Institution of the Lord's Supper
Notes
Transcript
Good Morning!
What did the grape say when it got stepped on? Nothing, it just let out a little wine.
Did you hear about the restaurant on the moon? Great food, no atmosphere!
We have our family fun night this Saturday! Please invite people and come if you are available.
This morning we are going to be in Mark 14:22-25.
Last week we talked about Jesus eating His last Passover meal. While they were eating the meal, Jesus revealed that one of the 12 was going to betray Him and hand Him over to the scribes. This news took everyone at the table by surprise. They all began to wonder if it was him. They all became sorrowful and this news of betrayal and it really affected everyone in the room. It completely changed the atmosphere in the room. They all began to ask Jesus one after another, “is it I?” No one knew who was the betrayer. The one who was going to hand over Jesus to the scribes was a very good deceiver. He had everyone fooled. Everyone but Jesus! Jesus knew it was Judas. Then Jesus told them that it would be better for that betrayer to never to have been born! What a statement on what hell is going to be like! Hell is so bad, if you are destined for hell, it is better to have never lived! God does not send anyone to hell, that is a choice that is made by us. We either choose to repent and believe in Jesus or we deny Him. Jesus saw into Judas’ heart and saw that it was as a stone! He lived with and followed Jesus for 3 1/2 years, and still he chose to deny Christ. He loved money and power more than Jesus. Because of that, it would have been better if he had not been born. I urge you to not wait if you feel God stirring your heart. If you feel Him, respond and repent of your sins and trust in Christ! Don’t wait, one day you will lose the option of choosing! When Jesus returns, all choices are done, every knee will bow and everyone's eternity will be settled. When we reject Jesus, we are rejecting just a man, we are rejecting God and His Son, whom He sent so that we could have a restored relationship with Him. Jesus is the Son of God
Today we are going to be looking at the first Lord’s Supper. Jesus is going to give us this new ordinance. One that is used to sanctify us and we use to remember what Jesus did for us, the gift that He provided. Matthew, Mark, and John all have basically the same account of this event, but Luke gives us more details. We can see more about the Lord’s Supper in Luke, so we will be using Luke’s account throughout this message.
Please stand as we have a moment of silence to prepare our hearts and minds to hear God’s Word.
22 And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” 23 And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. 24 And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. 25 Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”
Pray
Jesus is taking these last few moments with His followers and disciples and He is teaching them how to properly remember the sacrifice that He is about to become.
While they were eating the Passover meal, Jesus interrupts the normal order of the meal and takes a loaf of bread, blesses it then breaks it and says, take, this is my body. Jesus knows what is going to happen in the next 24 hours. He is preparing His disciples and followers for when He will no longer be with them in body.
First I want us to see that Jesus blessed the bread, Jesus is giving thanks for the bread (the symbol of His body). We are to do the same. As we give thanks for the bread while taking the Lord’s Supper, we are to be thanking God that Jesus came to earth and became flesh, that He became The Sacrificial Lamb! The One who takes away the sins of the world. This is a time of reflection, a time to think back about all that Christ has done and all that He is doing and all that He has promised to do! Because He died, we can live!
He says take the bread, this is my body. What about His body are we remembering? We can see more detail in Luke’s account of this event. In Luke 22:19
19 And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body, which is being given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”
His body is given for us! No one took Jesus and killed him. He willingly went to the cross, took on the full wrath of God for the sins of the world, so that we can have real life, life with God.
We can see what His body meant for us in Hebrews 10:10
10 And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
Who’s will? God’s will, Jesus said multiple times that He came to do the will of the Father. He was obedient to the point of death on the cross. Through Jesus giving His body for us, we are sanctified through His offering once for all. What a glorious and wonderful statement of truth! That through Jesus Christ, we can be made right in the eyes of God for all eternity!
Jesus also tells us to remember Him when we are taking the bread. When we are reflecting on His sacrifice, we should be humble in the fact that we had to have the crucifixion of Jesus in order to have the forgiveness of our sins. We can not pay the price that God requires for our sins. If we die in our sins, we will face the full wrath of God. It is only when we have repented of our sins and have believed in Jesus, then He sanctifies us! Humility is the only proper response to the cross. When we spend time daily at the foot of the cross, we will be humble and we will remember that it is only because of His gift, that we can truly live. That we are truly forgiven.
While we are reflecting on His body, we are given hope! Hope that one day He will return and establish His kingdom and we will all be called home! We are reminded of the hope we have in Him, the forgiveness that He gives to those who accept Him. When we think about all that Christ has done for us and all the promises of what He is going to do for us, that is our Hope. We do not hope in anything that it of this earth. This earth will one day pass away and be made new again. All governments will pass away. Christ is eternal, He is the only one who is worthy of our hope and faith! We are reminded of this when we reflect on what He has done, the gift of His body as the Sacrificial Lamb!
Next He takes a cup of wine and again He gives thanks for it and He gives it to them and they all drank. The Lord’s Supper is not something that is to be taken alone in isolation. It is a community event that binds us together as brothers and sisters. No where in the Bible are we shown an example of one person taking the Lord’s Supper alone. It is always the church gathering to reflect and celebrate what Jesus did. I believe that because of the command to partake in the Lord’s Supper, this is one of the reasons that we are commanded to be in church. The Lord’s Supper is part of our sanctification process. As we pause to reflect and think on the things that Christ has done for us, we are strengthened and our faith is made stronger. Also our fellowship with each other is strengthened. Church is vital to the true believer! Long periods of not attending church will cause our faith to weaken and our flesh to get stronger. We must be in church and we are to partake in the Lord’s Supper.
