The Lord's Supper | 1 Corinthians 11:23–34

Intro

If you’re honest, has it ever seemed weird to you that we eat a small piece of bread and drink a little cup in church? Is that really necessary? Does it really do anything? What exactly are you supposed to think or feel or get out of it?

I think one reason evangelicals in particular struggle with the sacraments is because we tend to assume that “God only cares about spiritual things.” N. D. Wilson pushes back against that assumption:

“God only cares how we emote at him? That's part of it, sure, but I was pretty sure that He made physical animals and a physical man and gave him a physical job. I was pretty sure that He made a physical tree with physical fruit and told that physical man not to eat it or he would physically die. He physically ate it anyway and now we physically go into the physical ground, physically rot, and become physical plant and physical worm food. And because of this incredibly physical problem, He made things even more clear when His own Son took on physical flesh to lead a physical life that lead to a physical cross where He physically absorbed our curse, was physically tortured, and bought you and bought me and bought this whole physical world with His physical blood. If He’d wanted a spiritual kingdom, He could have saved Himself a huge amount of trouble … by just skipping Christmas and the Crucifixion.”

It should come as no surprise that Jesus gave us physical signs and seals of our union with him. Afterall, the Word became flesh. Last week we looked at Baptism, and our text this morning instructs us on the Lord’s Supper, a God-given corporate habit of grace.

1 Corinthians 11:23–34

23 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, 24 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.” 25 In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” 26 For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. 27 Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord. 28 Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. 29 For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself. 30 That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died. 31 But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. 32 But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world. 33 So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another— 34 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.

The Lord’s Supper

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are the two practices commanded by Christ, taught by the Apostles, and practiced by the Christian Church from the beginning. We refer to baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments or ordinances. They are real means of grace the Lord Jesus gave to his Church—God-appointed ways through which God supplies his active and dynamic power to his Church.

Paul grounds his instruction on the Lord’s Supper in the words and actions of Jesus “on the night when he was betrayed”: “For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you …” (1 Corinthians 11:23).

The Lord’s Supper is a tradition in the church that was authorized by Jesus himself. At the Last Supper, as we call that Passover meal Jesus ate with his disciples, Jesus gave a command: “Do this.” He 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, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me’” (1 Corinthians 11:24–25).

And what Paul received from the Lord, he gave to the churches that he planted. So our practice of eating the Lord’s Supper together as a gathered church is a tradition that began with the Apostles by the command of Christ.

If Baptism (which Matt preached on last Sunday) is the “initiatory, unrepeated sacrament” that signifies the believer’s entrance into covenant fellowship with Christ, think of the Table as continuing covenant renewal.  David Mathis writes, “The Table is an act of new-covenant renewal, a repeated rite of continuing fellowship and ongoing perseverance in our embrace of the gospel.” You are born into your family only once, but you regularly and repeatedly eat family meals to maintain fellowship. A husband and wife consummate their marriage covenant once, but they renew and maintain their one-flesh covenant regularly.

The Lord’s Supper goes by various names, and each one has a biblical basis worth knowing. Paul calls it “the Lord’s Supper” here in 1 Corinthians 11:20.

You may be familiar with calling it Communion. The Greek word koinoia (κοινωνία) means communion or participation. It’s the word used in 1 Corinthians 10:16: “The cup of 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?”

Or maybe you’ve heard it called the Eucharist. That may sound Roman Catholic, but it’s a legitimate word for Protestants. It comes from the Greek word eucharisteō (εὐχαριστέω), meaning “to give thanks.” It’s the word used here in 1 Corinthians 11:24: “And when he [Jesus] had given thanks, he broke it, and said, ‘This is my body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’”

From the sheer volume of vocabulary used to describe this sacrament, it is clear, as Wayne Grudem says, that “the meaning of the Lord’s Supper is complex, rich, and full.” And according to 1 Corinthians 11, understanding the meaning of the Lord’s Supper is essential to partaking in a worthy manner.

How you eat and drink matters. That’s Paul’s point here. In verse 20, Paul says that, whatever the Corinthians were doing when they ate and drank together, it was not the Lord’s Supper they were eating.

So my aim is to inform you of the meaning and significance of the Lord’s Supper. We want to be biblically informed in our habits and practices. It strengthens us as a church to know why we do what we do. Here are six glorious realities contained in the Lord’s Supper:

1. The Lord’s Supper Commemorates the Gospel

When the Lord Jesus instituted the Supper as a meal for his people to eat together, he said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor 11:24, 25; cf. Luke 22:19). Jesus gave us the Supper as a way to worship him by commemorating his sacrifice for our sins.

The call to remember implies that we are prone to forget.

