1 Corinthians 11:17-34 The Ceremony of True Unity

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his sermon series titled, First Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in.

Community, Growth, and the Context for Communion

Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. And I want to just say how glad I am to be together here with all of you. It is all of you slid in on the roads and made it here.

And welcome to those of you that are maybe here just checking things out. And maybe you found out that we were having services, so you showed up. Or maybe it's your first, second, or third week here. Really, I'm glad that you're here.

I look out regularly, and I think those of you that have attended here for a while recognize that there have been a lot of new faces around here. How many of you know what I'm talking about? So, I encourage you to reach outside of yourself this morning and meet somebody that you don't already know.

I encourage you to get plugged in together in relationships. Reach out this morning and introduce yourself to somebody you don't know, maybe during connection time or something like that. And remember, as Linda said, I just kind of want to give an added plug to the community groups to get plugged into community.

We believe that all of us, the definition of maturity in the Christian life is not crossing a finish line, but it's a commitment to ongoing growth. And so, we here want to be growing in faith, growing in community, growing in service, taking on more that God desires for us, and trust in Him in relationship with others.

He's made us relationally, amen? He's made us to need one another, and then He's also given us an ability to serve the body. And so, growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service is vital here.

Sunday morning is going to naturally lean into more casual conversations about things like national title games and things like that. Yes, yes, yes. But I'm confident that we all have a lot more going on under the surface in our lives than celebrating a football game, right?

There's a lot more. There's a lot more depth. There's a lot more that's going on in our lives that good, bad, ugly, and all in between. And we want our community groups to be a place where we can have those deeper relationships forged, where when you go through hard times, you have a people surrounding you at that moment who can pray with you, who can reach out to you, make sure you're doing okay, can hold you accountable, all those things.

And this is not just one big plug for a church program, but it doubles as a lead-in to our text that we're going to be going over this morning. Paul is taking it in our text this morning to the Corinthians with a really strong rebuke.

We're going to be in 1 Corinthians 11. And despite the familiarity that our passage will have to many of us who grew up in evangelical or Baptist churches or just took communion at a church where they went over this passage regularly, I'm going to ask you to war against preconceived notions about this text.

Oh, this is a text I already know. Because I'm guessing that many of us have no idea of the context of this passage because the only times that we've ever heard it is when it's been taken out of context for the purpose of just, not really out of context, but just taking a chunk of it out without its context to talk about communion.

But this passage is really a rebuke to the Corinthians. We think, oh, this is the communion passage, right? It wasn't until this last week, as a matter of fact, that I realized I have a good chunk of this memorized just from my childhood, from mere repetition.

I have heard almost this passage almost every time I took communion in my youth all the way up until we started Recast. You maybe have noticed that I don't issue this mantra every time that we do communion.

And some of you are used to that. But much more than a passage to give us something to say and reflect on during communion, it's a stern rebuke and even more a stern warning to the church in Corinth that we are called to take on for ourselves.

Paul cannot, in this passage, he says as much at the opening, Paul cannot say anything good about the Corinthians surrounding their practice of the Lord's Supper. And he will at one point even say it would be better if they didn't even meet.

It would be better if they didn't even meet than to slander the worship of the holy and incur guilt, he says, pertaining to the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Really, really stern words. Paul gets my attention when he says, better that you don't go to church at all than go to church and do this.

Now, how many of you want to know what this is? Like he says, it's better that you didn't even show up here this morning than that you do this together. And I'm like, oh man, we better mine into this and find out what this is and be sure that we're not doing that.

When we see what this is in the text, we might be just drawn up to a level of motivation to get more involved in life and love and fellowship with one another. We might want to sign up for a community group when we understand the this that the Corinthians were doing that was maligning the body and blood of Jesus Christ.

We might want to get more connected in relationships within the body. And in this passage, we're going to be called to discern the body, that is the metaphorical body, us. We are the body of Christ, the church.

And while the Corinthians were disdaining each other through classism and factions within the body, we might be guilty of a deeper problem of apathy and individualism in our culture. You know, we could come in here in this place, and maybe God has this word for some of us even here, but it's just a simple, I don't care about all of you.

