A Worthy Celebration of the Lord’s Supper

Grace Fellowship Church

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

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So, we're in 1 Corinthians chapter 11. You'll remember just before Christmas, we were looking at issues related to idolatry and the conscience and matters concerning food.

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And then right before Christmas, we looked at this new section of scripture that's looking at worship now.

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And if you remember back a couple of weeks, we considered headship and head coverings.

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I won't do a thorough review because I feel like all of us in this room have a good handle on that. But suffice it to say that God has made men and women equal and yet different and has given us complementary roles.

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And now as we move forward through chapter 11, you might remember just by way of a preface last time,

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I said that we were going to be looking at worship at least for the next several weeks. So, we have worship in headship and head coverings in the beginning of chapter 11.

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In the second half of chapter 11, we're going to look at the Lord's Supper. In chapter 12, spiritual gifts, love, prophecy in tongues.

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In chapter 14, an orderly worship. And the whole idea of this, what these chapters are all about, is that God desires that His church worship

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Him with an orderly worship. With worship that is ordered according to God's revelation.

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That is ordered according to God's personality and His character. And worship that builds up the church.

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That builds up you guys. And that glorifies God in our midst. And so the last time, we talked about headship and head coverings.

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And you'll remember that Paul started that section in verse 2 by saying, Now I commend you because of your remembrance of me.

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Or because you remember me in everything and maintain the traditions that I have taught.

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And now that Paul has issued that encouragement and that gentle correction, you'll remember, with the confusion of genders, he's now going to move on to a new topic where he has absolutely no commendation for the church.

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He's not happy with where the church is. He's not going to praise the

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Corinthian church as it relates to the Lord's Supper. While it appears that the

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Corinthians made a sincere effort to honour God when it came to head coverings, to the role of genders, even though there was some confusion, it seems that they've fallen miserably short.

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They're failing miserably when it comes to the celebration of the Lord's Supper.

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And as we'll see, the Corinthians, when they came together, some of the conditions around their gathering at the

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Lord's table was this. There was obvious and pitiful divisions in the church.

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We're going to see what that looked like. But there were obvious and pitiful divisions. The purpose of the meal, it would seem, had been forgotten.

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And I don't know about you guys, but when we come every Sunday, and because we celebrate the

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Lord's Supper every Sunday, I see this as a real threat and a real concern in my mind that we could somehow become complacent and forget what it is that we're partaking in every week.

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And so I think this is really fitting for us. But there's this division, this pitiful division.

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They'd forgotten the purpose of the meal. There was, instead of a deep sense of reverence that ought to have accompanied this holy ordinance, there was a sense of cool complacency, an unworthy, in Paul's words, an unworthy participation in the

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Lord's Supper. And so in the end, if we look at 1

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Corinthians 11 and verse 17, Paul actually says that it would have been better for them to have not even participated in the

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Lord's Supper than to do it in the way that they were doing it. The church's celebration of the

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Lord's Supper was not worthy of the Lord that they were claiming to remember and to worship.

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And if I can just stop us in our tracks for a moment, what a terrifying thought that is.

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If you can think about it, that we as a church can come together every Sunday, and many of us give several hours just to the

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Sunday meeting, but just to come every Sunday. This is church. This is your church.

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What a terrifying thought that we could come together in Christ's name with the ordinances and with the practices that He has handed down to us and that in carrying these out, we could actually do more harm than good.

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If that makes sense, we can come on a Sunday, and if we don't do it right, we will do more harm than good.

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I find that to be a very sobering thought, a very concerning thought.

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It should fill us with no small amount of trepidation. What an awful thing.

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And my prayer is that that would never be true of us, that we would come together and that God would be displeased rather than pleased.

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But if you can imagine that this is exactly what was happening in Corinth. The Corinthian church was gathering on the

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Lord's Day, on Sunday, to celebrate, I would expect, to sing psalms, to sing hymns, to hear the preached word of God, and to celebrate the

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Lord's Supper, and God was displeased with them. And it made me think, as I was preparing, if Paul were writing a letter to our church today, what words would he write to us?

