purpose of our gathering together into something else.

We don’t get to, these things are commands of God, and we don’t get to change them. We don’t get to redesign them to suit our purposes. And so looking at things like that, Paul told them in verse 23 that the Lord’s supper was not a human invention that they could just adjust and repurpose as they saw fit.

It work that way. He wrote, for I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you. Now the church at Corinth had learned about the Lord’s Supper from Paul, but Paul was quick to point out that it wasn’t his idea.

If it was Paul’s idea, they could just change it however they wanted. It wasn’t just his idea. Galatians chapter 1 records that Paul went out into the deserts of Arabia for a couple of years following his conversion, and he was taught by direct revelation from God before he ever went and met with the other apostles.

And so when he came to Corinth, the things that he taught them were only the things that God had taught him. So he was trying to get them to understand that this wasn’t their idea, this wasn’t their deal to tamper with, it wasn’t even Paul’s, it was God’s. It belonged to God.

It was God’s idea, so they didn’t get to change it. Now that goes for us as well. We don’t get to change the Lord’s Supper into a party or a show or anything other than what God intended it to be.

A church can change some things, but the Lord’s Supper isn’t one of them. Now to be clear, I’m not talking about sticking rigidly to a ritualistic order of things. I’m not saying the Lord’s Supper has to be carried out the exact same way every time even that even if we did that we would run the risk of changing it into changing it from a time of worship into an empty ritual we can’t do that I’m not talking about changing the schedule we could we could do the Lord’s Supper at the beginning of the service we could do the Lord’s Supper on a Sunday night we could even move it to a Tuesday night if we wanted to.

We could start having it once a week instead of once a quarter. We could do all those things. When I say you can’t change it, I mean to tell you that we can’t change its meaning or its purpose.

That’s what Paul was getting at. Now our church traditionally, and it is a tradition, our church traditionally takes the Lord’s Supper anytime there’s a fifth Sunday in a month. Comes out to about once a quarter.

Now there’s often a fifth Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s. At that time of year when everybody’s distracted and worn out from the busyness of the holiday. And a couple of years ago, I came in on a Sunday morning that before Sunday school on one of those mornings, that Sunday morning between Christmas and New Year’s, and we had all forgotten about the Lord’s Supper.

We had all forgotten it was supposed to be today, or that day until we got there. We had all the stuff here. We could have gone ahead and had it, but we hadn’t prepared ourselves.

None of us had prepared ourselves that day. And so I consulted with several of the others here in leadership, and we decided that we ought to wait a week, give everybody an opportunity to prepare themselves. And we did that because we didn’t want to change the Lord’s Supper from a time of worship into just another event that we get because it’s on the calendar.

You see the danger here? We can change the Lord’s Supper into something else without even realizing it. It’s not just a human invention that we can change or that we’re allowed to change into something else.

It’s something that God gave us and we need to do it according to his purpose. And that purpose, as we see in this passage, is to draw our attention back to Jesus Christ. That’s what it’s all there for, is to draw our attention back to Jesus Christ. If we’re not focused on Jesus Christ while we’re preparing for and taking the Lord’s Supper, then we’re doing it wrong. We’re doing it wrong.

Paul showed this centrality of Christ in the latter part of verse 23 when he wrote, on the night he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread. Okay, so Paul’s message to the Corinthians was that they should look to Jesus if they wanted to get this By the way, if you want to get anything right, looking to Jesus is always good advice. But he said, the Lord gave it to us, and if you want to know what it’s for, the first thing he does is turn them to Jesus’ example.

He said, now look at Jesus. He took bread, and he broke it. And so at the end of verse 23, he turned their attention to what Jesus had done and how he instituted the practice.

Now, verses 24 and 25 summarize what he did. He took bread, and then it says, and when he had given thanks, broke it and said, This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

And in the same way also, he took the cup after supper and said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. So immediately, Paul drew their attention back to the upper room in Jerusalem that night, where Jesus sat with his disciples on the night before his crucifixion.

As they went through the meal, everything he did was designed to prepare them for what he would do for them and for us the next day. It was all designed to prepare them for that. Because all of it was a picture of his sacrifice.

Jesus’ body was broken for us, and his blood was shed for us. Now, that doesn’t mean that the elements that we eat and drink when we go through the Lord’s Supper, it doesn’t mean they are the literal body and blood of Jesus. I believe in interpreting the Bible literally, which simply means we interpret it according to the normal use of language.

