I've always thought it's interesting when we celebrate the Lord's Supper, so often the words of institution we draw out of 1 Corinthians 11 so that they become almost wrote to us. That's a good thing. It's not an undesirable thing, but I do think sometimes we neglect The other portions of Scripture, especially in the Gospels, where the Lord's Supper is instituted historically and the events surrounding it in the context, and there's so much there. So I wanted us to look together at Luke 22. I'm going to begin in verse 7, and then we can read down to verse 30. Luke 22, 7 to 30. Let me pray for us briefly. Father in heaven, we thank you for the Lord's day of rest and worship a day that you call us away from the cares of the world and those things that weigh down our hearts and our minds, those things in which our energy is spent. And we pray, our God, that you would draw near to us, that you would meet with us, that you would feed us as our shepherd, and that you would guide us as our savior and our king. We pray, Lord Jesus, that you would draw near to us and that you would give us a greater understanding of the sacraments that you've appointed for the strengthening of our souls and faith. We pray that you would mature us and make us better worshipers, and that you would sanctify us and conform us more to your image, even as we consider these things. We pray these things in your name. Amen. Luke 22 beginning in verse 7, then came the day of unleavened bread on which the Passover lamb had to be sacrificed. So Jesus sent Peter and John saying, go and prepare the Passover for us that we may eat it. And they said to him, where will you have us prepare it? He said to them, behold, when you have entered the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him into the house that he enters and tell the master of the house, the teacher says to you, where is the guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples? And he will show you a large upper room furnished. Prepare it there. And they went and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover. And when the hour came, he reclined a table and the apostles with him. And he said to them, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And perhaps a better translation may be, for I tell you, I will not eat of it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And he took a cup. And when he had given thanks, he said, take this and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. And he took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, this is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Likewise, the cup after they had eaten, saying, this cup that is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. But behold, the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table. For the Son of Man goes as it has been determined, but woe to that man by whom he is betrayed. And they began to question one another, which of them it could be who was going to do this. A dispute also arose among them as to which of them was regarded as the greatest. And he said to them, the kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you. Rather, let the greatest among you become as the youngest and the leader, as one who serves. For who is the greater, one who reclines at the table or one who serves? Is it not the one that reclines at table? But I am among you as the one who serves. You are those who have stayed with me in my trials and I assign to you as my father assigned to me a kingdom that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel. The Lord's Supper is the last of the sacraments that Christ has given his church. We've talked through this series about the trees in the garden in regard to the covenant of works. They were sacraments. They had God's word attached to them. They had his promises affixed to them. They had warnings attached to them. They had everything that you find, really, with the other sacraments. They were pointing beyond themselves. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life were pointing beyond themselves to what God had promised in his gracious covenantal condescension to Adam. And those same principles, the signifying and the sealing of the promises of God, are then found in redemptive history in the sacraments that we find in the Old Covenant, namely, especially circumcision, which, remember, was the sign of initiation into the visible church in the days of Abraham. That's the first forming of a visible church on earth. as distinct from the nations and distinct from just individuals. And the sign of circumcision set those people off as being members of the church of God in the old covenant. And then the Passover, which was to be a perpetual remembrance of what God had done in bringing redemption to his people and delivering them from the bondage of Pharaoh, but even more than that, the bondage of idolatry and sin in Egypt and pulling them out and separating them to himself. All of which points to Jesus Christ and the shedding of his blood at the cross. We've talked at length about that. And then as we move into the new covenant, we don't have a second story. We don't have another thing God's doing over here distinct from Israel. This is very important in understanding the sacraments. But it's all one story. Remember, God tells Abraham he's going to be the father of many nations, right? In him, all the nations are going to be blessed. That was