Mark chapter 14 and verse 22. This is my body, this is my blood. And as they did eat, Jesus took
bread and blessed and break it and gave to them and said, take,
eat, this is my body. And he took the cup, and when
he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank
of it. And he said unto them, This is
my blood of the New Testament, which is shed for many. Verily
I say unto you, I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine
until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God. Amen. So it's a rather short
reading from our gospel reading today, but I trust nevertheless
it will be blessed to us. At the end of the Passover meal,
before the Lord left Jerusalem for the Mount of Olives, He instituted
what we call the Lord's Supper or Communion. And sometimes I'll
say to you that we're going to celebrate Communion next week
or the week after or whenever it might be. It's the last Sunday
in the month is our practice at the moment. I say we're going
to celebrate communion and we get a little piece of bread and
we get a cup of wine and we share together in the Lord's Supper
or communion. And this is perhaps just an opportunity
for us to take a few moments and remind ourselves why we do
that and what it means. And of course, many of us have
been taking the Lord's Supper for many years. For some of the
younger ones amongst us, perhaps it isn't such a common or as
understood a service and meal. We call it a meal sometimes as
well. and therefore we have some benefit, I trust, in just reflecting
upon this activity for a few minutes today. This then is the
institution by the Lord of his supper, the Lord's supper or
communion. And he shared this with his disciples
and he shared it and told them, this do in remembrance of me. So that is what we are doing
every time we have our communion service, every time we share
the Lord's Supper together. We are following the instruction
of the Lord, the pattern of the Lord, when he said, do this in
remembrance of me. And it's good for us to be reminded
why we worship in the way that we do. especially perhaps for
the young people, but for all of us, it's good for us to remember
we do the things we do, not because it's a formality, not because
it's a tradition, because this is what the Lord has instructed
us to do. And let us endeavour always to
keep our worship as simple as possible, as direct as possible,
and as according to the word of God and the pattern of scripture
as possible. The Apostle Paul later shared
this instruction of the Lord Jesus, this instruction, this
do and remembrance of me. He shared that instruction with
the church at Corinth. And he established this feast,
this meal, this remembrance service, this communion or the Lord's
Supper, whatever it is that we call it, as an article of our
faith and practice for believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Now
the form of our communion service, as far as the elements and the
procedure is concerned, could not be simpler. The elements
are bread and wine. And the procedure that the Lord
gave us is to bless and to break and to distribute the elements
that are to be consumed by those who are present. And yet, for
the people of faith, The spiritual significance of this very simple
remembrance service is profound and far-reaching and joyful. So there is a simple service
with simple elements, bread and wine. and yet it has a very far-reaching
and significant meaning for the Lord's people. And that's what
we're going to touch upon for a little while today. Our thoughts
will centre on the Lord's establishing this ordinance in the company
of his disciples and in the presence of the church. And we'll briefly
mention some of the circumstances recorded by the Gospel writers,
Matthew, Mark and Luke, and the Apostle Paul, of course, as we've
mentioned in First Corinthians. However, our principal aim will
be to understand the meaning behind the bread and the wine
and the comfort and the grace and the strength and the assurance
that flows from our participation in this service, that flows to
believers who by faith look beyond the symbols the elements, the
bread and the wine, to discern and discover the Lord's body
and the Lord's blood, and the things that he secured for our
souls' salvation by the sacrifice that he made. When the Lord Jesus
Christ was bringing the evening's Passover meal to its end, now
you'll remember we've been thinking about that Passover meal now
for some weeks. The Lord had come to Jerusalem,
he had preached in the temple, he had prepared his disciples
for this meal, and then he had come together with his disciples
to share this Passover meal in the evening time, the evening. and as he was bringing the Passover
meal to its end, he paused in the proceedings and he added
another dimension to the night's events. Now I don't imagine that
the full weight The full understanding of the Lord's actions and words
was grasped by the disciples at that time. I'm sure that they
looked on and thought about what was happening in years to come
and realised the importance of what the Lord did for them that
night. But it was clear to them all
that something important was taking place. For example, the
Lord's comments that evening and his prayers were very, very
special indeed. And if we go to the New Testament,
