Communion

Everybody this morning, my name is Russ.

If I haven't had a chance to meet you, it's great to have you with us here on this Labor Day weekend Sunday as we conclude this series title community that we're in.

Um and uh you know I came in the room and I'm like, well, where do I go?

You know, it's different, right?

Different.

See, I love different.

I like to shake it up.

I and this is not my doing.

I give credit to Pat.

Yeah, so yeah, so he um he uh he walks he walks into a room and he just takes command.

And um, and so uh but I want to I want to share I want to share a message with you that that really um uh it seems so practical, but it's it when you it answers the question where did communion come from and how has it become practiced like we practice it today?

And this this message I gotta give I gotta give credit, I gotta give credit where credit is due.

Um a lot of what we're talking about was birthed out of Brandon.

Um many of you know Brandon that leads worship for us.

Uh Brandon Stubbs, he he's down in Social Circle today, but he he he and Hannah have been gathering all of the people that work in our worship ministry on a regular basis, and they get together, and and and at times they have meals together and they they share communion, they share uh the the goodness of God together.

I mean, you get you get together a bunch of worship leaders, and you can imagine how sweet it is to hear the music and and the singing.

Um and so Brandon taught um he taught uh some of what I'm teaching this morning, and I also want to give credit to uh um a young man.

He is a younger man, he's younger than me, and he's not he's he's probably not as young as he seems, but his name is John Mark Comer, and if you wanted to go on YouTube, you could look up what we're talking about today, and you can get an hour to an hour and a half worth of information.

Um you don't want an hour from me, you want you want about 20 minutes from me, and then we're gonna we're gonna actually share communion as a church, but I hope you'll do it with a different mindset, and I hope you'll understand that that I am giving you permission as a pastor for you to do communion in your community groups when you get together and you share meals and you fellowship and you have what we would call koinonia.

And I know this there are some pastors that would go ballistic at me giving you permission because of how communion is viewed.

I understand that, and I respect those pastors, um, but I hope you'll understand where I'm coming from.

The picture I want to show you is is called Fractiopanus, and I believe it's the earliest picture of the early church that that is that is available where a church was meeting, and this is probably early second century, so so 125 A.D.

or so, somewhere in there, and the church is not in a building, the church is not in a gathering, seated in rows, staring at the backs of the heads of other people as a pastor stands in front of them and gives them a message.

They are sitting around a table and they are sharing a meal.

They're sharing a meal.

And I'll tell you that the church, the church probably looked that way for the first few centuries.

For the first few centuries, up until early fourth century, this is how the church would look.

Now, this particular picture is taken, or it's taken.

It was drawn from the church meeting in the catacombs below the city of Rome.

In hiding.

Why are they in hiding?

Because they are facing persecution, terrible persecution.

They in the early years the church um the church faced all types of persecution, but it was very common for them, especially in cities in the Roman Empire like Rome, where they had colosseums, and these colosseums were all over the Roman Empire.

You can go to Israel, you can go to Turkey, you can go to Greece, you can go to all and see the effects of the Greco-Roman culture where colosseums in theater, and they would bring Christians and they would feed them and allow them to be eaten by lions or other wild animals.

They would have to fight gladiators.

We know the stories of Nero, uh the Roman emperor.

He would have party, he would have garden parties at night, and rather than using regular torches, he would put Christians on a stake.

Christians, people that believed in Jesus, and he would put tar upon them and just cover them with tar, and he would light them up, and that would provide the light for all of his friends and his family that would come to party and to eat.

Can you imagine?

Can you imagine?

And so for the first few hundred years of the church, that's how they had to live, and that's what they had to deal with.

That's how they that's how they worshiped, that's how they they gathered.

They didn't gather in large buildings, they gathered in um secret places underground, like the church in China now, like the church in Iran, like the church in North Korea right now in our culture.

And so let's shift our thinking of the Lord's Supper or from communion.

I want to shift it from a cracker juice experience in a large setting.

So I want you to think about a meal around a table.

And here's what Luke says in verse 22, Luke 22, chapter 22.

Luke chapter 22, verses 7 through 20 says, now the festival of the unleavened bread arrived when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, and you've got festivals, Jewish people, in Jewish culture, they lived, they had they had several festivals a year.

Luke 22:7–20

There's the festival of the Passover where they would sacrifice the lamb.