always plan A. And so when Jesus comes as the son of Abraham, he fulfills the covenant promises through His perfect life and His atoning death and His resurrection as the Son of Abraham and the Son of David, fulfilling all the covenant promises, Jesus is not, in one sense, enacting something entirely different with baptism, and as we're going to see in a minute, the Lord's Supper, but He is expanding the Abrahamic covenant and showing the greater spiritual nature of the sacraments in the New Covenant and the greater spiritual blessings of the New Covenant. right? Everything's expanded in the new covenant so that Israel didn't have greater blessings than you and me. We have greater blessings than Israel had. We have been brought in undeserving as we are. We have been grafted in. We have been given a right to the commonwealth of Israel and the inheritance, as Paul says. He's made of the two, one new man in Christ. He doesn't have two people. He has one people, one church. We've been grafted in. And so those Sacraments that correspond and correlate to what Jesus has done in the New Covenant are showing the fullness of redemptive history, and they're really showing us and teaching us about the great privileges that we have in Jesus Christ. Now, baptism, we have said, replaced circumcision in the Old Covenant. I think that's taught in Colossians 2, 11 and 12. There is some debate about that, but the Apostle Paul has very clearly said circumcision means nothing in the New Covenant, and yet baptism, while it doesn't save someone as the external sign itself, is a command. And so he's not saying circumcision didn't mean anything, baptism doesn't mean anything. It does. Baptism does mean something, just like circumcision did. Baptism has replaced circumcision as the sign of entrance into the visible church. And then now as we look at our final sacrament together, as Jesus is going to the cross, he's going to institute a replacement of the Passover. I think the context shows that very clearly in Luke 22. He is showing what is the new covenant replacement. Not saying this is bad, this is good. It's saying this is shadow, this is fulfillment. blood has been shed. It's as if it's already done as he's going to the cross, as he's getting so close to laying down his life on the cross. Jesus is saying, it's already finished. And here's the fruit of what I finished. And so just like the Passover was to be observed perpetually throughout Israel's history, circumcision only happened once. So baptism comes once, Ephesians 4, there's one baptism, and then there's the perpetual observation of the Lord's Supper. So there's correlation between the two Old Covenant and two New Covenant sacraments, and yet there's also distinction, right? The blood is shed, two are bloody, two are not bloody, shadow, fulfillment, promise, actualization in the New Covenant era. And so notice here in Luke 22 as Jesus is instituting the Lord's Supper for the first time in human history. Imagine the thrill that the disciples must have had as they walked every step with the Savior as he's instituting this for the first time. I mean, we take for granted all that we know. We know all the miracles. We've heard all the teaching. We know. We go through the rituals. We think we know better. Our hearts aren't engaged like they should be. Here the disciples, I can't imagine what they thought. They're seeing every miracle. They're hearing every word for the first time in redemptive history from the Savior. And here is the first supper. It's also the last supper. It's the only supper Jesus is going to have. We call it the last supper because it's the last time he's going to have a sacramental meal with his disciples until he says, we're in glory. It's the first supper. It's the last supper. Jesus is initiating it. And notice that he does it at the time of the Passover. Notice verse eight, so Jesus sent Peter and John saying, go and prepare the Passover for us that we may eat it. Now, it's sort of shocking that the one who is the Passover lamb has to partake of the Passover. because the Passover was a meal that said you needed redemption, you needed redeeming blood, you needed to partake of a substitutionary lamb. Here Jesus is partaking with his disciples, and yet he is the Passover lamb. The first part of this section is Jesus eating the Passover with his disciples. There are several cups on the table, there's the Paschal lamb on the table, And then something happens. There's a shift and it's almost imperceptible the shift where Notice verse 14 when the hour had come he reclined a table and the Apostles with him and he said to them I've earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer so they're still observing the Passover and then notice Notice verse 17 he took a cup and And when he had given thanks, he said, take it and divide it among yourselves. For I tell you that from now on, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes. Now, Jesus has done something, and you almost don't notice it. He's finished the Passover meal, and now he's instituting the new covenant meal, the Lord's Supper. He's already drank the Paschal cup with them. He's already feasted on the Paschal lamb with them. Now he gives them another cup. One old writer, R.A. Finlayson, wrote this really phenomenal little book. It's called The Cross and the Experience of Our Lord. I really encourage you to get that and read it. I think Christian