When things like the six-day creation or the virgin birth or the bodily resurrection, When those things are presented in the text as actual history, we interpret them as actual history. But when the text presents something as a metaphor, like Jesus gathering Jerusalem under his wings, we know Jesus didn’t have feathers, or Jesus saying the bread and wine are his body and blood, when his body had not even yet been broken and his blood had not been shed yet, we interpret them as metaphors. When the text presents it as actual history, interpret it as actual history.

When the text presents it as a metaphor, interpret it that way. So the bread and wine, we have to understand them as symbolic of the body and blood. Otherwise, we’re looking at the repeating of Jesus’ sacrifice in contradiction to everything that the New Testament teaches.

If we believe that we have to ingest the literal body and blood of Jesus Christ, then what we believe is he has to be sacrificed over and over and over for our sins. Hebrews chapter 6 tells us there is no other sacrifice. He did it once, and if that had not been good enough, there’s no other sacrifice.

The book of Hebrews is all over that idea that he would have to be sacrificed again. It’s not the literal body and blood. The bread symbolizes how his body was broken for us.

None of his bones were broken, which was incredible considering everything he endured. and it fulfilled a prophecy from the book of Psalms. But even though none of his bones were broken, his body undoubtedly was broken as he suffered through the torture of the scourging and the crucifixion. And his body was broken as he bore the full weight of God’s wrath toward our sin.

And then according to Jesus, the wine symbolized his blood and the new covenant that it ushered in. His blood was spilled so that you and I could be reconciled to God. And everything in the Lord’s Supper points to the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross.

Now earlier I said if we’re not focused on Jesus Christ while we’re preparing and taking the Lord’s Supper, then we’re doing it wrong. But I want to go a step further and say that our focus should be on not just on Jesus, but on what Jesus did for us. The bottom line is if we can eat this bread and drink from this cup without remembering the lengths that Jesus went to to pay for our sin.

If we can do this without a sense of amazement toward the love and the mercy that would drive the Savior to the cross on our behalf, if we can do that, then we’re doing the Lord’s Supper wrong. Everything about the Lord’s Supper is designed by God to bring to mind the nature of Jesus’ sacrifice. And we don’t have to go any further than Jesus’ own words to understand the purpose of that sacrifice.

He said it was for us. Everything He did on the cross was to make atonement for us. He said that the body was broken.

He said the body was for us. He said the blood was for a new covenant for us. What he did on the cross meant that we were no longer bound to suffer the eternal penalty for our sin, which was separation from God for eternity in hell.

Instead, because Jesus paid for our sins on the cross through his broken body and his shed blood, we can be forgiven. We can be reconciled to God and we can have eternal life with him. God forbid that we should ever forget what he did for us.

And so the Lord’s Supper was set up as a reminder so we don’t forget. So we can’t forget. You know, human beings are visual creatures.

That’s why God put our eyes in the front of our heads. We’re visual creatures. And so God designed this as a picture that we would see and it would stick in our minds.

Now, verse 24, in verse 24, Jesus said of the bread, Do this in remembrance of me. In verse 25, Jesus said of the cup, do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. It was made for us to remember so that we’d remember.

How long do we have to remember until he comes? Paul wrote in verse 26, for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. And that’s why we do this.

That’s why we do this. Until Jesus returns, we do this as a powerful visual reminder of the body that was broken and the blood that was shed for us. And so that we never forget what He did for us.

And so we never forget that He died to save sinners like you and me. In just a few moments, we’ll come together. And those who are believers in Jesus Christ, we’ll eat the bread and we’ll drink from the cup as a reminder of the sacrifice that Jesus made for us.

But before we do that, I need to address those of you this morning who’ve never trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior. You need to understand this morning that Jesus died to pay the penalty for your sins. This sacrifice that we’re commemorating this morning, it was for you too.

You can’t be at peace with God on your own because you’ve sinned, as we all have. You’ve disobeyed God in some way, shape, or form. and you can’t be forgiven by him, you can’t be reconciled to him by going to church, by giving money, by being a good person, by doing religious things.

The only reason that you can be forgiven is that Jesus died to pay for your sins. And if you realize this morning that you can’t do anything to bring yourself closer to God, and you know that you need a Savior, then this morning what you need to do is believe that Jesus Christ died to pay for your sins in full and rose again. If you believe that, you can pray to God right now and ask Him for His forgiveness.

As long as you trust in Jesus Christ completely to provide that forgiveness through the body that was broken and the blood that was shed for you.

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