Discerning the Body in the Lord's Supper | Communion

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If you have a Bible, you can take and open it to First Corinthians chapter 11.

1 Corinthians 11 · chapter mention

Or the passage will come up on the screen.

And I I just want to read what the Bible says about the Lord's Supper.

It gives us very clear instructions.

This is 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 23.

1 Corinthians 11:23

Paul says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

But the Lord Jesus, on the night 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.

And 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 the 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 the 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 is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.

But if we judge ourselves truly, now mark that in your in in your mind, in your attention.

If we judged ourselves truly, the worst lie, let me confess to you, I failed senior English.

There you go.

Are there others in the busless?

Well, wait.

Put your hands up.

Yeah, I just didn't get it.

And I failed my the reason I failed senior English, uh, well, let me take that back.

I I passed senior English barely, but I failed my research paper because I couldn't stand senior English.

You had to read stuff and then come and talk about it.

I was like, We had to read Huck Finn.

That's long, by the way.

I had the attention span of a gnat back then.

Uh but here's the one thing I remember about Huck Finn, okay?

This is my big takeaway from my senior year, which was lived in a chemical haze.

We'll just leave it at that.

I don't remember anything about my senior, but I remember this that my senior English teacher, Mrs.

Scudder, looked at us and she says, Huck Finn was a scoundrel.

He was a liar and a cheat and a thief.

But the one thing he never did, he never lied to himself.

Yeah, I was like Scooby-Doo.

That's the only thing I remember about senior English.

Thank you.

Don't tell your children.

Why do I tell you that?

Because when the Bible comes along and says, because I thought of Lillian Scudder this week as I was getting ready for today, he says, 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.

See, the Bible kind of flips the script there because you say judgment these days, and that's like a hate crime.

Like, what?

I don't like that.

My God's a God.

He says, hey, when God talks about judgment, it's talking about discipline.

He says, if we judge ourselves truly, so the imitation of the Bible today, we'll start backwards and work uh forward, is hey, tell yourself the truth.

And a couple things are going to help you tell yourself the truth around communion today.

It's early on the Bible says, very suddenly, it says, in Jesus on the night that he was betrayed.

And so God understands betrayal, the most galling of all human emotions.

Some of you in this room have been betrayed.

Last week when Renee Napier was here, you talked about forgiveness.

Some of you had to do some work this week and kind of like, mmm, ooh, I want to say to you that God understands what that feels like, okay?

But here's where I want us to really get to is towards the end of that section of scripture when he says, if anyone does this without discerning the body, if anyone does this without discerning the body, that's not a reference to your physical body, it's a reference to the church.

And so I want us to think about today in light of the church.

I want to think about ourselves in light of the church.

You say, What do you mean?

Well, you hear this a lot.

I hear this a lot.

People say they engage in sinful behavior and they go, Well, I'm not hurting anybody.

If you're if you're a Christian, yes, you are, because you're part of the church.

You're hurting the church, you're not discerning the body.

Uh, this happened a while back.

I was walking through First Colony Mall because some days I just have crazy, crazy weeks, and I just go to Sam's and just walk up and down the aisles and just stare at stuff.

I don't buy anything.

My wife called me this week and she said, Where are you?

I did a funeral in East Texas.

I said, I'm in Sam's in Lufkin, Texas.

She said, You're like an old man.

Get in your truck and drive home.

No, I just want to walk around and look at stuff.

I don't know when I'll need five gallons of mayonnaise.

You never know.

And so I just, I just kind of just let my soul breathe a little bit.

So sometimes I'll just go to the mall and I'll just walk around.

I'll walk around the mall in the food court.

Uh there was a kid that goes to our church, a teenager, and he has his back to me, and his girlfriend can see over his shoulder, and he had some handfuls of his girlfriend just kind of holding her.

I guess she was fixing to fall down, so he was holding her up.

And I'm just walking, and I just kind of stopped and I was just like, well, looky here.

You notice you never see adults doing that, by the way.

I just wanted to say, how's it like your mom and dad to come to the food court at the mall and do that?

But I just kind of stood there.

I wasn't mad, I wasn't angry.

I was like, hey man, don't do that.

But I did discern the body and I thought, hey man, is this the best testimony we can have as the church?

We come out in public and grope our girlfriends.

And so the girl looked at me.

I don't know if you know this, but teenagers, some of them don't understand respect.

We have to respect them, but they don't have to respect.

And so she says, You got a problem?

And I said, Yeah, he goes to my church.

And about that time he turned around and said, Oh, oh, oh, Pastor Neil, what's up?

What's up?

What's up?

And then I watched the kid try to explain to his girlfriend that this is his pastor.

And I just said, Hey, good to see you guys, man.

I just, she's like.

Here's what I'm saying.

When the Bible says just don't do this without discerning the body, don't do life.

Don't come and receive this and think, I'm good, I'm good, I'm not hurting anybody.

You can have secret, hidden sin buried in your life today, go, I'm not hurting anybody, that's a lie.

You're not judging yourself truly.

