First Corinthians, chapter 11, on page 959. I'm going to read from verse 27 to verse 34. Along with the Bible, it would be good, probably, if you have a bulletin near you to look at the back. On the back, you'll see what we're talking about tonight. It has to do with the Lord's Supper, what's required for us to eat the Lord's Supper in the right way. So that is our main focus. I'm going to read from First Corinthians, chapter 11. Verse 27 to verse 34, please give your attention to the word of God. Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord, in an unworthy manner, will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. For the person examined 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. So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. 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 direction when I come." I remember early on in my pastorate, I saw somebody come in, someone that I had known growing up. And she was here, and we had communion. And she had not met with us in advance, and so she was not served communion. Afterwards, she was irate. I think it's my job to examine myself whether I'm ready to take communion and not yours. She seemed sufficiently irate that she wasn't going to listen to me, so I did not argue with her. But if I had, I could have told her that I agreed with a fair amount of what she was saying. One, we each do have the duty and responsibility to examine ourselves before we eat the Lord's Supper. She has that correct. We need to examine ourselves. And secondly, I would agree with her that that's all that this passage talks about. This passage does not talk about meeting with the elders or explain why it's necessary to meet with the elders if you're new and you come into a given church before reading Communion. Now, obviously, I think she was wrong about the big picture, because there's this other passage. Matthew 18 says, if your brother sins, go and show him his fault privately, just you and him alone. If he's listened, great, it's over. You've won your brother. But if he doesn't listen, you can take another one with you, and go and show your brother his fault, seeking his repentance. If he listens to you, you've won your brother. It's done. But if he still doesn't listen, you're supposed to tell it to the church. And if you will not listen to the church, then let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. And then Jesus said, surely I say to you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven. Whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. It's the same kind of language he'd used for Peter a couple of chapters before, talking about keys. Keys are for locking and unlocking. So we see there in that passage that there is a responsibility when someone is not repenting, and they've been given an opportunity to repent and have refused it, then they're to be treated as an outsider, treated as someone who does not belong, that is a Gentile. And that's how you are to treat them. They may not say, hey, now I'm a Gentile. I'm out of here. Rather, they're the ones refusing to repent. You will have to place them outside. And so, right in Corinthians, there's a chapter 5, someone's described who is engaging in a gross sin, and Paul doesn't even tell him to leave. He tells the others, you have to put him out. So, that's something to keep in mind. When you talk about the Lord's Supper, there's a duty to self-examination, and we're going to talk about that. That's our main focus tonight. It's also a duty to guard the purity of the table. That's not to be left up to the individual. The church as a whole does that, and the elders in particular, the ones given the keys, to handle that. Now, on one level, I was a little surprised that my old friend was mad because she'd grown up in this church. I expected her to know the rules. On the other hand, I wasn't surprised. because the Church is almost invisible in the Shorter Catechism. And so if you only learn your theology from the Shorter Catechism, you've learned a lot of great theology, but the Church is a big hole, and Church discipline is entirely a hole in the Shorter Catechism. There's nothing about Church discipline, and there's barely the Church. So it's kind of a weak point right now. And so as we talk about preparing for the Lord's Supper, I also wanted to make clear why it is that the Lord's Supper is integral to the process of church discipline. If you think about the Lord's Supper, what is this? Think about it as something you find in the Old Testament, a sacrificial meal. Not a sacrifice. Sacrifice is over and done with. But very often in the Old Testament, you'd have a sacrifice, and then there would be a meal afterwards. Jesus on the cross, there's a sacrifice. But before he goes, he says, now, you're going to need to know how to remember this. You need to know what kind of sacrificial meal follows from this. And it makes it very clear that just as the Passover, there's one sacrifice, lambs, blood, open the doorposts, that's done with. But thereafter, there's a meal to remember that event. He's saying, here, you're going to have a sacrifice. That's going to be me. You need to understand that. And you're going to commemorate it with a meal. And you need to understand about that meal. I was reading this week, and I came across Exodus 29-33. When Aaron and his sons are ordained to the priesthood, there is to be a sacrifice made to atone for them. And then we read this. They shall eat those things with which atonement was made at their ordination. meaning the bread and the meat that have been part of the sacrifice to atone for them. I