The Lord's Supper is the rehearsal dinner that anticipates the great wedding feast of the Lamb and His Bride, the church. Today, Sinclair Ferguson helps us gain deeper insight into the Supper's significance.
Get 'The Basics of the Christian Life' DVD and Digital Study Guide with Sinclair Ferguson for Your Gift of Any Amount: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3490/the-basics-of-the-christian-life
Meet Today's Teacher:
Sinclair Ferguson is a Ligonier Ministries teaching fellow, vice-chairman of Ligonier Ministries, and Chancellor's Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary. He is featured teacher for several Ligonier teaching series, including Union with Christ. He is author of many books, including The Whole Christ, Maturity, and Devoted to God's Church. Dr. Ferguson is also host of the podcast Things Unseen.
Meet the Host:
Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of ministry engagement for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, host of the Ask Ligonier podcast, and a graduate of Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. Nathan joined Ligonier in 2012 and lives in Central Florida with his wife and four children.
Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
Don't look in here and think, "How can I live?" But look out of yourself to Jesus Christ. And so the fact that the Supper is a commemoration really underlines for us that all the resources of our salvation are not to be found in ourselves. They are not to be found even in our faith. They are to be found only in Jesus Christ. A lot of things take place in a worship service. Songs are sung, confession of sin is made, benedictions are given, and often we celebrate the Lord's Supper. But just because we do these things, it doesn't necessarily mean that we know why. Well, we've taken the time to consider these parts of the service deeply. So today, Sinclair Ferguson is going to help you think about the Lord's Supper in eight different ways. This is the Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and it's so good to have you with us. Today's message is the last message that you'll hear this week from Dr. Ferguson's series on the Christian life. So that means that it's also the last day that you can request the entire 12-part series and the Digital Study Guide when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. But be quick as this offer ends at midnight. Well, here's Dr. Ferguson on the meaning of the Lord's Supper. Well, welcome to our series when we're thinking together about what it means to become a Christian, to be a Christian, to belong to God's people, to enjoy the means of grace that God gives to us, and to run the Christian life right to the very end. And we said right at the beginning that this kind of study is really for all kinds of people, for people who are wondering, what does it mean to be on the inside of believing the gospel for people who may be thinking about becoming a member of a church? And for older and wiser Christians, because it's always so refreshing to us to go back to the fundamentals and to have those fundamentals in place in order that the building of our Christian lives may be on a solid foundation. And we've divided our series basically into three blocks. We thought about some very basic things, and now we've moved on to what are often called the means of grace, and I've emphasized already that we don't mean by that that so long as we use these means, we will get grace. What we mean by the means of grace is that God has given us gifts, and through those gifts he draws near to us and blesses us through the Bible, as his word, through prayer. And as we thought in our last session, through the gift of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and we specially thought about the meaning of baptism. And we're going to turn now to the meaning and the blessing of the Lord's Supper. The word Supper in Scotland can mean two different things. If your upper class, Supper means dinner. So if an upper class person invites you for supper, you know not to eat in advance for ordinary class people. In that category I include myself, Supper means something that you eat at night before you go to bed. And as I look back, I marvel at my mother's patience because I don't know how many hundreds of times she must have heard me say, "Mom, is there anything special for Supper tonight?" I'm really surprised that she didn't, as they say, cuff my ears for saying that kind of thing. And what I meant was, "Is there cake for Supper?" And whenever I have that childhood memory flooding back into my mind, I think about the Lord's Supper. And I think that's a great question to ask when you come to the Lord's table. "Is there anything special for Supper? Why do we celebrate the Lord's Supper?" The place in New Testament where we get the most condensed teaching on the Lord's Supper is of course in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. In 1 Corinthians, it chapters 10 and 11. It's a very interesting illustration actually of how much great teaching is given to us in the New Testament because things were going wrong in the church. And in the Corinthian church, things were going very badly wrong in all kinds of areas. And that included the way they were celebrating the Lord's Supper. And