Wash up before You Come to Supper

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Transcript:

If you would, turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 11. 1 Corinthians chapter 11. You know, when I was a little boy, I used to like to play outside.

If I could, if there was nothing that prevented me when I’d come home from school, I’d disappear outside. We’d climb the big mimosa trees in our neighborhood and chase the dogs and sometimes build things out of the vegetables in Dad’s garden, other than eat them. We didn’t live anywhere near a beach, so we’d run the water hose out to the backyard and make mud castles instead of sand castles.

I just, I loved to play outside and get dirty. But when it was supper time, my mother would call us, and you could not come to the table like that. Right?

Couldn’t come to the table like that. You had to go wash up. Wash your hands.

Wash your face if it needed it. I still love to play outside. I love it when I get done with my work for the day.

If I get to head home and I don’t have a meeting or something I’ve got to go to that night, you’ll probably find me out in the yard at least for a while and playing outside again. I repotted some ceramic pots full of rocks and things the other day to put lights in and moving firewood and digging and working with tools and messing with the car and be starting out a garden. And so I just love it.

And Charla has learned that when I’m playing outside, she needs to come and tell me about 10 minutes before dinner is ready. Unless she wants me coming to the table covered with grease and dirt and dog slobber and whatever else. She needs to come give me about a 10 minute warning.

And she does. She’ll come tell me, hey, or she’ll come say, are you at a stopping point? Well, never.

but dinner’s going to be ready in about 10 minutes. Okay, I’ll come in and wash my hands, wash my face sometimes depending on what I’ve been doing, change clothes, because she doesn’t want me sitting at the table filthy. And none of you ladies probably want your husband sitting at the table filthy.

The Lord invites us to his table. We can’t go to the Lord’s table filthy. The Lord wants us to wash up before we come to supper.

Now, I’m speaking specifically to believers this morning. If you’re someone who’s never put your faith and your trust in Jesus Christ as your Savior, please do not misinterpret this message to tell you, well, you’ve got to clean yourself up before you can come to Jesus. Can’t tell how many people I’ve heard over the years say, well, I can’t get saved.

Wait until I get my life cleaned up. That’s the whole point. You can’t get your life cleaned up enough to come to Jesus.

Jesus died for us because we were unclean and we were bound to stay that way. Because we’d sinned against a holy God and we couldn’t do anything to stop it or undo it. There was no amount of cleaning up or no amount of good that we could do that would undo the wrong that we’ve done.

So please don’t misinterpret this as a message saying, well, if you’ll just be good and you’ll get your act together, then you can come to Jesus and he’ll love you. This is a message for God’s children who are invited to come to the table, who’ve already trusted Christ as their Savior, who’ve already been forgiven of their sins, but sometimes we get a little muddy out there in the world. And it’s unfortunate, and it breaks God’s heart, and it should break our heart, but it’s just the nature of who we are.

We still have a sin nature. We are sinners saved by grace, but we still have that sin nature. And as long as we’re on this side of eternity, there’s still going to be some sin.

And we still need to come and take a bath from time to time. Now, it doesn’t mean that we’ve lost our salvation. It doesn’t mean that God has stopped loving us.

It just means we need to wash up before we go to supper. And one of those times that he talks about us especially needing to get our house in order, to get cleaned up, is when we come together to do what we’re going to do this morning, where we observe the Lord’s supper together. And they think, well, what’s the big deal?

It’s just a little cracker, just a little juice. It’s not that big a deal. It is a huge deal. It is one of, I’m not saying the most important, but it is one of the most important things that we do together as a church. It has come together to the Lord’s table.

And the church at Corinth that Paul writes to and that we’re going to look at this morning, the church at Corinth evidently thought it was no big deal. They treated it just like any other day of the week. And the Apostle Paul came to them and said, you can’t act this way anymore.

And this was a church with a lot of problems. okay so he’s a little harsh with with uh with this church when he’s writing to them but because he dealt with them at first he dealt with them before paul is very likely the one who planted this church very likely the one who led a lot of these people to the lord and stayed there with them I think 18 months and taught them they they should have known better plus he’d written to them since and been in communication with them and he’s looking at them thinking you should know better than this but if you go through the whole book of first corinthians up to this point up to chapter 11 He’s writing to them about some of the things that are going on in their church, and they were being torn apart by personality conflicts. I like this guy, no, I like this guy, no, I like that guy. I’m following him.

I’m going to do what he says. I like his teaching better. And I don’t really see that going on here, but it would be like if the church was split down the middle between those who liked and followed me and those who liked and followed Greg or Ralph or somebody.