if we go to the Gospel writers and we go to the Gospel of John,
The 14th chapter of John, the 15th chapter of John, the 16th
and 17th chapter of John were all delivered at this time. They all appear to have been
given at this service. So that as the Lord shared this
Passover meal with his disciples, it wasn't just something that
happened over the space of a few moments or a minute or two. The
Lord gave the content of those four chapters, John 14, 15, 16
and 17 to his disciples at this time. You remember that John 14 begins
with the little phrase, let not your heart be troubled. You believe
in God, believe also in me. And the Lord goes on to tell
him how that he's going away, and Philip says, well, we don't
know where you're going. And the Lord speaks to him there
about being the way, the truth, and the life, and being in his
house many mansions. So the Lord was carefully building
the view of the disciples to realise that something very significant
was about to happen. And he was comforting their hearts
and he was giving them a wisdom and the material that they would
be able to draw upon and understand better in the days that lay ahead. That same passage, John 14 to
17, it ends with the Lord's exquisite high priestly prayer in John
chapter 17, where he prayed, Father, I will that they also
whom thou hast given me be with me where I am, that they may
behold my glory which thou hast given me, For thou lovest me
before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the
world hath not known thee, but I have known thee, and these
have known that thou hast sent me. And I have declared unto
them thy name, and will declare it, that the love wherewith thou
hast loved me may be in them, and I in them. And so all of
these wonderful thoughts, these heavenly revelations, these divine
truths from John 14 to 17 were being spoken in the company of
these gathered men on this occasion. And as the Lord took the elements,
the bread and the wine, and broke them, We see that there was not
only this highly symbolic Passover meal that they had just enjoyed,
but now there was sublime, intimate comfort from the Lord's highly
instructive teaching, perhaps the greatest prayer ever to grace
the ears of sinful men and women. And the institution of this simple
service that would bless the Lord's people for the rest of
time, reminding us always of what the Saviour accomplished
for us in His death. So that of all the lessons, and
we've been talking about that for months and months now, for
all the lessons given to the disciples over these months,
given by the Lord to His disciples, the miracles, the parables, the
evidence of the Lord's dealings with the Scribes and the Pharisees.
Here in the intimacy of this upper room, these words and prayers
in the run-up to the Lord's arrest and his trial and his suffering
and his death were as significant and blessed as any that had gone
before. And so this is the subject that
we have, this Lord's Supper. The Lord's Supper seems to have
taken place as soon as the Passover meal was over. so that there
was the end of one and the beginning of another. And that's important. We saw that in the little introduction
that I sent out to you yesterday. That reference as well that we
had last week, where Paul writes, Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed
for us. So that as we have seen, the
Lamb, that was chosen by Peter and John when they went to the
temple and offered it. That lamb was slain. That lamb
was then roasted whole as part of the Passover service. It was
consumed. And that was all a type of the
Lord Jesus Christ, all a picture of what the Lord Jesus Christ
was about to fulfil on the cross. Christ being the fullness of
the shadow, And the fulfilling end of the type meant that the
Passover feast had come to an end. The Passover feast had served
its purpose. It had done its job. It had its
completion in Christ. And being finished, it was brought
to its end for all time. We do not celebrate the Passover. Nor indeed is the Lord's Supper
a Christian version of the Passover. The Lord didn't, as it were,
add one service to the other or overlay one service upon the
other, but he replaced a temporary pointer with an enduring reminder
and an explanation of his death. What the Lord did at that feast
with the elements, with the bread and the wine, was he blessed
it, he break it, he shared it, and he consumed it with his disciples. And these actions and instructions
of the Lord in this simple memorial feast are important. He took
bread, he blessed it, he broke it in pieces, he shared it amongst
the disciples and he commanded them to eat it. And so too when
he took the cup, it was blessed, it was dispensed around to those
who were present and it was consumed. And that continues to be the
practice of the Lord's people in our communion services. We
bless the bread and the wine with a short prayer of thanks. We break the elements, we distribute
the elements to all who share in the service, and we unite
together in eating and drinking these elements. following the
example and obeying the words of our master who said this do
in remembrance of me. So that's the service that we
have. John's Gospel, actually, I did mention Matthew, Mark and
Luke and how they speak about the institution of this service.