They would have the Day of Atonement, and it would provide atonement for the nation.

But right, just on the tail end of the Passover experience was the festival of unleavened bread.

And that goes back to Egypt where they where God said, cook your bread without leaven, because it won't take as long to cook it.

And so they basically had to rush out of Egypt, right, in the middle of the night with unleavened bread.

What does that mean?

They had crackers.

They had crackers.

It was like what we're gonna do the Lord's Supper with today.

They had crackers, and leaven in the Bible represents sin.

Whenever you hear the word leaven, it represents sin.

It represents sin.

Anything that is unholy, anything that is that is any any disobedience.

And so when the festival of unleavened bread arrived, when the Passover lamb is sacrificed, Jesus sent Peter and John ahead and said, Go and prepare the Passover meal so we can eat it together.

Where do you want us to prepare it?

They asked him.

He replied, As soon as you enter Jerusalem, a man carrying a pitcher of water will meet you.

Follow him.

Follow him.

At the house he enters, say to the owner, the teacher, ask, where is the guest room where we can eat the Passover meal with my disciples?

He will take you upstairs to a large room that is already set up.

That is where you should prepare our meal.

They went off to the city and found everything just as Jesus had said, and they prepared the Passover meal there.

When the time came, Jesus and the apostles sat down together at the table.

And Jesus said, I have been very eager to eat this Passover meal with you before my suffering begins.

For I tell you now that I won't eat this meal again until its meaning is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

So they get together and they they have a Passover, what's the word?

Passover meal.

So they they take a sacrificed animal, you know.

They probably weren't vegetarians or vegans.

And if you are, but God bless you.

But they had they had you know a meat, they had other food.

If you've ever had a sedar, sedar meal, you understand, you know what I'm talking about.

Uh then he took, he took a cup of wine and gave thanks to God for it.

Then he said, Take this and share it among yourselves.

For I will not drink wine again until the kingdom of God has come.

So he says, Hey, I won't eat this meal until its meaning is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

I will not drink this wine again until the kingdom of God has come.

Now, when did the kingdom of God come?

It's a trick question, isn't it?

Has the kingdom come?

Has the kingdom really come?

No, so so yes and no are correct answers.

It is already here.

It is already here because Jesus has come.

He has lived, he's died, he's risen, bodily resurrected.

The Holy Spirit came.

So the kingdom has come and now resides in us and through us as his people.

So yes, the kingdom has come.

Yes, but not already.

I know what that sounds like.

The kingdom has come, but it really hasn't already come.

Man, you're on you're off your rocker today.

Yes, I am.

He took some bread and he gave thanks to it for God.

Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, This is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

Do this in remembrance.

We remember what Jesus did.

We remember what, and this is before he has offered and died and been bodily resurrected.

So he is looking forward.

We are looking back.

After suffering, he took another cup of wine.

He said, This cup is the new covenant between God and his people, an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice, to a sacrifice for you.

So what does Jesus give us to remember him by?

Bread and wine.

Or the fruit of the vine.

Or juice if you are Baptist.

Meant to be a little joke.

I thought it would bring more laughter, but it's okay.

Just go with bread and wine.

So I'm going to give you all these several words, five words, I think it's five, that illustrate what the meal, how the meal has become the mass.

Luke 22, 28, 29, and 30.

And the first word is communion.

The first word is communion.

We celebrate what we call communion.

Communion.

That's what we celebrate when we come to the Lord's table.

Communion.

What does it mean?

He says, verse 28, Luke 22, verse 28, you have stayed with me in my time of trial, and just as my father has granted me a kingdom, I now grant you the right to eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and you will sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.

Luke 22:28

Here's what he said.

He says, Communion is with the Lord.

So communion is vertical.

It's communion with the Lord.

Lord, we remember you.

We thank you.

We praise you.

We worship you.

But communion is also horizontal.

It's me looking at my brother and my sister and us celebrating what he has done.

Man, has God been good?

He has saved me from my sin.

He has answered our prayers.

He has provided for our needs.

And so at the beginning, Jesus and the apostles were not in a gathering like today.

They were reclining at a table.

And he says, I confer unto you, I confer to you a kingdom and to eat and drink at my table.

And I wrote in parentheses, dining room Christianity.

Dining room Christianity or breakfast table Christianity or or or living room Christianity.

