Transcript

1 Corinthians 11, let’s go there and let’s talk about the Lord’s Supper this morning. It’s been quite a season since we have looked at the foundations or basics of what we as the church of the Lord Jesus Christ believe and mean when we take the Lord’s Supper together. I was just reading an article in my office this morning where they did an extensive survey of 20-24 year olds who grew up in church and they found that only 10% of kids who grew up in church when they reached their early 20s had any idea what doctrine their church believed and taught, 10%. And you wonder why we stay on a crusade about a true church, a healthy church, a church that believes right, has a biblical theology and a biblical methodology for what you do and practice. It’s because churches today are colossal failures. If 90% of our active evangelical kids go into their early adulthood and cannot tell you the basic things their church believes, we have failed.

I do believe that’s not the true statistic here but it reminded me in my heart and spirit that we have to go back and repeat things. It’s interesting, being here 33 years with you, how many things we’ve looked at, we’ve studied, we’ve preached, we’ve developed policies on it, we voted it in as church practice though it caused people maybe to talk about us or be opposed to us, whatever it was, and then you forget that that’s been 25 years ago since you’ve looked at some of those things. So, let’s renew our hearts again on the Lord’s Table and what it means and how special and wonderful and holy it really is.

1 Corinthians 11, beginning in verse 23. Paul writing to instruct the church at Corinth and really to straighten them out for all the errors and excesses and immaturities they had. He says,

“ 23 For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which He was betrayed took bread; 24 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.’ 25 In the same way He took the cup also after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.’ 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes. 27 Therefore whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord. 28 But a man must examine himself, and in so doing he is to eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29 For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly.”

Kind of a cornerstone, maybe the keystone in the arch, if you will, of observing the Lord’s Supper is that simple phrase “do this in remembrance of me.” He talks about the bread being his body. He says, “You take the bread,” and in ancient custom they, of course, served their bread as loaves and you broke off a piece so that you could partake of it and your body receive the physical nourishment. If you didn’t break it, you didn’t get a piece, you didn’t get the nourishment. So that prefigured, that is a symbol of his body which hung on the cross and was broken under the wrath of God for us. And from his sacrificial body and life, we receive spiritual nourishment and nutrition.

He talks about the cup representing the blood of the new covenant. Of course, to the Jewish mindset, that was prominent even though this was a Gentile area, the Jewish mindset was very prominent. They had for generation after generation after generation practiced bringing doves and turtledoves and bullocks and goats and lambs to their priest that the blood might be shed as a part of the covenant God ordained with Abraham. But now there’s a new covenant, one that makes all of those sacrifices and all of those rituals now absolutely – here’s the Hebrew word – obsolete. All of those old sacrificial aspects are now gone. They are all fulfilled in the blood of Jesus Christ.

There’s a figure in the ancient world that’s common in the Old Testament and it’s talking about a winepress and how the men would take off their shoes and they would tread out the winepress and stomp on those ripe, ready to burst grapes and as they would step on them, the juice would be released from the skins and it would flow down the little chute down into the containers they had to collect the juice. Well, that’s what happened to our Lord on the cross. The heavenly Father took his feet of divine jurisprudence and just wrath and he trod literally upo