so Paul comes in with this marvelous letter, and he gives them instruction in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 verses 14 to 22, and then in chapter 11 from verse 23 to 32 about what it really means to come to the Lord's table and come to the Lord's Supper. Now I think it's important for us to understand that both baptism and the Lord's Supper are sacraments, signs and seals of the gospel, and therefore they are both weighted with enormous theological and Christological significance. And we need to avoid trying to narrow down to just one or two things, the significance of both of these signs because they point to Jesus Christ and therefore they point to so much of what Jesus Christ has done for us and so much of what it means for us to enjoy fellowship with him. And that becomes very evident in connection with the Lord's Supper in the teaching that Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 10 and 11. I sometimes wonder in my more whimsical moments, I wonder if I could get some three by five cards, and then instead of shaking hands with people at the door at the end of a service, especially a service where we had enjoyed the Lord's Supper, I gave out three by five cards with a question printed on the top. What just happened in church this morning? You know, I have a vague suspicion, that's an understatement. I have a pretty serious suspicion that in some of the most orthodox churches, you might get very poor answers. The Lord's Supper is part of church life that we're so familiar with, that perhaps those who are ministers and teachers would feel a little embarrassed about saying to you, you do understand what this means, don't you? But that's exactly what I want us to try and do in the next few minutes. To catechize Paul's teaching here, to ask him some questions and especially to ask the question, so Paul, what is the meaning? What's the significance? What's the benediction of the Lord's Supper? And I want to try and summarize that in a very few minutes in, I think, eight words. So that three by five card, if you're looking for an A, I would be looking for the presence, either of these words or words that said the same thing. So this is going to be, from one point of view, very superficial, from another point of view. It should feed us with help that will enable us to see how much there is for us to understand about the Lord's Supper. The first word is the word commemoration. And Paul points us to this in 1 Corinthians chapter 11. When Jesus had given thanks, this is verse 24, he broke the bread and said, "This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me." And similarly in verse 25, with the cup, "Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me." Now it's very important for us to understand the direction in which that remembrance takes place. Paul is not saying, "I want you to sit there and close your eyes and try and remember." He is saying, "The Lord's Supper will cause you to remember." "The Lord's Supper is the remembrance of what Jesus Christ has done for us." Now that may seem a very simple point, but it's a very important one for this reason, that the blessings of coming to the Lord's Supper do not reside in anything that is in me. The blessings of coming to the Lord's Supper reside entirely in what the Lord's Supper is saying to me about the Lord Jesus Christ. So I'm not coming to the Supper thinking, "How can I work up faith? How can I feel differently?" I am to come to the Lord's Supper looking at these signs of bread and wine that our visible descriptions and statements about what Jesus Christ has done for me. And as I see their significance, faith in the Lord Jesus is drawn out of me. And so the direction is not, "How can I work up pious feelings about Jesus?" The direction is more like the direction you remember of the bronze serpent that Moses raised up. "Look," he said, "and live. Don't look in here and think, 'How can I live?' But look out of yourself to Jesus Christ. And so the fact that the Supper is a commemoration really underlines for us that all the resources of our salvation are not to be found in ourselves. They are not to be found even in our faith. They are to be found only in Jesus Christ. B.B. Warfield, the great American theologian, is a wonderful way of putting this. He says, "You know, it's not faith that saves." Indeed, it's not faith in Jesus Christ that saves. It's Jesus Christ who saves through faith. And so the commemoration is God reminding us of what he has done for us in Jesus Christ. The second word that I think is helpful, and you'll notice all of these words rhyme for some reason or another, is the language that Paul uses in chapter 11 of 1 Corinthians verse 26. For there he says, "When we do this, as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. You proclaim." So it's a commemoration and it's also a proclamation. I remember when I was a young Christian, people used to argue, does this mean there always needs to be a sermon whenever there is the celebration of the Lord's Supper? It's not really got anything to do with the sermons that are preached from the pulpit. The sermon is in the Lord's Supper. It's as we celebrate the Lord's Supper. Do you notice what he says? We proclaim. He doesn't say, "As you celebrate the Lord's Supper, it's really