I'm just keeping my head down. I'm going to get together. I'm going to get my church on. I'm going to sing some songs. I'm going to get my spiritual dose. My, my, my. My spiritual dose of penance by listening to Don preach.

I'm going to keep my head down. I'm cracker juice out the door, now back to my week. Check. I did my spiritual thing. In our worst modern equivalence to the problems in Corinth, I would suggest to you that we don't have as much of a problem anymore with disdaining the poor or even disdaining the rich.

We disdain each other rather by selfish apathy and indifference. A telling problem in the modern church is that we simply don't even know who the poor are among us. We can't enter into the problem of classism because we honestly just don't do life well together in our modern age.

An indictment on us all. And I'm hoping that here at Recast, we're going to make some strides, maybe even through this message in 2024, with really, really, really doing life better together. But let's open our Bibles or your scripture journals, your devices to 1 Corinthians chapter 11.

We're going to be reading verses 17 through 34. And while you're turning there, I want to just ask you a question. And the question is the question that the text is going to ask. And I'm going to show you a couple of things here.

Here's a cracker. Here's a cup of juice. And the question is, how can we honor the body without honoring the body? How can we honor this body without honoring each other? That is the question that this text is going to be asking this morning.

So 1 Corinthians chapter 11, starting in verse 17, Recast, God's holy and precious word. Give it your attention. Let it, let it wash over you. But in the following instructions, I do not commend you because when you come together, it is not for the better, but for the worse.

For in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and I believe it in part. Though there must be factions among you in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized.

When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What? Do you not have houses 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 commend you in this? No, I will not. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when 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, also, he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord.

Let a person examine himself then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.

But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world. So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another.

If anyone is hungry, let him eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for judgment about the other things. I will give directions when I come.

Let's pray.

Father, I thank you for this gathering. I thank you for this family that you are knitting together. I thank you that we don't all see things exactly the same. We don't all cheer for the same football teams.

We don't all work in the same places. We don't all have the same gifts and talents and abilities. And yet, it's such a beautiful thing. Your church gathered together, even on a cold and icy day like today, we're gathering together in your name to lift up Jesus Christ, our Lord, the one who bled and died for us.

Redeem us, to rescue us, to save us from our own sins and from our wayward ways, from the patterns of this world, from the futile ways that we inherited from our forefathers, and we have been purchased by the precious body and blood of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

I pray that that would wash over us fresh and new this morning. As we have a tradition here of taking communion every week, it can become a habit. And Father, I pray that today would be a recentering time for us to reflect more deeply on what this means.

Father, I thank you for the opportunity we have to mingle our voices now. What a beautiful thing that you have called your people to do, to sing your praises, to let our voices rise up to you together, together making a beautiful sound to you.

Father, I pray that you would be in our worship and help us to think of you rightly, high, exalted, and worthy in Jesus' name. Get comfortable and open your Bibles or reopen to your devices to 1 Corinthians 11, verses 17 through 34.

It's good for you to have that open on your lap to be able to see that the things that I'm getting are coming from the Word. And you can feel free at any time during the message to get up if you need to.

But our goal is to keep our focus as much as possible on God's Word for the remainder of our time together. And let me return to the key question that I asked at the end of the introduction, and that is, how can we honor the body together, communion, the body of Christ, without honoring the body of Christ one another?

And the answer in the text is going to be pretty clear. We cannot. We cannot. It is impossible to take communion in a God-honoring way, in isolation, focused on yourself, without any thought about others around you, without any love for others in your midst for whom Christ died.

The Lord's Supper ceases to be his supper, and it instead becomes your self-serving spiritual snack without consideration of others. There are going to be a couple of minor cultural hurdles for us to overcome in this text, like the fact that they have a major meal associated with communion back in Corinth and back in the biblical times.

But those are fairly low hurdles for us to overcome. And so let me first begin with an outline, if you're a note-taker. Here's where we're going to be going this morning in verses 17 through 22. The disunity of communion at Corinth.

A little bit of a focus on what they were doing wrong. The—more than a little—what they were doing wrong. And then the uniting purposes of communion, verses 23 through 32. The fact that it is much more communal than we think it is.

