Worship + Communion Sunday: A Single Sacrifice

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Well, I mentioned you you got came in and got this COVID-safe communion set up.

And this is what we're calling a communion Sunday.

Seasonally at awakening, we like to pause what we do and just focus back on this communion meal.

If you're new to church or just started coming to church during the pandemic, and this is new to you, that's okay.

Communion is for those that believe in Jesus, that call Jesus Lord, it is a reminder of God's work on the cross.

And as a church, we like to seasonally, regularly pause and just look at that bread and that cup and remind ourselves of its importance.

Communion is often called the Lord's Supper.

It's also called Eucharist.

You may have heard these other terms for it, but it simply is, refers to the bread and the cup that symbolizes the broken body of Jesus, the bread, and the shed blood of Jesus, the cup, that was given for us on the cross to forgive our sins and make us right with God and bring us into everlasting life with Him.

That is what the communion meal symbolizes.

It is a place of remembrance.

You know, in Luke 22, which is the end of Jesus' story in one of the Gospels, Luke, he's with uh his friends at a meal and he institutes this meal.

He places this meal before his disciples and he says, When you take this bread and when you take this cup, he says, Do this in remembrance of me.

So if you want to think about communion simply, it's this remembering Jesus and remembering all that Jesus is and all that Jesus did for us on the cross.

He said, When you take this, do this in remembrance of me.

What does it take for you to remember the important things in your life?

What does it take for you to remember what is most important to you?

Is it a song?

Is it a meal?

You know, it's interesting how physical things remind us of non-physical realities all the time.

Like somewhat insignificant physical things can remind us of the most significant non-physical things.

We've all maybe heard that song before that transports us back to a time in our life that was really special.

Or that meal that reminds us of that person that has passed away and the love that existed between us and them.

Or perhaps that place, that place you go to that reminds you of when you were a kid and some type of feeling is evoked in you of love and memory.

It's interesting how we are built this way.

It's almost as if God knew this, that God knew that we would need a tactile physical experience to remind us of something we were not there for, but something that deeply is important and impacts us, right?

So the communion meal is this physical piece that connects us to this non-physical reality, this idea that we are forgiven.

And it connects us to history.

It connects us to something that actually physically happened, that Jesus physically died and physically resurrected from the dead in order to bond us to himself.

It's interesting, isn't it, how easy it is for us to forget the most important things.

We're so busy, life is so fast that we remember very easily insignificant things, like how many calories are burning, our watch will tell us and beep at us on those kinds of things.

But like our relationships with the most important people, we have to remember, oh yeah, we got to get together with them.

We really got to make plans with them, we really got to make sure that happens, right?

We're like, oh, Mother's Day coming up.

I gotta think about that, you know?

Important things, it's easy to forget.

Today, we refuse to forget the most important thing.

We're gonna refuse to forget and we're going to remember Jesus.

And we're gonna do that by taking communion here at the end, but also by using God's word to guide us there.

So if you have a Bible, let's go to Hebrews 10 and um open it up on your phone.

It's also the only thing in your notes, okay?

So if you want to take notes, God bless you, type A's, take those notes.

Get after it.

But I also just want you to sit in this text with me to reflect a little bit.

Um, Hebrews 10, if you got a Bible, starting in verse 11.

Um, it says this requires some context, but let's just read this, okay?

Let's just read this and then we'll we'll lift the context out of it a little bit.

All right, Hebrews 10, verse 11.

Hebrews 10:11

And every priest stands daily at his, at God's service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.

But when Christ offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he, Jesus, sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet.

For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us.

For after saying, and this is a quote from Jeremiah, we'll talk about in a little bit, 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.

Where there is forgiveness of these, there's no longer any offering for sin.

Uh, this little passage of scripture, I want us, I want it to guide us to communion, to lead us there by remembering three very simple and quick things.

Through this text, looking at the weariness of self-improvement.

When we come to communion, we need to remind be reminded of the weariness of self-improvement, the explosive grace of the cross, and the new conditions for the relationship that we have with God.

