The Feast of Faith: The Lord’s Supper in Corporate Christian Worship

Preached on September 13, 2009, by Eric Schumacher.

Topics: The Local Church Worship

©Eric M. Schumacher – Preached September 13, 2009 at Northbrook Baptist Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Audio available here.

For the past several weeks, we have been examining corporate worship, asking the question of what we are doing in the various elements of corporate worship. The definition of worship that we have been using is:

Christian worship is the response of the believer to the Gospel by presenting the whole self to God as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.

Corporate worship is the presentation of the corporate body, the local church, to God in response to the Gospel.

So I want us, before we celebrate this Lord’s Supper, to pause and ask four questions of Scripture—Why? What? Who? and How?:

• Why do we celebrate the Lord’s Supper?
• What are we doing in the Lord’s Supper?
• Who can celebrate the Lord’s Supper?
• How do we celebrate the Lord’s Supper?

Why Do We Celebrate the Lord’s Supper?

We celebrate the Lord’s Supper…

...because it is an ordinance.

We celebrate the Lord’s Supper out of obedience. It is an ordinance. An ordinance is something that is:

1. commanded by Jesus,
2. passed along by His apostles in their writings,
3. and practiced by the early church as recorded in the book of Acts.

Peter Gentry defines ordinances as “symbolic acts that set forth primary facts of the Christian faith.” Baptism, done once, is a picture of us entering a relationship with God through Christ. The Lord’s Supper, repeated often, is a picture of us continuing in that relationship.

Being ordained by Christ, passed along by His apostles and practiced by the early church, they are obligatory for those who believe in Jesus Christ. They do not bring us, or help us attain, salvation. They are pictures of the reality of our relationship with God through Christ. Since they are ordained, all Christians are obliged to practice and affirm them. Since they are pictures of our covenant relationship with God, only those who have entered that relationship through faith in Christ should be allowed to participate.

...to remember Christ’s death. (vv. 24-25)

Jesus said twice, “Do this in remembrance of me.” This is a meal to be repeated by Christians to remember Christ and His death for us.

There are a number of things we should be careful to say it is not:

These elements are not literally Christ’s body and blood. The elements of communion do not become Christ’s actual flesh and blood. We can say this for a number of reasons:

1) Christ used symbolic/figurative language. He said, “This is my body. This is my blood.” This is like when the Psalmist says, “The Lord is my shepherd.” He does not mean that he himself is a sheep, which walks on all fours, eats grass and says “baaaa, baaaa.” And he does not mean that God is a man who lives in the fields with a flock of animals and guides them with a great big shepherd’s crook. He means that God cares for him like a shepherd cares for his sheep.

2) The Passover festival, which the Lord’s Supper is patterned after, was a memorial dinner, eaten to remember what God did for them. This meal is the same.

3) The pagan festivals at the same time were also symbolic. It would have been assumed that any such meal was symbolic, unless that was a clear explanation stating otherwise. We do not have such an explanation.

4) Jesus said twice, “This is my body, my blood.” He could have said, “This becomes my body.” Just as the gospel says of Jesus’ first miracle, “The water had become wine.”

This is not a new offering of Christ’s sacrifice. As Hebrews 9:24-28 explains, Jesus Christ’s sacrifice cannot be repeated. His sacrifice is “symbolized,” not presented again (re-presented). He was offered “once for all:”

For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own, for then he would have had to suffer repeatedly since the foundation of the world. But as it is, he has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself. And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

This is not a means of receiving saving grace. John wrote his gospel so that we might, “believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing we may have life in his name.” Eternal life comes by truly believing that Jesus was the Christ, the one who died for our sins. John’s purpose in writing his gospel was for people to have eternal life. John’s gospel is the only one that does not mention the Lord’s Supper. If taking the Lord’s Supper was a way of receiving saving grace, couldn’t we expect John to mention it? However, he does not. He says that by believing we have life in his name.

This is not a meal that gives us eternal life. It is a meal that pictures how we receive eternal life. Jesus spoke of himself as the “bread come down from heaven.” He said that the manna in the Old Testament pointed to him. We need to “eat his flesh” he said, to be nourished by the true food (John 6:55). This is speaking of receiving Christ and believing in Him.