Much more communal than I think any of us were raised to believe it to be. And then the third is the practical local corrections. These are a little bit more specific corrections that I just have to take off as a different point because they're very specific to their context, not to ours.

And so, practical local corrections, verses 33 through 34. So that's where we're going. And we're going to start with the disunity at Corinth. What was actually going on there? I mentioned in my introduction that I don't think that the cause of the problems with communion at Corinth are the same as we face, generally speaking, in our current context.

They're not synonymous with what our primary problems are surrounding communion. I do certainly leave room for us to get the same thing wrong that they were getting wrong. I just don't think we routinely do.

But I do leave room for classism to occur in modern America. For the rich to disdain the poor and the poor to disdain the rich. And we can see that in our culture. I just have not experienced that personally in the church.

And I haven't heard people talk about it that much in the church to identify that it's a significant problem for us in our day and age. But I just don't think it's the primary cause of conflict among us like it was in Corinth in that day.

We have other problems that I'm going to speak more directly to throughout the message. More things like individualism and isolationism and selfish and all of those kinds of things. Certainly, those are the seeds of all of this classism that was going on there.

But it's good for us to peer into the multi-layered problems at Corinth to identify, again, once again for us, the sinfulness of our human hearts and just how far down we can go, even as a church, how we have to be really, really careful.

Paul begins this segment of rebuke in his letter with a very, very harsh statement. One of the harshest statements he says in all of Corinth. It's a little lost on us, but verse 17 basically says, I've got nothing good to say about the next topic.

Now, he's bent over backwards to try to speak positively into the situations where he can. And here he says, I got absolutely zero good to say about this, the way that you take communion. But that isn't the most harsh part of verse 17.

He goes on to say, your gatherings are a detriment. When this church gets together in Corinth in their what was likely a Sunday evening gathering, that's probably when the early church gathered was Sunday evening.

Remember, they didn't have the work day off. They still had to work. So they got together on Sunday evenings to celebrate and to hear the word and the breaking of bread together and all that. But he says, when you get together in your Sunday gatherings in Corinth, it is worse than if you had stayed home.

Worse than if you had stayed home? How many of you know it's got to be really bad for a pastor to say, you all better just stay home because the gathering is detrimental. You see the harshness of what Paul was saying here?

It's detrimental.

It's for the worse that you're gathering, he says. And we begin to see the diagnosis in verse 18. There are divisions among them. Now, Paul has heard this report by someone in the church who has been informing him personally about how things are going in Corinth.

And they've been writing back and forth to each other. And he says, it's hard to believe things are this bad. But at the end of verse 18, but knowing what I know about all of you, I can see it. I can see it, he says.

I can see that this report about the divisions among you are fairly likely, he says, and I believe it in part. I'm kind of prone to believe the report. And he spends a lot of time on church factions earlier in the letter.

So really chapters one through three really emphasize church divisions. And we've already gone there as a church. I mean, anybody could go back and listen to those messages, but all about the divisions that were going on in Corinth and the way that Paul was encouraging the gospel to solve that.

But, you know, remember that some were following Apollos, and some were following Peter, and some were following Paul. But these are different kinds of divisions that are being addressed here. It's not merely factionalism or just like having your favorite preacher or something like that.

That's going to be made clear throughout this text. In verse 19, he makes a sarcastic dig that could be lost on us because we read the words literally and we don't understand the sarcasm. And so when it says, for there must be factions among you in order that there are those who are genuine among you may be recognized, it sounds to us like he's saying, divisions are necessary in the church.

Doesn't it kind of sound like that when you read it at first blush? And that's not at all what he's saying. He's being sarcastic. Basically, how else are we able to sift out the weeds from the wheat unless you voluntarily line up accordingly?

Could we just have the bad apple sit on this side and the good apples on this side so that we could just see who's really in? That's kind of what he's saying here. He's being facetious. But how are we going to know who's really in unless those who are out really show themselves.

To be really out?

He's saying your divisions are tantamount to wearing a name tag that says, wolf. How else are true Christians going to be seen unless the wolves form a pack? What are they doing in this context? Off eating sumptuous feasts early in the dining room before the day laborers even arrive.