Focus republished it a few years ago. The Cross and the Experience of Our Lord. And Finlayson says at one point in there, at this moment in this scene, Jesus lays aside, he pushes aside the Passover lamb and he places himself on the table. It's a really awesome meditation. He clears the table and he puts himself on the table. He's saying, this is my body. This is my blood. Now, it's interesting the things that are happening, and we'll come back to this in a moment, but you see the spiritual blindness of Judas, and you see the spiritual weakness of the disciples as this is taking place. I've always thought that was interesting. Jesus predicts his betrayers betrayal of him at the moment that he's instituting the Passover while he's in the room with him. The disciples, as soon as this is over, are arguing about who's the greatest. That's how messed up we are. So the next time somebody tells you, I don't like when all these preachers say these people were messed up. Just remember the disciples argue about who is the greatest the moment the Lord's Supper is over for the first time. They're like our children. We prayed the other day that our children would not argue. We finished our devotions, and literally two seconds later, they were having a huge fight. They walked away from, I called them back, and do you remember when we prayed that you would not argue the rest of the day? Mm-hmm. And what did you guys just go do? We argued. We're just like the disciples. The disciples here arguing about who's the greatest, and that'll have implications for we approach the supper, which I'll come back to, and why we need to examine ourselves, and why we give the warnings, and all of those things. But here, I want us to consider the context in which the supper is occurring first, and then I want us to consider the elements a little bit, the language, and then we'll talk about how we approach this. And if we have time, we'll talk about how the supper has been understood and approached throughout church history, which is immensely important for us. Now, it's very interesting. Jesus institutes a cup here, and the disciples would have understood the significance of eating and drinking a sacramental meal because they understood the Passover. Just as we talked about baptism having Old Testament roots, this is not something altogether new. And yet the idea of the cup is very interesting, especially in Luke's gospel. On the same night when Jesus institutes the Lord's supper and hands his disciples the cup, he will go to the garden and he'll be betrayed. But while he's praying in the garden, the father will set a cup before him. It's very important and very interesting. It's right after this. Jesus is, in verse 39 of this chapter, he went out, and as was his custom to the Mount of Olives, the disciples followed him. He came to the place, said, pray that you do not enter into temptation. He withdrew, and he prayed, saying, Father, if you're willing, remove this cup from me. So Jesus has put a cup into the hands of his disciples, and the Father has put a cup into the hand of the Son. Jesus has said, drink from it all of you. The Father has said, you will drink all of this. And the cup in the upper room finds its significance and efficacy based on the cup in the garden. That's not coincidental. The Apostle Paul calls the Lord's supper, he shorthands it in 1 Corinthians 10, the cup of blessing, which we bless. It's a means of grace. It's a covenantal drinking. The cup of blessing that we bless, the cup in the garden is a cup of cursing. That also has Old Testament background. Jesus understands when he's in the garden exactly what's happening. David, the psalmist, Isaiah, Jeremiah, they spoke of God's wrath. his judgment on his people in terms of God giving the wicked, giving all of his people who have been unfaithful, the cup of his wrath that they would drink the dregs of it. God will say, you will drink it to the very dregs, the bottom of the wrath. It will never cease as it were. And Jesus realizes in the garden as he is going to the cross and he is fixing his eyes on the cross, he understands that he is going to drink the cup of God's wrath. He is looking in. I don't know if I've shared this with you. Jonathan Edwards has this really amazing illustration about Jesus in the garden agonizing and looking into the cup and knowing that he has to drink it to the full and be forsaken by the Father and experience hell on the cross. And he says that what the Father is essentially doing by putting this cup before the Son is akin to what happened to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego when they're brought up to the fiery furnace and they're made to look in to the intense heat of what's about to happen. Jesus is looking into the furnace of God's wrath. And if you want to understand the cup that we drink, that the disciples had, you have to understand that he had to drink that cup. And that cup, being emptied by the Savior on the cross, makes this cup efficacious for those that believe. By the way, there are numerous sermons on this. R.A. Finlayson talks about it in the book I recommended earlier. Eric Alexander had a really amazing sermon he preached at the Keswick Conference in the 60s, 1963, I think, on the cup of blessing and the cup of cursing and that importance of the historical context. Now, why does Jesus institute bread and wine? Remember, Jesus has said on many occasions