Proclamation, Examination, and Habitation: Three Keys to Communion

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Take it and open it to First Corinthians chapter 11.

1 Corinthians 11 · chapter mention

And I'll just uh read.

Like I said earlier, we we're observing communion today, and for us, communion is the whole service.

And so I want to read kind of the instructions and remind ourselves and reorient ourselves around why we do this.

Uh and then I want to give you a couple words to think about.

This is 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 23.

1 Corinthians 11:23

He said, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That 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.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, The cup, 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 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.

Before I get to the words I prepared to say, let me just point out one that I wasn't prepared to say, but jumps off the page at me this morning, where there towards the end, about two verses from the end, Paul says, But if we judge ourselves truly, truly, see, and what the Bible is saying to us is that we have an infinite capacity to lie to ourselves.

We have an infinite capacity to, as men, to step on the scale and say, I'm not overweight, I'm just big boned.

We have an infinite capacity to say to ourselves, it's not that bad.

And so the Bible says, if we judged ourselves truly, now judge not as in harsh condemnation, did Oscar Pastorius, is he guilty or not guilty?

Not that.

If we just examined ourselves truly, if we looked at ourselves in the truest light possible, which is the light of God's word.

And so I want to give us three words to help us kind of do that this morning.

The first one is just the word proclamation.

He says, as often as you do this, you proclaim the Lord's death.

And so we are going to proclaim by receiving the uh the the cup and and the bread this morning, we're gonna proclaim the Lord's death, not as a historical fact, because it was that, but also as a personal need.

See, when you come to the table today, here's what you're saying by your coming.

And so you may say, I don't know if I want to say that, but here's what you're saying.

You're saying I am a person who is by nature and choice, deeply, deeply sinful and capable of destroying myself.

I have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

And not only that, I needed someone to pay for me a debt that I could never pay.

That's what he means when he says, as often as you do this, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

So my proclamation is your pastor today.

I can't speak for you.

I'll let you speak for you.

But my proclamation is that when I receive the elements this morning, because after we serve all of you, all the people at the different stations, the three in the front and the two in the back, will come down here and they'll gather around my station as their pastor, and I will serve them, and we will receive communion together.

And what I'm saying to them and all of you is that I'm so deeply flawed, Jesus had to die for me.

And then I'll smile because what also is on me is this understanding that I'm so loved by God that Jesus was glad to die for me.

And so I can't be a victim, but I also can't act like it was my idea.

See, you proclaim the Lord's death.

Second word I want to give you is examination.

He said, if we actually says, therefore let the man examine himself so he doesn't come to the Lord's table, doesn't receive this in a in an unworthy manner, not unworthy as if you deserved it, or do you deserve it?

No, no, no, no.

But but but but you you you you do it just as an empty ritual and you don't remember the body of Christ.

You don't remember.

We do not believe in transubstantiation, which means, which says that uh, hey, this becomes the body and the literal blood of Jesus.

We don't believe the Bible teaches that because when Jesus is standing there and he says they're observing the Passover uh feast, the feast of Passover, and he says, This bread is my body given for you, and this cup is the blood in my the new covenant, my blood.

We don't believe that the cup and the bread is the literal body and blood of Jesus because then you've got two Jesuses in that moment and you've got a problem.

We believe it's a symbol that reminds us of no less significant and no less substantive for us.

Uh but when he says examine yourself, uh think of it this way.

Uh I uh I eat out a lot and and and and I've eaten a lot of different places, and but I've only been to a really, really like five-star restaurant one time.

And and I don't know if you've ever been to a five-star restaurant, but when you go, the first thing you realize is I can't be myself in here.

Uh a little man stands about five feet away with a nice suit and a nice tuxedo, and he's got a thing called a crummer in his pocket.

And if you get crumbs of bread on the table, he'll step over and just sweep it all off like an artist and step back.

And I'm like, I was gonna lick my finger and get those in the like I do with a cracker barrel.

No, you don't do that.

Here's another thing I learned in the in the content, in the in in the in the course of this seven-course meal.

Between the courses, they bring you a little scoop of sorbet and they set it on there like here's a gold nugget.

The reason they give you seven courses is because they're all about that big.

And it's not polite to say to the guy, hey, is there a McDonald's around here?