Do this in remembrance of me.

It's looking backward, but it's also being in the present with Christ, but it's looking to the future, to the kingdom he has already conferred, that is that's already here, but not already yet here.

And so communion and it makes it goes with the word koinonia.

And that word koinonia is translated into the English as fellowship.

But fellowship does not do the word justice.

Koinonia is this rich, rich fellowship, it's this rich relational connection.

It transcends your biological relationships and it goes to the core of a heart.

It's the friendship that you have with somebody where you can share the share things from the depths of your soul.

It's when something happens that's joyful, or something happens that is tragic, and you think who's the first people you think of that you need to call to celebrate something joyful?

Or I need prayer, or I need you to be here with me in the midst of this trouble.

And so Koinonia, 1 Corinthians 10, 16 and 17, he says, when we bless the cup at the Lord's table, aren't we sharing in the blood of Christ?

And when we break the bread, aren't we sharing in the body of Christ?

And though we are many, we all eat from one loaf of bread, showing that we are from one body.

This is early on, right?

The idea that in a crowd this size to eat from one loaf, probably not possible.

That'd be a big loaf of bread.

It would be huge.

We would have to have multiple loaves, and we do.

We've done that before.

And so this term communion, D.

Martin Lord Jones says this.

He said the term communion, therefore, represents not only our communion with the Lord, but also our communion with one another.

The second word is breaking of bread.

This is Luke's favorite use.

Luke's gospel.

Bread had to be broken to be eaten.

Now, why is he talks about let's break the bread.

Why break the bread?

Bread has to be broken.

They lived in a culture.

They didn't have the special knives that all of you overpaid for.

You had bread, you pass it around the table and you would tear off a piece.

I've been in communion settings.

That's what we do.

We pass the bread around, we tear a piece off.

And so why do we break the bread?

Jesus was broken.

And he was torn apart and being beaten in his death on the cross.

It's symbolic of this that all of life comes to us through death.

Right?

We are sustained.

Our lives are sustained through something that has died.

Regardless of how you eat or whether you are vegetarian or vegan or a meat eater.

Something has to die.

A plant has to die.

An animal has to die.

Something has to die.

All of us, for all of us, life comes to us through death.

True life, eternal life, comes to us through the death of Jesus Christ.

It comes, it comes through his giving his life.

And this is what we do when we break the bread.

It is a beautiful, tangible reminder when the uh when uh Mr.

Don and Miss Charlene they show up and they prepare the tables.

I don't know if they they understand the significance.

I know they do.

I know it's I know they it's it's a ministry to them.

But every broken piece of the bread or the cracker is symbolic of the fact that Jesus has been broken for us.

The third is the Eucharist.

The Eucharist, if you come from a certain background, you you understand the word Eucharist.

We have probably all heard that referred to Mass or Communion.

The Eucharistic comes from the word Eucharisto.

It literally means I give thanks.

It means I give thanks.

We remember just how blessed we are.

We celebrate and we give thanks.

You don't here here's here's important what's important.

You don't take the Eucharist, you don't take the Lord's Supper, you receive it.

That is a perspective that is so important.

You don't take it, you receive it.

So our staff got together for uh some time to spend together earlier this week and we we we we worshiped together.

When you got Brandon and Hannah in a room, man, it is sweet.

And I think none of us were together, but but it was sweet worship, and we shared, we broke bread and we we shared in communion.

We shared the Eucharist, we gave thanks for what Jesus has done.

Charles Fergus says the converse of saints or the gathering of saints on earth should be a rehearsal of their everlasting communion in heaven.

Do you know that's what church should be?

Church should be a rehearsal for heaven.

And I come in here on Sunday and I've been preparing and I'm excited.

I've been spending time with the Lord, I've been in the Word, and man, I'm fired up.

I listen to the set list.

So Brandon and Hannah put the set list into an app called Planning Center.

And when they put it into the, into the into the when they put it online during the week, early week, sometimes midweek, I look for that and I start listening to those songs.

I start listening.

I want to be ready to celebrate.

The Lord on Sunday.

And what we do here on Sunday is simply rehearsal over what we do in heaven.

And so I wonder if there's gonna be any of you in heaven that are gonna be standing around like this.

Or like this.

What do you think?

I don't listen.

I don't care if you're an introvert.