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Or if Paul were to write a letter specifically to you, to address your heart attitude as it relates to the

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Lord's Supper, would that letter come, do you think, with a commendation, a warm encouragement, maybe some gentle correction?

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Or would it come like it is to the Corinthians with a sharp rebuke?

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How would you be met? Do we and do you celebrate the Lord's Supper in a manner that pleases

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God? And that's what our text, that's what Paul addresses today in 1 Corinthians 11, 17 -34.

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And this is what we're going to see, that Paul shows us. This is good news. Paul shows us the kind of Lord's Supper celebration that our

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God is pleased with. If you want to know how to please God every single time you come to the

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Lord's Table, Paul is going to show us how to do that. If it's your earnest desire to come to the

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Lord's Table, the Lord's Supper, with a right heart attitude, Paul shows us what that kind of attitude looks like.

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Paul shows us how to break bread, if you want the big idea, in a manner that is worthy of the

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Lord. I don't know about you, but I want to come every single time, every single week, not with a complacent heart, not with a heart that displeases

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God, but with a heart where, as God looks on, He's present in this room.

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And when God looks at us, and He looks not at the outer man, but at the inner man,

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He is pleased with what He sees. And what we're going to see is this, that we find emerging from this text,

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I don't like to alliterate too often, because when someone alliterates, when they give you the three

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Ps of obedience, or the three Ss of something, it can make it trite and difficult to swallow, because you think, is he a slave to his alliteration, rather than the alliteration serving the text?

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But in this case, I've actually come up with what I think is a helpful alliteration that will help us every single time we get up to participate in the

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Lord's Supper, how we can check our heart attitudes. And I call it maybe the three

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Rs, the three Rs of a worthy celebration of the Lord's Supper.

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And a worthy celebration of the Lord's Supper must consist of at least these three elements.

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These are three elements that we find in the text. Reunion, remembrance, and repentance.

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And I'm going to break that down for us. Reunion, remembrance, and repentance. So now to show you that this is not just something that I've come up with, but it's something in the text, we'll look there at the text.

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We'll start in verse 17. Paul writes, 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.

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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.

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For there must be factions among you, in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized.

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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.

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One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What, do you not have houses to eat and drink in?

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Or do you despise the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall

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I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. And so the first element that ought to be part of our worship at the

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Lord's Table, as I've mentioned already, is reunion. This idea of being in unity with each other.

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To appreciate this reality, we really need to understand one of the chief functions of the Lord's Supper.

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One of the chief functions. Every single time we come to the table on Sundays, one of the chief functions of the

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Lord's Supper is to remind the believers. It is to remind you of the unity of the body of Christ.

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It's to remind you, it's an opportunity for us to consider and to remember, to discern, and to reaffirm our union with each other in Christ.

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And I'm going to show you how that is. But what we see in the life of the

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Corinthians is this, that their first problem was that they failed to realize this truth, this principle that the

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Lord's Supper points to, the unity of the church. And rather than becoming an opportunity for unity, the

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Lord's Supper became an occasion for division. It became an occasion for division.

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And Paul says that these divisions were so visible in verse 18 that they became apparent to others, to other onlookers who brought this report to him.

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And the word that he uses there for division, or divisions in verse 18, is the Greek word schisma, from which we get, obviously, our

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English word schism. So there were visible splits in the church. There were factions.

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There was a party mentality, as we've already heard in the early chapters of Corinthians.

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There was a party mentality in the Corinthians. And their actions actually undermined the unity that Christ had purchased for his church with his own blood.

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And if we remember, if we look back in the first four chapters, the first Corinthians, we'll remember that those

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Corinthians were always trying to align themselves behind philosophies, behind leaders, behind apostles.

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They were always wanting to divide themselves according to worldly standards, worldly customs, worldly practices.

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And what we find is that in the Lord's Supper, it is no different.

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And Paul points out in verse 19, he says that there must be factions among you, probably with a bit of irony.