We are not told definitely if Judas was there or not. Some believe that he was par of the all who drank, if he was one of the all, then we can see the warning in 1 Corinthians 11:29-30 in action.
29 For the one who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not properly recognize the body. 30 For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number are asleep.
We know that Judas was not a true follower of Jesus and if he did take of the Lord’s Supper, we all know that he killed himself, he died. That is why it is so important that we always included Paul’s warning about wrongly taking the bread and the wine. We have to be sure that we are prepared for the seriousness of remembering Jesus’ sacrifice!
I don’t believe that Judas was there, I think by this time he had already left and was getting the scribes to take them to Jesus. That is my personal belief, but again it is not clear as to either way. So it is something that we can debate, but we should not divide on this. If you think different than me, lets have lunch and discuss it. I love to talk about the Bible and my King.
Jesus tells them that this is His blood of the new covenant. We can see more details about this again in Luke 22:20
20 And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, “This cup, which is poured out for you, is the new covenant in My blood.
Jesus is fulfilling the new covenant that Jeremiah prophesied about in Jeremiah 31:31
31 “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,
We can also see this in Hebrews 8:1-13
1 Now the main point in what has been said is this: we have such a high priest, who has taken His seat at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens, 2 a minister in the sanctuary and in the true tabernacle, which the Lord set up, not man. 3 For every high priest is appointed to offer both gifts and sacrifices; so it is necessary that this high priest also have something to offer. 4 Now if He were on earth, He would not be a priest at all, since there are those who offer the gifts according to the Law; 5 who serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things, just as Moses was warned by God when he was about to erect the tabernacle; for, “See,” He says, “that you make all things by the pattern which was shown to you on the mountain.” 6 But now He has obtained a more excellent ministry, to the extent that He is also the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted on better promises.
7 For if that first covenant had been free of fault, no circumstances would have been sought for a second. 8 For in finding fault with the people, He says,
“Behold, days are coming, says the Lord,
When I will bring about a new covenant
With the house of Israel and the house of Judah,
9 Not like the covenant which I made with their fathers
On the day I took them by the hand
To bring them out of the land of Egypt;
For they did not continue in My covenant,
And I did not care about them, says the Lord.
10 “For this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel
After those days, declares the Lord:
I will put My laws into their minds,
And write them on their hearts.
And I will be their God,
And they shall be My people.
11 “And they will not teach, each one his fellow citizen,
And each one his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’
For they will all know Me,
From the least to the greatest of them.
12 “For I will be merciful toward their wrongdoings,
And their sins I will no longer remember.”
13 When He said, “A new covenant,” He has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and growing old is about to disappear.
Why blood though? We can see through out the Old Testament, that God used blood to seal the covenants that He made with people. We can see this with Abraham in Genesis 15 and again with Moses in Exodus 24:8
8 So Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people, and said, “Behold the blood of the covenant, which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words.”
In the old covenant, Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people. The blood was put on the outside to cover up their sins. It was a temporary covering. That is why they had to continually keep sacrificing all those animals. The blood of the animals was never meant to be a permanent solution to our sin problem. It was to show us our need for God’s permanent solution, His Son!
Look at what is done with the blood of the new covenant. It is taken into us! It changes us from the inside! We are a new creation when we repent and believe in Christ, through the shedding of His blood, our old self passes away and we are made new. Our old hard hearts are replaced with new ones that are soft and full of life! That is why the new covenant is so special, it is a permanent solution to our sin problem! Through Christ, we are reconciled to God.
We don’t ignore the old laws, they are good guard rails on how we are to live our lives. Jesus summed up the 10 commandments with the two most important. Love God will all that you are and love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus didn’t come to do away with the law, He came to fulfill it!
Jesus said His blood was poured out for many! He didn’t just die for a select few people, He died for whomsoever would repent and believe. Jesus’ body and blood are available to all who would accept them! God loves us so much that He sent His son to pay our debt that we could work a million lifetimes for and never even come close to paying it off. We are unable to reconcile our ledger with God. We don’t have to, Jesus did it for us, we just have to repent of our sins and believe in Him. It is truly that simple! We like to make it harder than it really is! Jesus’ death was even available to Judas had he repented and believed, but he did not.
Finally, Jesus tells us that He will not drink of the fruit of the vine again until He does in the kingdom of God! I believe that when we get to heaven, we will get to take the Lord’s Supper with our Lord! It will be the most special meal that any of us will every eat! Celebrating what Jesus did, with Jesus! I just cant imagine how glorious that is going to be!
Many believe that when Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper, that He was saying that the bread and the wine literally turn into His body and blood as we take it. This is taking what Jesus says out of context. He is in the middle of taking the Passover meal where there is rich symbolism and meaning in the food of the meal. I believe that is why He waiting until they were taking this Passover meal, they were thinking about the food and what it symbolized. So in context with that, He symbolized the bread to His body and the wine to His blood. I have found nothing anywhere in the Bible that will change my mind on this. When we take the Lord’s Supper literally, we are re crucifying Him, we are saying the first time wasn’t enough and we periodically need to do it again so that it will work!
Hebrew 8:12 says that God will remember our sins no more once they are covered by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ! Once is all Jesus needs to die, His death was enough over 2,000 years ago, we don’t need to keep killing Him.
We are going to take the Lord’s Supper after we sing. Remember that this is a time of reflection and remembrance. This is our Passover meal! This is a joyous time! We are remembering the sacrifice of our King. We are reflecting on all that He has done for us! We need to take this time to ask for forgiveness and to forgive those who have wronged us! It is dangerous to take the bread and wine with unforgiveness on your heart!
Let’s pray