How are you nourished by food and drink? When you are thirsty and there is a cool, clear, mountain stream running nearby, how do you satisfy your thirst? You kneel down and drink. You don’t get up and do a lot of work for the water and then it satisfies you. You simply receive it and are satisfied. It, because of what it is, meets your needs.

This is how we are saved. We are convicted of our sin, we see our need for Christ to die for us and to have his righteousness counted to us. Then we receive the message as the true Gospel by which we are saved. This is what we do in the Lord’s Supper. We take the elements and put them in our mouth and eat. We don’t add anything to them. We simply receive them, just as we simply receive the gospel.

What Are We Doing?

We are Worshiping…

1) …by Remembering Christ’s Saving Sacrifice. (“This is my body…” v. 24)

Jesus, the night before He was crucified, told his disciples to go and prepare the Passover meal. He said, “I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). Jesus desired to eat this particular Passover with his disciples, because he was going to fill the old meal with new meaning and significance. Jesus deliberately chose the Passover Meal to institute the Lord’s Supper because as the Passover memorialized Israel’s redemption from slavery to Egypt, the Lord’s Supper would memorialize his people’s redemption from slavery to sin.

The Passover celebration and the seven-day festival that followed (the feast of the Unleavened Bread) were the most theologically significant days in the life of a Jewish person. They recalled Israel’s deliverance from almost 400 years of slavery in Egypt. The Lord was going to deliver his people by going through the land of Egypt and killing all the first-born in the land. The Jews were to take a spotless lamb and slaughter it. They were to collect its blood and spread it over the door posts of their houses. The Lord would “pass over” those houses covered by the blood of the lamb and they would be saved from death.

Along with the lamb, the Israelites’ meal included unleavened bread. It had no yeast in it because they were leaving in a hurry and did not have time to wait for dough to rise. The Jews continued to repeat this meal yearly. It memorialized the non-repeatable event of God delivering them from slavery and death. Its purpose was a backward glance to produce hearts of gratitude, thankfulness, and love toward the God who delivered them.

Jesus transforms this meal into a new institution. No longer does this meal symbolize Yahweh delivering Israelites from slavery by the blood of a spotless baby sheep. It now symbolizes God delivering us from our sins and death by the substitutionary death of Jesus Christ, the spotless Lamb of God, which is the fulfillment of what the Exodus pointed toward. Through Jesus Christ, the true Passover Lamb, we take part in the New Exodus.

Just like the Passover blood, Christ’s blood is a shield against God’s wrath. We were slaves to sin. God was rightly angry at our sin. We were sentenced to die for our rebellion against God. But Christ, like the Passover Lamb, died in our place. 1 Peter 3:18 says, “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God.”

So, if Christ takes the role of the Lamb, why is it we eat bread at the Lord’s Supper and not lamb-meat? For one thing, Jesus was focusing attention Himself being the “bread come down from heaven.” He is showing us that He is the true “manna” the bread that kept His people alive in the wilderness. And we, having been delivered, are kept alive by continually feast on Him, being nourished by Him, abiding in Him, not through this meal, but through faith.

Christ is drawing attention to the fact that the yearly sacrifice of a lamb was about to become redundant. It would no longer be necessary to sacrifice a lamb each year to have fellowship with God.

Fellowship with God is restored and preserved by One Sacrifice of One Lamb. Fellowship comes, not through a yearly, monthly or weekly ceremony, but by truly eating His body and drinking His blood—that is, by having faith in His substitution death on the cross for our sins. And this is now symbolized in the Lord’s Supper. His body was broken for us.

This is an act of worship because it highlights the value of Christ’s work. We come to the Lord’s Table needy, sinful, dependent and helpless guests. The Lord comes as the host of the meal, who provides, serves, cares for and redeems. In this act, we display the value of Christ’s work as the all-sufficient, life-giving source of our salvation.

2) …by Celebrating the New Covenant in Christ’s Blood.

This meal is also a celebration of the New Covenant in Christ’s blood. Jesus says (v 25), “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.”

The idea of covenant is one of the Bible’s central themes. It has to do with establishing a relationship between two parties. After God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, He made a covenant with them at Mount Sinai. This covenant established a relationship that was to be marked by love, loyalty, and trust. He would be their God and they would be His people.

