Why do we take the Lord’s Supper? (1 Cor. 10:16-21)

 

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Sometimes disputes and arguments and even heresy can help us to clarify things in the church.  It can reveal who the believers are and who aren’t, as Paul puts it to the Corinthians immediately before his instruction on the Lord’s Supper because of the controversy surrounding it: “there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you” (1 Cor. 11:19).  The disputes over the person of Christ especially in the third and fourth centuries led to the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) and to the Chalcedonian Definition (451), and this produced the clearest language about the person of our Lord and communicated in a way that dismantled the heresies of the time.

But sometimes controversy just stirs up more dust and leaves everyone worse off after than before. I think Paul was warning Timothy about this when he gave him this advice: “Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do” (1 Tim. 1:4).  There are some debates that don’t lead to any kind of godly edification.  They just lead to more questions.  Or to endless threads on Twitter.  Paul tells us to avoid that at all costs.  It’s not profitable.  Don’t waste your time on it.

Unfortunately, there are good things that sometimes get caught up in unprofitable controversy.  It’s not that the thing that is being debated is bad; it is, rather, that the controversy surrounding it is so unprofitable that it leaves the topic of debate more opaque and less clear than before.  It’s like taking a mirror and trying to clean it with mud.

Sadly, the Lord’s Supper has suffered that kind of a fate at the hands of the church for many centuries now.  What is even sadder is that the Lord’s Supper which is designed to unite the people of God has become an instrument to divide it. Nowhere was this more clearly demonstrated than at the very beginning of the Protestant Reformation, when, in 1529, the two greatest leaders of the Reformation at that point, Luther from Germany and Zwingli from Switzerland, met in early October at the Marburg Castle to iron out their differences.  At the end, they agreed on fourteen points, but on the last and fifteenth point – that about the Lord’s Supper – they could not agree, and it ended any chance for these two titans of the Reformation to join forces.  Luther famously refused to even give Zwingli the right hand of fellowship, and when Zwingli died a few years later, Luther said that he had died “in great sin and blasphemy.”  

The Corinthian Question

That’s not to say that the Lord’s Supper isn’t meant to divide, but the division is supposed to run between the world and the church, not between one part of the church and another.  This is what Paul is really getting at in the text we are looking at this morning. Our text finds itself in a larger section that begins in chapter 8.  As you may know, in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians he is having to deal with a train wreck of problems.  And as Paul moves from one mangled car to the next, he is telling them how they are to work through their doctrinal and ethical dilemmas to straighten things out and get the church back on the tracks.  At this point in the letter, Paul is working through one of their letters to him, in which they had asked him a number of pressing questions.  One of the questions, apparently, was whether it was okay to eat meat offered to idols?  Apparently, there were a number of Corinthian believers who were doing just that.  And they were not only eating meat that had been offered to idols, but they were also participating in the religious ceremonies of which the sacrifices had been a part.

Paul’s answer is that there are times when it is okay and times when it is not okay.  It is not okay if eating meat offered to idols causes a brother or sister in Christ to fall back into idolatry.  It may be a right to eat it, but Paul says it’s more important to love the one for whom Christ died than it is to exercise your rights.  That’s chapter 8.  Then in chapter 9 up to about verse 23, Paul illustrates how this had looked in his own life, when he had given up some of his own rights in order to love and serve the lost and to bring them to faith in Christ.  There is something we can learn here from Paul, for he does not describe his laying down of his rights as an act of oppression against him by those who were weak, but an act of love for Christ on their behalf.  

But then beginning at 9:24 and running through to 10:22, Paul says it is also not okay if eating meat offered to idols involves you in pagan worship.  You need to understand that a lot of meat in Corinth sold in the meat market was meat left over from a temple sacrifice.  Paul has no problem with that, per se, and in fact goes on to say, “Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience” (10:25, ESV).  But what he does have a problem with is a Christian going into an idol’s temple and eating meat as part of an idolatrous ceremony.  This is what he is dealing with here, and his point is that it’s no longer a question of rights; it’s a question of idolatry and idolatry is never right.  You don’t meddle with it, you run from it.  You don’t admire it from afar, you are supposed to be disgusted with it.  You are to be afraid of it; not because of what the idol can do, which is nothing, but because of what God can do (22).  We are not stronger than God, and God cares about who we worship.

