Preparing for the Lord's Supper

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

- SERMON TRANSCRIPT -  

I. The Corinthian Context

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II. Historical Context

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

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

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

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

III. Modern Context

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

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

IV. Looking Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. Looking Up

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

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

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

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

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

VI. Looking Within 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII. Looking Down

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

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

VIII. Looking Around

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

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

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

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

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

IX. Looking Forward 

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

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

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

X. Summary 

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

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