important. The minister proclaims Christ out until he comes." What he's saying is that what we are doing in the Lord's Supper is that we are preaching the gospel. In the tradition of communion to which I belong, what happens at the Lord's Supper is that the bread and the wine will be brought to the members of the congregation and they will serve each other. We will go from hand to hand to hand. Now, Paul gives us no directions about the liturgy of the Lord's Supper. But that tradition is very deliberately seeking to capture what Paul is saying here. Do you know how sometimes you feel that people view the Lord's Supper as a kind of very individualistic experience? But what the Lord's Supper is meant to be is the congregation preaching the gospel to one another. And one of the ways in which in my tradition that's expressed is that here are the symbols of the gospel and they've come to me and I pass on the symbols of the gospel to you. And I proclaim to you in that action the death of Christ. So if a little boy said, "What were you doing there when you passed the bread and the wine?" we would say we were proclaiming the gospel to one another without words. But we understood what the wordless signs meant. They pointed to all that Jesus has done for us. I've sometimes wondered actually if this is what Paul means when he says to the Galatians, "You foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ was publicly placarded as crucified." And that's the wonder of the Supper, isn't it? That we not only hear the gospel through irrigate, but we see the gospel through eye-gate. So it's commemoration, it's proclamation, and then thirdly it's benediction. Look at what Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter 10. In chapter 10 he speaks in verse 16 about the cup of blessing that we bless. That's the English standard version and it is the best translation. The cup of blessing that we bless. It's the word benediction. It is the word of God speaking well of us in Jesus Christ. And actually blessing the word that Paul uses here is a very big word in the Bible, isn't it? It's a hugely significant word in the Bible. But in our modern times, the only time you ever hear it is when somebody sneezes and people say, "Bless you." But you know that gets you very near to the real significance in the Bible of the word blessing. I mean, what do we say when somebody sneezes, why do we say, "Bless you"? That goes right back to the days of the plague in Europe. One of the signs of having the plague was sneezing. You know, the children's nursery rhyme, you know, play the game, you know, ringering a roses, pocketful of posies, a tissue, a tissue, we all fall down. I remember seeing gurus play that game. I don't know why their mothers taught them that because they all falling down was being dead. The roses were to keep the smell of the plague away. So in a world where the plague was seen as the evidence of the curse of God, the prayer may God bless you was a kind of gospel prayer. And that's what the supper sets before us, the broken bread, the poured-out wine. It's saying to us, "This cup that we receive is the cup of blessing, because in the garden of Gethsemane, the Lord Jesus was willing to take the cup of divine cursing." But then there's a fourth word. And it is the word which at least again in my tradition we most associate with the Lord's supper. It's the word communion. And Paul uses this term, various translations of course, but chapter 10 of 1 Corinthians verse 16, the cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation, a kynonia, a communion in the body of Christ? And is the cup not a communion in the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ? And I think we need to understand that that's what's happening at the Lord's supper. I don't know that we can do anything about this, but I actually have a personal regret that we no longer speak about the host at the Lord's supper. And the reason we don't speak about the host is because of course in the medieval Roman Catholic theology, the host is the bread and the wine that has been transformed into the body and blood of Jesus, so that Jesus is kind of localized in the bread and the wine. Because that was known as the host, Protestants kind of, well, you know what it's like you. You start using those words, but it's very important to understand that the Lord's supper is communion, and that there is a host, and that the host is the Lord Jesus himself. And this is what Paul seems to be saying here, that at the Lord's supper, we are not being thrown back on our own resources to think good thoughts about Jesus, but Jesus has come as the host. It's not the church who is the host, it's not the pastor who is the host. The pastor, the elders are just the hands and feet as it were, the message boys, the male men that the church uses to bring these gifts to you from the host. They're not big gifts, are they? You know, little bits of bread, little cups of wine. What therefore gives them so much significance? You know, I wonder if you've got a keepsake somewhere, somebody who's been important to you and that you've loved has given you something almost insignificant, but it's really important to you why. Not because of the inherent value of the gift, but because of the great significance of the