When God commanded the people of Israel to eat the Passover meal year after year, he said, “This day shall be for you a memorial day, and you shall keep it as a feast to the LORD …. And when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ you shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of the LORD’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt, when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses’” (Exodus 12:14, 26–27).

It is amazing how many times the Old Testament gives commands not to forget:  Deuteronomy 4:9: “Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life.” Or commands to remember: “You shall remember the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 8:18).

There is a kind of sinful forgetfulness.

But are we really in danger of forgetting that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins? Well, Paul wrote to Timothy, “Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead, the offspring of David, as preached in my gospel” (2 Timothy 2:8). And Paul tells the Corinthians just a few chapters after this text: “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:1–3).

It’s not that we forget the facts of the gospel—that Christ died on the cross. Rather, we are prone to loosen our grip on the gospel. What can forget the implications of the gospel. Our sensitivity to the Spirit’s conviction of sin weakens; our consciences grow dull. Our functional hope shifts away from Christ to self or stuff. Our zeal for Christ wanes; our confidence in his Word dwindles. 

The Lord’s Supper is a regular, concrete, tactile, participatory way for the Church to guard against spiritual amnesia by remembering and celebrating Christ and the gospel. And the Lord’s Supper is powerful in its simplicity: bread and wine symbolize Christ’s body and blood. Jesus took bread, gave thanks, and broke it, saying, “This is my body which is for you” (v. 24).

For you.

Jesus took on full humanity and fulfilled all righteousness in order to be a sinless substitute for you. In your place condemned he stood. He suffered the wrath you deserved. He laid down his life for you.

Then he took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood” (v. 25). The blood of Jesus seals and secures the new covenant. And that covenant guarantees the complete forgiveness of your sins and the transformation of your heart: “‘This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds,’ then he adds, ‘I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more’” (Hebrews 10:16–17; cf. Jer 31:33–34).

2. The Lord’s Supper Proclaims the Gospel

Verse 26 says, “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” As Matt mentioned last week, the sacraments have been called “visible words.” When we eat and drink the Lord’s Supper together, we are all preaching a visible sermon, like an object lesson. (“You proclaim” is plural in v. 26.) Robert Letham writes, “Whereas the preaching of the Word brings the gospel of God’s grace to our ears, the sacraments portray it before our eyes. … In this way God appeals to other senses than through preaching. These are, indeed, his appointed visual aids to reinforce the word we hear.” By God’s design, Word and sacrament go together. 

I love how John Frame says it: “The fullness of divine teaching is by Word and sacrament.”

Remember the Emmaus Road story in Luke 24? How did the resurrected Christ reveal himself to two disappointed disciples? By Word and sacrament.

Luke writes, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.” (Luke 24:27). That’s the Word. Listen to what happened when they arrived in Emmaus: “When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (Luke 24:30–31). There’s the sacrament. Jesus made himself known to them at the table.

In verse 32 they identify the moment their hearts began to burn: “They said to each other, ‘Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the Scriptures?’” (Luke 24:32). That’s the Word. But when they returned to Jerusalem, “They told what had happened on the road, and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24:35).

The Lord’s Supper proclaims the gospel in an especially powerful way, because when you eat and drink, you are saying, “Christ died for me, and I am trusting him.”

3. The Lord’s Supper Nourishes the Church

Just a bit earlier in this letter to the Corinthians, Paul wrote, “The cup of 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?” (1 Corinthians 10:16). Through the Lord’s Supper, you partake of the body and blood of Jesus. That is, you receive by faith alone the blessings and benefits Christ’s death secured.

Or to put it another way, eating the bread and drinking the cup of the Lord’s Supper provides real nourishment to your soul. Just like your body receives nourishment when you eat and drink food, your soul is nourished with the blessings and benefits Christ secured by his death when you eat and drink by faith.

In John 6, Jesus said, “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 you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:53–56). How do you do that? How do you eat his flesh and drink his blood? Answer: You participate in the Lord’s Supper by faith.

We do not believe, like the Roman Catholic Church, that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Jesus. When Jesus said, “This is my body” (1 Cor 11:24) we understand that he meant this represents his body. If I show you a picture of my family on my phone and say, “This is my wife and these are my kids,” you understand that my wife and kids are not physically inside my phone. So the incarnate Son of God is not physically present in the bread and wine. He was raised from the dead with a glorified body and he ascended into heaven.

But Jesus is spiritually present with us, as he promised (Matt 28:20). And Jesus manifests his presence in a unique and powerful way through the Supper. Robert Letham writes, “Christ does not come down to us in his body and blood. Instead, we are lifted up to him by the Holy Spirit.”