The weariness of self-improvement, the explosive grace of the cross of Jesus, and the new conditions we have with God through Jesus.

Let's just look at this passage, three thoughts.

First is this passage reminds us of the weariness of self-improvement, which is something we are reminded when we look at the bread in the cup.

The bread in the cup signify, again, Jesus' broken body, Jesus' shed blood, his sacrifice.

And it reminds us that our sacrifices will end up falling short.

In the text, it begins with this image of a Jewish religious ritual, right?

Of a priest standing daily, offering animal sacrifices, cutting these animals open in order to atone for the sins of the people.

Hebrews, which is a book written primarily to a persecuted Jewish audience, it is obsessed, obsessed with uh the ways in which Jesus' life and work fulfills the first half of your Bible through the Old Testament.

This book is repeatedly taking the images and situations of the Old Testament and showing Jesus' complete fulfillment of them.

And right here, there's a very specific one about Jesus' replacement of the old sacrificial system, that there's no longer any need for these daily self-sacrifices, animal sacrifices, because of the work that Jesus has done.

The priest, it says in verse 11, it says, daily, look at this, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.

What do we remember when we come to communion?

We remember what doesn't work.

What doesn't work, which is the repeated efforts of our own self-improvement, trying ourselves to make our life better.

We remember the weariness that comes with trying to make us right before God, us doing what we need to do before God in order to be loved by Him, that God might love us because we do certain things.

At communion, we kind of remember the pointless nature of constantly trying to approve of ourselves through the work that we do.

Like you might be going to work every week and sacrificing every week in order to receive affirmation from your career, either from your career itself, like wanting to find identity and affirmation from your career, or even from a boss or superior or peers at work, that you want them to see your work and you want them to think that you're a great person.

Or we're constantly working in this way as parents.

We wake up every day to try to, you know, appease our children and to love our children.

We want other parents to think that we're great parents, or maybe you're in school and you're constantly sacrificing your life to be a great student so that other people would show you love.

We're constantly offering ourselves up in order to try to receive love.

And we're constantly getting new invitations to do so through various places in our culture to constantly try to uh be approved because of a sacrifice we might give.

But here's the problem: your career is never gonna die for you.

You might die for your career, but it'll never die for you.

Right?

You might just sacrifice your life for school, but school will never give you anything back, right?

As much as we give to our children, we already know that what we give to them will outweigh what they give to us.

At some level, our constant laying down of our lives is only asking us to continue to lay down our life over and over again.

And if we are doing that with the wrong motivation, the motivation being that we might receive love from these daily sacrifices, we will only continue to grow weary in sacrificing ourselves so that others might love us.

We get invitations to this all the time.

Invitations to change our diet so that people might think we're conscious about what we eat, right?

Thrifty purchases and life hacks that make us presentable in some type of way, right?

Have a deep understanding of modern politics and injustices and project those opinions on social media so that other people can applaud us and enjoy the things that we say, so that all these invitations are constantly coming at us and we are constantly taking them, uh taking them up on it, aren't we?

Constantly doing these things that are maybe trying to get people to love us in some way.

See me, love me because of what I've done.

Aren't you exhausted, right?

And you were exhausted before the pandemic, right?

And then the pandemic came and you had to crush it at the pandemic.

You had to like crush it at being in quarantine and clean out all your closets and rearrange your workspace and get those desks that move up and down and show people how cool it is where you work.

And like, it's individualism is exhausting.

Self-improvement is exhausting when the self is the problem.

Constantly rearranging your life to present it as something someone would love is constantly inviting you to do that again and again and again.

It's the classic example of like the young boy whose father only really shows him affection when he produces good results of the sport he plays, right?

The only way that child receives the affection is by constantly performing for the father in a particular way, in a particular arena, in a space, right, where that father is showing the affection.

It only demands more and more sacrifice, and it never really pays off.

Because you're only loved because of what you do for yourself.

And self-improvement and individualism is the prize of our modern world to find within yourself the vast potentials that other people should look at and love.

They should look at the things, and we've dumped more and more resources into it than ever before in the last 50 to 75 years.