However, this covenant was broken by the people’s unfaithfulness to Yahweh. They repeatedly refused to follow God’s standards for the relationship. There was nothing wrong with the Old Covenant that led to it being broken. The covenant was good. The hearts of the people were bad. They were sinful and therefore unable to keep its requirements.

So God, in Jesus, initiated a New Covenant by a better sacrifice. The Old Covenant was good, but the New Covenant is better. It is based on a sacrifice that does not need to be repeated each year. It is a sacrifice given once for all.

We find God’s promise of the New Covenant recorded in Jeremiah 31:31-34:

Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

The New Covenant is also better because of the work God will do in the hearts of His people. He will write the law, not on tablets of stone, but on their hearts. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts.” In addition, the result: “And I will be their God, and they shall be my people.” God will give His people new hearts and remove their sin by forgiving it. “I will forgive their iniquity and I will remember their sin no more.”

The New Covenant is better because God takes it upon Himself to ensure that both parties will keep the covenant. He will completely remove their sin. He will bring about an inner transformation of the heart. And as a result of His work, there will be intimate relationship between the Lord and His people. The new covenant is as sure as the sun and the sea, as fixed as the order of the moon and the stars. It is indestructible, unbreakable, and eternal, because of the work of the Lord.

This cup that we drink today represents that covenant. The cup represents Jesus blood shed to bring about complete removal of our sins. Through trusting in His work, and His work alone, we are forgiven, pardoned, and our sins are remembered no more.

This cup is a reminder of the work God did on the cross to fulfill His promise, “I will be their God and they shall be my people.”

This is an act of worship because we are confessing and celebrating what God has provided in Christ. We do not drink this to get saved. That would insult the value of Christ’s blood. It would imply that Christ’s blood needs something added to it to redeem us. We drink to celebrate what his blood has accomplished.

3) …by presenting “the body” to Christ in response to the Gospel.

The Lord’s Supper is something that we do corporately, as fellow members in the covenant community. When Paul was giving these instructions on the Lord’s Supper, he was writing to a church, to a community of believers who were committed to fellowship with one another and to help one another live out the Christian faith.

In verses 17, 18, 20, 33 and 34, Paul uses the phrase “when you come together” five times, all in reference to this teaching on the Lord’s Supper. The Lord’s Supper is celebrated when the body gathers.

Paul gives these instructions to the church. He says, (v 23) “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you” and (v 26) “For as often as you drink it.” “You” is plural. It is to “more than one” Christian. This meal is not given to individuals, but to a community of believers. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:16 “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” By eating this bread, we are saying that we are participants in the “body of Christ,” the church.

In the context of 1 Corinthians 11, the problem that we find is that certain people were neglecting other members of the body. Some members of the body were going without while other members of the body were over-indulging. Paul says that they were not eating “the Lord’s supper” when they acted like that. If that was to be their behavior, they might as well have gone home.

The Lord’s Supper is a proclamation of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice to redeem his church. Such a proclamation should be matched in the lives of those taking it. When we take the Lord’s Supper, we should be living lives of selfless sacrifice for the good of other members of the body of Christ, the church. Those who are not committed to the church in loving service should not take this meal.

This is why the Baptist Faith & Message (2000), the summary of Southern Baptist belief, says, “The Lord’s Supper is a symbolic act of obedience whereby members of the church…” Now, this does not necessarily mean that you must be a member of Northbrook Baptist Church, Cedar Rapids, Iowa to take the Lord’s Supper here. But what it is saying is that you should be committed to a local body of believers. And, it is saying that those who have forsaken the body of Christ and are not committed to the covenant community shouldn’t take it. To take this meal is to say, “I am a part of the community formed by the covenant in Christ’s blood.” If the way we live our lives says otherwise, and we take this meal, we are lying.

Furthermore, in this meal, we (the church) are in communion with Christ. Just as this meal is an act of fellowship with one another in the body of Christ, there is also a deep and mysterious fellowship with Christ. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10:20 that those who participate in pagan festivals are actually participating with demons. In the same way, we who participate in this meal are enjoying a spiritual fellowship with Christ. This is why it is essential that we examine our lives for sin before participating.

