Please stand with me for a reading of the word. Our reading today is from 1 Corinthians 11, verses 24 through 26. And they read as follows. 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, he took the cup also after supper, saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink of it in remembrance of me, or as often as you eat of this bread and drink of the cup, you proclaim, the death of our Lord until he comes. You may be seated. This week's message is titled The False Theologies of the Lord's Supper. Today, we're continuing our short study on the Lord's Supper and understanding if we're going to partake in the Lord's Supper, it's extremely important that we must understand what we're doing and why we're doing it. And one of the many things that is important for any church to understand is the pedigree you come from, meaning what you believe in the things that you do, why you carry out the service in the way that you do and so on. And then when did those things first begin? And we need to realize that we are inheritors of traditions that have come down to us. Some of those are biblically correct and some aren't. One of my favorite sayings that I borrowed from James White is the uncle in the faith. The idea being that through faithful writers of centuries of writing, we've been given family members who have written to us to help us understand this. And that doesn't mean that anything that they write is on the same level of scripture because it isn't. But look at it this way. It's like having an uncle that's specifically writing to you in the faith who loves you, who has spent his entire life maybe in one area or over multiple areas. And now he's able to give that to you in crisp, clean learning. And so we end up with historical uncles like Uncle John Calvin, Uncle Martin Luther, Uncle Edwards, and we end up with modern uncles like MacArthur, Uncle Sproul, Uncle White, and Uncle Wilson. Now, it becomes important to remember that those that we adore from history were not perfect men. Luther and all his brilliance was extremely difficult to get along with. He would later condone holding Fritz Erba in prison for 15 years until his death. The crime he was charged with? refusing to baptize his children. And why? Because he came to believe based on the German Bible translated by Luther himself. So Luther translates the Bible into German. Fritz Erbe reads it, comes to conclusion that we have as a church about baptism. And in that time, he's thrown into a castle dungeon for the remainder of his life, which is 15 years. And so for 15 years, he was in a dungeon 30 feet below where Luther and later his disciples would preach from. And they left him there. And that's to show that at times you can get it wrong. And Luther did. Now, that doesn't mean everything that Luther did was wrong, because it wasn't. And a lot of his theology was dead on. But the point that I'm making is, can you imagine what your theology would look like today if we didn't have Luther and Calvin and Edwards and Fritz Erdo? Well, let me tell you what it would look like. It would be an incredibly distorted form of Roman Catholicism, because without Martin Luther, without that 95 pieces, more than likely we would not have broken off from the church. Now, much of what Luther in that time was reading was from the early church writers, but can you imagine what your theology would look like if you didn't have Romans or Galatians or Ephesians or maybe didn't even have all the Gospels. If you only have a certain portion of that revelation, it's understandable why someone may not have the proper balance of what they would need because they didn't have the entirety of Scripture. Now, many early writers didn't have a complete Bible, even though the Bible itself was completed. And remember how this works, how transmission works. You have a letter that was written. It was copied over and over by the scribes and sent to the different churches. And then later, the early church would compile the letters that met God's criteria for Holy Scripture, and those make up the New Testament. And you would have the scribes then, once again, copy by hand the entirety of the Old and New Testaments. But this took ages. There was no printers back in those days. Everything had to be done by hand. So we need to have a careful look back on history and be gracious to the individuals there and hopeful to them, recognizing they don't have what you and I have. And that's an important part as we go through this. My wife's famous line in our family is, if you know better than do better. And that's what we're here to do. Now, when it comes to, and let me add this, when it comes to modern preachers who are still alive, I generally mourn to be very cautious of any pastor, preacher, apologist, or theologian that has not been faithful for at least 40 years. And why? because countless faith leaders that have fallen between the 20 and 30 year time frame. It's very common. And so someone can seem orthodox and then turn out to have a gross heterox or even heresies in their teachings and lives. And isn't it interesting though how God utilizes not only those that have been faithful as great examples to us in the faith, but he also uses those that we thought were faithful, and then they have a huge fault, and we find out they were not. Those two are warnings for us. And God, honestly, he has demonstrated this throughout scripture. And one of the best locations, if you've never seen this, is in Isaiah. And if you've not done a deep dive of Isaiah, you would have missed Isaiah chapters 40 through 48. And it's been coined the trial of the false gods. Many