We have read together how Holy Week began. Our Lord riding on the foal of a donkey into the streets of Jerusalem and being received by the hosannas of those people who were there. Most of whom, I think, were a very clouded conception of what our Lord's ministry was. They expected Him to come in and to liberate Israel from the iron-handed rule only to find, of course, that his ministry was to suffer and to die on the cross. That week would be foundational for everything that he was going to do, not only on Friday and in his resurrection on Sunday, but in the establishment of his church, in particular, how his disciples would live going forward from there on without his visible, physical presence with them. There were a number of events that happened that week that were foundational for the work of the church. He walks into the temple, and for the second time in his ministry, he cleanses it from the money changers that were there. And he, of course, celebrates the Passover feast with his disciples. And that night, as they came together, the night that he was betrayed, and he eats the Passover with them, He gives that meal a significance that they would not have understood otherwise. And he changes the meaning of that meal to focus entirely upon himself, and to give to the Church one of its most wonderful celebrations, what we call the Lord's Table, or Communion, the time when the Church comes together, as Paul says here in 1 Corinthians 11, to remember our Lord. It was on the first day of Unleavened Bread, the Feast of Unleavened Bread, which coincided with the Passover, that Jesus sent a couple of his disciples, James and John, to Jerusalem to secure a place where he might eat the Passover Feast with them. They go to a house which tradition tells us was the house of the mother and father of John Mark, the author of our Second Gospel. And it was there in a very large room in the upper part of that house And he gathered with his 11, 12 disciples and he sat and he ate this meal with them. That meal was special for many reasons. It was the last supper that he would have with his disciples before his crucifixion. It was the last opportunity to teach them about true servanthood. And it would be the meal that would reveal his betrayer as he dips the bread and passes it over to Judas and says, what you have to do, go do it. and go to it quickly. And, of course, it would be during that time that he would institute one of the central ordinances of the church, the Lord's Supper. This meal, which began that night so wonderfully, as he sat with his disciples and ate, would become, of course, a source of great contention within the church. Historically, there has been much debate as to what Jesus meant in the words of institution. This is my body. This is the blood of the new covenant that I am shedding for you. The Roman church has one particular view of that. The Lutheran church has another view. The Calvinistic church has another. And of course, those who have followed Zwingli, in his view, have quite another. And unfortunately, even as early as the first century, the table was a source of great contention, but for another reason. And we read about that. Beginning in verse 17 of 1st Corinthians chapter 11 in the church at Corinth There had been a dispute that has arisen over the nature of this meal But in the following instructions, I do not commend you Because when you come together it is not for the better, but for the worse For in the first place when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you and I believe it in part For there must be factions among you, in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. When you two come together, it is not the Lord's Supper that you eat. For in eating, each one goes ahead with his own meal. One goes hungry, another gets drunk. What? Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the Church of God and humiliate those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I commend you in this? No, I will not. For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night when he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way also he took the cup, and after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this 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. Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a person examine himself then and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. That's why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world. So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. If anyone is hungry, let him eat at home, so that when you come together, it will not be for judgment about the other things. I will give directions when I come. We're studying what it means to be a gospel-driven church. The message that is central to the life and ministry of this body is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. It is good news. It is gospel. It is the euangelion. that holds us together as a body. It's that message that you hear preached and proclaimed from this church. It's that message that we stand and sing together. It's that message which we confess with one another. It's that message which forms the central focus of our prayers. And that message which is visibly displayed in the table that is before us. Normally we celebrate communion together on the last Sunday of each month. I've moved that up a few Sundays because I wanted to address this subject. What does it mean to be or to have gospel-driven communion? That when we share together this meal, how is the gospel central to it? How do we behave in regard to it? How do we come together? It was a message, of course, that Paul had to address with the Corinthian church that was getting so many things wrong. Wrong about the way they were living, Long, wrong about the way they were worshiping and central to their life, of course, was the life of the table itself. What is this meal that we take together? Why is it important and how do we make sure that we don't