I appreciate both of those hymns,
words, such a blessing. Let's look tonight to 1st Corinthians
chapter 10, and then we'll turn to chapter 11. 1st Corinthians chapter 10, beginning with verse 16. The cup of blessing which we
bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread
which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we being many are one bread
and one body, for we are all partakers of that one bread.
Behold, Israel after the flesh, are not they which eat of the
sacrifices partakers of the altar? What say I then, that the idol
is anything, or that which is offered in sacrifice to idols
is anything? But I say that the things which
the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not
to God. And I would not that you should
have fellowship with devils. You cannot drink the cup of the
Lord and the cup of devils. You cannot be partakers of the
Lord's table and of the table of devils. Now in chapter 11,
beginning in verse 17. Now in this that I declare unto
you, I praise you not, that you come together not for the better,
but for the worse. For first of all, When you come
together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among
you, and I partly believe it. For there must be also heresies
among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest
among you. When you come together, therefore,
into one place, this is not to eat the Lord's supper. For in
eating, everyone taketh before other his own supper, and one
is hungry and another is drunken. What, have you not houses to
eat and to drink in? Or despise ye the church of God,
and shame them that have not? What shall I say to you? Shall
I praise you in this? I praise you not. For I have
received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that
the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took
bread. And when he had given thanks,
he break it and said, take eat, this is my body. which is broken
for you, this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner
also he took the cup when he had supped, saying, this cup
is a new testament in my blood, this do ye as you drink it in
remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this
bread and drink this cup, you do show the Lord's death till
he come. 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. But let a man examine
himself, and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that
cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh
damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body. For this cause,
many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep. For if we
would judge ourselves, we should not be judged. But when we are
judged, we are chastened of the Lord that we should not be condemned
with the world. Wherefore, my brethren, when
you come together to eat, tarry one for another, and if any man
hunger, let him eat at home, that you come not together under
condemnation, and the rest will I set in order when I come. Before
we observe the Lord's Supper tonight, I want to remind us
of several truths concerning the Lord's Supper. And we're
going to look at this by asking these four questions. First,
why is it called the Lord's Supper? That which we are going to do
here tonight. Why is this called the Lord's
Supper? And I have four reasons. It's
called the Lord's Supper, first of all, because it was the Lord
who instituted it. Paul makes it very clear, as
an apostle who had not followed along with Christ as the other
apostles had, but yet he received this from the Lord. The Lord Jesus, the night before
he was betrayed, he's the one who instituted this supper. And so that's the first reason
it is called the Lord's Supper. And then secondly, it is the
Lord's body and the Lord's blood which are represented in the
symbols that we eat and drink. That's what they are. The bread
and the wine are symbols. They're symbols of His body and
of His blood. Number three, it's called the
Lord's Supper because it proclaims the Lord's death until the Lord
returns. Notice that in verse 26, he said,
for as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you
do show the Lord's death till he come. So that's the first
question. Why is it called the Lord's Supper?
Because the Lord instituted it. because it is his body and blood
which are represented in the symbols, because it shows forth
his death. And number four, it's eaten at
the Lord's table. It's called the Lord's supper
because it's eaten at the Lord's table. And we saw that in chapter
10. If you look back to chapter 10
and verse 21, You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup
of devils. You cannot be partakers of the
Lord's table and the table of devils. So this is the Lord's
table. We're participating in the Lord's
supper. And it's called the Lord's supper,
one reason, because it's upon the Lord's table. Second question,
what is the Lord's supper? Well, in answering this question,
there are four things I want to mention. First of all, it
is an ordinance given by the Lord Jesus when He said, this
do. It's an ordinance. It's not a
sacrifice, of course. It's not a ceremony. I remember
after the Reformation in the Church of England, Parliament
passed a law that they could not have the Lord's Supper unless
they also preached. Unless there was preaching in
the service, they could not observe the Lord's Supper because they
realized how easily it would be to fall into that era of thinking
of this as a ceremony. And especially as they had come
out of the Church of Rome, that actually teaches that this bread
is turned into the body of Christ, and this wine is turned into
the blood of Christ, and the mass. That's what the mass is. Never equate the mass of the
Roman Catholic Church with the Lord's Supper, because we're
talking about two entirely different things. The mass, they believe
that the priest, by the rigmarole that he goes through, all the
ceremony. Sometimes you may watch it on
television. You know, all the incense, they
go around shaking and they bow down, they kiss the altar. First
place, our altar is Christ. We don't have an altar in this
building. This is not an altar. This is a table upon which we
place the elements. But it's an ordinance. It's not
a ceremony. And an ordinance is not an option. It's not an option. Our Lord
instituted two ordinances for His disciples. Baptism and the
Lord's Supper. Neither one of them have any
saving efficacy. You could take this table for
a hundred years and die and go to hell. You could be baptized
in the baptistry so many times that your feet were like duck's
feet, webbed, and still die and go to hell. There's no salvation
in the water. There's no salvation in the bread
and wine. Salvation is in Jesus Christ. He's our Savior. We look to Him. On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground, no matter how
religious it may seem, is sinking sand. That's all there is to
it, my friends. This is one of the two ordinance.