It is in this context that Paul brings up the Lord’s Supper in 10:16-22.  His point is basically this: just as participation in the Lord’s table – the cup and the bread – involves us in real communion with Christ, even so participation at the table of idols involves a person in the fellowship of demons.  Do you see the parallel here?  “But I say, that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils. Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils: ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils” (20-21).

Paul is literally saying that though the Gentiles never intended to be worshiping demons, that is really what they were doing.  They thought they were worshipping a god, but Paul says, no, they are worshiping demons.  Charles Hodge put it this way: “Men of the world do not intend to serve Satan, when they break the laws of God in the pursuit of their objects of desire. Still in so doing they are really obeying the will of the great adversary, yielding to his impulses, and fulfilling his designs. He is therefore said to be the god of this world. To him all sin is an offering and an homage” [from his commentary on 1 Cor. 10:20].

So it is just unthinkable for a Christian to enjoy the fellowship of Christ in the Lord’s Supper and then to run over to the Temple of Apollo and enjoy the fellowship of Christ’s cosmic adversary, Satan, at the table of idols.  You can’t have the best of both worlds, can you?  You are either for Christ or you are for the demons.  As Paul will say in his next letter to the Corinthians, “And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing; and I will receive you” (2 Cor. 6:16-17). Taking the Lord’s Supper, therefore, as an act of communion and fellowship with Christ, is both an act of defiance against the devil as well as an act of devotion to Christ.  You can’t fight for both sides in a war, neither can you eat at Christ’s table and at the table of demons (1 Cor. 10:21).

My Question

And that brings me to the question that I want to ask and answer this morning.  The question is this: why do we come to the Lord’s table?  Why do we partake of the Lord’s Supper?  

I feel like I need to ask this question because I am afraid that many of us may not really see the need for it.  We don’t think it’s a big deal to skip it.  If we do miss it, we don’t act like we really missed anything important.  Or maybe, we take it and walk away underwhelmed.  I know I’m guilty of that.  And I say that this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Lord’s Table is and does.  I have even met Christians who actually believed that it was even wrong to take the Lord’s Supper!  That may not be our position, but sometimes we act like it, don’t we?

I’m coming at this here in 1 Cor. 10 because the answer to Paul’s question gives us the answer to ours. It comes in as Paul is describing the Lord’s Supper. You will notice that he describes it primarily in terms of fellowship.  The word Paul uses is koinonia.  What happens when we take the Lord’s Supper is that we have koinonia (16) with Christ, and that makes us koinonoi (18, 20), or those who have fellowship with the Lord.  

In fact, I think this helps us to understanding the meaning and function of the blessing over the cup: “The cup of blessing which we bless” (16).  We bless the cup by thanking God for it, but also by asking him to consecrate it to the end for which it is given.  What end is this?  The purpose for which we ask God’s blessing is fellowship with Christ, koinonia with him.

Now think about it: Christ has given us the Lord’s Supper so that we can have communion with him in it.  One of the things that this means is that there is fellowship and communion with Christ that we can only have in the Lord’s Supper, because our Lord doesn’t give superfluous gifts.  It is as crazy to think that we can be healthy Christians without the Lord’s Supper as it is to think that we can be healthy Christians without the Bible.  God’s word is a means of grace, and so is the Lord’s Supper.  So is baptism. They all preach the gospel to us, though in different ways.  We need the Bible, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  We can have fellowship with God in them, and we were meant to.  We need the Word of God, and we need the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  The Lord’s Supper is no vestigial ordinance!

So what I want to do today is to meditate with you for a few moments on the meaning and implications of the fellowship a Christian has with Christ in the Lord’s Supper and how that ought to motivate us to its enjoyment and blessing by faith.  You know, our Lord said to his apostles about the Lord’s Supper which he instituted as they were taking part in the Passover meal, “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk. 22:15).  “With desire I have desired,” is a Hebraism that means to earnestly desire.  It was then that we read: “And he took the cup, and gave thanks, and said, Take this, and divide it among yourselves: For I say unto you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come. And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. Likewise also the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” (17-20).  So it is fitting for us to greatly and earnestly desire to eat the Lord’s Supper as well.  And there are three reasons in this text (at least) that strongly motivate us to desire participating in the Lord’s Supper with the church.  They are: communion with Christ, commitment to Christ, and connection to the Church.

Communion with Christ.

Why do we take the Lord’s Supper?  It is so that we may have fellowship with Christ in it.  Now the question is, What does that mean?  In what particular ways do we have fellowship and communion with Christ in the eating of the bread and the drinking of the cup?  