And just over personality conflicts, they were divided. And they were at some points at each other’s throats. There was spiritual immaturity.

People thinking, well, I want to be better spiritually. And I’m going to make rules for you. And you don’t measure up to my.

And it’s a mark of spiritual immaturity. There was sexual immorality in the church. And I’m not going to go into detail on that because we have children in here.

We didn’t have children’s church today. That way our workers could be here for the Lord’s Supper as well. But suffice it to say there was immorality in the church.

But I think even our modern culture with all of its perversion would look at and say, I can’t believe that’s going on. And we as a church would be horrified by that. And yet they were just allowing it to go on.

There were legal battles. There were members of the church who were suing each other. And Paul says, you’re going together to be judged by non-believers.

Y’all need to work this out within the body. There were marital troubles in the church. There were people misusing their Christian liberty.

The Apostle Paul teaches us that all things are lawful for us, but not all things are expedient. As a Christian, I have the freedom to live my life however, but not all things are good for me. Not all things glorify Jesus Christ. Not all things build me up spiritually, and not all things build you up spiritually.

And so even though we’re not under as many rules as they were in the Old Testament, Paul still reminded them, you’ve got to consider these things. The most important question we ask ourselves before we do anything is, Does it bring glory to Jesus Christ? If it doesn’t, we need to knock it off.

Does it build myself and other people up spiritually? Does anything good come from it? It’s actually kind of a high bar to meet.

And yet there were, in this church, he spends two chapters dealing with the fact that people were just living however they wanted to. They were misusing this Christian liberty and causing others to stumble. There was idolatry in the church.

A lot of these people, these were not mostly Jewish background believers. A lot of these were saved out of, they were Greek and Roman background, and so they were saved out of those religious practices. It was real easy to slip into some of those old habits.

And you know what, maybe we won’t go back and worship the statues, but it’s fine if we want to eat the meat that was sacrificed to them. And yet he was warning them, you’re causing some people to see that and think idolatry is okay, and again we go back to making the weaker brother stumble. There was disorderly conduct, there was fighting in the church assemblies when they would get together, people talking over each other.

The church at Corinth was just a mess. It was just a mess. Paul spends most of 1 Corinthians just straightening out what he can with the church at Corinth.

And at one point he even says, and everything else I’ll just deal with when I get there. Think about that. The church had so many problems that this long letter couldn’t even contain everything that he needed to deal with, and he just said, just start there, and I’ll deal with the rest of it later.

Wait until your father gets home. Wait until I get there to deal with the rest of it. So he calls out the church because they’ve got all these problems. And when he gets to chapter 11, he deals with the fact that when they were coming together for this worshipful time, they were misusing it.

Now, I don’t know how often they were taking the Lord’s Supper. That became a discussion for me and some others this week. How often are we supposed to do it?

The Bible just says as often as you do it, you show his death until he comes. If a church does it every week, good for them. If a church does it once a quarter like we do, good for them.

If they do it when they feel led, good for them, as long as they’re doing it and doing it in the right spirit. But when they came together, we don’t know how often it was, what was supposed to be a worshipful time was devolving into these drunken parties. And it was just a symptom of the greater underlying problem that was the common thread that ran through all these things in the church, this selfishness, this sinful attitude that says, I want what I want and I’m going to do what I want and I don’t care how it affects the rest of the church.

And so he reminded them of what a solemn time this was supposed to be. We’re going to start in verse 17. He says, now in this that I declare unto you, I praise you not.

What I’m about to say is you’re not going to like, he says. I don’t praise you for what you’re doing. That you come together not for the better but for the worse.

When we come together as a church, when we come together to worship God as a group, We should make each other better. We should encourage one another and challenge one another, strengthen one another. But he says you’re coming together not for the better but for the worse.

You’re bringing out the worst in each other. For first of all, when you come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you, and I partly believe it. And I don’t think that means Paul’s on the fence that, well, maybe I believe it, maybe I don’t.

I think Paul was hearing so many things about all the fights and the disagreements and the divisions in the church that he’s saying they can’t all be made up. Now, maybe some of them are rumor, but there’s got to be truth to some of them. I believe there’s some division, some problem going on in this church.

He says, and I partly believe it, for there must also be heresies among you that they which are approved may be made manifest among you. See, there was false teaching going on in the church as well. There were different groups and different factions in the church and some of them were teaching heretical things.

