Welcome to An Orderly Account with Pastor John Stewes as he continues a journey through Luke's orderly account of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Church of the King strives for biblical worship, which views the Lord's Day as the time when God meets His people to renew His covenant with them. Covenant renewal is characterized by God's calling us to worship, a time for the confession of our sins, the hearing of God's forgiveness based on the finished work of Christ on the cross, the new life and His resurrection, presenting our offerings, approaching the throne of grace and prayer, and His teaching us from the Word of God. Now, here's Pastor Stoos. We will remain standing for the reading of God's word this morning are reading continues in Luke chapter twenty two this morning will be will begin in verse thirteen here now the word of the Lord. So the disciples went and found it just as Jesus had said to them and they prepared the Passover and when the hour had come he sat down and the twelve apostles with him. And then he said to them with fervent desire, I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I say to you, I will no longer eat of it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And then he took the cup and gave thanks and said, take this and divide it amongst yourselves. For I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. And he took bread. and gave thanks and broken and gave it to them, saying, This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And likewise, he also took the cup after supper, saying, The cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you. But behold, the hand of my betrayer is with me on the table, and truly the son of man goes as it has been determined. but woe to the man by whom he is betrayed. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we give you thanks for the beauty of your word. We thank you for this resurrection morning that we celebrate the resurrection of your son, his rising in power, showing that you have been fully satisfied. We thank you for this in Jesus name. Amen. You may be seated. Two weeks ago, our journey through the Gospel of Luke brought us to the preparations for this final Passover. We reviewed how God had prepared down through all of history for this event. And we also saw how Jesus used his disciples and others to make the very practical preparations for that meal. So this week, we come to the fulfillment of this final Passover. We will see Jesus instituting the Lord's Supper, which we will celebrate here this morning. We will consider the significance of Jesus going to save his people from their sins and how the supper reminds us of this week after week. And finally, we need to consider how we should respond to so great a salvation. Now, Luke tells us that Jesus had a fervent desire to have this final Passover meal with his disciples. And we know from John's gospel that he still had much to teach all of his disciples. And I trust that you've taken some time to review those chapters, chapters 13, 14, 15, 16 and 17, where John gives all an awful lot of detail about what transpired at that meal. But the focus with Matthew and Mark and also here in Luke is on the change that takes place at this Passover meal. No longer will God's people have to look forward to the forgiveness of sins. No longer will the blood of bulls and goats or even lambs be offered to picture the great sacrifice for sin that Jesus would present. Jesus has come to Jerusalem at His appointed time to fully atone for the sins of His people, to be the sacrifice for sin. Jesus, in His suffering and death, which we will study in the coming weeks, fully satisfies the wrath of God that is due to us because of our sin. It's important that we understand that our sins are not just forgotten or overlooked. God doesn't stick them in a drawer and say, I just won't pay any attention to those anymore. God is not one who forgets. He's not one who can overlook justice. Our sins are not set aside. Our sins are fully forgiven because Jesus, as the Son of God, come in the flesh suffers and gives his life to fully propitiate or to fully satisfy the wrath of God. The death and burial of Jesus means that God can be just as he must and the one who justifies. It is through the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus that the dilemma of sin from our perspective is solved. Now, the disciples had prepared the Passover meal, and I'm sure that everyone gathered expecting sort of a usual event. As I mentioned Friday night, this would have been at least the third, perhaps the fourth Passover meal that Jesus would have celebrated with his disciples. The Passover proceeds. And then Jesus must have surprised them a bit when He took that cup and said, take this and divide it among yourselves, for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. The earthly ministry of Jesus was coming to an end. He would no longer walk and eat with them as He had for some three years. Things would now be very different for these disciples than it had been. But you see, there wasn't much time for the disciples to be surprised or to ponder what Jesus meant, because then he shifts the entire event with words and actions that had never been experienced or expressed at a Passover meal. We read this in verse 19. And Jesus took bread and gave thanks and broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. And likewise, he also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is shed for you. With these simple words and actions, Jesus instituted the Lord's Supper, which has been practiced rightly and wrongly by the church for almost 2,000 years. The supper that we have before us this morning is simple and it is serious. And there have been down through the years errors that have run off both of those cliffs here in America. We have to be careful of simplicity. You know, we have to realize that this institution, this sacrament is not something that can be done with Coke and chips