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Paul says that God has allowed, God has ordained, he's permitted factions, divisions to exist among you because it will actually show who the genuine believers are.

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This is interesting and it's ironic, but what he's saying is this. If you find a person who is really, really, really good at their faction, at their division, at their party, at their position, in such a way that it divides the church, that's a good way to identify someone who is not genuine.

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The factious people, the contentious people, are not the genuine ones.

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So if you frequently find yourself surrounded by division, if you're a purveyor of controversy or contentiousness dividing

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God's people by the world's means, you just might not be genuine.

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You might be an imposter. And your divisive actions will actually help the genuine people of God, the genuine believers, to identify you as such.

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And so he says there must be factions among you because as you see the factions, it will actually reveal who the genuine believers are.

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And then what's more, in verse 20, he says that the meal that they celebrated could not even be considered the

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Lord's Supper because of the division in their midst. He says it is not the Lord's Supper that you eat.

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He goes as far as to say, if this meal doesn't demonstrate, if it doesn't affirm, if it doesn't recognize your unity, the unity of the body of Christ, then it is illegitimate.

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It might be a supper, but it is not Christ's Supper. And in our modern reading of that text, maybe that doesn't shake us the way that it should.

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Maybe because we live and move and have our being in a church culture that does not prioritize and does not emphasize the

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Lord's Supper, maybe that doesn't bother us the way that it should. But imagine it this way.

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This is a very blunt statement from the Apostle Paul. Imagine this. Someone comes to you and they say,

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PJ, sorry to pick on you, brother, but you may have been immersed in water. You may have been immersed in water, but that baptism was a farce.

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It meant nothing then. It means nothing now. It's worthless.

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You'd probably feel some degree of offense. You'd say, how do you know my heart? Were you there when

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I was baptized? Do you know my current feelings about baptism, my current attitudes about Christ?

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But that's what Paul is saying here. He's telling them that their participation in one of the two ordinances, only two ordinances, these practices that have been ordained, handed down, passed down, commanded by Christ, their participation in one of these two ordinances is meaningless.

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And then Paul gives us some of the details of their divisive actions in verse 21 and 22.

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So what was happening is the few in the church, you remember earlier in Corinthians he said, not many of you were wise, not many of you were of noble birth, but there were a few.

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There were a few. And a few of those rich, the wealthy, the elite in the church were bringing their own meals.

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They were bringing their own food and drink to the remembrance service. And they were gorging themselves and getting drunk while the poor,

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Paul says those who had nothing, were being starved and humiliated in the meeting of the church.

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So not only were they aligning themselves according to apostles and philosophies, but they were also aligning themselves along social and economic lines as well.

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Pride and this sense of elitism had taken root and division had hijacked the

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Lord's Supper. And because of this pride and division, and because of their worldly attitudes, the Lord's Supper had become meaningless in Corinth.

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Useless, worthless. It wasn't even the Lord's Supper. And more than that, it was now a source of God's great displeasure.

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And we're going to see what that looks like in a little bit. And so every time, think about this. This is our church.

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Every time that the church met in Corinth, every time that they broke bread, every time that they took the cup in their hands in this unworthy fashion,

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God was displeased with them. And not only was God displeased with them, but they ate and drank judgment upon themselves.

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The judgment of Almighty God. We're going to see that as we move on. What a terrifying thought.

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And what we need to see, what do we glean from this? If we're going to be a church, if you're going to be a

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Christian that honors God at the Lord's table, we must be a church that loves unity, that seeks unity, that promotes unity.

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That when we see a brother or a sister or an unbeliever or a friend or a visitor sowing disunity, sowing division in the church, we need to respond like firefighters to an out -of -control blaze.

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We need to understand that even a small amount of division in the most healthy and robust of churches is like a small amount of the most deadly kind of poison.

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It's absolutely destructive to the local church and to the believers in the church.

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Listen to what Paul says here in verse 22. He says,

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Or do you despise the church of God? To have a divisive attitude is to despise the church of God.