that he was, what, the bread that came down from heaven, right? Remember the showbread in the temple? That was prefiguring Christ. That was God saying, I am going to give you a soul-nurturing, soul-satisfying provision for you to be in my presence. That's what the showbread was pointing to. the manna that came down from heaven, right? We talked about this in our home recently. And the manna that came down from heaven, Jesus says in John 6, even though it's not a Lord's Supper context per se, it became vital in understanding the Lord's Supper for the Reformers and the Puritans that when Jesus says, Moses didn't give you the bread that came down from heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread. I am the bread of life. He who feeds on me will live because of me. I have a blog I call In 2007, feeding on Christ, I had somebody at seminary say, that sounds Roman Catholic, to which I said, you've obviously never read the Gospel of John. Jesus said, whoever feeds on me will live because of me. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. That's the epicenter of Christianity, feeding on the Savior, his body being Ground, the Puritans would often talk about, in order for bread to be made, the grain had to be ground. Christ had to be ground under the wrath of God. I think there's a lot here. I don't think any of this is arbitrary. The wine was real wine. They were getting drunk on it in 1 Corinthians 11. It was probably not 2% if they were getting drunk at church on wine. I know there have been attempts to say it was, but Paul rebukes them for that, right? He says, don't you have houses to eat and drink in? This is the Lord's cup for the Lord's people, right? Why wine? Besides the fact that it looks like blood, very evidently. Well, I think there's a bitterness and there's a sweetness to wine. A lot of people have made a big deal about this too, that there is a sting in the death of Christ, a bitterness, right? Just like the bitter herbs on the Passover, because of the bitterness of our sin and what it would cost the Savior to take it, there's a sweetness that flows from what he does. Jesus certainly prefigures the joy of the new covenant by turning water into wine in his first miracle. right? The emptiness of the Old Covenant ceremonial system as void of his grace in contrast with the joy of wine, right? Book of Amos, he says that there would be in the New Covenant wine flowing from the mountains. It's symbolic of the joy of the New Covenant. That's how he prefigured the joy and gladness, right? Wine makes the heart merry and so our Savior, he intentionally chooses these two things. to symbolize his body and his blood for the rest of human history. Isn't that awesome? He would say these two things. I've always loved, you know, churches get in debates about drama and whether we can have drama, and I'm not here to tell you my opinion, but I have always thought it's interesting that Jesus has given us a drama team every time we come to the Lord's Supper. That's the divinely instituted drama team, the bread and the wine. He has placarded before us what is most central. I've also thought it was interesting that God didn't, and let me say this by way of preface first. We are to love God's law. We are to want to obey God's commandments. We have been redeemed to love God's law. So don't hear me saying anything short of that. But God did not give us the 10 commandments on the table as a sacrament. I think that's very interesting. He gave us broken bread and poured out wine to symbolize what Jesus fulfills. Gerhardus Voss has this really great observation about how the Lord's Supper ought to dovetail into the preaching and how it ought to guide and direct the preaching. And he says something like this. He says, if we want to know whether the purport of our sermon is one and the same, with the purport of the supper, then we need to ask if the same message is being communicated. It's so simple, and yet I think that's so wonderful. If the sermon isn't taking us to the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus, then there's something wrong. The purport of our message is not in line with the purport of what God has said is most central. There's a real lining in the supper, isn't there, for us? We celebrated weekly communion at the church. I planted not that it's commanded at all and there's debate about this and we'll talk briefly about frequency here in a moment, but one of the reasons why we did is I felt as though It's a good thing for us To come to the means of grace as often as we can because we need all the grace we can get By the time Sunday rolls around I mean, we're barely making it Praise God for another Lord's Day. That's why God carries us from strength to strength. And the supper becomes such an important means of God's grace, right? It becomes a strengthening to us. It doesn't work out of itself. The supper doesn't work. As Rome says, ex opere operato, it's not like a faucet that the pastor, in the case of Rome, the priest gets up and opens and just dispenses the grace to whoever takes it. You can actually take the Lord's Supper for the worse, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 11, right? If you come flippantly, if you come unrepentantly, if you come selfishly, if you come with wrong motives, not coming to feed on Christ but to please yourself or go through rituals or think that somehow this magically carries you to