said, that's very interesting. I never saw it before. Exodus 29, 33, Aaron and his sons shall eat the things with which atonement had been made for them. That is, after the atonement, after the sacrifice, now they eat. And they eat not just anything, but the things with which atonement was made. And Jesus here is driving in the same direction. When he said, this is my body, he's obviously holding bread. His body is obviously him. So clearly he doesn't mean that the bread is his body. He means this is going to represent my body. This is what you're going to think of. This is what you're going to use. This will be as it is my body to you, representing that to you as you come forward, explaining in advance how to do this sacrificial meal. Jesus said at the cup, he said, this cup is the blood of the covenant, or my blood of the covenant. And that's the language that Moses used at Mount Sinai, in Exodus 24. He sacrificed animals, gathered up the blood, half the blood went against the sides of the altar, and the other half of the blood was sprinkled on the people. And he said, behold the blood of the covenant. Notice there's a sacrifice, the blood is sprinkled, and then the leaders went up on Mount Sinai, and it says that they saw God, and they ate and drank. They had a covenantal meal with God, a sacrificial meal. And I noticed that this idea of seeing God shows up at the Lord's Supper. Because in the Gospel according to John, Philip is sitting there and he says, show us the Father and it is enough for us. And Jesus says, have you been with me so long, Philip, and you don't know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. So just in Exodus 24, there's a sacrifice, and there's a meal, and seeing God, so with the Lord's Supper, there's going to be a sacrifice. Here's the meal, this theme of God's presence, seeing Jesus. All these things come together. So Jesus calls us to participate in the blessing of His sacrifice, these things that He's providing for us. And so we have to come rightly, because we're participating with the Lord in His own sacrifice and in His benefits. After Exodus 24, what happens? Well, Moses is up on the mountain for 40 days, and the people at the bottom get tired of waiting for him. And so they say to Aaron, up! Make us gods to go before us. As for this Moses, we don't know what happened to him. And a whole string of counterfeits comes out of there. Aaron makes a counterfeit god. People are all very happy. Thank you for this golden calf. So, having a counterfeit god is going well. Then he makes a counterfeit altar. And he proclaims a counterfeit sacrificial meal. Today will be a feast to the Lord. As it says, they sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play, the connotation of pagan revelry, which you might have at a pagan feast. They weren't saved by having had the Exodus 24 meal. They weren't saved by having observed Passover or going through the Red Sea, because God is a jealous God. He just told them that in the Ten Commandments. And he tells them again, after the golden calf, in Exodus 34, it's again underlined, the Lord our God is a jealous God. So the takeaway for us that we read in 1 Corinthians 10 is, you are not to participate with the Lord at the Lord's Supper, and then with demons at some other religious festival. They were not to do that, the golden calf after the Lord. Very angry at this abomination. And so the Corinthians were not to do the Lord's Supper and also go over to Aphrodite's temple or Isis's temple or something like that. And so for us, part of coming to the Lord's Supper rightly is to make sure that we're not coming to anything that functions in the same way. Because the Lord our God is a jealous God. Now, I've gone to a synagogue, watched, you know, I read as fast as I could, trying to keep up with the Hebrew. But when they brought the Torah scrolls out and the guys got up to kiss the ends of their scarves and then touch the Torah with this, I didn't do that. I said, that looks like not just being here, but the act of devotion that's at the center of it. So I'm not going to do that. I've been to a Catholic funeral for a member here whose mother died. at a Catholic funeral, so I'm there to support him. When they went out for the mass, he didn't go up, and neither did I. I did not participate in that. And this is also why you cannot be a member of this church and a member of the Masonic order. Now, the Masons say, wait, wait, wait, we are not a religion. But I've had a wonderful fellow tell me a great length about the Masons. And the more he told me, the more I understood why our church for centuries has said you cannot be a member of the Masons and also a member of the church and come to the Lord's table. Because this not religion has all kinds of religious rights to it. And they claim to make brothers of Christians and Muslims. We can make brothers over these religious differences. Now, if they just said, we provide a safe framework to work out deals, that would be fine. But they're saying they can make brothers where Christianity says, but we're not brothers. They're claiming to supersede Christianity. I'll be claiming to supersede Islam, but that's not my problem. When you're trying to supersede something, you are saying you are a superior. You're a rival and a superior. It's a rival brotherhood. That's why we say, wait, wait, wait. This is the brotherhood that Christ establishes among us. This is the brotherhood that we celebrate. Masonic brotherhood, it's not like a football team brotherhood. It's not like a bunch of doctors in association. It's more to it than that. And so for that reason, you cannot