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Division is not a small issue. It undermines the work of Christ and contaminates every aspect of the church's life and ministry, including its ordinances.

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But I want us to see, almost as part of the remedy of what Paul says here, I want us to notice how often

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Paul uses this expression, When you come together. In verse 17. When you come together.

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In verse 18. When you come together. He says it again in verse 20. And then in verse 33.

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And then verse 34. Paul repeats this phrase, When you come together. Five times.

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And the idea, I want you to see this with me. The expectation is that the church is to be a church that is frequently reunited.

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Always coming together. Coming together to celebrate the Lord's Supper. Coming together to worship.

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Coming together to fellowship. Coming together for accountability. For encouragement. For service to our

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Lord. The church is always to be assembling. That's what the word church means in the

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Greek, Ekklesia. It's the assembly of God's called out people.

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And we're to be a family in the truest of senses. I know a lot of families, they have a reunion once a year.

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Or once every five years. Once every ten years. If you're a really, really tight family, you have a reunion once a month.

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I don't know any family, not even your family has a full family reunion once a month, Steve. But the church is to have a reunion every single week.

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And that reunion is at the Lord's Supper. And this is an idea that's been largely ignored by the modern church in the

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West. But we've not only been made new in Christ, we're not just, there isn't just a new birth.

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We've not only just been made new in Christ, but we've been made one in Christ. I think about Paul's words in Galatians 3, in Ephesians chapter 2.

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I think about the metaphors of the church. One body, one bride, one family, one flock, one field, one temple.

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And we're to come together often to partake of one bread.

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And if you don't think that this has anything to do with the unity of the church, let's look at 1 Corinthians 10, 17 together.

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In that context, Paul is actually building an argument with the Lord's Supper and the unity of the church in 10, 17.

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He says, Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

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And so the Lord's Supper, when we come to the Lord's table in a way that pleases Him, if we're to drink the cup of blessing rather than the cup of judgment upon ourselves, we need to be a unity loving people.

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And we need to see this as an opportunity every week to think, do I have anything against my brother?

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Does my brother or my sister have anything against me? Do I have a divisive spirit, a backbiting spirit, a critical spirit?

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Am I slandering? Am I gossiping? Or am I promoting unity in the church?

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We need to be the kind of people that tear down every man -made hindrance to peace and unity in the local church.

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I read a story recently about Harry Ironside. He was the pastor of the

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Moody Bible Church in Chicago in the early 1900s. And one day he was approached by a woman and she said,

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Mr. Ironside, what denomination do you belong to? And he responded, I belong to the same denomination that David belonged to.

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I love this answer. And the lady said, what was that? I didn't know that David belonged to any denomination.

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And then he quoted from Psalm 119 .63 and he said, I am a companion,

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David said this, I am a companion of all them that fear thee and keep thy precepts.

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That's David's denomination. Psalm 119, verse 63. And this is the heart that God desires when we come together as a church.

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A true celebration of the Lord's Supper is an opportunity to reunite, to remember, to affirm, to love the unity that Christ purchased for us with his own blood, with his own blood.

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Paul turns his attention to the second necessary element of a Lord's Supper celebration that honors

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God and it's this, it is remembrance. So we have reunion and now, number two, remembrance.

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And he starts in verse 23. 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.

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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.

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In the same way, he also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

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Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the

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Lord's death until he comes. Now, I love to get into some of the apologetics of these passages because we're talking about the

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Lord's Supper and we know, everyone in this room, I'm sure, knows that there is a lot of disagreement and debate about the purpose of the

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Lord's Supper. Why does the Lord's Supper exist? Why do we do this on a weekly basis?

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Why would a church do this once a month or once a year? What is the purpose that the

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Lord's Supper serves? And I think that Paul gets to the heart of the issue when he talks about remembrance.

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But, for the sake of clarity, we'll introduce a little bit of contrast.

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We'll look at what the Catholics believe about the Lord's Supper. When the Catholics come to this ordinance, what do they think they are doing?