Sometimes people downplay the Supper by stressing that the bread and cup are just symbols. But the nature of a symbol is to represent a greater reality. Letham adds, “In the sacrament the Holy Spirit unites the faithful [that is the one who has faith] to the person of Christ as they eat and drink the signs, the physical elements of bread and wine. There is an inseparable conjunction of sign and reality. As truly as we eat the bread and drink the wine, so we feed on Christ by faith.”

To be clear, this is by faith alone. The bread and cup are of no value to you apart from faith. In fact, eating and drinking without faith is dangerous, which brings us to our next point.

4. The Lord’s Supper Purifies the Church

In v. 27, Paul begins to speak of the alarming dangers of eating and drinking the Lord’s Supper “in an unworthy manner.” He warns, “Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord” (v. 27). He goes on, “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.” (1 Corinthians 11:29). What kind of judgment? Paul adds this: “That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died” (1 Corinthians 11:30). So this is not an abstract, imagined, hypothetical judgment. Many in Corinth were sick and a considerable number had actually died.

What is the remedy? Paul urges believers: “Let a person examine himself, then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup” (1 Corinthians 11:28). And in v. 31, “But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged” (1 Corinthians 11:31). To examine yourself and judge yourself truly means to deal honestly with sin in your life. When you do, you will agree with God’s verdict—that your sin deserves God’s wrath. And those who agree with God will confess their sins and rely on Christ who died for them.

In Matthew 5:23–24, Jesus said, “So if you are offering your gift at the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Matthew 5:23–24). Horizontal reconciliation is so important to right worship that Jesus says to leave the altar and put things right with your brother. Are you out of fellowship with someone here? Be quick to put things right.

Thus, the Lord’s Supper purifies the church and keeps us in fellowship with Jesus Christ our Lord. The Lord’s Supper regularly induces believers to rely on the gospel and to make no provision for the flesh. And it also presents those who are unconverted in our midst with repeated warnings, reminders, invitations, and incentives to trust in Christ.

“But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.” —1 Corinthians 11:32

5. The Lord’s Supper Unifies the Church

The presenting problem Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians 11 is division in the church.

“For, in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you …. When you 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.” —1 Corinthians 11:18, 20–21

A better translation of v. 20 would be, “Each one devours his own meal.” It’s not likely that the problem was some people eating before others arrived. Five times in this passage, Paul locates this meal in the corporate worship gathering: “when you come together” (vv. 17, 18, 20, 33, 34).

Rather, what was most likely happening was that when the church gathered in homes, those from a higher socioeconomic class gathered in one area of the house and feasted indulgently on fancier food and drink, while those from lower classes were left in another part of the house.

To act in such worldly, unspiritual ways is completely inconsistent with the Lord’s Supper, because the Lord’s Supper unifies the Church. Back in 1 Corinthians 10:17, Paul said, “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Corinthians 10:17).

Paul’s final conclusion comes in verse 33: “So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another.” Again, perhaps a better translation would be, “Receive one another.” The Lord’s Supper is not an act of private devotion only. It is a unifying moment in the life of the church.

What does that look like in our context? For one thing, it means shifting your thinking about the Lord’s Supper from a personal, private experience to a corporate expression of unity. When you examine yourself, don’t limit your thoughts only to hidden sins in your heart—thoughts, motives, attitudes, etc. By all means, confess those to the Lord. But let the corporate nature of the Supper remind you to check yourself in relationship to other believers partaking from this Table with you.

6. The Lord’s Supper Anticipates Christ’s Return 

Verse 26: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”

Every time we eat this meal together, we are reminded of the feast that is to come. At the Last Supper, Jesus himself pointed to that feast:

“‘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 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.’” —Luke 22:15–18

This meal foreshadows the feast we will enjoy when Christ returns and all is complete. John had a vision of that in Revelation 19:9: “And the angel said to me, ‘Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb.’”

When you take those small servings, set your hope on the feast God has prepared for those who love him.

“On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wine, of rich food full of marrow, of aged wine well refined. And he will swallow up on this mountain the covering that is cast over all peoples, the veil that is spread over all nations. He will swallow up death forever; and the Lord GOD will wipe away tears from all faces, and the reproach of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken. It will be said on that day, ‘Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him, that he might save us. This is the LORD; we have waited for him; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.’” —Isaiah 25:6–9

Conclusion

It’s our practice to come to the Lord’s Table on the first Sunday of each month. When we do that next in two weeks, come in faith; come trusting and proclaiming the gospel; come expecting Jesus to strengthen your weary soul with food this world knows not; come in sober self-examination; come in full assurance that Christ gave his body and his blood for you; come in unity with each other; and come anticipating the day when we feast with our Lord forever.