There are more resources towards individualism and self-realization than ever before.

And yet we're more anxious and scared than ever before.

Like I've been watching this um, there's this BBC series right now.

Um, there's a six-part BBC series called Can't Get You Out of My Head, An Emotional History of the Modern World.

And it's by this um filmmaker named Adam Curtis, and he is not a Christian, but he's critiquing individualism across 50 to 75 years of you know global history, basically.

And the critique being this: we have put so much resources of money and products and um inventions into the journey of becoming a great individual.

And yet we are more disunified and violent and chaotic and rising levels of anxiety and depression than ever before.

So his question is this if individualism works, how come we're here?

You see, constantly reinventing ourselves has only brought new reinventions of depravity, new ways in which our own darkness is exposed, because we're constantly obsessed with the thing that is broken within us and constantly trying to tweak it and not truly heal it.

And there is a difference between sacrificing and sacrificing and sacrificing for approval, and a difference of sacrificing out of an approval.

And that's the difference that the Hebrews writer brings us to.

Not just the weariness of self-improvement, but the explosive grace of the cross.

I love verse 12.

Look down back at the text.

Every priest is sacrificing daily, and then he comes to verse 12, but when Christ, which is a very New Testament way of introducing the gospel.

There's one of these in Galatians 1, there's another one in Ephesians 2, where the writers are making this move of showing us the darkness of our own self-involvement, and then bringing us into what Christ has done through very simple words like this.

But when Christ.

Not but when you, but when you began to do something, right?

But when Christ, look it, but when Christ had offered for a single, for all time, a single sacrifice, not multiple sacrifices, one single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God.

This is the great gospel, the great invasion of grace.

Look at that verse in verse 12 very closely, and notice this the contrast between the priest and the Christ.

The priest got up to sacrifice, to sacrifice again, and then went to sleep and then sacrificed again.

He sacrificed only to sacrifice again.

Christ sacrificed and he sat down.

See, you and I are in the hamster wheel of self-improvement, where we will constantly sacrifice only to sacrifice again, to constantly lay down our life to try to get us people's approval or try to get even our own approval, only to get up and do it again.

Because we are now defined based off of what we produce, not because of who we are.

And if we're constantly only loved because of what we produce, we will only be invited to continue to produce again, daily, daily, daily, offering the same sacrifices, which never take away sin, the root of the problem.

It never takes it away.

It constantly just reintroduces us to the same problem over and over again.

But when Christ, because he was not just a man, because he was God, came and sacrificed his life, a single sacrifice, he sat.

When you and I sacrifice, we get up and sacrifice again.

When Jesus sacrificed, he sat down.

Because that's how powerful his work is.

Our sacrifices will only produce the need to sacrifice again.

Jesus' sacrifice produces the need to sit down and rest in what he has done.

This means that we are now able to receive love not based off of our performance of what we might do, but off of Christ's performance and what he has done.

And that's what we see in communion.

We see Christ's performance.

And look at verse 13.

It says that He he sits and then waiting from that time, he's sitting after he sacrifices, Jesus Christ, crucified, risen from the dead, sitting at the right hand of God, and he puts his feet up.

And it says this in verse 13, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool.

He didn't just sit down, he put his feet up.

He sat down because he was so confident in the work that he did, he knew his enemies would be defeated.

This image of Jesus giving his life, being crucified, and rising from the dead, sitting at the throne, and just it says, waiting.

Waiting until the enemies are slowly defeated.

He doesn't have to do anything anymore.

And if Jesus doesn't have to do anything anymore, I don't think you and I have to do anything anymore.

You see, after you meet Jesus, after you know his sacrifice, after you take this meal and receive it in the way that Jesus provided, do this in remembrance of me.

After that, there's nothing left to earn.

There's nothing left to earn.

There's nothing left to accomplish.

There's plenty to do.

There's plenty to be involved with.

Because Jesus Christ has shown it to us on the cross.

And his enemies, make no mistake, he has them.

Satan, sin, and death, and the evil works that exist in this world, his enemies are slowly defeated and brought to a footstool position as he sits in victorious confirmation over them.