profane the body and blood of the Lord when we eat of it? To begin with, communion, whenever we celebrate it, is a meal of unity, or it should be. Which is why Paul is so bothered by the way in which the Corinthians are celebrating this meal. To see this, I want you to turn back to chapter 10, to a couple of verses where Paul, as we've already seen, is warning against eating and drinking inside an idolatrous temple. His argument goes this way. When you go into an idol's temple and eat, even though ostensibly it's a restaurant, you are eating in a religious festival. and you are participating with demons that stand behind those idols. That's the point that he made in chapter 10. Now he illustrates that point by saying, think about the way in which you and I eat together and drink together in a worship ceremony in church. He says this in verse 16. The cup of the 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 one body For we all partake of the one bread So it doesn't matter whether you're male or female Whether you're wealthy or poor whether you are Jew or Gentile When you come to participate in this meal, you are partaking it together. That's why we call it communion It isn't something that you do individually, it's something that you do corporately as a member of this particular body. And the one loaf of bread that gets broken and distributed to all of us represents the oneness that we have because of Jesus Christ. Now, turn over to chapter 12. Because the discord that is affecting the Church at Corinth at the table is a discord that runs much deeper than that. it's affecting them through their use of gifts so Paul makes this point in a similar way in verse 12 and look at verse 12 chapter 12 verse 12 for just as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body though many are one body so it is with Christ for in one spirit we were all baptized into one body Jews or Greeks Slaves or free and are all made to drink of one spirit now if that's Paul's theology of the church That by the spirit we are brought together regardless of our very diverse backgrounds and are brought together and formed into one body namely the visible body of Christ and that it is of utmost importance that when we come together, his word in chapter 11 for worship, that when we come together there not be visible divisions in that body. That we don't have the men sitting on one side of the church and the women sitting on the other side. Or as James warns in his epistle, that we don't have the wealthy in the front of the church given the best seats and the poor shoved to the back. or that we don't divide along racial lines, where blacks are seated together and whites are seated together. The visible corporate body of Christ should show unity. So when I stand up here, I am warm to see that there are a lot of people here, older folks sitting side by side with younger folks, and children, not shoved off to a separate area where they can worship themselves, but sitting right here with the rest of us participating in the worship of the church. We are a body and it should be reflected in the way in which we worship and it ought to be reflected in the way in which we take the meal. Now, let me give you a little historical background to help you understand what's happening here, maybe shed some light on what Paul was saying. When we come together, we're coming together from a lot of different areas and we're meeting in a building that we have bought to house our church congregation when we worship. But as Late as the middle first century, when the Corinthians are getting together, there is no evidence that they have a central location to meet. Instead, they are meeting like the church in the Book of Acts met, in small houses situated all over the city of Corinth. And when they get together, it's a big meeting. So you're meeting together in a house. By the way, that's descriptive, that's not prescriptive. That's by necessity, that's not necessarily the way it has to be done. side to all of that. There's nothing that says you have to meet in the houses, and there's nothing that says you can't meet in houses. They were meeting in these houses. Now, a house, as you can imagine, even of a very wealthy man, would only house a relatively small group of people. And so when they came together, they had a meal. That meal, which Jude refers to as the love feast, as the agape meal, was part of what we would today call a potluck dinner. where we'd come together and we would eat and part of that meal would then extend into a very special ceremony called the Lord's Supper, named for him because he was the one who had instituted it originally. But here was what was taking place in Corinth. As we're always prone to do, we have a tendency to take our own traditions, our own cultural baggage, and bring them into the church. And long before any of these people had ever become Christians, they were used to a certain protocol taking place inside their homes. There were a couple of rooms in particular where people would eat. There was the triclinium, which is what we would call the dining room, a relatively small place that could only seat a few people. And there was an atrium, a courtyard area that could seat quite a few more. Well, it was the tradition inside these Corinthian Greek homes that the wealthy, important people would sit together in the dining room, the triclinium. That's where they would eat. And the servants and the poorer people would be placed out into the atrium, and that's where they met. So guess what? Because we have a tendency to bring our cultural baggage with us in the church, as the church begins in these homes, The rich begin to gather in one room, the poor begin to gather in another room, and there is a very visible divide between those two groups of people. What's worse is that the rich begin to eat in the dining room, while the rest of the church are sitting out in the atrium, wondering when it's going to be their turn. They're eating and