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What do they think this means? And if you were part of our Statement of Faith study almost a year ago, looking at the

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Lord's Supper, I did quote this, so you'll be ahead of the game, but John Anthony O 'Brien, he's a

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Catholic author. He wrote the book, The Faith of Millions. It's a widely accepted book amongst

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Catholics. And he writes this, when the priest, think about these words, if you're not paying attention, pay attention now.

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When the priest announces the tremendous words of consecration over the table, he reaches up into the heavens, brings

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Christ down from his throne, and places him upon our altar to be offered again as the victim for the sins of man.

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It is a power greater than that of saints and angels, greater than that of seraphim and cherubim.

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Indeed, it is greater even than the power of the Virgin Mary. Well, the

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Blessed Virgin was the human agency by which Christ became incarnate a single time, a single time.

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The priest, the Catholic priest, brings down from heaven and renders him present on our altar as the eternal victim for the sins of man, not once, but a thousand times.

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The priest speaks, and lo, Christ, the eternal and omnipotent God, bows his head in humble obedience to the priest's command.

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So contrast for the sake of clarity. They believe that when we celebrate the

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Lord's Supper, we are calling Christ down to sacrifice him anew, and not just one time, but a thousand times.

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And this is not a fringe view of the Council of Trent in the middle of the 16th century.

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This was a response to the Reformation. They decreed this, If anyone saith in the mass that a true and proper sacrifice is not offered to God, and that to be offered is nothing else but that Christ is given us to eat, let him be anathema.

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And so anyone that says that Christ is not sacrificed anew should be accursed.

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So that is the Catholic view. When they read this text, that is what they think the function of the

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Lord's Supper is, is to offer Christ again, just as if we went back to Calvary anew and re -sacrificed

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Christ. Now, Darrell, do you think that's what Paul is teaching here?

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No, you don't think so? What did he say? You do this in remembrance of me.

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You do this in remembrance of me. We proclaim, he says, you proclaim the

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Lord's death until he comes. To the contrast, Paul tells us the

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Lord's Supper is a meal of remembrance. It's a commemorative meal.

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It's a meal of proclamation. And Paul provides us with the authoritative source of this.

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We don't get this from man's imagination. We don't get this from a systematic theology. We don't get this from the

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Westminster Confession of Faith or the London Baptist Confession of Faith.

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We get it from the Lord Jesus. In Matthew 26, in Mark 14, in Luke 22, it was the

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Lord Jesus who ordained, who commanded this meal, and he gave it to us to do, he says, in remembrance of me.

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So when we come to the table, when we come to the Lord's table, what is our chief responsibility?

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We're here to reunite as a church, to affirm our unity, and we're here to remember.

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We're here to remember him, to discern the body, as Paul is going to say later, is to remember him.

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The Greek word for remembrance that he uses here is the word amnemesis, which shares the same root as the

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Greek and the English word amnesia. You can think about amnesia. Daryl, do you know what amnesia is?

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Right? Someone gets hit in the head, and then they forget, and they can't remember something. You know, in the movies, they can't remember anything about who they were and what their name was and who they were married to, but amnesia is to be forgetful.

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It's to have a sense of forgetfulness. And so the Greek word here is this amnemesis, and it can be translated as in remembrance, as we see it in our text, or as a reminder.

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And so what Paul is saying is that Christ gave the Lord's Supper as a reminder to his people.

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The Lord's Supper was given to proclaim the gospel, to proclaim the gospel to Christ's church until he returns.

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Even if the preaching of the word grows stale, even if Christ is absent from this pulpit.

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So long as the church is participating in the Lord's Supper in a faithful way, the

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Lord's Supper, this ordinance, will continue to preach the gospel until Christ returns.

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As long as the Lord's Supper is practiced, it declares and it demonstrates Christ's work on the cross for sinners.

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Paul says in verse 26 that the Lord's Supper proclaims. And what that means, that word means to report, or at a more escalated level, it tells with conviction.

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It gives us a convicting picture of the incarnation of Christ, that he came.

