Remember Jesus Often — David Servant

The third biblical principle to ensure that next year will be your best year yet. Hi, welcome to today's Little Lesson. Thank you so very much for joining me. This is kind of like the 12 days of Christmas.

I was thinking about that Christmas carol earlier today, the Christmas carol that says on the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me. And every day, the true love gives the singer of the carol another gift and so on.

And so I'm so blessed that I have 12 gifts to give to you as we approach Christmas. And actually, we're going to go all the way to the end of the year because our goal is to have the very best year of our lives next year.

Loving God and Doing What Is Right

It's very, very possible if we'll get on the path of the righteous, do right, and love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength. We've talked about those two principles in our last two Little Lessons, special Little Lessons.

So if you missed those, why don't you just stop right now and watch those? They're both about 15 minutes, and then you'll be caught right up with the rest of us, and we can build from there. So this third principle that I want to talk about today, and again, it's very simple.

Of course, it's biblical. And it's so simple that I think people miss out on how profound it is. And when I first say this principle, you're going to go, oh, well, you might roll your eyeballs. But just hang with me because I have a lot more to say about this principle, and then you'll understand a little bit more what I mean.

First principle is do right. Second principle is love God. And the third principle is remember Jesus. Now, you're going to say, well, how could I ever forget Jesus? Okay. Yeah, I get that. But what I mean by remember Jesus is to be mindful of what Jesus has done for you and for me as much as possible.

Okay? Because if we're going to do right, let's start with loving God. We're going to love God. And as a result of loving God, we're going to do right. Why do we love God? Well, John wrote, we love God.

Understanding the Transforming Love of God

We love him because he first loved us. So the more that we come to comprehend and understand and grasp the love of God, then the more we're probably going to love him. In fact, Paul even prayed that for the Ephesian Christians, that you might know the length and the breadth and the depth and to know the love of Christ, which surpasses knowledge.

And so there's an infinite potential. I didn't say that right. The love of God is infinite. It's beyond actual realizing it in its fullness. But we can grow gradually to getting a better and better revelation and understanding of God's love.

And that's transformative because we love because he first loved us. So the more that we can get a handle of his love. So what's the greatest act of love by our wonderful God? Well, I know you know, and that is Jesus's excruciating sacrifice on the cross.

Remembering Christ’s Sacrifice for Sin

And of course, he suffered even before the cross, starting in the Garden of Gethsemane. If possible, take this cup from me. He even prayed. It was so horrible. He received 39 lashes. He was mocked. He was abused.

He was spit upon. His beard was torn out. He was impaled to a cross. He hung there for hours and so forth. And even the people who gathered around to watch him die, mocked him and so forth. So he did that for us.

He bore our sin in his body on the cross. And you cannot help but think about that without it giving you pause and to make you appreciate and thankful and eliciting feelings of gratitude towards the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I don't think about that enough myself, but I'm taking steps to try to think about that more. And that's what I also want to encourage you to do as well. If we want to have our best year of our lives, well, it's going to be related to loving God and doing what's right.

And so if we're going to love God, well, let's get to know his love for us. And naturally that will produce a greater love and appreciation for him from our own hearts. So in expounding on this a little bit, you recall that Jesus, on the night in which he was betrayed at the end of what would be the last supper, the Passover meal that he had with the 12, that he, first of all, girded himself with a towel and he washed their feet and so forth and gave them example as how they ought to serve one another.

The Lord’s Supper and Remembrance

But something else that happened after the supper is that he took the bread and the cup and he said, this is my body broken for you, et cetera, et cetera. And this is the cup of the new covenant, my blood shed for the remission of sins and so forth.

And he said something very important. It was all important, of course, but he said, do this in remembrance of me. And so it's become an ordinance of the church. Most churches say there's two ordinances, at least in the Protestant world, baptism and the Eucharist or baptism and communion.

And various churches have various traditions as to how often they partake of the Lord's supper and how they do it, when they do it and so forth. And I've never, well, I should say for a long time, I have not been persuaded that we're doing this right on a number of levels.

Okay. And I'm not going to elaborate on all those particulars, but I am going to hone in on do this in remembrance of me, because we know that the bread represents his body broken for us. That's his excruciating death.

He bore in his body our sins on the cross and the wine or the juice represents his blood, which was shed for the remission of our sins. So the death of Jesus Christ is very much characterized and symbolized in the Lord's supper, no matter how you take it.

Now, some churches, their tradition is they do it once a year because they say, well, Jesus did it once at the Passover. Passover is once a year, and that's what he meant. Do this in remembrance of me once a year.

But Jesus didn't say, do this in remembrance of me once a year. Some churches do it once a month. They have their communion Sunday. It's the first or the last Sunday of the month, oftentimes, and they do it that way.

And it's kind of evolved into a kind of an interesting thing. Again, I'm not here to argue the particulars, but the first Lord's supper was a meal with believers gathered around, and they just had a meal together.

And then they each broke some bread, which would be a component of every Jewish meal. And then they drank from this common cup. And wine was a very common beverage. They didn't have Coca-Cola and Mountain Dew and all the other beverage choices that we have.