drinking, and Paul says, in some cases, they're even getting drunk inside this meeting, while there are hungry people sitting out in the atrium who, for all intents and purposes, are being treated like second-class citizens within the church. And Paul hears about this. And he's fuming. Because he has an ecclesiology that's very different from that. In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither bond nor free. There is neither male nor female. Those kinds of class, racial and ethnic distinctions have been obliterated in the body of Christ. James evidently felt like it was a problem in his day when he writes to his group of people and he says to them, don't say you have faith. If you're giving the most prominent places in the church to the wealthy, while the people that come dressed poorly, you're saying, hey, do me a favor, sit in the back, will you? wrong and Paul hears about this so this meal is being divided between the haves and the have-nots look at verse 21 for in eating each one goes ahead with his own meal one goes hungry another gets drunk now can you imagine that in a few weeks we'll have our own church dinner after the service and we'll all go downstairs and Can you imagine that we come together and you have your food and I have my food and I go take my family over to my little table and we eat sumptuously while there are other people who maybe could not afford to bring food sit and their children look and watch as my children are eating and they have nothing to eat and they're hungry? What does that say about the body of Christ? That's why when we have meals, for the most part, we bring food, we put it all together and say, look, stick around. There's plenty of food for everybody. Enjoy it. It's our fellowship meal together with one another. So what are the results of all of this? Well, he says their gathering is for the worse, not for the better, verse 17. He says, when I hear that you come together, it's not for the better, but for the worse. In other words, you're exacerbating the problems because of the way that you're coming together. In verse 22, he says that you are humiliating those who have nothing. They're leaving your homes and going away. They don't feel loved and they don't feel cared for. They feel like second-class citizens. It was kind of the way I think. I was flying back from New Orleans, sitting as I always do in coach. And I was sitting at the front of coach, so I'm on the bulkhead and I've got plenty of leg room, which is great. And then there's, you know, four rows of first class up above. So by the time the airplane leveled off and the pilot took off the fasten your seatbelt sign and said that we were free to move about the cabin, I decided I needed to move about the cabin and go to the restroom. Now, the closest restroom to me was up there. So I got up out of my seat and I walked through first class. the hoi polloi, and I went to their restroom. When I came out, the flight attendants had put up a little barrier between first class and coach to make sure that nobody else in the back of the airline came forward through first class to go into that. And I thought to myself, that must be, in a small measure, how the people at Corinth felt. You guys are coach. You stay out in the atrium. You eat out there if you've got food. Don't bother us who are in here in the dining room eating sumptuously and drinking. They were humiliating, he says, those who had nothing. The result is that their sin was revealing those who were genuine Christians and who were not. Look at verse 17. I'm sorry, verse 18. For in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and I believe it in part. Notice, for there must be factions among you, in order that those who are genuine among you may be recognized. Isn't that an amazing statement? Paul says, I believe that there are factions among you, because when there are divisions, we find out who are the real believers and who aren't. That's how serious he regarded their actions here. Furthermore, their actions were actually nullifying the meal. Paul evidently doesn't have a sacerdotal view of the supper. That in the doing, grace is dispensed. Because he's saying, you're not really eating the Lord's Supper, verse 20. It's not the Lord's Supper you're really eating. Because on that day when the Lord instituted it, he broke the bread and he made sure that all of his disciples had it. It is to be a meal of unity. Secondly, it is to be a meal of proclamation. Now, what does this meal proclaim? Well, Paul says he originally received this meal from the Lord himself. He was taught it by the Lord himself. As part of the Passover meal, verse 23, I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, this is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Now, if you know anything about the Passover meal, you know it's a rather long affair. And the head of the household, the father, in the case of our disciples, the Lord, would stand before the disciples and they would go through a number of ceremonies, a number of rituals. It was a meal of remembrance. They were looking back on that night of the exodus when God, by His grace, had delivered Israel out of the Egyptians' hand, and had taken them away from Egypt, and had taken them away from all of the sorrow, and the problems, and the heartache, and the hard toil that they had under the Pharaohs. It was also, of course, a night of judgment, because it was on that night that God declared Himself to be Yahweh, by killing the firstborn male children of all those who had failed to cover their doorpost and their lentils with the blood of that lamb. So that as this Passover feast is celebrated in centuries to come, a lamb is killed, the blood is sprinkled on the door, the lamb has been roasted and made part of this meal, and there are a number of pieces of meal in the Seder, what's now called the Seder, which typified all of the anguish and the bitterness and the sweetness of God's deliverance out of that place. There