4) …by Expressing Our Future Hope in the Return of Christ.

Paul says, (v 26) “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” This meal is to be continued by the church until Christ returns. We celebrate the fact that the one who died for us will return for us. We celebrate what happened and what will happen.

We believe, as Christians, in Jesus' bodily and physical return in glory. Titus 2:13 calls Christ’s return our “blessed hope.” Psalm 98 is a call for all the earth to rejoice and be joyful. Why? “For He comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with equity.”

Why is it good news that God will judge the world? It is good news because when “His kingdom comes” He will judge his enemies and punish them. He will set right the wrongs done in the world. He will reward His people. It is day on which those who are counted righteous in Christ through faith in Him will be given glorified bodies and reign forever with Christ on the new heavens and new earth.

When this happens, we will no longer eat this meal. We will no longer need a reminder, because we will dine at the marriage feast of the Lamb (Rev 19:6).

This is an act of worship, because it proclaims to the world that we are awaiting something better. You speak about what you value.

5) …by Proclaiming the Gospel.

The final thing we are doing is evangelism. The Lord’s Supper is a proclamation of the Gospel, of Jesus Christ crucified for sins and raised from the dead. This is a simple and visible way for observers to see what Christ did for us. As we proclaim what this means and then eat, unbelievers see what it means to be a Christian and to receive Christ by faith.

This is not a meal for unbelievers to participate in. Doing this will not save you. You could take this meal every day for the rest of your life and not be pleasing to God. We become pleasing to God by trusting in the death and resurrection of Christ for the forgiveness of sins. This meal expresses that.

Who?

The Lord’s Supper may be celebrated by baptized believers who are persevering in the faith and are committed to the fellowship of a local assembly of believers.

Baptism is an expression of our entering into a relationship with God through Christ. The Lord’s Supper is an expression of continuing that faith relationship.

We only see the Lord’s Supper being eaten in the context of a local church in the New Testament. We only see baptized believers being admitted into the membership of the local church. So, it we can deduce that only baptized believers would be participating in the Lord’s Supper.

This meal is a sign of our continuing relationship with Christ. This is a relationship of faith and obedience. Only those who are feasting on Christ by faith should participate. We are identifying with Christ in this meal. We are saying, “I trust in Him and receive Him.” If this isn’t true of us, we are lying.

How?

We should eat the Lord’s Supper as an act of worship—trusting in and treasuring Christ.

In verse 27, Paul says that it is possible to eat the bread and drink the cup in an “unworthy manner.” Such eating and drinking makes one “guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

This implies that we ought to eat and drink in a “worthy manner.” But, what can that possibly mean? It does not mean that our lives have earned or merited Christ’s work. The whole point of the Lord’s Supper is that we are sinners who have been freely and graciously redeemed by the mercy of God in Jesus Christ. To eat and drink in a “worthy manner” means to partake in a way that displays the value of Christ’s sacrifice.

Paul says that there were some eating who weren’t “discerning the body.” They weren’t stopping to consider what this meal was and what it meant. They weren’t examining their lives to see if what they were saying in the Lord’s Supper reflected the reality of their lives. As a result, they were being judged and disciplined. Paul says that there were people in their congregation who were “weak and ill, and some had died” because they were eating this meal without examining themselves. This seems like an outdated and superstitious idea, but it is what Scripture says.

This was not an outbreak of God’s anger. He was not punishing them with his wrath. Verse 32 tells us that this is discipline given “so that we may not be condemned along with the world.” The world will be condemned under the wrath of God. God disciplines his children so that they will not be condemned. (Thus, discipline is not punishment for sin, but the infliction of pain for the sake perseverance in faith.)

They should instead examine themselves and eat and drink “discerning the body.” They should eat and drink understanding the sacrificial nature of Christ’s sacrificial death and its implications for the church. Their selfish behavior in neglecting and mistreating the rest of the church body was a symptom of the fact that they did not value what Christ had done.

To eat and drink in a worthy manner is to eat and drink in faith—trusting in and treasuring the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That is the only person who will benefit from the meal—the person who comes and eats because they treasure what Jesus Christ has provided through his death and resurrection.