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When we take, later this afternoon, when we take the bread in our hands, we're reminded that Christ, just as this bread is real,

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I can feel it in my hands, Christ came. That's what we celebrated at Christmas, his incarnation.

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Christ came in a physical body. It heralds the crucifixion of Christ.

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That physical body was put on a cross, that it was nailed there in its place, and he became, our

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Lord Jesus, accursed on our behalf. When we take the cup in our hands, it preaches his atoning work on the cross.

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It preaches his atoning death, that his blood was spilt.

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In Hebrews 9 .22, it says, Without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sins.

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But, praise God, when we take that cup in our hands, and we see that red liquid in the cup, it reminds us that Christ's blood was shed for sins, and that there is forgiveness for sins, and that real forgiveness.

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The Lord's Supper teaches us through repetition, through repetition.

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For parents, we understand the importance of repetition in the lives of our children, even as adults.

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To build a habit, to do something for the long term, requires repetition, and the

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Lord's Supper teaches us through repetition what we read in Hebrews 10 .14, one of my very favorite verses in all of the

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Bible. Hebrews 10 .14, For by a single offering, Daryl, not a thousand offerings like we were reading, but by a single offering, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

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What a wonderful truth. Who here is perfectly sanctified? None of us.

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None of us. We desire to be sanctified. We desire to be more like Jesus, but none of us is perfectly sanctified, and yet, by a single offering 2 ,000 years ago, what we remember at the

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Lord's Supper is that we're already before God perfected. That is such good news.

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We take the bread and the cup in our hands each week without price, and we're reminded that we have been freely and fully forgiven from all of our sin and rebellion forever.

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We do it until the Lord comes. On the day that the Lord comes, if we are still alive and we are still participating in the

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Lord's Supper, we are still proclaiming that Christ is our hope.

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Christ is our salvation. Christ is our redeemer. In Christ, we have received the free gift of eternal life.

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The Lord's Supper, brothers and sisters, preaches every week without a word.

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And the Lord's Supper, if we're doing it right, does not preach me. It does not preach you.

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It preaches Christ, Jesus, and Jesus alone. And we need to be reminded every single week.

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That's why we celebrate the Lord's Supper at this church every single week. It's because not only do we need to hear the gospel preached, but we need to see it preached in the ordinances every week.

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We need to have the gospel of God told to us with conviction, to be proclaimed to us every

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Lord's Day in the Lord's Supper. We need to be reminded. Otherwise, believe me, otherwise we will drift into a subtle and a dangerous type of gospel amnesia.

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The opposite of remembrance. And if you don't believe me, you just need to live a little bit longer.

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Some of us might say, but I would never, I would never forget Jesus. Ever. Never, ever in all of my life.

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But just like Peter did on the night that Christ was betrayed, just as soon as we say that we would never do something, we find ourselves doing it.

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As soon as we say that we would never forget Jesus, almost invariably we find ourselves forgetting

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Him. I don't know about you, this is my experience, but how often I find myself at work, it's a busy day,

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I'm engaged in my work for hours, I have problems galore, and I get to the end of the day and I realize

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I have not given a thought to God for three hours, or for two hours, or for us to come into a time of crisis or distress and then to come out on the other side and say,

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I was so worked up, I was so preoccupied that I forgot the only one who could truly help me through that difficulty, that was

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God. We find ourselves irritated, or annoyed, or whatever it is, if we're honest with ourselves, if you are at least like me, we find ourselves constantly, constantly forgetting

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God. We don't just forget, I've said this before, we don't just forget our car keys, we don't just forget our cell phones, we don't just forget our computer passwords, we forget the

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Savior of the world who died for us, who became sin on our behalf.

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We are so forgetful. Charles Spurgeon, I love a good Charles Spurgeon quote, he said, we are too prone to engrave our trials in marble and write our blessings in sand.

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Just like the Israelites needed the Passover celebration to remind themselves of God's deliverance in Egypt, the

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Passover, we can't get into it today, but the Passover is essentially the parallel of the

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Old Covenant. Just as they needed the Passover year by year to remember

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God's deliverance in Egypt and to commemorate the

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Old Covenant, we need the Lord's Supper to remind us of God, the

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Son's ultimate deliverance and the inauguration of the new covenant of God.