have asked the question, even now, today, why does God allow idolatry? Why would he allow false religions that drag souls to hell and deceive people? And God has already answered this question in Isaiah, the trial of the false gods. By contrasting himself to false gods, we often get the clearest revelation of who God himself is, in contrast with that error. And so we need to take a look at history of the church and thereby how the Lord's Supper has been conducted throughout the centuries, because likewise, often the clearest understanding of truth is best seen by contrasting that with error. Now, as we get into this, when a professing group of Christians, or even a church of believers, moves away from biblical truth, the common consequence is what we call like a game of tug-of-war. And so they're pulling wrong wrong direction and counteract that massive pull in the wrong direction, there's an equal unbalanced pull in the opposite direction, causing the inability to remain standing upright. And that's what's happened in most of our churches today in regards to much of their liturgies. And when you see an overemphasis of an abuse of something in one direction, the tendency, if you're not firmly rooted in the scriptures, is to lean too far in the other direction just to counteract. And that's why every generation is called to agonize, to contend earnestly for the faith, to constantly be reforming, to constantly be examining what they do and what they believe. And we are all influenced by our cultural changes. Everyone is, everything is. That's why we need to have the unchanging word of God to be our example. Now understand in this example of tug of war, Christ's word stands with him holding the rope and giving no quarter to the abuses being pulled in the opposite direction, but he's not leaning either. He's standing straight up and down with the truth, and that intense pull from the other direction doesn't make him pull the wrong way. He just stands as that plumb line, straight up and down, and so should we. And my hope is that I will be able to demonstrate through the rest of this message how to stand straight up and down and not lean in the wrong direction. Now, there have been centuries of debate over the church's understanding of the doctrine of the Lord's Supper. And understand, debate is a good thing. Debate creates refinery. It refines what we think, what we believe, because you're being tested to actually push that to the limit. And so debate is a good thing. So we shouldn't scoff at debate. It's a good thing to help you understand what you believe. But there has been a fundamental disagreement over the Lord's Supper, and it's generally seen in four distinct views. And these views include the first, which is the view of trained substantiation articulated by the Roman Catholic Church. Second, the doctrine of con substantiation articulated by the Lutheran community. Third, the memorial sign view of the ordinance espoused by Zwingli and by the majority of those in the Baptist and non-denominational communities. And then fourth, the Reformed and Anglican affirmation of the real presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper as a memorial. And so in church history, we need to start ultimately with Roman Catholic Church. Now understand, I was raised in the Catholic Church, and most of what I'm about to go over, I didn't really understand while in the church. Secondly, most of my family is still in that church. And so I have a real desire for them and a love for them. And so the desire becomes for correcting either the false beliefs of that community or informing the unaware individuals like I was of the false teaching itself, and then ultimately drawing true believers out of that body and into an orthodox church. But understand, many will think, aren't we just all on the same team? They just wear long robes and call their pastors priests and don't allow them to marry. That's all right. Sadly, no. If they adhere to the Roman Catholic system, they're not on the same team. And if you've been listening to Pope Francis recently, you know he's not even on their team anymore. Now, even though we're starting with the Roman Catholic transubstantiation, the reality is that much of the language, confessions, and theologies of all four belief systems were all forged in the battle of the Great Reformation in the 1500s and then following till today. And so the Reformation brought not only some of the greatest theology that we've ever seen in church history, but simultaneously forged some of the most heretical theology in all of church history, specifically by Rome. And as reformers pulled to straighten Rome up, Rome would double down and lean even further in the wrong direction. And since that time, other denominations that would have branched out from the reformers have leaned in the opposite direction even further as well. And so Rome's false beliefs is a springboard to many other false beliefs. They're just in different directions. But we need to know what Rome believed then, and then we're gonna have, if we don't, we're gonna have a hard time understanding the accurate understanding of what the issues are really about. But understanding Rome will help understand our own beliefs and our own liturgy. Now, if you don't have a working knowledge of the Reformation, as most honestly professing Protestants don't, you're missing a vitally important aspect of your faith. There's a common old quote that most of us are familiar with, those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it, which truly could be the Book of Ecclesiastes summary statement. But the real