Neither one have any saving power, and neither one are optional
if we have the ability. What I mean by that, the thief
who was crucified alongside the Lord Jesus Christ and was saved
and entered into heaven and into paradise on the very day that
Christ went back to the Father, he was never baptized, but he
was saved. This day thou shalt be with me
in paradise. And sometimes people will try
to take that and say, Baptism wasn't mandatory or necessary
until the Lord died. But the Lord died before that
thief died. You look it up. He died first
and then the thief later died. Everyone who is brought by faith
to the Lord Jesus Christ, the command is to be baptized. Go into all the world, preach
the gospel, whosoever believeth and is baptized. You say, well,
does baptism save? Does baptism help save anyone? Of course not. The very next
verse says, he that believeth not shall be damned. It doesn't say, he that believeth
not and is not baptized. No. He that believeth not shall
be damned. all of those who truly believe
will want to be baptized. We'll have that desire to confess
Christ and this is one of the ways that we confess Him. To
confess Him with our mouth. We do not consider baptism optional
and we do not consider the Lord's Supper optional. It is an ordinance
that He has given us, and He said, this do. The second thing about this supper,
it's not only an ordinance, but it is to be done in remembrance. Remembrance. In both 24, verse
24 and verse 25, He tells us, do this in remembrance of Me. When we eat this bread and we
drink the cup, our thoughts should be on Christ. Not on who's sitting
next to us, not on what we're going to do tomorrow. God give
us the grace when we take the bread to think about his body,
which was broken for us. And when we take the cup, let
our thoughts be upon that precious, precious blood of the Lamb of
God that was shed to take away our sins. Do this in remembrance
of me. We should think on Him and who
He is. Who He is. Yes, who He is and
we should think not only on who He is but on His love that He
has for us. He came from heaven to be our
Redeemer. He came from heaven to shed His
blood. For this cause, He came. to be the propitiation for our
sins. That is to appease God. Our sins
merit the wrath of God and he is set forth to be the propitiation
for our sins. Number three, it is a proclamation. A proclamation. The word which
is translated show in verse 26 where he said for as often as
you eat this bread and drink this cup you do show the Lord's
death till he come. That word means to proclaim,
to declare, to preach. Now, I do my best every message I preach to proclaim
the death of Jesus Christ. And any message I preach when
I don't, that message should never have been preached. Paul
said, I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus
Christ and Him crucified. You heard about the story, heard
the story of the man who preached, a younger man. After the message
was over, he asked an older pastor who was sitting there in the
congregation, what did you think about my message? He said, it
was awful. It was awful. He said, what do
you mean? He said, I studied, I got a good
outline, I had a good illustration. How can you say it was awful?
It was awful because you didn't preach Christ. He said, well,
Christ wasn't in my text. He said, you better go back and
you better look at that text again. The word of God is all
about Christ. It's a hymn book, and that hymn
is Christ. It's a proclamation. We do not drink and eat to satisfy
our hunger, our natural hunger, but we do eat and drink tonight
this bread and this wine to proclaim his vicarious sacrifice, his
substitutional sacrifice. He died in our stead. And because he died and he experienced
the wrath of Almighty God, we never will. We never will. And number four, it is a communion. We saw that in verse 16 of chapter
10. Let's look at that again. The cup of blessing which we
bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? We have
the word communion in a form of the same word in verse 20,
which is translated fellowship. fellowship, or communion. This
word also means joint participation. In eating from the Lord's table,
we come into communion with the Lord. That's, many times this
service is called a communion service. That's not in the Bible,
but it is a communion. But it is, what we always need
to remember, the communion is between the believer and Christ.