participate in that altar, or whatever they want to call it. And in our own. So to come rightly to the Lord's table, first and foremost, you're to go to no other God's table. No demon's table, nothing that is roughly functionally equivalent. Secondly, to come rightly, we have to come with reverence and awe. In Malachi 1, there's a condemnation of priests who were despising the Lord's table. Bringing disabled animals in sacrifice. I'm going to sacrifice that one. He's blind anyway. Okay. Despising its food. And Paul, in Corinthians, he calls it the Lord's table as well. He says, you're not to despise the Church of God by not waiting for each other, by shaming those who have less food than you. To respect the Lord, you've got to respect what he's given us in the Lord's Supper and all those that the Lord brings to the table with you. Got to respect them by waiting for them. Now, I think for the most part, the Christian church has learned this. So we do not feast at the Lord's Supper anymore. Instead, you get very small portions. And as you heard last week, sometimes those portions really taste pretty bad. So we got that. It's not to be done alone. It's to be done together, because it's a spiritual matter. What I want to talk about now is not just to be a spiritual focus as we do the Lord's Supper. What are we supposed to do ahead of time? What are we to do before we come? Because there is this discussion here of examining ourselves and so on. It clearly describes something about how to conduct yourself during the Supper, but what do you need to do ahead of time? You might want to look now at the back of your bulletin there, or if you Memory is good enough, and you've worked on the catechism, reach back in your mind and try and pull it out. What is required of those that would worthily partake of the Lord's Supper? Summarizing the Bible's teaching, you see there, it is required by Christ, and therefore by the Church. The Church uses the keys. It is required as we come to the foundation of our unity, We don't build on anything else. Require that we examine ourselves. You see that right here, right out of the passage. Let a person examine himself then, in verse 28. If we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged. Verse 31. And also 2 Corinthians 13, 5. Examine yourself. See if you are in the faith. Test yourselves. So we do examine ourselves. Of what? It says, our knowledge to discern the Lord's body. The intention there is to refer to verse 29. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body. A lot of Greek manuscripts have the body of the Lord there. So they're just picking it out of the Greek manuscripts they had. Your King James will say, of the Lord. These aren't the oldest manuscripts though, so this follows the oldest ones. It doesn't have of the Lord. That would seem to be stuck in to explain it to us. We'll take it that way. Anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body of the Lord. That is, we're to discern what God is up to in the Lord's Supper. Here's a sacrificial meal. Do I get that? Do I know who sacrificed Himself? What He went through? And why He did this? Do I understand that God himself took on flesh and he came in the flesh as a man? Came not in the glory of his pride, but came as a baby. Went through all the indignities of growing up. And then having grown to adulthood, poured himself out serving others, and then was framed and beaten and spat on and crucified. Do I understand what he went through? And do I know why He did it? Because our sins make a separation between us and God. We've incurred a debt that we cannot pay. And for our sakes, the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. Do we understand that? And do we remember that the Lord's Supper is to proclaim this. As the Church does it, there's a proclamation being made. And as the proclamation goes on from the time Jesus gave us this meal until he returns. So we're going to review the basics, because they're not that basic. The basics are somewhat foreign to us, since Jesus made himself the last real sacrifice. So it takes a little bit of understanding here. And that helps us answer a really good question. I was asked again this week. Really good question. You said a week or two ago that the infants who get baptized are members of the church. If they're members of the church, why don't they eat the Lord's Supper? It's a good question. Along the way to answering it, I will point out we actually have a distinction. We have baptized members and we have communicant members. Communicate members, commune to the Lord's table, and vote in church decisions. The baptized members do not. But why do we have the distinction? Which is the same question of why, if baptized members are members, why do they not eat the Lord's supper? Well, the answer is based on this paragraph right here. Notice all the things that are required of the one who comes to communion. Must examine themselves. must discern the body, must judge themselves, and there's danger. If you come unworthily, you may become sick, or weak, or you may die. That's why with the Lord's Supper, this is restricted to those of such an age as to be able to do these things. It's required that we examine ourselves, discern the body, judge ourselves truly. Infants don't do this. Small children don't do this. It's become the age of understanding that we're able to do this, and so it is safe for us then to do it. So the question, if the baptized infants are members, why don't they have the Lord's Supper? Because they can't do the things explicitly required here in this paragraph. Because we need to examine ourselves