reason I bring this up is because the fact is that most people today in evangelical churches have compromised on the very issues that gave the Rome, or excuse me, the Reformed churches their strength in response to Catholicism. So the victories that they already had, we've turned back over to Rome in most of our churches. And that is why you see many people today in different denominations slowly becoming more like Rome. And what follows is an external changes, so they start wearing the robes and the collars, but as they start doing that, the internal aspects start to change too, and it hurts truly. And sadly, I've encountered this most recently with a lot of faithful Presbyterian churches. placing that overemphasis on paedo-communion, ministers' collars, robes, and other ceremonial aspects of the service itself. And what happens is then you start to change the inside to be like Rome. Now this has also caused many others to move away from the Lord's Supper altogether because they don't want to be like Rome. And so they too have perverted the beliefs of the reformers. Now, I've been asked many times, can a Catholic be a believer and be saved? And my answer is always the same, of course they can. But here's the key to that answer. They must be drawn out of that system. There are fundamental issues within their theology, their liturgy, and in their lives that are completely different from orthodoxy, from truth. Meaning, there are intentional things placed inside the Roman Catholic system to draw them away from Christ and towards anything else. And that's built into their system, into their theology, into their service, into everything that they believe, into the priesthood. That's all seeped in there. And hear me, a failure to be drawn out is like living in a town with a poisoned well and wondering why you're always sick and can't get well. And if you get out of the town permanently in order to get well, you cannot return to visit. And here's the real sad thing. If you are used to being sick and living around other sick individuals, you think it's normal. You cannot imagine something else because you've never experienced it. Now, if you're truly interested in understanding what the Roman Catholic Church believes, there's a book called The Faith of Millions by John O'Brien written roughly 1938. And it represents old time Roman Catholicism. Now be warned. Hear me, be warned. It is complete heresy. Complete heresy. Now, it's a lot easier to talk to or even understand Roman Catholics who are still Orthodox Roman Catholics than it is to even talk to a squishy Roman Catholic, whichever way the wind is blowing, which is generally those that have only been around in the last 30 years. And so especially if they've been lockstep with Pope Francis is doing, they're about impossible to have an intelligible conversation with. And so when I say Roman Catholic Orthodox, I mean to say that they are someone that would point to the Council of Trent in 1545 and say that was right. And then looking at Vatican II that was done in the 1960s, they would say that was squishy. And so know that Vatican II didn't make any doctrinal changes, but the changes it made was where the emphasis was placed. So up to the 1950s, you pretty much knew where Rome stood, and you pretty much knew what Rome believed. And today, like I said, the current pope, he's a universalist. He thinks everybody's gonna get saved, no matter what happens. And so he's not an Orthodox Roman Catholic at all, and that's a major problem for them inside their own problem. So the people that think that he's pulling towards Protestantism, he isn't. He's pulling further and further away from even where the Roman Catholic Church was during the Reformation and in a totally new, awful direction. But from O'Brien's book, this is where historic Orthodox Roman Catholicism believes. And listen carefully to these words. These are his words. Quote, when the priest announces the tremendous words of consecration, this is my body. When the priest announces the tremendous words of consecration, he reaches up into the heavens and brings Christ down from his throne and places him upon our altar to be offered up again as a victim for the sins of man. It is a power greater than that of the saints and angels, greater than that of the seraphim and cherubim. Indeed, it is greater even than the power of the virgin Mary. While the Blessed Virgin was the human agency by which Christ became incarnate a single time, the priest brings Christ down from heaven and renders him present on our altar as the eternal victim for the sins of man, not once, but a thousand times. The priest speaks in low Christ. The eternal and omnipotent God bows his head in humble obedience to the priest. Command of the sublime dignity is the office of the Christian priest, who is thus privileged to act as an ambassador and vice-surgeon of Christ on earth. He continues the essential ministry of Christ. He teaches the faithful with the authority of Christ. He pardons the penitent sinner with the power of Christ. He offers up again the same sacrifice of adoration and atonement which Christ offered on Calvary." End quote. Complete heresy. No wonder, then, why the name which Roman Catholic writers are especially fond of using to apply to the priest is that of alter Christus, Latin for another Christ. That's what alter Christus means, another Christ. Now, let me tell you something. If you ask any priest or any devout Catholic, do you believe the priest is an alter Christus, they will defend that language completely. And it's complete misuse of many verses, but mainly John 14, 16 through 17. And