I need a big Mac after that.

But between the courses, you know, here's the course, and they bring you, it's called a palate cleanser.

And what they do is they want you to remove the taste of what you just had from your tongue so your taste buds will be fresh and clean, and so you can really taste what you just had.

And that my rich horty-torty friends that took me here, I think they took me there for entertainment because I was like, are you serious?

They said, you know, Neil, at a really nice meal, it's not how much you eat, it's the taste of what you eat that matters.

No, no, you're wrong.

You are dead wrong.

Uh because they could tell, I mean, you cut it in half and it's two bites and it's gone.

But but this dawned on me as I was thinking about this morning.

Communion is the only meal that God says, hey, you need to cleanse your palate before you even partake of it.

Now, that thing was nice, it was seven courses, and it was, you know, took us forever.

And for four of us, the bill was six hundred and something dollars.

And I was like, Thank you, Jesus, I ain't paying for that.

Yeah, wow.

Makes my point even more.

It pales in comparison.

They would bring us little sore little palate cleansers between the courses.

God says, This is so significant.

You need to cleanse your palate before you come to this.

You need to think about what you're doing here this morning, he says.

Last word I want to give you is just the word habitation.

He says, as often as you do this, do this in remembrance of me.

If you grew up in a Baptist church, chances are they had a little table in front of where I'm standing right now, and on the front edge of it, someone took a router and scrolled in there.

It was usually a brown table with dark brown writing on the front edge.

You with me?

And you always kind of looked and kind of like, uh, well, I never got, I didn't grow up in church, and so I would go a few times with my friends.

I remember one time, see, I got really imprinted about communion because we were in the back, they passed it out like most churches do, they passed out the little cracker and then the Jews.

And some of my buddies were goofing around the back of First Baptist Church, a little small town, and they had a deacon's bench on the back wall, a little short thing like that.

And a man always sat back there, and I didn't know why until that day he leaned over two rows and thumped two of my friends in the back of the head so hard, it sounded like you were thumping a watermelon.

Doom, doom.

So you can do that in East Texas.

You can actually physically harm parishioners.

And then he just looked at and they kind of leaned like that.

He looked at he said, not with this.

And as a young unbeliever, I realized there's something sacred going on here, and I need to shut up and pay attention.

It so shook me to my core, I abstained.

Because they were all like, we're gonna watch this funny, pretend like they were shooting taking shots, and the old man, who smelled like brill cream, by the way.

Boom, boom! Not with this.

He was loving us enough to say, This is bigger than what you boys understand.

And see, that's the reason on the front edge of the table when it says, This do in remembrance of me.

And God is saying, Don't ever forget me.

And you're saying, Oh man, I could never forget you.

Think about your life before you say that.

Or I'll think about my life before I say that.

See how easy it is?

And so what I'm saying is that communion is one of those holy habits.

It's a place of habitation that he says you come back to.

The ancients, the old timers used to have what they called a rock of habitation, where they would literally go down by the lake or the creek and they would sit or they would just kind of lay, just kind of prostrate out on this rock and just cry out to God for their wayward children to come back home or just meditate or read and just gaze upon the Lord's beauty and creation.

But it was a place where they went to remember and reorient their lives around God.

That's why someone took a router and scrawled in front of the table, this too, in remembrance of me.

Only God has earned the right to say, never get over me.

Have some holy habits in your life that bring you back to me and cause you to go, yes, thank you.

I was kind of getting a little fuzzy there about what my priority should be, but because you are my highest priority and my deepest affection, God, I come to the table to reorient myself around you to remember the body and the blood.

And so let's do what the Bible calls us to do by just, he says, let a person examine themselves.

And so let me just say this before I pray, and Clyde will just play, and we'll just kind of just have some time just to reflect.

You examine yourself, look at me, beloved.

You examine yourself not to disqualify yourself.

You don't examine yourself and kind of go, well, nah, okay, I better just sit.

You know, God says examine yourself because He wants you to participate.

Stand to your feet if you would.

Let me speak a blessing over you, and we'll be dismissed.

It is a humbling thing to be died for.

And you are a died for people.

Provision for your sin.

Absolutely.

But also provision for your life.

Depart now and live the life Christ died for you to have.

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

Amen.

Bless you, you dismiss it.