were four cups that were given at various points in the meal, cups of wine which were then shared around the table by all of these people. When the Lord comes to the third cup, He changes the entire protocol of the Passover by saying, this cup now different. This cup will signify the blood of the New Covenant, which has been prophesied by Ezekiel, prophesied by Jeremiah, and I am telling you today will come. This wine that you were about to drink is my blood, the blood of the New Covenant. So this Passover meal, which was a meal of remembrance, now becomes the Lord's table, which is also a memorial meal, because he says, as Paul writes here, do this in remembrance of me. By the way, just to make a point about these elements, when Jesus says, this is my body, and when he says, this is my blood, He is speaking from a Semitic frame of reference, not a Greek or Roman one. He is speaking in the same way that the father at the Passover meal would lift a loaf of bread and break it and say to his family, this is the bread which our fathers ate, the manna which God provided for our people when they wandered in the wilderness. In the Semitic mind, that word is meant signify. It didn't mean literally. We do not believe, as our Roman Catholic friends do or as our Lutherans do, that the elements of this table are somehow morphed into the body and blood of Christ, either physically or in some way metaphysically. We believe that when Jesus, a Jew, spoke of these elements in that way, that he meant that they were to signify these meals, in much the same way that Paul would say, Hagar is Mount Sinai in the book of Galatians, or the rock was Christ, or I am the light of the world, or I am the bread of heaven. He means signify. Now, if you know anything about the debate at Marburg between Luther and Zwingli, when Luther, who held a very literal view of these words, got to the debate early. There was this wooden table that was situated that they would be surrounding and discussing what Jesus meant in the words of institution. So Luther, being a fiery German, full of vim and vigor, gets to the table early, takes out a knife, and he carves into the table the Latin words of institution, hoc est corpus meum. Then he covers it. Zwingli is going to view view that the words mean symbolic and signify and he means Luther believed them to be literal so at one particular point as the argument gets heated Luther pulls off the the the Covering over those words and he says hoc s corpus ma'am Was his way of saying it says is and is means is and that's all his means But that's not what it means When he says, this is my body, he says, this signifies my body. When he says, this is my blood, he says, this signifies my blood. Zwingli, I think, was right in the debate. It's instituted by Christ, and of course, it is a meal of proclamation that proclaims the gospel itself. It proclaims that his death, which he is about to die, is a substitution. This is my body which is for you, he says in verse 24. This is, most commentators believe, an adaption of Isaiah 53-12, when Isaiah would speak of the suffering servant who would bear the sins of many. For our Lord to say, this is my body which is given for you, he was identifying himself with that Everything that that suffering servant was prophesied to do, to stand in the place and on behalf of his people, that I am about to do. So that from this point forward, as you do this meal, as you participate in it, and you hear those words of institution, You are to hear the words of the Gospel, the good news that God has come and condescended in this world. He has clothed Himself with humanity and has humbled Himself even to the point of the death of the cross. And in that cross, He died not as a victim, but He died as a purposeful death on behalf of all those people that the Father had given to Him. so that their salvation should be secured. He pays the debt they owe in order that they might receive the riches of his grace. This meal, then, is a visible proclamation of the gospel every bit as much as what you hear me preach or what you hear taught in our Sunday school classes. In that, it is then the inauguration of the new covenant. It is the blood of the new covenant, he says. That new covenant which is in every respect superior to the Old Covenant. Not because the Old Covenant was in and of itself bad, it was given by God itself, but because it was inadequate. It was preparatory. It was designed by God to lead us to the point where we would rejoice in this New Covenant. Because what the Old Covenant could not do, namely change our hearts, the New Covenant would through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. So that we who are now members of this New Covenant community participate in this meal and celebrate with one another that in the work of Christ God has done for us what otherwise we could not do for ourselves. We have passed from condemnation to life because we have passed from old covenant to new covenant. We have moved from Mount Sinai to Mount Zion, the city of the living God. And there in joyful celebration with myriads of saints and myriads of angels, we celebrate the Lord's death and we do it until He comes. That's the final thing that this meal proclaims, is that it proclaims our future hope. Look at verse 26, for as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. So I said a moment ago, like Passover, this meal is a meal of remembrance. Do this in remembrance of me. But it is also a meal of anticipation. On one hand, as we take these things, we think back to what Jesus did on the cross for us. But also as we take these elements, we look forward in anticipation to what He is going to do. We have already received the benefits of being members of His body, but we still wait for the glorious consummation of those promises when we will see Him as He is. When we will gaze upon His physical body. A body that will, I believe, still bear the marks of his death. And we will, looking upon the marks of