verse 16 reads, and I will ask the father and he will give you another advocate, that he may be with you forever. Advocate is the term paraclete in Greek, meaning representative, similar to a lawyer, one who would stand beside you in a court hearing. Christ is the first advocate, the first paraclete. And here Christ says, I will send another. And this is why not taking scripture out of context is so key, because here's the next verse. Verse 17, the spirit of truth. whom the world cannot receive because it does not see him or know him. You know him because he abides with you and will be in you." And Jesus says, I will send you another paraclete, another representative to stand with you, the Spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit. But even Christ didn't say, I'm sending you another Christ, for there is only one Christ. But in the Orthodox Roman Catholic system, they placed the priest in the place of Christ, out of heaven. That's what they believe. And as I just read, then, Christ is subservient to them. And so the Son becomes subservient to the earthly Father, which is why they are called Father, as priests. That's complete heresy. And that's why it's important to understand your terms and debate. Now, why would any of that be necessary? because the central aspect of worship in the Roman Catholic Church is what they call the Mass. That's why they call it the Mass. The Mass is understood to be a perpetuary sacrifice. It's not a new sacrifice, but a re-presentation, which is different from representation. And they're spelled the same way, but the definitional difference is the perpetuatory, meaning you come to the cross over and over and over again in the Roman Catholic system, and you still die impure. This is one of the primary differences in what we believe about Christ and what he accomplished on the cross. And that brings the concept of transubstantiation. When a priest holds up and says, this is my body, you have a change to the substance of the bread and wine. What it looks like does not change, but what the substance of which makes it up changes into the body, soul, body, and divinity of Jesus Christ. So that is the true and perpetuatory offering. Now, how many Roman Catholics actually believe this in the United States? It's estimated to be about a quarter, 25%, and that's including the leadership. Now, does the leadership know they're supposed to believe this? Yes. But Rome has been so deeply infected with humanist philosophies, and it's gutted the ability to even pretend that they're faithful to the text of Scripture anymore, let alone with the dogmas and teachings that came out of the Council of Trent. Now, historically, the Roman Catholic teaching of transubstantiation began around the 1200s. And in 1545 and 1563, the Council of Trent met as a response to the Protestant Reformation, and that's where they sealed transubstantiation as a practice during that council. Now understand, the language was from and borrowed from the philosopher Aristotle. And yes, if you're thinking, Greek philosopher that lived approximately 350 years before Christ? Yes, that's where they stole this from, this idea. Now, I don't have time to go through all the connections of the Apocrypha books that were added to the Catholic Bible during the Council of Trent, but realize when you take this Aristotelian philosophy mixed with the books of the Apocrypha, they go hand in hand with the priest system, Roman Catholicism, which is why it all works together, which is why any parent who teaches classical Christian education, they teach Aristotelian philosophy as a worldview up against the Bible. And the reason being is because Aristotle is one of the greatest enemies that ever stood up against Christianity in the history of man. And the reason why is because much of what he said seemed incredibly intelligent and true. Now, Aristotle distinguished between essence or substance of an object and its external. So you have its internal essence or substance and its external perceivable qualities and called the accidents, which is where we get our word accidents from. Therefore, he distinguished the two internal and external and then utilizing that theology or that terminology. The Roman Catholic system teaches the miracle of the mass. which is where the substance of the bread and the wine that is used in the Lord's Supper is miraculously changed into the substance of the body and blood of Christ. Now understand, that philosophy that they're utilizing comes from a pagan atheist. So you're taking pagan atheist theology and sticking that into scripture. That's what they're doing. Now they say this miracle, however, has two aspects. And so the substance of the bread and wine are changed So the internal is changed into the body and blood of Christ. The external is kept the same is what is happening. And so you have a double miracle. It changes into the body and blood of Christ, but it does a second change by making it still look like bread and wine. So at all times, it always looks like bread and wine, but it goes through a conversion into his body and blood, and at the same time goes into another conversion. to totally look the same. So the internal substance changes, but the external still looks the same. And if your head hurts after that, understand there's a reason for that as well. If you as a churchgoer cannot articulate the proper understanding of the theology of the church, then the idea is it must be correct because you're not meant to understand it or you're unable to understand it. And second, then you need someone who is, and insert the priest system, your father, the