heaven, then you're not going to benefit from the supper. That does open for us the question, how do we benefit from the supper? And what is happening at the table? And this becomes the big conversation in church history, right? This becomes the big debate between Luther and Zwingli when Luther apparently slams down his knife on the table. They only had wooden tables back then. Slams his knife down on the wooden table. And this is my body, Jesus said, this is my body. And that's how we get those general three categories in church history of what's happening, right? The Lutherans say, following Luther, that the bread is consubstantiated, that there is a con with substantiation, the substance, the body, that the body is by, within, around, under the bread, in every molecule, but not the bread. I don't know how that's possible. We'll talk briefly about the problem with that, even though Luther saw that as a corrective to Rome's transubstantiation, where the priest got up in front of the altar, not the table, and he uttered his incantations, the hocus corpus, which is what we get what from? Hocus pocus, right? That's the magical, the priest's craft, and he utters those words, and then it magically Transubstantiates into the body and blood of Jesus and this is why right the priest Had to handle the elements with so much care because if they dropped you know a crumb on the ground and the rats might take it up into the rafters and then you have Jesus in the rafters and you can't have Jesus in the rafters and And Luther, remember if you've seen the Luther movie where he's shaking and he's spilling the blood of Jesus and there are all kinds of problems. Besides the obvious fact, as the reformers said, that's idolatry. To worship elements and Rome's catechism clearly says that they worship. Sometimes they play with words like venerate, worship. It's idolatry. To worship bread and wine is idolatry. To pay homage to material things that are not Jesus, is idolatry. But then, what is the Lord's Supper then? I mean, Jesus does say, this is my body, is Luther right? And then the Reformers and the Puritans are gonna, I think, do us the greatest service in helping us understand that when Jesus says, this is my body, and this is my blood, he's using sacramental language. the same way that circumcision was called my covenant in Genesis 17. Chuck O'Brien preached on that recently. When God gives the covenant sign of circumcision to Abraham, he says, he calls circumcision my covenant. Well, circumcision is not his covenant, but because the two things are so closely and inseparably related, the language of one can be attributed to the thing it's signifying as if it were that thing. And so in the same way, Jesus can attribute the language of my body and my blood, though it's just bread and wine, to the bread and the wine, because they are sacramentally prefiguring, shadowing, and sealing the promises of what he has accomplished by means of his bread and blood, by his body and blood. Now, the question still remains, what is happening in the supper? There's going to be two streams within the Reformed and Protestant camp that we are going to essentially, I think, be forced to choose from biblically. One is the view of Calvin, and it differs a bit from the view of the Westminster divines. We hold to the Westminster Confession of Faith, so your pastors in this church take vows to uphold what that teaches. Not that it's infallible, but we think it's better than your theology, and you would benefit from reading it, as would I. It's better than my theology. And we take vows to say, we believe this is what the scriptures teach. The Westminster divines are going to teach that there is a spiritual presence of Christ with the supper, and that we partake of him spiritually, and that our feeding, as we eat the bread and drink the cup and drink the wine, that we are really and truly participating in Jesus Christ as he is spiritually present with us. The problem with the Lutheran position is that they believe that Jesus could be bodily everywhere. And where is Jesus bodily? He's in heaven. Derek Thomas often says the body of Jesus is a zip code. Heaven. He is seated on the throne of God. Is Jesus bodily everywhere? No, that's metaphysically impossible. Is Jesus in his divine nature everywhere? Yes. At all times, together with the Father and the Spirit, the Son of God is everywhere present, fills the heavens and the earth. And in a special sense, he makes his presence known by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, in the worship, in the preaching, in the singing, in the praying, and at the table. so that what the Spirit does is enables those common elements to be set apart and utilized as they're accompanied by the Word and the preaching of the gospel to become means of grace by which we truly and really feed on Christ, his flesh and his blood. We partake of his sufferings and are made more sure of what he's done for us. Robert Bruce, the Scottish Theologian wrote a book on the sacraments, and he has this famous saying. He says, in the supper, we don't get a better Christ, but we get Christ better. It's one of those great quotes you just use every time you come to the table. In the supper, you don't get a better Christ. Then you get in the preaching, but you get him better. Now, what is unique about the supper that's different from the preaching of Christ crucified and risen. The preaching touches what? Our hearing. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of God. What senses does the supper reach to? Senses do, sorry, I had my person number off. Yes, visual, taste, even smell. the other senses. These are why the theologians will call them sensible signs and seals. Now I mentioned that Calvin had a little different view than the Puritans. Calvin's view, and there's several books about this, not all are equally helpful. Calvin wrote so much sometimes he said too much and didn't say it quite the same as he should everywhere. How could you fault John Calvin for that, I mean? But John Calvin had a view of the supper that, and it's very interesting, actually, the Holy Spirit lifts us up into heaven, where the real flesh of Jesus is, and the blood of Jesus carried, as it were, into the heavenly holy place, and that we really and truly feed on Christ in heaven, mystically. I've tried to understand this my whole Christian life, I don't. But it's not far off from what the Puritans are saying, but it's different. There was a guy named Wayne Spears, who was a professor of church history at Reform Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, who gave a lecture on Calvin's view against the view of the Westminster divines. Very interesting. I'm happy to get you a copy of that if you want that ever. But we have to essentially fall somewhere in there between Calvin and the Puritans because we know Jesus can only bodily be in one place at one time. We know that the bread and the wine don't actually become Jesus as both Lutherans and Roman Catholics will use that language. But we also have to know that the Lord's Supper is more than a bare memorial. There is a memorial aspect to it, do this in remembrance of me. But the better part of evangelicalism, and maybe churches you grew up in, certainly it's the predominant view, is that this is just sort of a, hey, we're just remembering Jesus. It's just a memorial. Yeah, I think this symbolism carries the memorial aspect of it, but it carries it beyond that to say this is symbolizing the real Christ who we really and truly feed on by faith, right? That this is Jesus. We are partaking of the Savior. We're partaking of his sufferings by faith. We are being made heirs of the promises of God that Jesus has fulfilled whenever we take and partake by faith, which is why faith is so important, right? Jesus says, whoever believes on me will live because of me. Whoever feeds on me will live because of me. Feeding on Christ is believing in Christ. It's trusting in him. It's coming to him. It's casting ourselves on him. It's receiving him as he's offered to us in the gospel. So that it's not this sort of just intellectual exercise that we're doing, but that we actually are coming to the Lord Jesus when we come to the supper in order to be strengthened, in order to say, you are the nourishment for my soul. Now, that also opens the door for questions about how we're to approach the supper, right? Calvin, and I won't read any of these quotes for you, but he had many communion sermons, as many of the Puritans did, that are exceedingly helpful. And you kind of get an inlet into his view on the supper, and especially how people should approach it. And one of the first things Calvin's going to say is that we should come with a deep sense of our sinfulness and our depravity, so that we should be coming to the table not thinking we're worthy, That would be a wrong understanding of the warning not to partake unworthily, but coming saying, my only worth is in Christ, and I believe he has died for me, and how I need his sacrifice. So that I come with all my sin, but I come lamenting it, and I come grieving it, and I come grieve that I've sinned against the Savior who's loved me and given himself for me, and I come sorrowing first and foremost. I think if we don't do that, we never come to really truly feed on Christ. Yeah, I think so. I think it's both an examination, a self-examination, but I think it's also in the context of 1 Corinthians 11, the corporate aspect, which I want to talk about in a minute, that there is an element where, especially in that context, people were not waiting for each other. So they were not taking into account who Christ was and what he had done for all his people and how they were to live together in the communion and fellowship of the saints. And so the call there to examine themselves I think is more a call along the lines of that historical context. But certainly we are called to examine ourselves whether we're in the faith and that we never are going to come to the table properly if we're not examining whether I really see my sinfulness and I really see my need for Jesus. And I'm really coming to him saying, Lord, have mercy on me, wash me, cleanse me, enable me to feed on you. That's the first most vital step. I do think that we err often, though, in stopping there. And in too many churches, and I'm not going to criticize Reformed churches because I don't think we're wrong to have that introspective call to self-examination, but the supper can sometimes always just be somber. And it's rarely joyful, corporate joy over what the Savior has done for us. I don't know how to strike that balance, so don't hear me saying I would know how to do that. collectively, and the church I pastored for 10 years, it was somber, just like this church. Because we don't want to lose that somberness. We don't want