The answer to that question is to try to understand exactly what koinonia is. It means to participate in something. It is synonymous in this connection to another word that Paul uses (metecho) which means to share in something, to be a partaker of something.   Hence, in the Lord’s Supper, we share in and participate in, the benefits of Christ’s death.  And when we pray that the cup and bread may be blessed, we are praying that we may be blessed through a participation in the benefits of Christ’s redemptive work, so that it becomes a means of grace to us.

Now, someone may ask that since the Lord’s Supper is only for baptized believers (which it is), and since all believers in Christ are already regenerated, justified, and adopted, what kind of benefits are we talking about here?  The Lord’s Supper doesn’t confer salvation upon us in the sense that it doesn’t bring us out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear Son.  What does it do then?  In what sense is it a means of grace so that we are blessed by the benefits of our Lord’s atonement?

And the answer to that question is that the Lord’s Supper taken through faith causes the realities of the New Covenant to be more and more realized in ourselves.  You will remember that when our Lord instituted the Supper, and when Paul teaches us about it in the next chapter, we are told that our Lord said, when he gave the cup to his disciples, “this cup is the new testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me” (1 Cor. 11:25).  “New testament” is kaine diatheke, “new covenant,” which the prophet Jeremiah foresees in the 31st chapter of his prophesy and which is rehearsed in Heb. 8:10-12:

“For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my laws into their mind, and write them in their hearts: and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people: And they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for all shall know me, from the least to the greatest. For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more.” (Heb. 8:10-12)

It is true that every believer is justified fully and adopted already into the family of God.  But it is not true that what the Lord has begun in us is finished.  He will finish it (Phil. 1:6), but God uses means, the instrumentality of his word, the Christian fellowship, and the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.   It is through these means that God’s law becomes more and more precious to us and our lives conform more and more to its standards.  It’s through these means that we come to draw closer to God and image forth more and more our likeness to Christ.  It is through these means that we receive ongoing cleansing through the blood of Christ (1 Jn. 1:7).  

Now I said earlier that this is by faith, and it is.  The Lord’s Supper does not work on us or in us irrespective of our faith in Christ.  This is one of the great dangers of the Roman Catholic teaching, along with the error of transubstantiation, in that they argue that the grace of God is communicated ex opere operato, that is, “by the work performed.”  But this is not what the NT teaches.  Rather, the NT teaches that the Lord’s Supper becomes a means of grace as we reflect on the meaning of it by faith.  It is faith that enables us to “do this in remembrance of me” (11:24-25).  This is not a bare remembering, but a remembering in faith, a remembering with the mind and heart engaged in understanding and personally appropriating anew the benefits of Christ’s once-for-all atonement for ourselves.  It is behind Paul’s warning about the necessity to discern the Lord’s body (11:29).  In fact, it was from a lack of such discernment that led some people in the Corinthian church to misuse the Lord’s Supper and to bring themselves under the judgment of God so that they died (29-30).

My friends, is this not a reason to come to the Lord’s table?  Christ has given us this table, and we should see him welcoming we who are children to it today.  We are communing with him in it.  This is no bare memorial.  It is a memorial of course.  The bread and the wine are bread and wine; symbols of Christ’s body and blood.  But as we take these symbols by faith, the Lord is really present in the grace of his Spirit to bless us.  As the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 teaches:

“Worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this ordinance, do then also inwardly by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive, and feed upon Christ crucified, and all the benefits of his death; the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally or carnally, but spiritually present to the faith of believers in that ordinance, as the elements themselves are to their outward senses.” [Chapter 30, Paragraph 7]

I like the way Michael Card puts it in his song on the Lord’s Supper:

Come to the table He's prepared for you

The bread of forgiveness, the wine of release

Come to the table and sit down beside Him

The Savior wants you to join in the feast.

Commitment to Christ

As in baptism, the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper is first and foremost a declaration of what Christ has done for us.  But it is also secondarily a time in which we recommit ourselves to him.  How does the Lord’s Supper do this?  The Lord’s Supper does this by reminding us of who we are.  Recall the contrast in this text between the table of Christ and the table of devils.  The apostle is reminding the Corinthians that participation at the Lord’s table and the table of demons is incompatible.  They are incompatible because Christ and Satan are incompatible.  To be at the Lord’s table we are saying that we are part of the body of Christ, and connected to our Head, we cannot but be anything but against the world, the flesh, and the devil.  Every time we take the Lord’s Supper we are as it were waving the banner of Christ over our heads and declaring our commitment to him.  He loved us; how can we not love him back?  