priest, another Christus. Now, one additional aspect that is truly important to understand, and this is where the step of heresy takes a giant leap further into heresy and damnation, in my opinion, and this is the declaration and belief that the Lord suffered a Roman Catholic Mass is a sacrifice and offer to God again and again and again and again. Meaning his payment on the cross didn't accomplish the forgiveness of sins that we covered last week. And so he must be sacrificed over and over and over again. And what the Roman Catholic Mass is declaring, whether the participants realize it or not, is the theology behind the Mass, and this is why I said, You cannot stay there if you are a true believer inside the Roman Catholic system. You cannot, on one hand, proclaim that the forgiveness of sins has been accomplished, and then on the other hand go, no, it hasn't. Because that's what Rome is doing. And if that happens, I would continue to pray for those individuals that have that distorted view. Pray for God to draw them out of there. But understand this, at the bottom of this debate, It's not so much about the Lord's Supper ordinance, but about their Christology. That's what it's about, meaning the doctrine of Christ himself. This is in their Christology, which is why that church is not a believing church. Now, our second belief system developed during the early years of the Reformation. Martin Luther saw the frivolous use of the word miracle in Rome's understanding of transubstantiation. and said that it is not necessary to talk about the substance of one and the absence of another, we can just affirm that the true corporal presence of Christ in, under, and with the elements of the bread and wine. Now, we as Protestants, we use the term consubstantiation, but Luther didn't use that term, and nor would likely any Lutheran, and they'd probably not prefer that term to be used. And this was Rome's, or excuse me, the Reformed Church's attempt to faithfully articulate Luther's view by using that term. which means that Christ is substantively present with the substantive presence of the bread and wine. And so how this works in the terms, so when you have transubstantiation from Rome, that means to change. It says that a change has taken place, the bread actually becomes the body of Jesus, the wine actually becomes the blood of Jesus. But with consubstantiation, the prefix con means with, and it says that the bread does not become the body of Jesus but coexists the body of Christ, so that the bread is both the bread and the body of Jesus. And the same thing is then true of the wine. And so it does not become the blood of Jesus, but coexists with the blood of Jesus, so that the wine is both wine and both blood of Jesus. And in both Roman and Lutheran view of the matter, Christ is to be present in his human nature, and that's the key. And once he's human nature here, he has to be in more than one place at the same time in his human nature, which requires the divinity attributes to take place between God and the human Jesus. But understand, ultimately, how you get consubstantiation is you take the false belief of transubstantiation that is Aristotelian that we already talked about and from outside of Scripture and try and use what has been done as not so heretical. That's what you're doing, which if you understand Martin Luther's pedigree, this makes total sense. Martin Luther was a monk inside the Roman Catholic system for years. His whole life evolved around transubstantiation. And then he starts to read Augusta, and where transubstantiation doesn't exist. And then you don't, you also don't have really anybody that's had that theology of the Lord's Supper that he's reading. And so he tries to offer a substitute to transubstantiation, which I call transubstantiation-like, is ultimately what it is. And you try and remove the gross heresy while maintaining the idea that Christ is physically present, which is why, if you watch the service for both a Lutheran church and a Roman Catholic church, and you turn the sound off, it will look almost identical. Now, the third view is those who wanted to reduce the ordinance to a mere symbol and a memorial, mainly the disciples of Zwingli. Now, personally, I think Zwingli would have been more closely agreed with our fourth view, which is of Calvin, but after the debate between Zwingli and Luther, and the fact, honestly, that Zwingli would die three years after that debate before he could really define what he meant. Disciples of Zwingli have definitely pushed the third view to a reduction of the presence of Christ, meaning he's not there, and it's just a symbol. And now, understand the debate that occurred was actually supposed to be a coming together, and it was at Marburg-Holloway Philip Hess gathers together most of the leaders of the early reformers, and they have been called there to come up with a confession of faith that would hold the Reformation together. Now, understand timeline-wise, John Calvin might be converted at this point, but he's young. He's not a leader yet. He's not even really known yet. And so the two big names on the playing field are Luther and Zwingli. Luther in Germany and Zwingli in Zurich. Now most of you know Martin Luther, but you're probably unaware of Ulrich Zwingli. Brilliant guy. Absolutely brilliant. Read Greek and Hebrew. debated Roman Catholic priests, and he just obliterated it, okay? And so Luther was a theologian of what we call a theologian more of the heart than of the mind. And consistency and coherence was not Luther's goal or Luther's aim. And he was a brilliant man, though, and he was every much as