Interestingly, John's Gospel, although he gives us John 14,
15, 16 and 17, which were related at this meal, he doesn't actually
talk about the meal itself, but he does give us a very interesting
little passage in John 6, verses 53 and 54, speaking about bread to the scribes and Pharisees,
the Jews, on another occasion and in a slightly different context. But nevertheless, although he
doesn't speak about the Lord's Supper directly, he does give
us a key verse to understand the significance of what it is
we're doing. He says there, verily, verily,
I say unto you, this is the Lord speaking to the Jews, verily,
verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of
Man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth
my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life, and I will
raise him up at the last day. Now, of course, the Lord's meaning
here is not that we literally eat his body or literally drink
his blood. But we believe his body and his
life is given in the place and for the life of his people. And his blood was shed for our
sins. This is simply the gospel. And it shows us that the Lord's
Supper, when we take the bread and the wine as emblems of the
Lord's body and blood, that this supper is simply the gospel. And it shows us that the Lord's
Supper is a picture form of the spoken gospel because we are
sharing together in the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. By
faith we share in and we benefit from and we enjoy the many blessings
of grace that was obtained by the Lord Jesus Christ for us
on the cross. such as our redemption, our redemption
from sin, the pardon of our sin, peace with God, and justification
with God, acceptance with God, and indeed the righteousness
of God becomes ours because of the sacrifice of the Lord upon
the cross. And this sharing in communion. This coming together and doing
what the Lord commanded his disciples to do, do this in remembrance
of me. This sharing in communion is
a public testimony of our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. When
our Saviour dispensed the bread, he did so with an instruction
that we are to eat it. and he did so with the explanation,
this is my body. The breaking of the bread is
for the Lord's people a representation of the broken body of the Lord
Jesus. Broken as it was on the cross,
where he was bruised and wounded and crushed under the weight
of our sin, where the wrath of God was poured out upon the Lord
into his soul and the judgment of God came upon him. Not only
the physical sufferings of his body and all that the Jews and
the Romans could do against him physically, but all the judgment
of our sin that he bore. And there the Lord's body was
broken. And we take the bread in our
communion service as from the Lord's own hand. and we eat it
to symbolise receiving Christ in his death with the hand of
faith. We live because Christ died. We feed on him spiritually by
taking that bread into our bodies and feeding on that piece of
physical bread. It's a picture of us feeding
on the Lord Jesus Christ spiritually. that we might grow in grace,
grow in our union with him. It's as if men and women and
boys and girls are saying, I trust in the Lord. I believe that when
he died, he died for me. And so with the cup also. The blessing of the cup cup to the disciples
around the table that night, it was just a cup of wine. But
it's what the Lord calls the fruit of the vine and he tells
his disciples as he passes that cup to them, this is my blood. The wine signifies the blood
of the Lord Jesus that he shed on the cross when his hands and
his feet and his side were pierced. And just as with eating the bread,
when we drink the wine it symbolises receiving the benefits of the
blood of Christ by faith. That is the forgiveness of our
sins, the remission of our sins, the taking away of our sins and
the cleansing of our conscience from evil. So that again, we
see it's a picture of the gospel all bound up in this element
of the wine and the consumption of that wine by faith. And faith is important. It must be said, it should be
said, that the mere act of participating in a communion service does not
secure these blessings. Men and women, and indeed boys
and girls, have been taking communion perhaps for many, many years,
and they've not benefited from it in any way because it was
not mixed with faith. Communion isn't a means of grace
in the sense that something is conveyed to us in those elements. Sometimes that's claimed and
some churches make a big boast about that. But there's nothing
magical, there's nothing miraculous in the bread and in the wine. It's only bread and it's only
wine. It doesn't become anything else,
whether it's been blessed or not. And through the years, there
have been many abuses of the communion service or the Lord's
Supper. Many, many things have been done
and said that shouldn't have been done and said. No one is saved and no one goes
to heaven by taking communion. No sins are forgiven simply by
eating the bread or drinking the wine. And no man or woman
or boy or girl is saved by the things that we do. Salvation
is God's gift. Salvation is by grace. It's God's
work. Nevertheless, the ordinances
of Christ when mixed with faith in the heart of the believer
do bring spiritual blessings and benefits. The faith that
is given as God's gift when we engage in these practices that
the Lord has left to us are a teaching and a comfort and a help to our
spirits. Just like hearing the gospel
explained and preached in our hearing, so receiving communion
teaches us about the Lord Jesus Christ when we have faith. and
it brings us spiritual benefit thereby. It's a great comfort
to the Lord's people to see, by faith, Christ's sacrifice
and death in the bread that we eat, and to see Christ's atoning
blood in the wine that we drink, so that with the eye of faith,
these emblems, they come alive to us with meaning for our souls. and they broaden our spiritual
experience and understanding and they strengthen our confidence
in the work of the Lord on the cross and the work of salvation
on our behalf. And I want to mention this too.
