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
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.
