1 Corinthians 11:27-34

November 4, 2018

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

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The sermon starts at 14:10 in the audio file.

Or, Dangers and Doubts at the Lord’s Supper

Too many times it’s as if when the church comes together for communion, everyone is urged to look at the Table, and then the preacher dumps a pile of leaves that have been in the compost pile for six months on top of the bread and the cup. Or it’s as if he dumps the pile of compost in front of the Table and requires everyone to wade through it. Or it’s as if he tells everyone to bring their own pile from home and examine each leaf remnant looking for what is most grimy, pick it out, and stare at it for an indefinite amount of time, and then, maybe, people will be ready to eat and drink.

Beloved, these things ought not be so. You were not made for the Lord’s Supper, the Lord’s Supper was made for you.

How do you think God wants you to feel when you come to the Lord’s Table? We don’t usually talk that way, but try it out for a moment. What does He want the state of your heart to be? Even more than that, how do you think God feels when you come to the Lord’s Table? What is the state of His attitude toward you?

We’ve been lead to believe, and it is based on the verses we’re going to work through today, that God prefers that we be anxious about our sin. We don’t use the word “anxious,” because that is a sin, so we use other terms: convicted, bothered, grieved, horrified. That is how we should respond to sin we find, and there’s also a second-level worry about whether we found all the sin we’re supposed to feel bad about. As for God’s stance toward us, we envision Him in perfect holiness and perfect omniscience, with a suspicious or even displeased countenance, knowing that we don’t know how truly awful we are. He demands that we do this in remembrance, but threatens to kill us if we eat in an unworthy manner.

There is some truth in what I’ve just described, except that the gospel has been buried. There is a sliver of good news, but it is like a tiny, dry, tasteless cracker. There is a thimble of joy and life, but the joy is like one part grape juice to five parts vinegar of knowing you don’t deserve to taste the one part of joy in the first place.

Not only is this anxious approach not right, at the root of it is the same problem the Corinthians had, even though this attitude is supposedly an attempt to avoid being like the Corinthians. Paul started rebuking the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 11:17 since some of them were indulging themselves and neglecting others while claiming that they were remembering Christ. Their ironic failure is legendary, and Paul reveals that God disciplined some of them with sickness and death because of it. But what was their problem? Their problem was focus on self. And that is the same problem with the predominant sort of introspection urged on believers in our day. Focus on self, even the sinful parts, is not what the death of Christ was for, and it is not what communion is about. We do this in remembrance of Him, not in remembrance of sin. We do not share communion in cultivated unhappiness.

We must take seriously the consequences Paul describes and the counsel he gives to the Corinthians. We would be wise to follow Paul’s instructions and avoid the dangers he identifies. And also, we are wrong if we think the antidote to self-indulgence is to doubt our salvation really hard and chew the bread softly hoping that God won’t punish us.

Consequences (verses 27-32)

In the first three sentences of the paragraph Paul speaks in the third person about what happens to any person who eats unworthily, in the last three sentences he addresses them directly in the second person and then includes himself in the first person plural to describe what we must all do.

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