brilliant as Calvin. But Calvin was a systematizer, as was Zwingli. Luther was not. And Luther did not mind holding two different positions that were completely contradictory to one another. which is why Luther preached justification by faith, but then also continued to hold infant baptism as a sacrament in the essence, communicating the peace of God, which the peace of God is that atonement has occurred. And so we still have Lutherans today who firmly believe in baptismal salvation. That's because of that distorted view. Now, it's important to remember that Luther was trying to hold together two different worlds. Luther wasn't trying to start a revolution. He was trying to reform the Roman Catholic Church. But instead, what he did is he started the birth of the Protestant churches. And unfortunately, the person who then succeeded Martin Luther went on in the wrong direction, interpreting everything that Luther believed even further out of context. And so the present Lutheran church as a belief system would not be something Luther would hold today. And part of what I believe that caused that was a theologian of the heart and not of the mind. But that was not Zwingli's aim. He's a systematician, and so he's trying to get it right according to scripture. Now, don't hear me say that Luther isn't. I'm not, but what I wanna show you is the difference between the heart versus the mind. Now, last week, we went over Matthew 26, 26. Now, while they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, he broke it, and giving it to his disciples, he said, take, eat, this is my body. Now understand, Luther's trying to hold onto part of the Roman Catholic system, and the thing that he got right was the fact that the Lord's Supper is a big deal. It's meant to be a big deal. And so Luther's trying to lessen what deal the Catholics are putting it in, and then you have Zwingli's doctrine of the supper as a memorial. And I don't think that Zwingli was trying to make the Lord's Supper a lesser deal than it's supposed to be, but he's fighting Rome too, so he doesn't want it to look anything like the Roman Catholic Church. And because of that, we know that his disciples carried out lessening it and lessening it as they went on, watering it down more and more. Think of wine. You continue to pour more and more water into it until it's just water. And so whether Zwingli was doing it or not, his disciples were carrying it out, and Luther believed that's what he was going to do. And we know Luther absolutely detests Zwingli's answer. A memorial is not enough. And so Luther points to the different scriptures that say, this is my body. Is in Greek is the word etson. And it's the term that Jesus used himself. This is my body. And no matter what Zwingli said, no matter what scripture he pointed to, theology, showing the systematics, bringing everything, Luther would just point to the Bible and say, Etzen is, this is my body, and then he'd pound the table. On a side note, not exactly the best way to win debates, because as he kept saying, Etzen is, is, is, all the people saw was this angry man, and most were not overly impressed with his argument. And so after, many abandoned that because of the failed argument. Now remember, as we covered last week, every single item on the table is something. They were celebrating Passover, so everything is something. But as I said before, we have the blessing of standing on the shoulders of giants. And so we already had that formed into our theology. That was something we've already been able to look at all of scripture and realized it was already there in the Passover. And I believe Martin Luther, with enough time, would have gotten there. But at that time, that's not where he was at. And so he doesn't have the same blessing. Him and Zwingli are still trying to sort it out. But because of that single point, they agreed on everything else. They managed to find language to agree on literally everything else, but they could not agree on this. And so they failed to come up with a confession of faith. And it is extremely important to have a confession of faith because it tells everybody specifically what you believe in every aspect of a doctrine. And so that's why we recognize the 1689 as a church, the London Baptist Confession of Faith. And there are eight principles of the confessions that are bound together in harmony. eight paragraphs that bring everything into focus together. You don't take one paragraph at its own, you take them all together. But here's paragraph two. In this ordinance, Christ is not offered up to his Father, nor any real sacrifice made at all for the remission of sin of the quick and the dead, but only a memorial of that one, offering up of himself, by himself, upon the cross, once and for all, and a spiritual oblation of all possible praise unto God for the same, so that the poppish sacrifice of the mass, as they call it, is most abominable, injurious to Christ's own sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of the elect." That entire portion is Zwingli. That's his belief, okay? And because of it, we clearly embrace Zwingli as a father in the faith, another uncle in the faith, and he was a believer. And that's what Zwingli was arguing against, was the teaching of Rome about the mass and the perpetual sacrifice. And so the language that Zwingli used in this paragraph of the confession came from scripture. Remember, it's memorial. He took those directly out of scripture. But I want you to understand, historically, this had legs, and it kept morphing under followers as they would come, and it kept being watered down. Now, if it had