Back in their day, in that time, it was basically water, by which you took a risk drinking water because of poor sanitation and so forth. Paul even told Timothy, don't longer drink water exclusively, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments, and that's the reason.

And so wine was a very, very, very common element of Jewish meals, not just something they did once a year at Passover. And bread was the most common element of average Jewish meals in Jesus's day. Right?

Right. In fact, the phrase, let's break bread together, is just really a synonymous term. People think, well, that's talking about communion. Well, it could be, but it doesn't have to be talking about communion because they broke bread every day, practically at every meal.

There was a loaf of bread and they broke it and didn't even have a knife, broke pieces off. And so Jesus took those very common elements and he said, this is my body. This is my blood. So from now on, I want you to associate bread with my body and wine or grape juice with my blood.

The Symbolism of Bread and Wine

Do this in remembrance of me. And if you read in the New Testament epistles, there's nothing that says once a week, once a month, once a year, they came together with their love feast. Paul did talk about the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians and how it was being done improperly when they all came together.

But there's no mention of a little wafer and a little cup. It seems like they did it as a full meal altogether. Okay. But I'm not even going to get off onto that. I want to talk about the fact that Jesus took the two most common elements of what you would eat and what you would drink in his day, the most common elements.

And he placed a symbolism on them. My body, my blood. You think about it. Grape juice does kind of look a little bit like blood, not exactly like blood. Wine, red wine looks a little bit like blood, not exactly.

Bread kind of looks like a body, just a round thing, but maybe kind of flesh colored. And so Jesus takes two very common things and says, do this in remembrance of me. And so I actually, I'm just telling you what I've done.

And even if I'm wrong, I'm not wrong in what I'm doing. Who was going to argue against this? I like to think that every time that I have a meal, if I have bread, for example, or a beverage, I can think about the body and the blood of Jesus and that he gave his life sacrificially, excruciatingly, unjustly, in one sense, he took upon himself my sin.

Practicing Remembrance at Every Meal

And it's good to think about that and to remember him every time I do that. And my diet is much more varied than the average diet back in Jesus' day. I have, probably you too, we eat so many different foods and bread is just one component and we have so many different beverages.

I just think about this, what if Jesus, instead of coming to Israel, had gone to somewhere in the tropics where there's not wheat, there's rice. And where the most common staple, for example, in most all of Asia, every meal seems that you have rice if you're in Asia.

And what do you drink? Well, you're not drinking wine if you're in a tropical area, unless of course it's been imported from a faraway place. You can't grow wine and tropical grapes and tropical climates.

People drink a lot of things. So again, I'm just wondering and just want your gears to be turning a little bit. If Jesus had gone to Burma or Cambodia or Laos or Thailand or something instead of Israel, is it possible that the Lord's Supper would have been different elements?

And it could have been rice and pineapple juice or something. Why not? Why not? And does God love the people in Thailand and Cambodia? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So again, I think we've religiocized this in a lot of ways.

Remembering Jesus Through Prayer and Obedience

And here's what I'm telling you to do. I want you to, in this next year, to make it the best year of your life by doing right, loving God, and remembering Jesus. And I'm going to encourage you at every single meal, I hope that you take a moment to be thankful for your meal and to pray a prayer.

My wife and I always, when we eat together, we pray. And I am reminding myself and reminding my wife in my prayer, thank you, Lord Jesus, that you died on the cross for my sins. You shed your blood for my sins.

Your body was broken for me. And I remember you. That reminds me of how great and good you are. And that causes me to love you more, which is going to result in me loving you more and obeying you more.

See, I'm remembering him. Now, I only eat two meals a day at my age, but you might eat three meals a day. If at every meal, three times a day, you remember Jesus' sacrificial death for you consciously in your mind and said something out your mouth to that effect, even if I'm wrong in saying that that's really not the Lord's Supper, because that doesn't meet the criteria.

There's not an ordained minister, and you're not in a church building, and you don't have the little cup and the little wafer and so forth. Even if I'm wrong, and this is a little bit unscriptural, who's going to find fault with me for encouraging people to remember Jesus?

Every three times a day, every time when you pray. And even think about the fact that just you can take the communion symbolism further. When we take communion, the wine and the bread, we eat it, and it goes into us.

And so, that also reminds us of the fact that Christ who died for us has come into us. You could even take it one step further. There's lots of analogies, but you chew it, the bread. Jesus was crushed for our iniquity.

So, as you chew, you could even think about, it was my sins that killed Jesus. And that will cause love for him to well up on the inside of you. Three times a day, remember Jesus and verbalize that out loud.

And think of whatever you're eating, that's his body. Whatever you're drinking, that's his blood. Don't ever have a meal again without thinking, that's his blood. That's his body. I'm taking it into me.

I'm remembering what he did, and he's in me now. Just as this food gives life to every cell in my body, so Christ gives life, eternal life, new life, the Holy Spirit life inside of me. Okay? So, that's the third thing I want you to do.

Beginning Today: Do Right, Love God, Remember Jesus

Don't wait until next year, start today. Why would you wait? Do right. Love God. Remember Jesus. Until next time, may the Lord bless you.