It shouldn’t be that way. Now, that’s not to say that we can’t ever disagree. I’m sure we do disagree on some things.

But these were not minor things they were disagreeing on when he uses the word heresy. This is not like, you know, I believe in a pre-tribulation rapture and somebody else believes in a mid-tribulation rapture. Somebody believes in post-tribulation.

You know, and we can debate on that and we can discuss that and part as brothers and still love and respect each other. It was not that. It was not a question of, well, I think we should take the Lord’s Supper weekly.

I think we should take it daily. It wasn’t a minor issue like that where the Bible gives us some leeway, or at least it’s not clear-cut. They were disagreeing on some of the big things.

In a lot of these early churches, there was disagreement about who Jesus even was. It was a few years later, but if you recall, those of you who were here on Wednesday night before Christmas, we talked about who St. Nicholas was.

And we talked about the big discussion that they had at this church council over who Jesus Christ really is. And there was a man named Arius who taught that he was a created being and St. Nicholas punched him in the face.

For repeatedly denying that Jesus was fully God. Now again, I don’t condone violence, but anybody who’s that passionate about Jesus Christ and who he is is somebody that I can get behind other than the violence. These things were going on from the earliest days of Christianity.

Who is Jesus? Is he the only begotten son of God? Or is he a created being who’s not really God?

Is he just a good man? There were people in the church at Corinth who were teaching he was just a good man. I hate to break it to you, but if he’s just a good man, he couldn’t die for my sins or yours.

There were those in the early churches who were teaching that in order to be saved, you had to be circumcised, or you had to keep the Old Testament feasts, or you had to keep the Old Testament law in addition to being saved by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. and let me tell you if you’re adding something to the grace of Jesus Christ it is no longer the grace of Jesus Christ is your effort that’s saving you. These were pretty big disagreements and I’m sure that’s not the extent of it but there were false teachings that were spreading in these churches they were leading people astray sinful attitudes dividing people so it was just chaos when they came together and I’ve told you before we can disagree about some things that we can discuss back and forth. I think this means this.

I think this means that. But there are some basic non-negotiables that for there to be any kind of church unity, we’ve got to be in agreement on. I think two of those are who Jesus is and how he plans for us to be saved.

Those are absolutely non-negotiable. So they were fighting about these things. And it says in verse 20, when you come together, therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord’s supper.

Because they were coming together and they were fighting and they at each other, and they were disunified in every way you can imagine. And so he says, when you come together, you’re not eating the Lord’s Supper. I don’t know what this is, but it’s not the Lord’s Supper.

For in eating, everyone taketh before other his own Supper, and one is hungry, and another is drunken. Here’s another thing. Because of their division, and because of their sinful attitudes and their false teachings, it had led them to just an anything-goes kind of melee in their church meetings.

And so what was supposed to be the supper, what was supposed to be this reenactment, this commemoration of not only the last supper that Jesus had with his disciples, but also what he did on the cross and the shedding of his blood and the breaking of his body became a drunken feast that was more like the pagan worship in their temples than anything represented in Christianity. And so people who had a lot were bringing in all this food, and they were feasting, and they were getting drunk and gluttonous and fallen over, and meanwhile somebody sitting next to them, supposedly their brother and sister in Christ, is starving. One is hungry and another is drunk.

He says in verse 22, what? Have you not houses to eat and drink in, or despise ye the church of God, and shame them that have not? What shall I say to you?

Shall I praise you in this? I praise you not. I’ve heard people take this out of context and said, this is why we shouldn’t have dinners at church.

Go home and eat. So, not what he’s talking about. He’s talking about this selfish drunken partying that was masquerading as worship, and it looked so much more, as I said, so much more like the pagan worship than it did the worship of Jesus.

And you’re ignoring one another’s needs, and you’re divided, and there’s all this friction. He said, should I praise you in this? I praise you not.

I don’t find any good thing to say about this. He says, For I received of the Lord that which I also delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he break it and said, Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.

He said, this is supposed to be about Jesus. This is supposed to be about remembering what he did. And what he did was to take his bread and break it and give it to his disciples and say, this is my body.

Now, was it literally his body? No, it was bread. his body that was broken would be the next day on the cross but it was a reminder to them it was a picture to them of what was going to happen and it’s a picture for us of what did happen verse 25 says after the same manner also he took the cup when he had sucked saying this cup is the new testament in my blood this do ye as oft as ye drink it in remembrance of me he said take this and remember my blood that was spilled for you for as often verse 26 for as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, you do show the Lord’s death until he come.