Because you're part of the body of Christ.

So don't just think about yourself in terms of the church.

Think about the church in terms of you.

What does that mean?

That means a couple of things.

The Bible says things like, confess your sins one to another.

So when we open up the communion stations here in a little bit, and people begin to line up and come and climb the bamboo leaders in worship, you may want to go to somebody and say, you know what?

I need you to, I need to confess my sin to you before I go up there and receive communion.

And so that'd be great.

You can look around, grab somebody, you can come to the altar, you can go sit in my office, you can go outside, you can go sit in your truck in the parking lot.

I don't care.

But what I do care about is that you don't turn this into an empty ritual.

Okay, cracker juice, here we go, and walk out and continue to live a sinful life.

The Bible says, confess, you see, thinking about the church and in relation to you is you need other people in your life.

I need other people in my life.

The Bible also says in Galatians chapter 6, verse 1 and 2, bear one another's burdens and thus fulfill the law of Christ.

Galatians 6:1

The way you fulfill the law of Christ is coming alongside people and just bearing their burdens.

I sat in the living room of Kevin and Leanne Larks yesterday.

Leanne's two brothers were killed in a plane crash this week.

Avid pilots, you know, they died together doing what they love.

And I looked at her and her husband and their three beautiful daughters, and I said, God's here.

He's not the there's a reason the Bible says though we walk through the valley in the shadow of death.

Somebody asked me, What'd you say when you went over there?

As little as possible.

What would you do?

I just wanted to just get up under that with them and say, Let me just bear this with you.

This is overwhelming.

And I looked and I said, Hey, people, everybody grieves differently.

Kevin, your husband, is an intellect.

He's going to be wanting to know about the airspeed and what the whether instruments are working, because Kevin's a pilot.

And I said, And y'all gonna drive up to Ohio now, somewhere along the way, your wife, Kevin,'s gonna look at you and say, I want you to sell your plane.

And you're gonna grab that joystick like, I ain't giving up my plane.

And I said, This is it, and they just laughed, and she kind of looked at me like, mm-hmm.

And Kevin looked at me like, mm-mm.

That's being their pastor.

It's sitting in their living room when life is falling apart.

And and and somebody said, Well, what does the Bible say about this?

And I said, You know and worship the God who says, I'll give beauty for ashes and strength for fear.

You'll put on the oil, you'll put on the garment of praise for the garment of despair.

And it's okay to be sad.

What am I telling you that for?

Because that's just what it means to bear one of those burdens.

If you're walking through life right now and it feels overwhelming, then you're not utilizing the church that is all around you.

So when the Bible says, right here in 1 Corinthians 11, hey, if anyone does this without discerning the body, you eat and drink judgment on yourself.

And so think about yourself in relation to the church and think about the church in relation to you.

What do you need?

And don't come on Sundays and just sit there quietly, anonymously, and thinking, well, no one's giving me what I need, so I'm gonna go find another church.

You might want to just turn to somebody and say, Hey, I I need I need just anybody.

You've got a pulse, you'll do.

Uh just to bear this with me.

That's what the church is for.

That's why you're here.

Okay?

The preaching in this church is at best mediocre.

The people of this church are incredible.

And so there's a great resource available to you, is what I'm saying.

Finally, Paul says this, he says, Hey, so let a man examine himself.

Let a woman, let a person examine themselves.

So we're gonna, I'm gonna voice a prayer and we'll we'll just kind of enter into a time of examination.

Let me say this: this is not morbid introspection where you tell yourself all the reasons you're not good.

That's not what this is about.

This is not about, well, you know, I just I stink and I did this and blah, blah, blah.

Not at all.

No, a person examine himself.

One of the things you need to let in while we're just kind of being still and kind of thinking about our lives in relation to the church and the church in relation to us, one of the things you should think about is I'm a person for whom Christ died.

You say, Well, what does that mean?

That means that when I was a kid, I remember we our stepmom used to take us uh to the store and put stuff on layaway.

Remember layaway?

Anybody?

We did layaway all the time.

You while we put five hours down, they'd hold that.

We were so broke, we went back to get it out.

I was four sizes bigger.

And the guy was like, Yeah, we put it, we we returned it back to stock because we didn't think you were you were ever gonna come get it.

And so I lived with this fear as a kid that I was never gonna get what I wanted.

Just never.

I mean, I saw it and it was on layway.

My stepmom go, it's on layaway, it's on layaway.

Well, why can't we ever pay off layaway, but you can always buy cigarettes?

Help me with that.

Never got it.

Never.

There's so many things that we saw that were on layaway that we never wore.

You're not put on layaway.

He didn't put down five dollars and go, I'm gonna watch your behavior and see if I'm gonna pay more.

He paid for you.

Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God.

So let that in while you're reflecting and examining yourself.

Stand to your feet if you wouldn't hold your hands out.

Because Christ has defeated every sin.

Every sin.

All sin.

Because Christ has defeated every sin.

You're free now to depart and rejoice in his great love for you.

In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Bless you.

You dismiss.