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I have a good quote from R .C. Sproul. He says, the Lord's Supper is a drama that has its roots, not only in that upper room experience, but the roots reach back into the

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Old Testament celebration of Passover. And of that upper room experience, Sproul writes, in essence,

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Jesus was saying, I am the Passover. I am the Pascal lamb.

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I am the one who will be sacrificed for you. It is my blood being marked over the door of your life that you will escape the wrath of God.

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Every day and every week, we need to rehearse the gospel and to proclaim it anew to ourselves.

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Every day and every week, if we are to celebrate the Lord's Supper in a manner that pleases

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God, we need to discern the body, which means we need to see the gospel in the meal.

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We need to remember Him. As I said at the introduction, I think that we as a church that practice it every week, we get the benefit of remembering

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Christ every week. We get the benefit of Christ proclaimed every week. We also have the great hazard and the great danger of growing cold and indifferent to the meal.

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But we must remember Him. So there's reunion, there's remembrance. Lastly, the

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Lord's Supper is an opportunity, a necessary element to the Lord's Supper, and it's an opportunity for repentance, an opportunity for repentance.

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I'm not going to read this whole next section, but I'll read the first few lines. Verse 27. Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the

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Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and the blood of the

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Lord. Let a person examine himself then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

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For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself.

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Verse 30. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.

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So here Paul addresses those who participate in the Lord's Supper in a way that is complacent, that is indifferent, that is not accompanied by a repentant heart.

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And then Paul says in verse 28, if we see that, that every person should examine himself and then eat of the bread and drink of the cup.

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And Paul lays out the consequences of eating and drinking in an unworthy manner. He says those who do eat and drink

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God's judgment upon themselves, they invite God's discipline, God's loving and yet corrective and painful discipline into their lives.

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And some, Paul says, are weak, sick, and have even died as a result of this cavalier, this unworthy attitude towards the

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Lord's Supper. And here we see the deadly consequences of sin. I think sometimes we like to comfort ourselves that because we are redeemed, that because God is sovereign, there are no real consequences to our actions, to our sin.

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But Paul says no. Some, I don't know if we've ever thought about this, if you've ever thought about this as you come to the

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Lord's Table, some have died. You know, if I were to load us up into an airplane and we were to fly 20 ,000 feet above and I gave you all parachutes and said,

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I want you guys to enjoy yourselves, just remember that some people have died doing this. That's going to strike fear into the hearts of most ordinary people.

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When you approach the Lord's Table, I warn you, some people have died doing this.

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Some people have died doing this. And this is the reason why we actually practice fencing the table, because we take this warning deadly serious.

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As far as we can help, we do not want an unbeliever who is living in unrepentant sin to eat and drink

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God's judgment upon themselves. This is something that oftentimes isn't taken as seriously as it should, but in the early church and after the

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Reformation, we see all kinds of examples of this. And I found one that I thought was both powerful and amusing.

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In the 4th century, the Roman Emperor Theodosius ordered the killing of 7 ,000 citizens in Thessalonica.

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We know Thessalonica because Paul wrote letters to the Thessalonians. And the Bishop Ambrose, the bishop in the church, wrote the

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Emperor a letter of severe rebuke. He's writing a letter, remember, to the Emperor, the Roman Emperor, not even the

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Prime Minister, but the Roman Emperor. And he wrote a letter of severe rebuke, warning him not to approach the

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Lord's table. He said because he had hands stained with innocent blood.

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And when Theodosius came to the church of Milan to partake in the

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Lord's Supper, despite Ambrose's warning, Ambrose stopped him at the door. Again, the

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Roman Emperor, the Bishop, stopped him at the door and refused him entry.

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And when he was refused entry, the Emperor pleaded with Ambrose. He said, David, the man after God's own heart, had been guilty of murder and adultery.

