Come by for Supper - The Lord's Supper
Mark 14:22-25
Message
by Kurt Jones
Nov. 19th, 2006
Introduction –
Favorite meal – tell someone next to you…
EX: Thanksgiving dinner was this week.
On Thanksgiving you don't "dine and dash" right? You don't grab a turkey leg as you run out the door to work… Slam your wife and kiss the door…
It's a time to savor a meal – bon appetite
It's about relationships… It's an invitation to intimacy.
Family relationships means you sit at the same table… (Dick and Rick Hoyt)
Today we're going to teach about the Lord's Supper and then we're going to do it.
"Where did this come from?"
Matthew, Mark, and Luke all report the Last Supper.
John doesn't record the supper, but all of the events around it.
Mark 14:22-24
22 While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, "Take it; this is my body."
23 Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, and they all drank from it.
24 "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many," he said to them.
Jesus with his disciples. 2000 years old.
Covenants and meals.
Song 2:4 - "He has brought me to his banquet hall,
And his banner over me is love.
Genesis 3:6 – "she took the fruit and ate…"
Rev. 19 – Wedding Supper of the Lamb
Passover – Seder meal… Exodus 12:1-28
You are participating in history – an ancient ceremony practiced all over the world.
From cathedrals to squatter shacks – for over 2000 years. Glen and I in "Horseshoe" squatter area in Manila.
"Who does it?"
It's the gathering of God's people.
1 Cor. 11:17ff records "when you come together…" FIVE times.
This is an historic event in the life of NBC. We go from being a group of people who've been meeting in the place to a local expression of the body of Christ.
Can you do it around a hospital bed, or mountain top, or a campfire? Yes, but the normal expression is when God's people get together.
Unbelievers should NOT eat and drink. It is a public event, not some secret backroom cultish magic trick with blood and bread. Not some weird ceremony involving human sacrifice and cannibalism – which the early church was accused of…
We like it when people watch this… We PROCLAIM His death until He comes…
"How often?"
"As often as you eat and drink of it". There is nothing I can find in the Bible that says how often we should do it….
Weekly, monthly, annually?
The question we should ask is "What frequency helps us to feel it's value?"
"What happens?"
Physical Action. This isn't Thanksgiving with all the fixin's… it's a two course meal…
1. Eat Bread –
1. loaf, chip, bullet?
2. Leavened, unleavened? Sourdough or whole wheat?
3. Eat - Not to get physically filled up. The church at Corinth got this wrong and the people were hogging it all…
2. Drink Cup
1. Grape juice, wine, other? "Fruit of the vine"
There is lots of freedom – you don't HAVE to use wine, or matzoth bread… It shouldn't be done flippantly – Coke and pretzels.
While DaVinci's "Last Supper" has provided a lot of interest lately and gave Dan Brown something to write about, it doesn't depict the correct setting… They wouldn't have sat in chairs on one side of the table… Jewish custom to eat while reclining…
We're not going to do that… this week!
Mental Action
"Remember". The Death, Burial, and resurrection of Christ. The payment for sin, the sacrifice for atonement, the triumph over death and the grave, the promise of eternal life.
This is history –
Not in neutral – spinning wherever your thoughts take you.
Not channeling, new age positive affirmation or some whacko mental exercise.
"Examine" – Paul makes it clear that this is not something that should be done flippantly…
Spiritual Action
Unbelievers can do the first three things… eat, drink, remember… Even the devil, if he had a body, could do those…
This is a spiritual action – we are not physically eating Christ's body.
The KEY is "Participation"
1 Cor 10:16-17 - Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.
1 Cor. 10:16-17 = Koinonia = fellowship.
Participate in the body.
Participate in the blood.
Participate vs. Spectate – EX: Soccer games yesterday.
We are eating and drinking spiritually
"We eat and drink—that is, we take into our lives—what happened on the cross. By faith—by trusting in all that God is for us in Jesus—we nourish ourselves with the benefits that Jesus obtained for us when he bled and died on the cross." Piper
Gal 2:20
20 "I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.
John 6:53 "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves. 54 "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. 55 "For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. 56 "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.
The crowd Jesus was talking to knew he was not speaking literally.
Drinking blood was prohibited Ge. 9:4
Eating flesh was hostility toward another person. Ps. 27:2
They knew that when he said, "I am the bread of life" – (John 6:35, 41, 48, 51) He wasn't saying he was a loaf of bread.
The meaning of this leaves everyone in shock. Religious questions turn to grumbling, then sharp arguments. Finally his closest followers admit that the saying are hard (6:40) and many begin to fall away in disbelief.
One of our problems with this passage is that we all immediately think of Communion… bread, juice… that's what Jesus is talking about right? It refers primarily to the spiritual appropriation of Christ, and in a secondary sense, how we should receive communion.
The key to unlocking this passage is v. 51.
51 " I am the living bread that came down out of heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread also which I will give for the life of the world is My flesh."
Do I have to keep "eating Christ" again and again, or I'll die? Some have thought that they must continue to have communion again and again or they'll miss salvation
"Came down" is in the aorist, pointing to a single act of incarnation.
"Eats" = aorist, singular event, meaning a decision to believe and appropriate the gift of eternal life.
But Webester gives us some more insight into Bread =
2 : FOOD, SUSTENANCE - a supplying or being supplied with the necessities of life; something that gives support, endurance, or strength.
It goes beyond just what we fill our stomach with, but what we fill our LIVES, HEARTS, MINDS with….
What are the appetites of man? All kinds of them at many levels… hunger, thirst, intimacy, significance…
C.S. Lewis says that these desires, these hungers are just surface indicators that there is a deeper meaning and purpose to our lives.
Christ won every spiritual blessing
2 Cor 1:20 - For all the promises of God in Him are Yes, and in Him Amen, to the glory of God through us.
So in the months or weeks to come we may focus our time at the Lord's Supper on different aspects of these blessings… peace with God, joy in Christ, hope for the future, freedom from fear, security in adversity, guidance in perplexity, healing from sickness, victory in temptation,
INSTRUCTIONS FOR COMMUNION
Dick Hoyt
Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in Marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day.
Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. On a bike.
This love story began in Winchester, Mass. , 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.
"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life;" Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. "Put him in an Institution."
But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the Engineering Department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told. "There's nothing going on in his brain."
"Tell him a joke," Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up with a computer that allowed Him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that."
Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker" who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. That day changed Rick's life. "Dad," he typed, "when we were running, It felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!"
And that sentence changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into shape and he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.
"No way," Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a Single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.
Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?"
How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried.
Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii . It must be humiliating to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you think?
Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? "No way," he says. Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling" he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.
This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992--only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.
"No question about it," Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century."
"The thing I'd most like," Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once."
Discussion questions