Talk about disunity. And they're calling it the Lord's Supper. Verse 20 is short but has a direct impact and has had a direct impact on the way that we do things here at Recast Church. When we first started, we were coming from a church that took communion every couple of months, alternating between Monday and...I mean Monday, morning and evening services, Sundays.

But one communion would be on a morning service and then two months later you would take it in an evening service. Now if you miss one of those, how long could you go without taking communion in the body?

You could end up going a few months without taking communion together. And I just think celebrating the central death of Jesus Christ for us and what he sacrificed for us is pretty significant. So I combed through the scriptures early on when we were starting Recast and landed here on this very passage and then another passage in Acts that...and I came to a fairly strong conclusion that when the organized gathering, the church got together, they did what they call breaking bread.

It's synonymous for the participation in the Lord's Supper and taking communion together. And here in this very short verse, verse 20, note how it's clearly presupposed that they participated in the Lord's Supper together when they gathered.

When they got together. When you come together, it is not the Lord's Supper that you eat. When they come together, they're celebrating some form of supper. Now, of course, here in verse 20, he's chastising them again in crazy harsh terms.

What you call the Lord's Supper is some knockoff cheap plastic model. It isn't the real thing. It might look like a Stanley Cup, but does it say Stanley on it? Did you overpay for it? If not, then it isn't original, right?

No.

I might get some laughs, but I don't know. Anybody know about the Stanley Cup craze? I'm not talking about hockey here. So what were they eating together if it wasn't the Lord's Supper? But what were they doing together?

Because they're taking bread and breaking it and spreading it around. They're drinking juice or wine in that context. They're doing the things. So what were they actually taking if it wasn't the Lord's Supper?

And I contend that they were just merely eating their own suppers. They were doing their own thing and calling it spiritual. Could we not be guilty of doing the same thing from time to time? They were in a state of radical disunity with one another while claiming to reflect the central unifying theme of the gospel and participating in the bread and the cup.

Namely, what is the gospel? That we have one Lord and Savior over rich and poor and everybody in between. One Savior who shed his blood because each and every one of us is an unworthy, filthy, rotten sinner who needed the blood of Jesus Christ to cover us and his body to be sacrificed in our place.

Now what were they doing in Corinth? They refused to acknowledge the leveling power of the table. The place where we come to get that bread and that juice is a leveling place where we are all on the same footing before our God.

All desperately needing his salvation over us. No one higher. No one lower. All of us on the same plane. Does that make sense? And this is a good place to interject that they came by their divisions naturally over this issue because no place seems to have been less level than the table in Roman culture.

James speaks about seats of honor and being seated at seats of honor and taking seats of honor for yourself at tables in his letter to the churches. And then Jesus talked about this as well. And so did many, many, many Roman authors dating to this era spoke about the culture surrounding the feast and the festivals and the dinner parties and the meals and all of.

This.

So much was written about the political drama that routinely unfolded around dinner parties daily in the Roman world. This was a routine thing for them. This was almost as baked into their culture as radical independence and an I can do it spirit on our part is baked into us.

They had clearly taken Paul's instructions to commemorate Christ through the bread and the cup. They were doing it and they had adopted it into their own cultural practice of what I would call table segregation.

They were segregating the table. So their divisions are the main thing shining through during what is meant to be a celebration.

Of unity.

What is meant to be a unifying thing is where their divisions are showing up the most. A couple of things that we need to understand culturally to wrap our mind around this text. Roman houses had two places to eat.

What was technically called, and here geek out a little bit on history, but it was called the triclinium. It was a formal dining area where about 10 people could recline with their heads. Why in the world did they eat reclining?

This is a mystery to me. Seems like gravity doesn't work with you on that, but that's what they would do. And they would, about 10 people around in a circle, head toward the central table where courses of wine and delicacies would be served by a household servant.

The triclinium was where you entertained high standing guests and people that you respected. But all but the most modest houses would have a triclinium, but they all had a covered porch called an atrium, a word we still use in English today.