He sits in complete victory because of his work, because he wasn't just a man, because he was God giving his life for us and defeating the enemies.

And you know this is true if you know the gospel.

If you're a Christian, you know the greatest weapon against the enemies of your life is the gospel itself.

It's not a new way of thinking spiritually.

It's not some mindfulness trick or anything like that.

The simple defeat of the enemies in your life happens through the reminding of the work of Jesus Christ on the cross.

You know this to be true, do you not?

Right?

Simply, you say, man, I am loved not based off of what I produce, but because what Christ has done on the cross.

The enemy of career fulfillment is defeated, of trying to find your fulfillment in what you do for work is slowly brought to low positions in your life because of your security in Jesus Christ.

Your fear and anxiety about a potential relationship and how it might work is cast asunder at the light of Jesus Christ, saying, I don't love you because of what that person thinks about you.

I love you, and my demonstration of it was on the cross.

And that enemy is silenced and defeated.

This idea that I'm not worthy, I don't have enough worth in this world, is defeated and silenced at the work of the cross because you see the God who died for you, who doesn't want you to lose your life because he gave his life for you on your behalf.

And because of that, when the gospel is announced, when it is preached in a room like this, enemies are silenced, and Jesus puts his foot up on them to say they are defeated, they are done.

Not because of what you might do, but because of what I have done and the word that is now announced on your life.

See, that's how good the good news is.

And when we come to the cross, we see this.

We see that we there is an explosive grace to the cross.

There's this kind of bomb that's set off in our life that clears the space and destroys the things that have been damaging us.

And as that space is cleared, we don't only see the weariness of self-improvement and this explosive, beautiful grace of the cross, but we see new conditions for this relationship.

New conditions for the relationship.

Hebrews closes this section by appealing, I said, to Jeremiah 31, which is a prophet in the Old Testament.

And in that section, if you look through 15, verses 15 through 18 in your notes, there in your Bible, you'll see Jeremiah saying, like, my people will no longer relate to me based off of their actions.

My people will now relate with me.

This covenant will be based on my action, what I have done, to choose to forgive their sins, to make right, and put their the law that I've given on their hearts.

Now you and I, if you are a Christian, you stand in a beneficial arrangement.

We don't relate to God because of what we might do, we relate to God because what he has done.

Do you feel like God is unavailable to you?

Do you feel like you're not good enough?

Do you feel like you keep falling into the same addictions or patterns over and over again and you think God is not talking back, he's not listening, he's far away?

Let that enemy be defeated today in the light of this good news that you don't relate to God based off of what you promise him you'll do.

You relate to God based off what he has already accomplished.

And so he is with you, he is available, he does know you, he is with you, he is present right now.

And as you take this meal, be reminded of that new relationship.

Come and remember, are you tired of the pursuit of self-improvement and individualization?

Are you ready to receive the explosive grace of the cross?

Because if you are, you stand in the beneficial new relationship and new arrangement of your relationship with God.

It is all based on what He has done.

And you and I now get to sacrifice and lay our lives down and show up to work and be the people we are, not so that we can be approved, but because we already have it.

We have it in Christ and we live a life now free of the potential entanglements of our own dark nature.

And so I'm gonna invite the band up and we're gonna take this communion together to remember these things.

I'd like you to take this out now and um consider some of these things.

And I want to remind you of the night that Jesus died, the night he was betrayed before he died.

He had this meal with his friends, as I said.

And you can take this bread out now, this COVID-safe thing.

And I want you to pause, and I want you to hear what Jesus said the night that he instituted this meal.

On the night he was betrayed, he took the bread, and after he had given thanks for it, he broke the bread, he gave it to his disciples, and he said, This, take this, all of you, and eat it.

This is my body that is broken for you, and it is broken for all, so that sins might be forgiven.

In other words, I have offered my life and broken my life for you, so that you don't have to offer your life for approval.

You can offer your life now from it.

And so take this bread in remembrance of Jesus.

We hope you are blessed by this message.

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