at the beach if it feels right. And yet that happens in some American churches. But it's also not something that is so serious that only the really smart church officials can understand what is going on. And they fill it with pomp and circumstance so that they end up hiding it from the people, even excluding some covenant members from partaking. There were pictures of the Pope this week with more gold and stuff around him than you could possibly keep track of. And I'm sure there was bread and wine in there somewhere. But it's lost when that kind of ceremony buries the simplicity of what Jesus gave. You see, our obligation is to follow the simple commands that Jesus gave us. Jesus said to take bread. to give thanks and to partake. Jesus said to take wine to give thanks and to drink it. If we follow these simple commandments, we have the very promise of Jesus Himself that He is with us in faith and that our souls are fed and nourished by His own body and blood in the same way that bread and wine or a beautiful ham dinner nourishes our physical bodies. This is a truth that is so simple that the youngest children among us can begin to understand what they're doing. It is a mystery so profound that men have studied it in depth for two millennia and have barely scratched the surface of understanding all that it truly means. Now, just as Jesus shifted in a very dramatic way what was said and done from the Passover meal to the Lord's Supper, he is about to change how God's people respond to his great salvation. In the Old Testament, we have an altar, always an altar. where priests are to make sacrifices that picture the great sacrifice that was to come, offerings made to God. But Jesus has now come at His appointed time to be that great sacrifice. In the New Covenant, the sacrifice for sin has been made. And we now have a table set before us with provisions that are given by God and ministers who serve God's people. This is a simple and yet profound shift and a failure to understand what Jesus was doing has caused a host of problems and errors down through church history. The Roman Catholic and Eastern traditions have gone back in many ways to the old sacrificial system, where they have priests administer the sacrifice of Jesus on an altar. That is at best a distraction from the simplicity of the Lord's Supper, and it is at worst an accursed idolatry, as it is proclaimed by the Heidelberg Catechism. But we have some problems on our side as well. In the Reformed and Evangelical circles, the supper has become distant from God's people in different ways. Often recoiling and reacting from the errors of Rome, the supper has become, oh, just a way to kind of reflect on what Jesus did, and we don't want to do it too frequently. It might take away from the sermon. To speak of the real presence of Christ at the table the way that John Calvin and the other Reformers do would really raise some eyebrows. in some circles today. And yet, Jesus promised that He would be present with us as we follow His simple commands. The epistle to the Corinthians. For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night in which He was betrayed, took bread. And when He had given thanks, He broke it and said, Take, eat, this is My body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of Me. And in the same manner, he also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do 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 Lord's death until he comes. That's the whole institution of the Lord's Supper, the gospel accounts that we've read and that account from Paul. We are not to sacrifice Jesus anew on the altar. We are to proclaim His death, not repeat His death. We are to gather around a table and receive the gifts of God as Jesus feeds His people. As Pastor Duckett would always remind us here in Sacramento years ago, the sermon is where we hear the gospel with the ear gate. The table is where we see the gospel with the eye gate. In both places, the good news is proclaimed. The good news that Jesus has come to save his people from their sins. Now, in the coming weeks, we're going to spend a great deal of time considering what happens in terms of the suffering and death of Jesus over the next 18 hours or so in the gospel account. The penalty for our sin was indeed a very steep price to pay. But we rejoice here on Easter Sunday and around this table each and every week because Jesus was raised in power on Sunday morning, because His sacrifice was sufficient. the wrath of God had been propitiated, death and Satan had been defeated, and Jesus was raised in power to reign over his kingdom. The sins of God's people are forgiven, and Jesus then commissions his disciples to take this good news to the world, which we continue to do today. So how should we respond to so great a salvation on this Resurrection Sunday. Well, as always, I would suggest that we look to the example of our Savior at this very meal where He instituted the Lord's Supper. We see that example as He prepared to eat this final Passover with His disciples, knowing that He was about to fulfill all of the promises that God had made to His covenant people down through all of history. in the Old Testament. It's John who gives us this insight at the beginning of chapter 13. It says there. Now, before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that the hour had come that he should depart from the world to the father, having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. and supper being ended, the devil having already put into the heart of Judas Iscariot Simon's son to betray him. Jesus, knowing the father had given all things into his hands and that he had come from God and that he was going to God, rose from supper and laid aside his garments and took a towel and girded himself. And after that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples' feet and to wipe them with the towel with which he was girded. I think we can see three very important things that we should take