So it is a reminder to us. But folks, what we do is also a picture to a watching world that we really do believe the things that we say we believe. We’re not just spouting some things about Jesus dying for us.

We have kept this picture alive for 2,000 years because we believe that his body was broken because of our sins and his blood was poured out for our forgiveness. And it is a picture that we show the world that we really do believe what we say we believe. Paul’s reminding them that this is a big deal. It’s not just coming together for a snack.

What we’re doing matters. It has spiritual implications. And so he says in verse 27, wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the Lord unworthily shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

Now this word unworthily is used multiple times and it’s an interesting word. There’s a connotation to this word that means not just, oh, you’re not good enough, because quite honestly, none of us are good enough. Their attitude was unworthy.

They were treating this irreverently. They were treating the bread and the wine irreverently, and in doing that, they were showing that they had very little, if any, respect for the body and blood that was broken and spilled for them. It wasn’t for them an act of worship.

It was just some other party, some other get-together. Verse 28 says, but let a man examine himself and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup. Paul said, I want each of you before you come together to give yourself a once over or maybe a twice over.

Examine yourself. Examine your life. Examine your motives.

Examine why you’re doing this. Examine whether you really believe the things that you’re proclaiming through these elements. Examine whether you’re in the right condition to come together at the Lord’s table.

It says, For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. Now on the surface of this, it sounds like if you take the Lord’s Supper unworthily that you’re condemning yourself to hell, you’re dooming yourself to hell. That’s what the word damnation sounds like.

But the Greek word behind this gives us more of an idea of judgment. And that’s borne out in the next few verses. That really, if we take the Lord’s Supper without first examining ourselves, what we’re doing is inviting the Lord to discipline us.

When we do something wrong, we get disciplined. Whether it’s by our parents when we’re young, whether it’s by employers or the government, or why would we not expect God would discipline us when we do wrong? He says here that they’re not discerning the Lord’s body.

And again, it’s not that the body and blood of Jesus are literally present in the bread and the wine, but it’s what they represent. and not discerning that coming in and saying, oh, this is just any other time together. He says you’re inviting God to discipline you because you’re not disciplining yourself.

He says in verse 30, for this cause many are weak and sickly among you and many sleep. There were people who were weak and sick, and that could mean physically, that could mean spiritually, it could mean both. And he said in some sleep, some people have even died.

For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. Again, if we would just exercise some self-discipline, we wouldn’t be inviting God to come in and deal with us. Because God, you know, the way God has set this up, he forgives us and he forgives our sins, but we still mess up.

The relationship is there, but the fellowship is not what it ought to be. But God gives us the ability to come and be reconciled to him over again. And God is willing to forgive sin and doesn’t necessarily step in and smack us down immediately.

It doesn’t necessarily step in and spank us immediately. We have the opportunity to come to God and deal with him about our sins once we are believers. If we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.

But when we are judged, we are chastened of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world. He says, Wherefore, my brethren, when you come together to eat, tarry for one another, and wait for one another. It’s not so important that the order that they took the supper in, but waiting for one another, It was a good sign that they were thinking of others besides themselves, and it wasn’t just a drunken party for them.

And if any man hungry, let him eat at home. Let you come not together unto condemnation, and the rest will I set in order when I come. So he’s dealing with this church.

He’s dealing with this church that’s not taking the Lord’s Supper seriously. They’re not looking at it as an act of worship. And he reminds them that the Lord’s Supper is an act of worship, and God calls us to come to his table prepared.

He tells them all this division, all this fighting, all this heresy, all this stuff that we’ve talked about already. Don’t bring that dirt. Don’t bring that filth in with you to the table.

This is an act of worship because we’re commemorating Jesus’ sacrifice together before a watching world. And this is not the first time in God’s word that he tells us to come and worship him with a clear conscience. If you go back to Matthew chapter 5, when Jesus is delivering the Sermon on the Mount, he tells them that if they’ve got an issue with their brother, they need to go and make it right.

And then come back, he says, Therefore, if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way. First be reconciled to thy brother, then come and offer thy gift. He’s telling them if there’s something not right spiritually in your life, If you’re at odds with somebody else, leave your gift there at the altar.

Go deal with that. And then come back and offer the gift. God wants us to come prepared for worship.

Again, this is not get your life cleaned up and then you can come to Jesus. We’re talking about those who already belong to him. We’re talking about those who’ve already trusted in him.

Our sins are forgiven, but still the fellowship needs to be made right. We’re supposed to come to his table prepared. A couple things that we need to know from this.