his death, have an even greater appreciation for this gospel that has saved us and has made us his own. The third thing this meal is is a meal of sober examination. Verses 27 through 34, the key word is judgment. The Greek word is krino. Judgment occurs here. And in essence, what Paul says is because you were coming in this presumptuous fashion, because you were coming in disregard to the have-nots, because you were eating and drinking without thinking about the oneness of the body of Christ, you are in reality eating and drinking judgment to yourself. He even goes so far as to say, and here I think he uses He has heard about many who have become sick. He has heard about others who have died. And as someone who has a special office as Apostle, he looks upon their situation and he says, the reason you're sick and the reason you're dying is because the way in which you come to this table. You are eating, drinking judgment to yourself because you are trampling underfoot the very elements which speak of the way in which God has brought you together as a body. In fact, I think that's what he means in verse 29 when he says, for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. The traditional interpretation of that phrase means that you discern the body of Christ through the elements of the bread. I think, however, that the context dictates us to understand that you're coming to the table without discerning the body, meaning the church. The body of Christ is the oneness that He has bought. Because you were eating and drinking without discerning that the Gospel has made us all one in Jesus Christ, and you're treating one another with this kind of high-handedness, that's why you're sick. That's why you're dying. Because God's judgment is falling upon you. So He says, Verse 28, let a person examine himself then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. Don't eat, don't drink, if you're going to come to the table in a way that you have not discerned the body. The covenant signs bring blessing, but they also bring discipline. And it was clear at the Church of Corinth that God was judging this people. So the solution to all of this is before you come to the table, examine yourself. Now isn't that consistent with how the Lord said our worship is to be? He said if you come together as a group of people and you're worshiping, and the time comes to take the offering, the ushers come forward, they begin to pass the plate, and you reach into your pocket, and you begin to pull out your gift, and just as you're about to put it into the offering plate, you say to yourself, You know, there's somebody in this church that I'm at odds with. That I'm fighting with. Put your money back in your pocket. Go to that brother. Be reconciled. And then, give your offering. Otherwise, your worship is no better than the worship of Old Testament Israel. When God would complain of them, they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their new moons, their Sabbaths, he says, I do not regard. While they are taking advantage of the poor and they are not seeking justice. Worship is at its heart a matter of sincerity. And when you come as a hypocrite, you don't participate in the Lord's table. You are eating and drinking judgment on yourself. If you're at odds with somebody else, including your husband or your wife, before you eat and drink of this communion, you want to get it right. If you're living at odds with other people within the congregation, treating them as somehow differently, you should be reconciled to that person before you come to this table. but because this table speaks of our unity in Christ. We're eating and drinking together and fellowshipping and participating in the Lord's death. And how can we do that if we hold another one of His members at arm's length and treat them poorly and badly? How can we do that? That is to not discern what the Gospel has done informing the body as one particular people. So it is a meal of sober examination. It's why every time we come to the table, we fence it. That's what we call it when we give warnings about coming to the table if you are not a believer. Our fence is low, by the way, and it has an open gate to anyone who has professed faith in Jesus Christ and is following Him. We want you to come. You don't have to be a member of this church in order to come, but you have to be a member of the church by faith in Jesus Christ. Otherwise, you should stay away from this table, because this covenant sign, which brings blessings to God's people, also brings judgment against those who would eat it in an unworthy manner. So let's bring this all to our communion today. You say, Tony, I know I've sinned this week. So have I. I know that even as I was coming to church today, I was a sinner. So am I. The old King James says that you must not take of this in an unworthily manner. That's an unfortunate translation of that verb. We are all unworthy of this table, all of us. It is only by God's gracious invitation that we have any right to approach it whatsoever. What Paul is warning us against is not sinners coming to the table. Otherwise, that fence would be so high that none of us would be admitted. He's warning against people who have so behaved in a cavalier and dismissive fashion other brothers or sisters within the church, that to come to a table that speaks of our unity while you are dividing yourself from them is to eat and drink in an unworthy manner. If you're a sinner, you can come to this table and be reminded again of the gospel of Jesus Christ, that he died on behalf of people just like you. And if you look out of yourself and look to Him, His wounds are sufficient for your sins. No matter how great they are, no matter how horrible they may be, Paul, who would call himself the chiefest of sinners, nevertheless says, this table is for you. I want you to join me in prayer as we ask the Lord's blessing upon this communion table together, and as we worship at that table. Heavenly Father.