with us this morning as we are commissioned to serve the risen and reigning Savior. Jesus knew who he was and where he was going. As those who Jesus came to redeem, we must know who we are and where we're going in history and in eternity. We must often review those glorious Gospels like Ephesians and Colossians and Romans, taking in all that Paul teaches us about what it means to be saints in Christ's church. What it means to serve in His kingdom. If we don't understand that, then we're just keeping busy. We're not really serving the risen and reigning Savior. The second thing to note is that Jesus never ignored the reality of sin in the fallen world. You'll notice that Judas keeps coming up over and over again. From the beginning of his ministry, where the Spirit led him into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan, until the very end, where Satan has possessed one of his own disciples, we see Jesus trusting his Father and the Scriptures to protect him. We must do the same. We need to remember and know that our great enemies, the world, our own flesh, and Satan himself are seeking our destruction day and night. We must be sure that we walk in the full armor of God, the full armor that was described for us in the sixth chapter of Ephesians. If Jesus himself trusted in God's Word, how can we do any less? And finally, we see that Jesus has come to serve and to give us an example of service. We need to really reflect on what happened at the beginning of that meal. John says that Jesus knew that He was the Son of God. There is no doubt now that He fully understands who He is. He had come from heaven, and He is about to return to heaven in victory, to be the King that sits at God's right hand. He knew that He was about to defeat death and same. He certainly anguished over the torment, but he knew what the outcome would be. Paul tells us that he did this for the joy that was set before him. He knew that victory was his. And yet, in the midst of that, Jesus humbled himself and served his disciples one last time by washing their feet. And we need to remember that that was something that was actually important in those days. Sandals and dusty robes led to very dirty feet. And it was very common practice for the host to provide for pans and washings of people's feet. And Jesus takes the role of the servant here to do that for his disciples. We must not leave here this morning in the midst of all of these glorious hymns in the midst of all the truth of the Gospel. We must not be proud of the fact that we are Christians who are the very sons of God destined to reign with our Triune God forever. That's true enough. We must also not leave here this morning with any sort of arrogant pride that will come from us reflecting on the fact that Jesus is going to crush Satan underfoot and fill the earth with His Kingdom. through the church, even though that's what's going to happen in history. No, we must humbly accept these graces that God has given us in his son, Jesus, and then we need to follow his example. We need to make sure that we set aside all of our pretenses and certainly our pride. And we need to do what Jesus did and look for ways to serve others. We need to look for ways to serve others right here in the church. We need to look for ways to serve others in our families. We need to look men for ways to serve others as we carry out our vocations. We need as Christians to make sure that we are looking for ways to serve those in the world at large. You see, this is how we fulfill the prayer that Jesus lifted up to His Father as He made His way to the Mount of Olives after He had been betrayed. In John 17, we read this, Father, I desire that they also whom You gave Me may be with Me where I am. that they may behold my glory, which you have given me, for you loved me before the foundation of the world." Now, that's pretty heady stuff. That's why we have to be careful about pride and arrogance and being puffed up. We are the very sons of God. We are going to share in the triune glory. Oh, righteous father, he prays. The world has not known you, but I have known you and these have known you who you sent me. And I have declared to them your name and will declare it that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them. What kind of love was in Jesus? It was a heart of service. We don't get puffed up. We don't get contented in sitting around thinking, wow, I've got my ticket to heaven. We glory in the fact that we will learn to love the way that Jesus loved. And Peter reminds the saints in his first epistle that we can follow this example of Jesus, that we have the opportunity to be his saints and to serve only because Jesus has fulfilled the Passover only because Jesus was the sacrifice for sin. Peter says this in the second chapter, For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example that you should follow his steps. Who committed no sin, nor was deceit found in his mouth, who when he was reviled did not revile in return, when he suffered he did not threaten, but committed himself to Him who judges righteously, who bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness, by whose stripes you were healed." For you, dearly beloved, were like sheep going astray, but have now returned to the shepherd and the overseer of your souls. May God be praised as we serve the risen and reigning Savior. Thank you for listening to Pastor John Stewes of Church of the King. Join us next week at the same time as the journey through Luke's orderly account of the gospel of Jesus Christ continues. You're invited to join us for Sunday worship at 11 o'clock, where biblical worship is characterized by the active and vigorous participation of the entire congregation. Church of the King is a pro-life, pro-family church where all baptized children participate in worship including the Lord's Table on a weekly basis. To learn more or to hear this message in its entirety, visit orderlyaccount.com or call 916-451-5660. still at that