The work of the cross, the work of redemption, undertaken by
the Lord and accomplished by the Lord Jesus. The thing that
Christ did on the cross, the atonement that he made, is a
distinguishing personal and particular work. Luke, in his gospel account,
and Paul, they both emphasise the personal nature of the blessings
that come to the Lord's people from the death of the Lord. And they emphasise that by giving
us Christ's words. This is my body broken for you. This is personal. If we are the
people of faith, then this body was broken for us. If you are
a man or a woman of faith, this body was broken for you. And yet we also noted how the
Lord specifically speaks of his blood being shed for many. This is for you, and it's for
many. So who are these people? Who are these many for whom the
blood of Christ is shed? Well, they are the elect of God. They are the people who are everlastingly
loved by God the Father and ordained to eternal life by the sovereign
decree of God. These and these only the elect
of God were given to Christ in covenant agreement and justified
in Christ based on the success of his death on the cross and
his resurrection from the grave. These, many, these and only these,
are the many sons he will bring to glory, having honoured God's
holiness and satisfied God's justice and met the demands of
God's holy law for all the transgressions of his people. These are they
who are quickened by the Holy Spirit and converted by the preaching
of the gospel and taught to trust in Christ for all their righteousness
and sanctification and holiness. These many are they whose forgiveness
is procured and whose redemption is accomplished through the broken
body and shed blood of Jesus Christ. This leaves us with a final question. How do I know if I am one of
those many. How do I know if this is for
me? How do I know if this blood was
shed for me? How can I tell if I am entitled
to sit at the Lord's table, to partake of these emblems, these
elements of bread and wine that speak of the body and blood of
the Lord Jesus Christ broken and shed for me? Am I worthy
to eat that bread and drink that wine? These elements that speak of
the body and blood of Christ, Paul knew that that was a vital
question. So let me ask you and me that
question, that message that Paul gives us. He says in 1 Corinthians
11, verse 27, Wherefore, whosoever shall eat
this bread and drink this cup of the Lord unworthily shall
be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. You see how important
this is? Guilty of the body and blood
of the Lord. Why? Because you've eaten and
drinking unworthily. And again in verse 29 he says,
Now here's the clue. You see, if we are not discerning the
Lord's body, then we are eating and drinking unworthily. It sounds
very serious, and it is serious, even fearful. But what's Paul's conclusion?
He says in verse 28, let a man examine himself. I can't examine
you and you can't examine me. We have to have this self-examination. We have to look at our own hearts. and think about what the Lord
Jesus Christ has done, think about what the Lord Jesus Christ
has said, and discern the Lord's body in these elements of bread
and wine. And then, says Paul, let him
eat of that bread and drink of that cup. You see, the worthiness
is not how good we are or indeed how bad we are. The worthiness
is in the purity of the Lamb of God that was slain for the
sins of God's people. And if we understand that Jesus
Christ is the way, the truth and the life, if we understand
that Christ is the way of reconciliation and peace, if we understand that
his bloodshed is for the cleansing of our sins and we are a sinner,
then we have discerned the Lord's body and this service is for
us. We remember what Christ has done
for we believe that this is all our salvation. This self-examination
is not to prove us worthy of eating, but it acknowledges the
necessity of salvation by Christ. Because I know I'm a sinner,
I hunger for the bread of life and I thirst for the blood that
brings redemption and righteousness. Coming to Christ in faith and
fellowshipping with Him in communion, I'm filled with hope and I'm
satisfied with the promises of grace and mercy that He has given. And that's really our final thought.
Our saviour promises us that soon he will drink the fruit
of the vine anew with his bride in the kingdom of God. Soon we
shall drink the wine of joy and gladness with our bridegroom. And it won't be a little piece
of bread and it won't be a little glass of wine. These elements,
these emblems, these symbols will have passed away and we
will have entered into the presence of our dear Lord personally. Soon that will happen. In the
coming hours the Lord would be arrested, he would be tried,
he would be delivered to Pilate to be crucified. The Saviour's
death on the night in which he instituted this little service
was imminent. And this evening that he spent
with the disciples, first in the Passover meal, in speaking
the lessons that he gave to them, in sharing the intimacy of this
little communion service, this Lord's Supper, this few hours
of quiet before the storm of judgment entered into his soul,
was the Lord's final moments of rest and peace with his beloved
disciples. The Lord had begun this evening
by telling his disciples, with desire I have desired to eat
this Passover with you before I suffer. He ends it looking
forward to the of his redemptive work and the
glory that should follow. I don't know about you, but I
always find when I'm facing a challenge or I've got something difficult
that I've got to do or some big problem that I'm worried about
and anxious about, I always find that if I picture it finished,
and anticipate its completion, that I'm comforted in that. And perhaps, if I'm not too bold
in saying so, perhaps that prospect even fortified the Lord's own
soul in Gethsemane, that he looked forward to that day when he would
share in the presence of his Father and the company of his
people, this blessed communion once again with his people. Yes,
he had much to do, much had yet to be suffered, but that prospect
and that satisfaction of joining with his people in glory made
his task bearable. It was for the souls of his people
that he bore this suffering. Peter, James and John are already
partaking of Christ's eternal rest and ease in heaven with
their Saviour. That service, that feast, that
new wine in the Kingdom of God is already being enjoyed by these
apostles, our brothers in Christ. They are in their Saviour's presence
celebrating His victory, singing His praise and tasting His glory. and soon it will be us. The importance
of the Lord's Supper for Christ's church and people is to bring
to mind regularly and frequently the suffering and death of our
Saviour. Our Saviour fulfilled the types
and the symbols of the old dispensation and he left us with an ordinance
to remember and reassurance in the new dispensation. In the
Lord's Supper, we solemnly remember his willing sacrifice and we
gratefully acknowledge his atoning grace. It's a simple meal. but it is a feast of gospel truth
to be treasured and to be enjoyed until he comes for us or calls. May the Lord bless these thoughts
to us. Amen.