I don't care if you're an extrovert.

I don't care what your preference is.

I don't care if you like hymns or if you like choruses or contemporary or traditional.

I understand all that.

I'm telling you, when you get into the presence of the Lord, all of that goes away, and you are going to be blown away with his presence.

So that's about how many of you worship with excitement on Sunday.

Now, I mean, you don't, everybody doesn't have to raise your hands.

I'm not telling you how to worship.

I'm just saying, man, we come together, we're practicing for heaven.

We ought to be a little bit excited when we celebrate the Eucharist.

We think about the broken body and the shed blood of Jesus.

Man, I ought to be, man, that says, I give thanks.

I come to give thanks.

Thank you, Jesus.

And the fourth word is agape feast, the love feast.

Jude.

Jude uses this word, the language of the love feast.

These are hidden reefs.

Jude 12.

Jude, if you want to read Jude, read Jude.

Jude is correcting false teaching.

He is challenging the church and those believers that have allowed false teaching and division to come into the church.

And he uses language from shipping and traveling on the seas and the waters.

And he says, these are hidden reefs at your love feast, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves, waterless clouds swept along by winds, fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted.

He's saying false teachers will want to share their truth at your love feast, which is the gathering of believers and worship.

Somebody's going to bring false teaching.

Are we where we need to be?

Or have we gotten off track?

Have we grounded ourselves using the language that he's using?

Talking about a ship that is off course and grounds itself on a reef.

And the fifth word is the Lord's Supper.

The Lord's Supper.

The Lord's Supper.

We're probably more, we, we, and when I say we, I would, you know, I know in my traditions that I have been in, we use the word communion and the Lord's Supper most commonly.

But I'm going to read this little passage of scripture and I'm going to just give a brief explanation.

It's 1 Corinthians 11.

It's one of the passages we read at communion a lot, but I'm going to read more of the passage than usual.

Verse 17, 1 Corinthians 11, verse 17.

1 Corinthians 11:17

But in the following instructions, I cannot praise you, for it sounds as if more harm than good is done when you meet together.

First, I hear that there are divisions among you when you meet as a church, and to some extent I believe it.

But of course, there must be divisions among you so that you who have God's approval will be recognized.

When you meet together, you are not really interested in the Lord's Supper.

See, he's correcting.

For some of you hurry to eat at your own meal without sharing with others.

As a result, some go hungry while others get drunk.

What?

Don't you have your own homes for eating and drinking, or do you really want to disgrace God's church and shame the poor?

What am I supposed to say?

Do you want me to praise you?

Well, I certainly will not praise you for this, for I pass on to you what I received from the Lord Himself.

On the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took some bread and he gave thanks to God for it.

Then he broke it in pieces and said, This is my body which is given for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way he took the cup of the wine after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant between God and his people, an agreement confirmed with my blood.

Do this in remembrance of me as often as you drink it.

Reminds you that Paul is writing this.

This is after Jesus' death and his resurrection.

The new church has been birthed.

And in verse 26, he said, For every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are announcing the Lord's death until he comes again.

So anyone who eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord unworthily is guilty of sinning against the body and blood of the Lord.

That is why you should examine yourself before eating the bread and drinking the cup.

For if you eat the bread or drink the cup without honoring the body of Christ, you are eating and drinking God's judgment upon yourself.

Man, that's a lot.

But what is he what is the correction about?

Let me let me tell you what's happened.

And this is a this is a glorious, this is the this is the beauty of the church.

In the early church, you had you had Jews that had come to Christ, and then you had Gentiles came to Christ as Paul and other apostles begin to do ministry outside of the Jewish family.

And in the midst of all this, you have young people and you have old people and you have wealthy people, and then you have poor people, and not just poor people, you have slaves.

Slaves have been invited to come into the church through faith in Christ.

Everybody is welcome.

Everybody is is has been has been welcomed into the body through Jesus Christ, but the church at Corinth, they've got a bunch.

They've got a crowd in that church that is wealthy and selfish.

They're wealthy and selfish.

And so they're showing up early, which is a little bit of an anomaly among church fan goers, right?

They show up early, and it's a meal.

It's not it's not crackers and juice, it's a it's a spread.

And they start eating, and the poor people and the slaves are still working in the fields, they're still out doing their work.