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Let me in. Even David was forgiven. And Ambrose replied, you have imitated

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David in his crime. Imitate him in his repentance. That has been the heart and the attitude of the church towards the

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Lord's Supper throughout the ages. Is that our attitude?

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And then see this. He said, you've imitated him in his crime. Imitate him in his repentance.

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This is one of the gifts of the Lord's Supper. It's an opportunity every single week to repent.

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Do we see that as an opportunity in the church? I get the opportunity today to repent of my sin.

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To really, when it gets serious, when the pressure is on to come before God and to lay it all out, to itemize it one by one, to put it all into God's purifying light, to lay it out before the

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God of the universe, the holy, holy, holy God that we read about in Genesis and Exodus and Deuteronomy and Joshua and Isaiah.

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It's an opportunity, Paul says, for honest self -examination. And that's repeatedly commanded in Scripture to examine ourselves.

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We're not to come with this sense of entitlement that because I have a profession,

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I am therefore secure. Paul exhorted the Corinthians to examine themselves.

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Examine yourself. Like I said, lay it all out before God so that not a single sin is hidden from His sight.

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It reminds me of before I was a Christian. I underwent a few polygraph tests for work.

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And I remember at the beginning of both polygraph tests, one of the things that they do is this.

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They say, imagine, maybe I've shared this story before, so forgive me. I'm thinking maybe I have. But imagine there's a cake on the counter.

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And as you walk by, maybe your parent or your family member says, do not eat this cake.

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Do not eat this cake. This is for tonight's party. And so you say, absolutely, I won't eat this cake.

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They leave the room, and you see a crumb that's fallen off the platter and is on the counter.

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And so you think, how can that possibly hurt? And you take the crumb, and you eat the crumb. And then they come in with the polygraph test, and they say, did you eat any of the cake?

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And if you're really honest, you have to say, if it's a yes or no answer, you have to say, yes,

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I ate the cake. Even though I was told not to eat the cake, I ate the cake, but I only ate a crumb.

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When we come before God in repentance, true repentance, it's not just coming in vague terms, but it's coming with all of the crumbs.

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It's coming with everything. I've heard it said, and I believe it, that the most sincere confession, the most sincere repentance, is the most specific confession.

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And the Lord's Supper is that opportunity. And not only should we be doing this every week, but we should be doing it every day, actively, actively putting sin to death.

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Daryl, to repent, that means to have a change of mind and have a change of direction.

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And so you say, in this area where I have not been looking to God, thinking the way that God would have me to think, walking in the direction that God would have me to walk,

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I'm going to change course, and I'm going to God and to what God desires.

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That's repentance. God commands us to do that every day. I'll share this just as we conclude.

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Philip Henry, who here has benefited from the commentaries of Matthew Henry? Many of us have.

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Philip Henry was his dad. And in the year 1680, he spent some time preaching on the doctrine of repentance and faith that had become quite a controversial topic because people felt that some preachers, and one preacher in specific, was preaching too much on repentance and faith.

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There's too much emphasis on repentance. Too much repentance. And during one of the sermons, as he was addressing this issue of repentance and faith, he said this.

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He said, Some people do not like to hear much of repentance, but I think it is so necessary that if I should die in the pulpit,

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I should desire to die preaching repentance. And, and think about this, and if I should die out of the pulpit,

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I should desire to die practicing repentance. That is how we are going to come to the

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Lord's table and to honor him by seeing it as an opportunity to discern the body, the body of Christ slain for us, the body of Christ, which is the church, and her unity, and to come to the

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Lord's table with a heart of repentance, laying our sin before God. And brothers and sisters, in laying our sin before God, finding assurance in Christ, looking to Jesus, knowing and trusting and believing with all of our hearts that we are forgiven.

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Not only do we have an opportunity for repentance, but we also, at the Lord's table, have an opportunity for a clean conscience before him.

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And a clean conscience, as far as I'm concerned, is worth more than all the money in all the world.

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To know I'm right with God Almighty today, and if you should call me home, even now, come