to lose the sense of who the Savior is, and what he's done for us, and why it was important for him to lay down his life, and who we are as sinners. At the same time, we don't want to lose the joy, the wine, the new wine, the gladness, the exuberance of accomplishment of salvation. I mean, Jesus has almost a celebratory tone when he institutes the supper. With fervent desire, he says, I have desire to eat this supper with you. Isn't that awesome? Fervent desire. That's not a somber dower. He's not saying, well, let's go to the upper room. Every head bowed, every eye closed. He is calling them to a serious consideration of him, but there's a joy and there's a longing that he's going to eat it again with them in the kingdom, the fulfillment of it, which won't be somber. All sin will be taken away. And so when we come to the supper, I think we need to come expectant, both to mourn and grieve over our sins and to receive Christ and rejoice in him. I also think that we should be taking consideration of one another. You know, I sometimes sneak a little look around the congregation when every head is bowed and every eye closed, like the Bible never told us to do. And I sneak a little look around because I want to remind myself that the blood of Jesus that I am crying out for and partaking of is the same blood he shed for you. Like, that's a really beautiful picture to remember. It's the same blood. Never forget, I went to a conference together for the gospel a number of years ago, and 10,000 people in the Yum Stadium in Louisville, and singing hymns, beautiful old hymns, with just a piano and C.J. Mahaney belting them out, and 10,000 people singing, Alas, and Did My Savior Bleed. And I had one of these moments that I've never had in my life where I thought for a moment about the blood of Jesus being shed, for so many in that place. The same blood, same savior, same sacrifice, one cup, one bread. I know we live in a germaphobic society. I've never done this, but I could do a common chalice if everybody wasn't freaked out about germs. Because the symbolism is real. That's why we have the one cup. That's why we have the one live. That's why all of that symbolism is so significant. It's become very common. for churches in our day to move to a practice called intinction. How many of y'all know what that is? It's the dipping, right? I have an Acts 29 friend who gave me a t-shirt he made with a hand dipping, a little graphic, and it has a note that says, sip it, don't dip it. And it's become very common for churches to move back to what they see as this ancient practice. It's actually an Anglo-Catholic practice. Rome, it actually initiates with Rome because Rome doesn't want the body of Jesus to fall on the ground and the crumbs to crumble down there, lest the rat do his thing. And so they put the two elements together. Why are the elements separate and why are so many conservative reform pastors insistent on that? The reason the bread and the wine have to be separate is because they are depicting the blood separated from the sacrifice so that it was a real sacrifice. So just like the bull was offered and the blood would run out right? And then the blood would be carried into the most holy place, not the body, not the flesh, that it was a real sacrifice, that the blood really and truly. And so, I've always thought it's strange. Intinction would symbolize then, if that's correct, putting it back together, which is not what the sacrament symbolizes, just as an aside. Everything about this, let me just say, that Jesus has instituted has an intentionality to it. There's nothing arbitrary about it, which is really beautiful that our Lord so perfectly does everything He does, and everything He gives us is just the way it's supposed to be. Calvin wanted weekly communion, never had it. The council in Geneva didn't want to support him in that. Spurgeon was for weekly communion, so you have some pretty heavy-hitting theologians in church history, which is not insignificant for us in our Reformed and Calvinistic tradition to see that. Sometimes the argument is made, if we do it all the time it'll just become rote and then it won't become special. Well, I think the argument can also be made if we only do it once a quarter. then we elevate it to a place of significance beyond what it should be. So I was in a very large church many years ago that boasted 1,200, 1,300 members on the roll, 850 maybe came regularly, and then on the one day they did Lord's Supper quarterly, it was packed. And I remember thinking, these people who are never here any other Sunday think the Lord's Supper is more important than it is. Now, maybe I was wrong in drawing that conclusion, but so I think you can elevate it to a place above its importance by infrequent observation, just like you could elevate it to a place of too much importance by too much frequency, or you could diminish its importance by sort of a roteness to it, to the ritual. But I think a lot of it depends on the minister. I mean, it's incumbent on ministers to keep the supper meditations about the supper and making it lively to the people and fresh so that when they come, they should be hearing new meditations every week and seeing new things about Christ as they come to the table. But again, I don't think it's commanded to do it weekly, and everyone's agreed on that, but we should be doing it frequently. So I'm grateful we do it frequently here.