just stopped there, we would all say we're Zwinglings. But because it didn't, that's why we have to have this distinct view. And so the vast majority of our Baptist or non-denominational brothers and sisters, that's all they've ever been taught. And that's all I was ever taught after exiting the Catholic Church. It was only a memorial, which is why you just do it a couple of times a year. Every three months or so, it says a memorial. It's something we do. It's no big deal. But if you start reading the New Testament, really, if you start deeply going into the New Testament, something that strikes you immediately when you read the New Testament is there's something going on here in the body of believers. This isn't just me alone in a cave or in the woods. This is something the church is supposed to be doing. And it's supposed to be a remembrance of Christ. But there's something grander than just a remembrance. And it's in those key words, the New Covenant. It doesn't stop at memorial. It is a memorial, but it doesn't stop there. And that's what leads into the fourth belief system, which is that of John Calvin. Now, understand timeline-wise, Luther and Zwingli are operating roughly at the same time, roughly around 1517 and then, you know, the 20, 30 years after until their deaths. John Calvin, on the other hand, started preaching and gaining prominence about 15 to 20 years after them, because he's younger than they are. Now, it's important to understand that Luther and Zwingli started debating the Roman Catholic Church prior to Calvin in 1517 and following, and they're absolutely destroying all the Roman priests who ever come to debate with them. for years, okay? The priests are not trained well. They've been told, believe this, think this. They've never been taught well how to debate, and they're not as well-read as Luther and Zwingli. And so what occurred, though, is because of getting destroyed by the two, the training of priests and reading would greatly increase, eventually leading to the Council of Trent in 1545, where the Roman Catholic Church would seal and even pull further in the wrong direction. But what had occurred in that is they did it in a more systematic and intelligible way to further seal it. Now, what they were not prepared for, as they were trying to prepare themselves to battle Luther and Zwingli, God had been preparing a lawyer and a mind of a systematician And then God sealed him with converting him to himself. And so Calvin steps on the battlefield. Understand his mind was probably only surpassed by the Apostle Paul. And so God had been preparing for us for this very debate. Now, Calvin truly had two battles on his hands when he stepped forward. because he had Luther and Rome on one end, and then he had Zwingli and the memorial of turning it into a nothingness on the other. And so you have the chief objection that he launched against Luther and Rome was a violation of the Council of Chalcedon that had already been sealed hundreds of years before, which taught the two natures of Christ are united without confusion or without mixture. For Jesus in his human nature, to which his body certainly belongs, to be present at more than one place at the same time would require removing him from his body, which the former saw as a thinly veiled heresy. And so Calvin insisted, as did the Anglicans, on the true presence of Christ, but he also insisted that the presence of Christ is through his divinity only. His human nature is no longer present with us on earth. because he ascended into heaven. And so he's in heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father. And so we're still able to commune with the human nature, but it's through the divine nature which that occurs, which does indeed remain united to the human nature. But the human nature, and this is the point, is localized in heaven. It is not brought down out of heaven by a priest, and it is not with the bread and wine, as Luther was attesting. The human nature remains in heaven where he ascended to. And secondly, Calvin had to battle the Zwinglians, who wanted to reduce the sacrament to just this thing over here, just a symbol. And so Calvin insisted upon the term substance, and this is his brilliance. His term substance had two different nuances. Against Lutheran Rome, the term substance meant corporeal or physical, and against the Zwinglians, Calvin used the term substance as for real or true. And it's because of Calvin, out of our eight paragraphs over the Lord's Supper in the 1689, we get paragraph seven. Now realize paragraph seven blends in harmony with paragraph two that I already read. So here's paragraph seven. worthy receivers, outwardly partaking of the visible elements in this ordinance, do then also inwardly, by faith, really and indeed, yet not carnally and corporally, but spiritually receive and feed upon Christ crucified and all the benefits of his death, the body and blood of Christ being then not corporally or carnally but spiritually present to the faith of the believers in that ordinance as the elements themselves are to their outward senses. The point being, the Zwinglians are pushing that the Lord's Supper does nothing for you and nothing to you. It's the significance of blowing out the candles at your birthday, okay? It's just remembering how many years old you are. The Roman Catholic Church pushes for the Lord's Supper does everything for you. everything to you it is necessary for your continued salvation for without you would not be saved and although I wouldn't say Luther would go that far he would say it helps in your salvation that's the idea not you need it but