THREE VITAL REQUIREMENTS OF THE LORD'S SUPPER

I Cor. 11:27 ... "Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner, shall be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord."

      On the night He was betrayed and arrested, Jesus kept the Passover Feast with His apostles in an upper room somewhere in Jerusalem. At a certain point in the ceremony Jesus took some unleavened bread, broke it and said, "This is My body which is for you, do this in remembrance of me." Then He took a cup of wine, and after He had sipped from it, He said, "This cup is the new covenant in My blood; do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me." With these words Jesus established a memorial to His sacrificial death by which He atoned for the sins of all people. This solemn meal was established to be observed as an act of worship by Christians as long as time shall last, for in the verse previous to the text above, it is proclaimed that "as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until He comes." Since the death of Jesus was uniquely important to God, as indeed it is also to us, we bear a grave responsibility to observe it in the manner which God approves. We must not be like the Corinthians who modified the ceremony to suit their own desires and vanity. In this passage we are shown three vital requirements set by God that we must be careful to meet lest we keep this holy feast "in an unworthy manner" and become "guilty of the body and blood of the Lord."

      First, we must observe the Lord's Supper with a backward look. Nearly twenty centuries have passed since that day when Jesus was nailed to a cross, suspended in the air, and suffered excruciating pain for about six hours before He died. Time tends to obscure the meaning of events, and to many people now the death of Jesus is about as relevant as the death of Sekhemkhet, third pharoah of the Third Dynasty in 2643 B.C. This distant king's death has absolutely no bearing on anyone today, but the death of Jesus means everything to everyone! He died to pay the penalty of death that is due us for our sins. Had He not done so, we would each have to die for them ourselves. Every few years I review the history of the 170 pharoahs; most people, however, never do. But every day of the year I review Jesus death for me. And every Sunday Christians around the world come together in their congregations to look back 2,000 years to the day when a loving Lord died for them. For both when He blessed the holy bread and the holy cup, Jesus said, "Do this in remembrance of Me." That is the backward look.

      Second,. we must observe the Lord's Supper with a forward look. According to I Cor. 11:26, when we keep this memorial, we "proclaim the Lord's death until He come." Our assemblies each Sunday for this observance proclaim to the community about us that the Lord we worship is going to return some day to terminate the world and summon all men unto judgment.

      Third, we must observe the Lord's Supper with an inward look." We must turn our attention inwardly upon our own heart to determine how far off from the image of Christ it happens to be. Our text does not demand that we be "worthy" to participate in this supper. If that were the case, no one could every take part. The essential idea in this command is for everyone to "examine himself" to discover the sin within him, sin that is removed only by the death of Jesus which we commemorate in this holy meal.

THE WAY OF ESCAPE

I Cor. 10:13 ... "No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it."

      A temptation in the moral sense is an inducement to violate the will of God. The possibility of temptation assumes that man has a choice in experience. He is free to choose to conform to God's will, and he is equally free to choose not to conform. God has revealed His will for us in the Bible so that we might know it, and offered us glorious inducements to subject our lives to its direction. At the same time, however, Satan endeavors to persuade us to ignore God's will and live as we wish. He also offers us enticing rewards for such independent behavior, although his rewards are deceptive, being temporary and ultimately dissatisfying. His method is to approach us with such powerful stimuli to sin that we are overwhelmed and cannot help ourselves. When we fall to temptation, as we often do, we defend our behavior by pointing out how forceful the temptation was and how understandable it is that we could not resist it. Take the case, for instance of the drunk driver who kills someone. When brought into court, he seeks to exonerate himself by blaming the deed upon the power of the alcohol and his inability to leave it alone. We are expected to convict the alcohol of the tragedy and acquit the drunkard as its helpless pawn. We yield rather easily to this rationalization, for somewhere in our hearts we are prone to say, "But for the grace of God there am I." After all, do we not "all sin and fall short of the glory of God?" (Rom. 3:23). A particular individual might not drink and kill another with his car, but he knows he falls to other temptations, with sin as the result in either case.

      Our lead text above points us to a different conclusion than our rationalization. It assures us first that no one is ever confronted with a unique temptation. Temptation can be cruel, but never unusual. Any temptation is "common to man," that is, it is generally a problem in human experience. Many people are tempted to consume alcohol, but not all of them give in to its allurement, dull their senses with its toxin, and kill someone with a car. Many people are tempted to great anger toward someone who is provoking them, but most of them do not succumb to its urge to attack the obnoxious one and perhaps kill him. We should always consider that Christ was "tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin," (Heb. 4:15).  Someone then may well object, "but Christ, as God in the flesh, was a Superman!" Indeed, but His struggle with temptation was faced in His humanity, which He shared with us; otherwise, the victory He won over sin would be meaningless as a model for us.

      Our lead text also informs us that God is always involved whenever we are tempted, not as the tempter (Jas. 1:13), and not as One who prevents it (Jas. 1:2-3), but as the One who controls its power. It is significant that I Cor. 10:13 says nothing of God shielding an individual entirely from temptation, nor does any other Scripture. Rather, God guarantees us that no temptation shall come  upon us that is too strong for us to withstand, reduce, and defeat. We can never say, "The devil made me do it!" Neither can we ever say, "The Lord failed me in my time of need." In Jsh. 1:5 God assured Israel, "I will not fail you or forsake you." The Lord still shows the same fidelity to His people today. We are told in I Jno. 4:4 that "Greater is He (God) who is in you than he (Satan) who is in the world." God certainly does not allow our arch-adversary to bring pressure upon us that we are unable to resist. He limits Satan's seductions so that they are less than our power to defeat them. When we sin, the fault is always our own.