And this is where the servants and the lesser guests would be welcome to eat a modest meal, sometimes supplied by the owner, but often not. And that was where they could sit and eat their own food. It was estimated that about 30 to 50 people could sit comfortably and eat together in an atrium, where only about 8 to 10 could sit comfortably in a triclinium.

This configuration isn't mentioned at all in our text, so don't look for it there, but it helps to imagine some of the potential conflicts an early church could face by meeting in a home that was set up this way.

You knew if you got to eat in a triclinium of a dinner party, you were esteemed. Left out in the atrium, and I'm suddenly getting flashbacks to middle school cafeteria. Who am I going to sit with today?

Probably alone again. I don't know. So, some of you get that, and then some of you are the people who wouldn't let me sit with you. Okay, talk about classes in here. Other important considerations are simply that Sundays were work days too, and so I mentioned that earlier, that the poor would have long work hours.

Church was held on Sunday evenings. The wealthy would be getting past their eating time, while the average day laborer wouldn't even be there yet. And so what's happening? The wealthy are just going ahead with their meals.

Some people will show up when they show up, but I'm hungry. This man's got to eat. And so verse 21, when you see in verse 21, people think rich people go on with their meals in advance, and if you were poor, you probably didn't even have a shot at a seat in the triclinium to begin with.

It was already full by the time you got there. And so our modern sensibilities likely are most offended by a specific word that you see in verse 21. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal.

One goes hungry. Another gets... What's the next word? Oh, how offensive. How offensive. We might be very, very offended by that word, and yet there's a word in that text that ought to be at least equally offensive to us.

Hungry.

Hungry. The church letting people in the church go hungry while they dine and they feast, and they have extravagant meals all the way to the point of overindulging while others are hungry. Do you see how repugnant that word ought to be to our ears when you think about what's actually happening in Corinth?

Gathering together for a feast, and some are literally, their stomachs are grumbling, and others have just had a sumptuous meal, and some are just a bit tipsy. A little bit past that even. Some are wrapping up a fine dining experience and feeling a bit tipsy.

They've already toasted Jesus, the food is gone, and now the hungry start to arrive. And church, you need to understand, how harsh is Paul being to them? Not harsh enough. Week after week after week, this is happening in Corinth.

This is their plan. No change in sight, just this is what we do. Week after week after week, this is what's going on. Now imagine, if you will, that this is the very context into which this letter arrives to them.

So it arrives in his first read to Corinth in a church gathering where some are already drunk.

That's the context.

This letter, first read.

Oh, a letter from Paul. Everybody gather around and we're going to read it tonight. Get here. Get here as soon as you can, and we'll have the meal together, and then we'll do what we do, and then we'll read Paul's letter.

Can you imagine when they got to this section? First time it was read, some were sitting there, stomachs empty and grumbling, while others had loosened the top button to their pants because they just had a little too much at the buffet.

Someone else is snoring in the corner from a little bit too much wine. Corinth, Corinth, Corinth, are you kidding me? This is what's going on there. Their gathering was for worse indeed. Do you hear it?

This is a bad thing going on here. Just don't even, just stay home rather than do that. Their practice of eating a meal together was a practical matter of the time of day that they were meeting, but it also developed into for at least a phase of church history called the love feast.

They would do this. I believe that this idea of eating a meal together every gathering was disestablished as a routine church practice, in part because of this very passage we're reading right now. I think this passage was part of one of the reasons that that didn't become established as just a way that churches do things.

When we lived in England, when Lynn and I were in England for a couple of years, we would often take communion in the context of a potluck meal together with our church, where we would all eat a meal together and then our pastor would get up at the end, pass a loaf of bread, pass a cup of juice.

It was interesting, it was unique, it was different. And while it was meaningful, it is not in any way to be established as the regular routine practice or this required practice rather. And by the end of passage, Paul will say so.

Yeah, it might be better that you don't have a meal together if you can't handle it. It might be better that you just eat at home before you gather if you can't get over the cultural baggage that comes in the form of Roman table segregation to the Corinthians.

But Paul expresses incredulity at their practice. What? Are you kidding me? Don't you have homes to eat and drink in? Wouldn't it be better to not eat a meal together than despise the church by humiliating those who have nothing?