of our knowledge to discern the Lord's body, of our faith to feed upon him. Now, I was reading this week and one of the authors said, faith is here described as a mouth. Our faith to feed upon him. It's your mouth that feeds, right? All right, well, what is the point of describing faith as a mouth? Well, for your mouth to work, you've got to reach out and grab the food. You've got to put it in your mouth and chew it up and assimilate it and take it into yourself so that you can then draw strength from it and be nourished by it. And faith, likewise, has to reach out and lay hold of Jesus. And part of the point of Lord's Supper is to tell us that we can't just hold Jesus at arm's length, we have to bring Him into ourselves. Because He's the only food of our souls, we must take Him in, meditate on Him, become one with Him, so that we may be nourished by Him. And the point of Lord's Supper, and that's why faith is here termed a mouth, our faith to feed upon Him. And we're to say, as surely as this bread is present to my senses, so surely Christ is present among us. As surely as my body is nourished by bread, so surely my soul is nourished by Christ. That's the point of Lord's Supper. We're to examine ourselves, do we have that faith that feeds upon Him? So how do you come? Knowing what you're doing, examining yourself, your knowledge of what was done and what you're doing. Come in faith that Christ will build us up, that he will meet us here and strengthen us. And examine yourself of your repentance. Now, why do you have to repent before you come to Lord's Supper? Well, why did Jesus have to die? He died because my sins have made a separation between me and the Lord. Because your sins made a separation between you and the Lord. And so we're to trust Him that He can bridge this gap. And we're also to turn in horror from our sins that are so terrible and so difficult to deal with that they require the death of God's Son to handle. If you come to Christ as an adult, there's a great repentance at the beginning of your Christian life, and you are baptized. And then there's the ongoing work of repentance, because we all sin in many ways. And we need to be repenting, not digging in on them, not just saying, well, that's who I am. I want to stay, or how it's impossible to be different. There needs to be this ongoing work of sanctification, and that's driven by our repentance. and are reaching out to God for strength. It's widely understood that repentance is at the heart of the Lord's Supper. So the Roman Catholics, for a long time, I don't know what they're doing now, but they used to say, you've got to go to confession before you come to Mass. Now, we've got some issues with how they do confession, but the basic idea there is correct. So there needs to be repentance before you come to the Lord's table. Presbyterians. very often, used to say, you need to meet with the elders the day before, perhaps get a communion token, which you then hand in when you come to communion, to say that you have met with the elders. In fact, another time we were doing communion here, and I thought I had explained what we were going to do well enough, and there was a lady who'd been here a couple of times, and I went up and down, we're serving, and she said, hey, where's mine? And I said, oh, I didn't explain it clearly enough, she's going to be offended, she will not see her again. But after the service, she came up and said, I remember when I was growing up in another continent, you used to have to meet with the elders on Saturday before you could have communion on Sunday. That's what you guys are doing. I said, that's right. That's what we're doing here. That's what we're doing. Where there's not repentance, there will ultimately be damnation. Where there's refusal to repent, and the person's been shown their fault and it's not a gray area, it's clear, it's obvious, and the person's not repenting. You're dealing with somebody who's not a brother. And how do you make it clear to that person that, no, no, no, no, the judgment of the church, acting impartially, is that you're no longer a brother and won't be until you repent. How can you bring that home to somebody? The way you bring it home to them, if you won't listen, is you don't serve in communion. Because then he's out of communion. He's excommunicated. He's been exited from communion. And that's when you say, oh, all right. That's the church trying to shout, you need to repent. That's why the Lord's Suffering is at the center, then, of church discipline. So we commune with one another, with the Lord. If someone's sins are of such a nature that you're not communing with the Lord, this is the way that that is made clear. So where to come? Examine yourself of your knowledge of what's going on, of your faith to feed upon Christ, of your repentance from your sins, and then it says, of your love and new obedience. I'll do those together, because Jesus said, if you love me, keep my commandments. There's to be a love for the Lord who gave himself up for us. We're to love him, because he first loved us. And together with that love, there's to be a love for each other. As I think it was put very well this morning, we'll find some of each other easier to love, and some of each other harder to love, and that makes it just like your family. Assuming that your family has more than one or two people in it, you know what we mean. You love all of your family, including the ones that are more difficult to love. Love the rest of the body. The next chapter talks about the church being one body. And while in the body there are many members, yet it makes up one