First of all, we shouldn’t come. Don’t come to the table divided. as a church.

Don’t come to God’s table divided. They were divided by heresy and false teaching and personality conflicts. He told them there was no place for that.

He told them there was no place for that. As a church we’re supposed to come to the Lord’s table as one body. Now that doesn’t mean that we won’t have disagreements.

It doesn’t mean that you won’t be closer to some people in the body than others. There’s no room for there’s no room for division when we come together at the Lord’s table. I think that’s part of the examining ourselves, is to see if there’s something between us and any other brother.

If there’s any division that needs to be fixed so we can come to the Lord’s table united. And it’s easy for me to preach on this this morning because I don’t know of any. So if you’re thinking, ah, he’s just up there stepping on my toes, he’s talking about me.

Well, that’s the Holy Spirit’s doing because I don’t know of any conflicts that are going on. And you may think, well, you know, that just never fixes anything. There’s a friend of mine.

He wasn’t a friend at the time. I met him at the beginning of high school. And I met him because he had started dating my best friend.

And just teasing him, the first time I met him, I was just teasing him. I told him, if you ever hurt her, I’ll break your legs. You’ve got to know my sense of humor.

I would never hurt anybody. I told him, I didn’t realize how deeply that had offended him. But from then on, he didn’t like me.

And when I realized he didn’t like me and had this attitude toward me. I didn’t like him. And we ended up going to the same church together, being in the same youth group together.

And we didn’t like each other. And it was pretty well known. And I remember one Sunday, as we were preparing for the Lord’s Supper, I got convicted about this and said, you know, this is not right.

Here I sit hating him and I don’t even know why. And I don’t know why he’s mad at me. And this had been going on for years.

By now we’re either juniors or seniors in high school. and during the invitation I had to go pull him aside and say, I don’t know what’s wrong between us but we need to fix it. And we talked about what had been wrong and we prayed together and we stood up for us.

And that was one of the best experiences the Lord suffered that I’ve ever had because something that had been division in that church for some time now was reconciled. And we were, I don’t know what everybody else did with their divisions and conflicts. I mean, there’s a church with 1,400 members, four or five hundred active members.

I don’t know all the conflicts that might have been going on or what anybody else did, but I know I came to the table undivided and he came to the table undivided. It was a sweet time of fellowship together with each other and our Lord. Don’t come to the table divided.

Second of all, don’t come to the table with unconfessed sin. He tells them, because of all this sin going on, that when they came together, it wasn’t even for the Lord’s supper. He said, you really need to examine yourselves.

Take this seriously. Don’t just treat it as I’m going to have a snack. You’re going to worship the Lord.

And don’t come to the Lord with this life full of sin and just act like it’s okay, God. You’re just going to take whatever I want to give you. So you need to examine yourself.

I try to sit in here before, and I’m finishing up, but I try to sit in here before church on Sunday mornings and pray about the message. And I was praying about this this morning. And I’ve always thought of examining yourself being a list of things I’ve done that I need to confess to God.

And I just realized the list is way too long. And my problem is not necessarily individual actions. It’s attitudes and tendencies and that sin nature that pops up.

And I just realized there’s all these attitudes and things that I had to confess to God. There’s nothing, there’s no redeeming quality in me that makes me worthy of God’s love and forgiveness. And I know that up here.

But being reminded of that this morning and dealing with God about that was a totally different circumstance. Kind of gave me new eyes for what we’re coming together to do. Because when you realize your sin before a holy God and you confess it to him and you realize that that’s all I am is just a bundle of sins.

Then to come together and experience this picture of what Jesus Christ did for us in paying for our sins when there were so stinking many. Makes it matter that much more.

when we don’t just flounce in and think we’re going to do the Lord’s Supper and check it off our list but we come in and we realize how sinful we are before God and how little we deserve what he did for us it changes the way we view this and finally this morning don’t come to the table carelessly don’t come to the table carelessly so much of this deals with their attitudes that they were they were irreverent they didn’t care about what they were doing they didn’t recognize what Jesus had done for them, for them it was just another thing to mark off the list. The worst thing we can do with this today is treat it like it’s any other day, like it’s any other religious exercise, like it’s something that really doesn’t matter. You come to the Lord’s table and recognize the gravity of what we’re doing together and what it represents.

God commands us to examine ourselves before we come to the table and if sin stands between us and God or us and others, we need to seek reconciliation with God and with others, and come to the table in remembrance of what Jesus Christ did to save us from our sins.