This is why Paul goes on to say in chapter 11, after reminding us how the Lord instituted the Supper, that we should examine ourselves.  He writes, “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” (27-29).  

Now, to be careful here, we need to say that to partake of the Lord’s Supper “unworthily” doesn’t refer to our own personal worthiness.  The whole point of the Lord’s Supper is to remind us that we are not saved by our worthiness but by Christ’s!  If our own personal worthiness were required here, no one would be able to take the Lord’s Supper.  To take the Lord’s Supper unworthily is referring to the manner in which we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, as in, shaming the poor by refusing to share it with them.  

But nevertheless, we should not go to the other extreme and think that now the state of our heart doesn’t matter.  It does, and we need to examine ourselves in light of the meaning and purpose of the Lord’s Supper.  Are we taking this as forgiven but true disciples of Jesus?  Is repentance a part of our lives?  Again, as Hodge put it, all sin is an offering and homage to Satan!  So the Lord’s Supper is only taken properly when we take it is true and committed disciples and followers of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

But again, is this not reason to take it?  He loved us; shall we not love him?   He died for us; he spilt his blood for us and allowed his body to be broken for us: shall we not willingly offer ourselves on the day of his power?  Shall we not, in taking the Lord’s Supper, wave high his banner and declare anew that we are for him?  There is no better Master, no better Captain, no better Lord and Savior and God!

Connection to the Church

The last reason I want to draw your attention to is the connection to the Church that the Lord’s Supper points us to.  It is given in part so that we may express our unity with other believers, and be motivated to live that out in appropriate ways.  Notice again what the apostle says: “For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread” (1 Cor. 10:17).  Paul is saying that the one bread that is eaten by the church is representative of the unity of the body of Christ.  The ESV translates this verse this way, and I think this is correct: “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”  This is very similar to what Paul will say to the Ephesians, “There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Eph. 4:4-6).  Just as baptism points to the one body of Christ, so does the Lord’s Supper.  We are one not because we have similar interests or similar backgrounds or similar temperaments.  We are one because we all belong to Jesus Christ, and we are declaring that in the Lord’s Supper.  This is why it was so awful for the Corinthians to turn the Lord’s Supper into soemthign that shamed the poor among them.  They were turning something that was meant to beautifully demonstrate their unity and turning it into an ugly reminder of their differences.

And though I don’t think the washing of the saints’ feet is Biblically required to be a part of the Lord’s Supper – for the simple reason that every time in the NT you read about foot washing, you don’t read about the Lord’s Supper, and every time you read about the Lord’s Supper, foot washing is missing – yet I do think it can act as another way in which we visibly demonstrate our love to each other, just as Christ did in John 13.  It’s not an ordinance of the Lord, but it is a good object lesson from the Lord.  It’s interesting to me that when Ambrose the fourth century bishop of Milan describes the baptismal service in his day, it was also accompanied with the Lord’s Supper and the washing of feet.  It is a humble and beautiful way of showing that we are committed to loving each other through acts of service, not in word only but in deed and in truth.

This love ought to be of course daily demonstrated in the church in a thousand other ways.  I heard a wonderful story this past week from Rebecca McLaughlin who was relating how a woman who started attending their church recently came from the kind of background that you might think would make her immune to the overtures of the Christian message.  She was rough, to say the least.  But she has come to embrace Jesus as her Lord and Savior.  Not too long ago, she came up to her and said, “I’ve just realized that you guys have to love me!  In any other community, that’s not true, but here in the church you don’t have a choice!”  It is true, isn’t it?  Of course, McLaughlin reminded her, “But the thing is, you have to love us too!”  Yes, brothers and sisters, we have to love each other; it's not an option.  The Lord’s Supper is a visible demonstration of that, as well as a means by which the Holy Spirit makes this more and more of a reality among us and in us.

The words of our Lord in the Sermon on the Mount are relevant in this regard.  He says, “if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift” (Mt. 5:23-24).  If we have done something wrong to a brother or a sister and we know about it, then we need to make it right.  It is the right thing to do, and it is the loving thing to do.  Let’s not come to the Lord’s table having hurt someone but refusing to make it right.  Let’s make it right!

So we have so many reasons to come to the Lord’s table.  Today, I pray that all these will be reasons in our hearts as we take the bread and drink the cup.  May we have true communion with our Lord, may we recommit ourselves to Christ and to his church.  May the Lord make it so among us.