Believer in Christ. Communion. Fellowship. Eating this bread and drinking
this wine from the Lord's table, we are in communion with the
Lord. The elements symbolize His body
and blood, but we are communing with Him, with Christ. Verse 17, where we have, for
we being many are one bread and one body. Charles Hodge said,
since it is one bread, this is the way this verse could be translated,
since it is one bread, we the many are one body, for we are
all partakers of one bread. We're one body, one body, because
we're all partakers of one bread, and that one bread is Christ. And the design which the Apostle
Paul has here is to show that everyone who comes to the Lord's
Supper enters into communion with Christ and with others,
believers, other brothers and sisters in Christ. Because we
all form one body in virtue of our joint participation in Christ. Now third, when are we to observe
the Lord's Supper? Well, the church at Corinth,
according to chapter 11, verses 18 and 20, was guilty of trying
to have the Lord's Supper at the same time with what they
called Love Feast. At least that's what I've read.
They termed their dinner on the ground Love Feast. We will eat together next Sunday
morning after our service. And the people bring food, you
bring food, and you put it all out there. And we go by, we help
ourselves. It's a common meal. But that's
not the Lord's table. And what they were doing, they
were trying to combine the two, evidently. And some people in
this church were wealthy, and they had plenty of food. Some
people were poor, and they didn't have hardly anything. And some
people, they brought plenty of wine to drink with their meal. And so they got drunk. That's
the reason we spread the food out, isn't it? If you can't afford
to bring anything, we still want you to come and eat, right? We want you to eat. And no one should ever go away
hungry, rich or poor. They were misnaming and they
were mishandling a common meal and then calling it the Lord's
Table. And they were wrong in doing
so. One thing I do want to point
out here, when are we to observe the Lord's Supper? Paul says
when you are come together. In other words, I wouldn't take
some wine and some bread and go down here to the hospital,
if one of our members was in the hospital, and say, let's
you and I have the Lord's Supper. Because the church has not come
together. That'd just be that person and
myself. The church has come together.
We're here together tonight. And I think that's important
to keep in mind. There's no rule. There's no rule
concerning how often we are to partake of the Lord's table.
He just said as often. As often. To me, it's a sad thing when
people who profess to be believers in the Lord Jesus Christ choose
to disobey our Lord's command. This do. This do in remembrance
of me. Even though, as I said, there's
no saving efficacy in this ordinance, in this table, but yet we do
have his command. And he said, he that loveth me
shall keep my commandments. He's the one that loves me. Now,
let me close with this. What is this warning that the
Apostle Paul gives? Well, it is a warning of of the
possibility, and in the church at Corinth it wasn't just a possibility,
they actually were guilty of eating unworthily. Now that,
it doesn't say they were unworthy. I've pointed this out many times.
No one is worthy. No one is worthy that Christ
would come into this world and die for us. And no true child
of God thinks that he's worthy of Christ. John the Baptist,
I'll tell you what he said. He said, I'm not worthy to unloose
his sandal. And John the Baptist, he was
somebody. He was prophesied in the Old
Testament. He was a herald of the Lord Jesus
Christ. But when it came between John
and his Lord, I'm not worthy to even unloose this sandal.
So we're not saying a person's unworthy. It's observing the
table in a manner which is unworthily. And for instance, there was a
time in England when you had to take what they call the communion
in the Church of England to hold any position, to hold any government
job. And so people would do it, to
obtain a job. That's taking it unworthily. And I would say that anyone who
doesn't base all their hope and salvation upon what this symbolizes
here would be eating it in a manner that is unworthily. That Christ
is all. He's everything. And those of us who can say that
tonight, by the grace of God, then we want to observe this
table, don't we? I know I do. OK, I'm going to
ask the men, if you will, to come forward.