And they show up, man, and they are they are tired and they're hungry.

And can you imagine the division?

The food is there's no food for them.

And can you imagine when when they when it comes time to stop and to recognize that that God has brought us together as a family to eat and to drink and to celebrate and to give thanks.

Can you imagine the division and the struggle?

And I know we don't deal with that.

My challenge is where are the poor?

I thought about that.

I thought, where where are the poor?

In this room.

Because I can tell you they're in this community.

Where are the people that don't look like us?

I'm looking around this room.

Now I'll tell you there's there's some at the 11 o'clock service, it's a lot more diverse than it is at the 9 o'clock service.

That's just how it's been since the summer.

Which is a beautiful thing.

But it ought to be the same for all of us because I can tell you the community we're in has a lot more diversity than we have in this room right here.

And that's just a challenge for us to be willing to consider that everybody, Jesus died for everybody.

Didn't Jesus die for everybody?

Jesus died for the rich, He died for the poor, he died for everybody.

And so commonly, that's what we know is the Lord's Supper.

The last word is is mass.

And so I don't have time to go into great detail.

This is not a term used in the New Testament.

But what what communion came primarily through legalizing the church?

So up until about 315 A.D., the church was illegal and met underground.

But but there are scholars, multiple scholars now that will say that the church had grown to become over 50% of the Roman Empire while meeting underground in hidden places.

Same thing's happening in other countries right now.

And so all of a sudden, Constantine's like, man, there are more Christians than there are of anybody else in the Roman Empire.

And then all of a sudden, Constantine says, I am becoming a Christian.

I've had a vision.

I've had a vision of the cross.

I'm giving you the idea that I don't believe Constantine.

I don't know.

I just don't think it's likely that his conversion was probably all that real.

It was convenient so he could keep the peace in an empire where Christianity was taken over.

And then all of a sudden, Christianity is legal, and we're going to build cathedrals, and we're going to have clergy, and they're going to become part of the nobility.

They're going to wear robes and pointing hats.

And you're going to have all of this liturgical part of worship added to what was simply a time for believers to gather together and to share food and the presence of God.

And we heard a testimony from someone outside of our church.

And it was so sweet.

And so we'll start meeting together.

But I want to encourage you to, when you're you're sharing the word, right?

You are sharing the word.

You are studying or you are discussing, and you're opening the Bible, stop and give thanks.

And I'm giving you permission.

And you say, Russ, I don't know how to do communion.

I don't know the right way.

Then I'll be glad to go over with you what I do.

But you see it like today, there's nothing necessarily real special.

There are some particular scriptures that we go to on a regular basis.

But we are basically getting together and we are remembering and we are giving thanks, and you can do that around the table just like the early church did it around the table.

And so right now I want us to think, I just want you to bow your heads.

When we when we understand that the significance of the church, significance of the church is not necessarily how we gather in large groups on Sunday.

It is how we gather around the table during the week.

There's a book written by a lady named Rosaria Butterfield.

The title of her book is The Gospel Comes with a House Key.

And she was a lesbian professor at Syracuse University, an atheist who disavowed God.

But she had neighbors that kept loving her and showing her genuine Christ-like hospitality to the point that she could not deny that there was something supernatural that was being demonstrated before her.

And she gave her life to Jesus and she has given her life.

You can find her online sharing her story or speaking about how the gospel is shared through Christ-centered hospitality.

So I want to invite you to come to the Lord's table this morning.

But I want to encourage you not to rush, and maybe instead of just gathering as a family, biological family, if you've got some friendships that run deep, or some of your community group might be here, or you've got some relationships with other people, or you see some people, you see a person or a couple that are that are here by themselves, maybe reach out and pull them in and have prayer with them as you take the bread and the fruit of the vine.

And maybe instead of rushing out of here, this becomes a moment of ministry to one another and fellowship and communion as we give thanks for what the Lord has done.

Because he has done great things.

Hasn't he, church?

Amen.

Father, would you bless us as we come to the Lord's table?

Would you bless our fellowship?

Would you bless us?

Bless us as we as we experience not just fellowship but koinonia, this deep rich, this rich fellowship that comes through a supernatural connection as a result of the of all of us that are that are of the same faith, believing and celebrating the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

It's in Jesus' name I pray.

Amen.

You come to the table as you feel led.

Take your time, look around.