it sure helps a lot Calvin on the other hand is pointing to the necessity of sanctification that continually taking the Lord's Supper is then spiritually receive all the benefits from his death on the cross, including the forgiveness of sins and then ultimately the progressive sanctification becoming more and more like Christ. Remember last week I said it is a seal at the end of that which is being sealed, okay? And the fact is, to a faithful, repentant believer, the Lord's Supper does something to you and for you. And without it, you are missing something. That's not to say you're missing salvation or even sanctification. But I like to think of it, it's like playing baseball. You can play baseball without a glove, but it's sure a whole lot easier with a glove. And the glove will assist you in catching things that without you would not be able to catch. And it will assist you in becoming a better player in general because of that. And the mistake would be thinking that you cannot play without a glove and therefore you have to take Christ out of heaven each week and slaughter him to then sew a glove for yourself out of him every single week. Or the mistake would be thinking Christ gave you this glove and he just wanted you to put it behind the glass and sometimes look at it and think how great it was when he played with it. No, he gave you a tool. And he sacrificed himself to make you that tool. And so every time you step out on the field of life and you strap that glove, strap that glove to your hand, you remember him who gave it to you. And then you use it to make you more like him. And lastly, and this is the big lastly, you look to your other teammates and see the gloves that Christ fashioned for them as well. And they too remember him who died to give them this gift. And then they use it to make them more like him. And that's why we partake together. That's the whole point. One united in the new covenant. Now, we've covered the blessing of the Lord's Supper, and it's been historically distorted in two ways. You have the area of the sacerdolus, who magnifies what happens to the bread and wine to the point of idolatrous superstition, or the other is of the memorialist, who minimizes and denies that Christ is even present. But there is one more position and distortion of views, and that's a distortion of Calvin's view. I just gave you what the true view is. Let me show you what the distortion is. And that's a distortion of the hyper-Calvinist. Now, if you, as a believer from our church, start debating somebody or discussing your view with a memorialist or even a Lutheran or Catholic, you're more than likely going to be accused of being a hyper-Calvinist. But that's not what you are. Let me show you what a hyper-Calvinist is. And this is still carried out today. It's primarily in the Netherlands. Holland, understand, in the Netherlands, was a place of deep Calvinist orthodoxy in the centuries past. But what has become of it is something you would not even recognize as Calvin at this point. In fact, many of the Reformed churches in the Netherlands today, where you have a large gathering of people, hundreds, okay, when the supper is offered, you might have 10 people who will partake of the supper. And why? And this is including the elders, mind you. Why is this occurring? It's not because of change in the theology of the supper itself. It's because of the perversion of Reformed theology to a point where they have hyper-defined things like repentance, and so hyper-defined that no one can do it. And so if you cannot repent, then you cannot receive the Lord's Supper, but also you have no assurance of salvation because you can't repent. And that's why I said last week that those that have sinned need to confess their sins and then follow the command of receiving the Lord's Supper. because failure to do so places you in the same position as the hyper-Calvinists. That's where you end up. When you come here and you say, I can't confess my sins because it's so great, you are on the path to the hyper-Calvinists. And the reason I bring that up is because I've seen it. I've seen it today in America. I've seen it. And it comes through a stringent use of this sentence. Do not come to the Lord's table if you have unrepentant sin. Now that sounds very right, but it's not. Let me show you what is truly right. If you have unrepentant sin, repent of it, because that is a command from your heavenly Father. If you are a believer, you repent of your sin. If you know that it's there, you get down on your knees now and you repent of it. And then secondly, come and receive the blessing is a command, both of which you are not worthy to receive. And that is the point. The only time that you should have the supper withheld from you is because you were under discipline of the faith believers that you belong to, or you're a non-believer. That's the only two times. And so it is key to understand the errors so that you don't make them. Pray with me. We are thankful for this. We are thankful for your wisdom. We are thankful for this clear reminder of the great price that was paid for our redemption. Lord, may we never walk down this aisle without deeply reflecting upon your great love and your great holiness that require the sacrifice of the cross. Father, as we partake, change us. May we ponder the benefits that are ours in Christ, our adoptions as sons and daughters, our imputed righteousness of Christ that is ours. May you cause us to hate our sin as we consider the cost of the forgiveness of that sin. And may we leave this place and reflect upon that. May it forever change us by your spirit. Amen.