person. And that's what it means for us to come to the Lord's table. That's why it seems to me in our churches, we need to try and do something about making the celebration of the Lord's supper more leisurely, because the Lord's supper isn't something we are doing so much as a person we're enjoying, because he has come as the host and he has invited us to his table. And he is saying, I am yours, and we are saying to him, and I am also yours. And that leads us to the fifth word. Commemoration, proclamation, benediction, communion, and consecration. And Paul speaks about this back in 1 Corinthians 10 verses 22, 21, because he is concerned about the fact that the Corinthian Christians are not only coming to the Lord's supper, but they're going to all kinds of other feasts that were pagan, in which pagan idols were being recognized, and he says, you cannot do this. It's exactly what Jesus says in the Gospels, you can't serve two masters. And so either you must turn your back on that paganism and idolatry, or if you continue, you are turning your back upon the Lord Jesus Christ, because to share in the meal is to share in the person. And so when we come to the Lord's table, we are actually re-consecrating ourselves to the Lord Jesus Christ. You know how in some churches they have occasions at the end of the mercy seat, or re-consecration, or ask people to come forward. And I sometimes think about that, why would you replace the sacrament that God has given to us with a new sacrament that he hasn't given to us? And it's often a real sign in a church that they don't have a very good understanding of what the Lord's Supper is. That at the Lord's Supper, Jesus is giving himself to you. And you are giving yourself in return to the Lord Jesus. Here's another word. It's the sixth word. And I can deal with it just in a sentence or two. It's the word repetition. Now, where do we get that? We get that from chapter 11, verses 25 and 26. He says, "As often as you drink it, as often as you eat the spread." Now here's a question, especially for those of you who are interested in language, how often is often? If you know the answer to that question, you will know the answer to the question, often should we have the Lord's Supper. I know the answer to that question. I can say it with great confidence. It may seem arrogant by a full confidence. I know the answer to the question, how often is often? Often. Often. Why? Because we need the fellowship of Jesus so much. And it's like our own relationships, isn't it? Imagine you're at a wedding and the minister addresses the bride in the groom. And he says, "Here is my rule for a happy marriage. Kiss one another once a year." That would be a very strange exhortation, wouldn't it? When we love, we want that love to be expressed often. And the same is true of the Lord's Supper. But then there is a seventh word that I think we really do need to catch hold of. And that's the word, anticipation. We remember the Lord's death until he comes. So, in a sense, these little bits of bread and these tiny sips of wine, it's almost as though God has deliberately designed them to teach us, "This isn't the full meal. The full meal is coming." In the United States, you have this tradition of the celebration of a marriage, the evening before the marriage takes place, the rehearsal dinner. And I've noticed in the American culture, it's the father who pays the bill for the rehearsal dinner. And that's like a picture of the Lord's Supper, isn't it? This is the rehearsal dinner, and the father has paid the bill. And it's because it's all of these things. The commemoration, proclamation, benediction, communion, consecration, repetition, and anticipation, that it will naturally lead to self-examination. It will lead us to say, "Lord, there is nothing in me that makes me worthy of communion with you." But there is everything in your grace that calls me to have communion with you, to know your presence, to ensure your grace, and to trust you now until eternity. And that's the meaning of the Lord's Supper. What a wonderful summary sentence of the meaning of the Lord's Supper. "Lord, there is nothing in me that makes me worthy of communion with you, but there is everything in your grace that calls me to have communion with you, to know your presence, to enjoy your grace, and to trust you now until eternity." That's a line I don't want to forget. This is the Thursday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. If you'd like to go back and listen to today's message or the complete 12-part series, you can do that when you request it with a donation of any amount. Until midnight, you can give your gift when you call us at 800-435-4343 or online at renewingyourmind.org. You'll receive the DVD of this series plus lifetime digital access to the messages and study guide. This study guide will help you if you plan to lead a small group study, as it contains discussion questions, quizzes, and even prayer suggestions to help you close out a lesson. So give your gift at renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes. Tomorrow, Sinclair Ferguson will join us again, but we've gone back into the archives and will feature a conference message on rightly dividing the word. Don't miss Friday's episode here on Renewing Your Mind. ♪ (gentle music)