body. And the chapter after that talks about, here's something even more excellent to think about. Love is patient, love is kind, love does not boast and is not arrogant. So as we come to the Lord's Supper, we're to ask ourselves, am I full of love for the Lord? Do I have anything against anyone? Does anyone have anything against me? Jesus said, if you're at the altar to sacrifice and you realize your brother has something against you, just leave it and go be reconciled to your brother. You see that here as well. And you see the importance of this, lest coming unworthily. Now, the word worthy is tricky. So hang on a second there on the word worthy. Pretty much the point of the Lord's Supper is that no one's worthy. Only Christ is worthy, that's why he had to die for us. So it's not that you clean yourself up and now I'm coming worthily. No, no, no. You come worthily when you come humbly. You come worthily when you come in a proper, contrite, humble, and obedient frame of mind. That's coming worthily. And it's not that you're so great, but you are coming the way that he tells you to come. Jesus told a parable once about a Pharisee and a tax collector. They both go into the temple to pray. The Pharisee, he's right up front. He's standing there. He's saying, oh, Lord, I thank you. I'm not like other men. I fast twice a week. I keep the Sabbath. And I'm certainly not like that guy over there who's a tax collector. The tax collector's way in the back. He doesn't even want to look up. He's just pounding his chest. Lord, have mercy on me, the sinner. And Jesus says, yeah, the guy over here, that's the guy who's forgiven. So if you come this way, that's the worthy way of coming. You come worthily when you come unworthily. You come in a worthy way when you are aware of your sin, and know that in Christ you are forgiven. Because of Christ you are adopted. Because of Christ you have access. Not that you are worthy, but that Christ is worthy, and that you are in Him. And you say, I'm not sure about the in Him part. Well, that's part of the Lord's Supper, is to show you that you are in Him, as He is in you. So we're warned. Coming to the Lord's Supper, it's not either a plus or a zero. It's not as if you do it rightly, that there's a benefit, and if you do it wrongly, then it's just a wash. He's telling you, no, no, no. You come rightly, and you'll get a benefit. You come wrongly, and there's a problem. It's not a zero. There's a cursing to it. But the point is to be positive. So you have this gracious call from a gracious Savior. Examine yourself, not whether you're going to come or not, but to confirm that you are coming the right way. Come with a broken and a contrite heart. I want to talk about one practical suggestion for how to come right. It says examine yourself. As I said, different branches of the church have had ways of doing that, and we used to have a way of doing that. In former Presbyterian Church, we used to have communion only about twice a year. And we'd have communion season. You'd have a worship service on Friday night and a worship service on Saturday morning or afternoon. And then you'd have communion on Sunday. That's within my memory in Broomaugh. If you go back a little further, you might have another follow-up Thanksgiving service on Monday. You might have had another service beforehand. You can ask Bruce and Joanne how far back their memory goes. Now, we stopped doing that here because we saw that only having communion twice a year was not often enough. We said, let's do it monthly. But when we started doing it monthly, we weren't going to go ask everybody to come that often all the time. And so we've lost the communion season, even while we've gained a more frequent communion. So how can you have the benefit of that communion season or something of it? Well, here's how. You can put a reminder on your calendar to tell you Thursday that you're going to have communion on Sunday. Let that be your reminder that Friday or Saturday morning, you're going to have an extended time of personal devotions. And think about the things we've talked about today. And the reason I'm not saying Saturday night or Sunday morning is so that if you realize that you have someone that you're not reconciled with, you'll give yourself a little bit of time to get reconciled before you hit church on Sunday. Can't be doing it Sunday morning at 9.30 and say, oh, actually, I need to reconcile, but I also have to get in the car in two minutes. Do it a little earlier than that. Give yourself time to go and to be reconciled. So you see here, in the Shorter Catechism, it's required, and you can see very easily what they're talking about. It's right out of 1 Corinthians 11. We examine ourselves of our knowledge of what's happening, of our faith to depend on Christ, of our repentance of our sins, and of our love and new obedience. So give yourself some time to do that. And remember, it's the gracious call of a gracious Savior who invites the humble to come humbly, knowing. In ourselves, we don't open the way to God, but the one who is worthy has. And now he tells us to walk to the Lord. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for Jesus, who brings us to you. We thank you that we have such a Lord and Savior, who is our way and our truth and our life. Lord, we thank you for your supper, and we pray that it really would be a means of grace to us. Help us to eat your supper rightly. Strengthen us through it, we ask. And help us, Lord, also to examine ourselves rightly, and to be strengthened by that discipline as well. Lord, we pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.