Obviously better than any of this, of course, is to share. Eating at home is not the cure for a lack of generosity in your heart or a lack of love for each other. But Paul was making an extreme statement here.

Are you serious? Can I say anything good about the situation in which you're practicing the Lord's Supper, Corinthians? Of course not. You see that at the end of verse 22. And so now we come to the well-known portion of our text and possibly the most well-known passage potentially of the entire letter to Corinthians except maybe the love passage that's read at most weddings in chapter 13.

The Words of Institution and the Meaning of the Lord's Supper

But here we find the uniting purpose of communion in verses 23 through 32. Paul is passing along a direct teaching of Jesus and he's already communicated it to them. And you can see that, They're already aware of these things.

This is not new information. He's reiterating it for a specific purpose. He's already told them and they've already been instructed on the source of the Lord's Supper. This passage, this section of scripture is called the words of institution whereby Jesus institutes this as something for his church to participate in.

And it's believed to be a formula well-established and spread throughout the early church to educate on the centrality of the Lord's Supper as an instituted practice that we still practice today. But it goes back to the Last Supper and reminds us that this took place on the night he was betrayed.

You notice that that's stated in there. More than just a way of identifying the particular night, you know, the one on which he was betrayed. The mention of betrayal in this context also reminds us of the relational nature of his death.

It was someone who purported to love him who betrayed him. In the church, it is those, in the church in Corinth, it is those who are meant to love one another that are betraying one another. And there at that practice of Jewish, the Passover feast, Jesus transformed it obviously into a deeper meaning for us.

He took the bread, which is broken near the start of the Passover. And we have documents that indicate how the Passover was practiced. There was usually a cup of wine that preceded the breaking of the bread in that Passover feast.

But he broke the bread and he associated it with his body broken for them and us. And he instructed his followers to do this in remembrance of him. Verses 24 through 25 clearly support an institution of making, of taking rather, and eating communion bread, likely unleavened bread in its original context in the gathering of Christ's people when they gathered together.

And the church has been doing so since this time. Paul had already taught the Corinthians to do this when they gathered. But they were going beyond the bounds of this simple church ceremony that was instituted by Jesus.

And it seems likely to me that even turning it into a substantial meal, taken unintentionally and not even together, was part of the main problem that Paul is addressing here. More than just the drunkenness, more than people eating caviar while other people have bologna sandwiches, there's an issue of them not participating in this together with a focus on remembrance.

They are not remembering, and so Paul is fixing that. And as a side note, it's kind of for this reason I won't give personal communion at weddings. This has been a policy of mine since I became a pastor, because communion is for the gathered believers together, not just something for a couple to do that they perceive as meaningful on their wedding day.

That's not the meaning of it. The meaning of it is the together people of God. I've offered communion at weddings when everyone that's present that's a believer is welcome to participate too. Does that make sense to you guys?

This passage is incredibly clear about the unity of believers in this activity, not the unity of a couple. It's your vows. Take vows. Let's do that. Let's take rings. Let's do different cultural things.

But communion is not to be adopted in that. And for that reason even, I would just discourage a family from doing it alone. I would encourage it to be something that you preserve for the faithful body of Christ when it's gathered together.

The fundamental elements missing in the Corinthian table can be summarized by two very important words that we ought to have in our mind every time we think about the Lord's table, every time we think about communion.

And it is these two words that drive the force, I hope, behind your participation every morning, every Sunday morning in communion. It's these two words. Write them down even if you're not a note taker.

Together and remember. Together and remember. That's what we're doing. Together and remember. Neither were present in any meaningful way in the Corinthians practice. And if we don't consider ourselves carefully, as we're called to do in this text with even severe warnings of judgment, we may find that we are often lacking together and or remember in our hearts as we come to those tables.

Together and remember. The same is said of the cup here. Only Jesus added a beautiful phrase into the middle of instituting the cup. Not just take a piece of bread, but also drink when you are together.

It is a potent statement that's here. The cup is a new covenant in my blood, said Jesus Christ. Covenants in the Old Testament were ratified by blood sacrifice. And they were in the New Testament too.