SPEAKER_00: This podcast is brought to you by Grand Parkway Faptist, helping people to know, enjoy, and glorify God.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about Grand Parkway, visit GrandProquay.org.
SPEAKER_01: Pray together.
SPEAKER_01: Father, there's a uniqueness to your name.
SPEAKER_01: There's a worth that we ascribe to your name that we don't ascribe to any other name, including our own.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible says that there's no name given under heaven whereby which men should be saved except the name of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Proverbs says the name of the Lord is a strong tower.
SPEAKER_01: The righteous run into it and find strength.
SPEAKER_01: And so we come today to be nourished and strengthened by who you are at the expense of who we are.
SPEAKER_01: So, Holy Spirit, lead us into this time as we prepare our head and our heart to come to the table and remember that you offered up your body and your blood in our place and for our sin.
SPEAKER_01: This is a cause for great celebration and great preparation.
SPEAKER_01: We give ourselves to both of us now in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: And everyone said, Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: You can have a scene, if you have a Bible, you can open up to 1 Corinthians chapter 11.
SPEAKER_01: And let me just explain what you're seeing.
SPEAKER_01: If you're our guest, we're observing communion today.
SPEAKER_01: And we practice what's called open communion here at Grand Park Way, which means if you're a Christian, you have a relationship with Christ, you can be visiting for the first time today.
SPEAKER_01: You are welcome to come and receive communion with us, okay?
SPEAKER_01: However, if if you're like, you know what, that's not who I am, uh, or I've got some things in my life I've not dealt with, then we encourage you to abstain from the table today and just observe and just worship and spend some time thinking and praying about your life.
SPEAKER_01: Paul gives instructions in 1 Corinthians chapter 11 to the church at Corinth, which was this most problematic church that he'd ever dealt with.
SPEAKER_01: There was always controversy and crisis going on in the church at Corinth.
SPEAKER_01: And so Paul gives them a lot of granularity because they started consuming the Lord's Supper upon their lust.
SPEAKER_01: It was just a thing for them.
SPEAKER_01: It's like a ritual, another thing for them to exploit in the ways that they wanted to.
SPEAKER_01: And if left unchecked into ourselves, we can become the same way.
SPEAKER_01: And so it helps us to kind of look into what the Bible says and then take our cues from that.
SPEAKER_01: I'll start reading in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verse 23.
SPEAKER_01: He says, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.
SPEAKER_01: That the Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and he said, This is my body which is for you.
SPEAKER_01: Do this in remembrance of me.
SPEAKER_01: In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant and my blood.
SPEAKER_01: Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.
SPEAKER_01: For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
SPEAKER_01: Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and the blood of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Let a person examine himself then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
SPEAKER_01: For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body, eats and drinks judgment on himself.
SPEAKER_01: This is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died.
SPEAKER_01: But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged.
SPEAKER_01: But when we are judged by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.
SPEAKER_01: There's three things I want to give us to think about as we prepare to come to the table.
SPEAKER_01: Just three simple words.
SPEAKER_01: And the first one is just remember.
SPEAKER_01: Remember.
SPEAKER_01: Twice Jesus says that do this, and as often as you do this, do this in remembrance of me.
SPEAKER_01: You engage in this behavior, what Jesus, what Paul tells us, what Jesus says at the Last Supper.
SPEAKER_01: He says, Hey, do you do this, but you and when you do this, you do this in remembrance of me.
SPEAKER_01: It's important that we remember today because it's our nature to forget.
SPEAKER_01: It's our nature to come through a year like this past year and come out of it and think it's all depends on me.
SPEAKER_01: I reached down, it was difficult, but I reached down and pulled myself up with my own determination.
SPEAKER_01: And yet the Bible, we open it up, and it Jesus says, Hey, as often as you do this, remember me when you do it.
SPEAKER_01: He says, when it comes to the bread, and he holds up the cup and he says, This cup is a new covenant in my blood.
SPEAKER_01: Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.
SPEAKER_01: Now, you should be asking yourself, why does the Bible have to tell us to remember?
SPEAKER_01: Because it is our nature to forget and therefore to take matters in our own hands.
SPEAKER_01: And so it just kind of slows us down and unwinds us and finds us and says, remember.
SPEAKER_01: Second word I want to give you is just proclaim.
SPEAKER_01: Proclaim.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 26, Paul says, For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
SPEAKER_01: Here's what you're doing today.
SPEAKER_01: Let me just remind you, it's been a while, but if you leave your seat, when we start to receive communion and you come to one of these communion stations, there's three in the front and two in the back.
SPEAKER_01: If you leave your seat and you go receive communion today, what you are saying, what you are proclaiming is that you by nature are so sinful and so separated from God and so incapable of doing anything about your status in standing before God, that you require a perfect God to sacrifice his perfect son in your place and for your sins.
SPEAKER_01: That's what you're saying, that there is no way, the only hope I have of forgiveness and heaven is that someone dies for my sin in my place.
SPEAKER_01: But you're also proclaiming that yes, yes, this is who I am by nature.
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm this sinful of a person.
SPEAKER_01: But you're also proclaiming I'm also so loved by God that He was glad to do that.
SPEAKER_01: And so one of those balances out the other.
SPEAKER_01: One uh uh one uh stops the the boasting uh and and the other stops the pity.
SPEAKER_01: It's a proclamation.
SPEAKER_01: Proclaim.
SPEAKER_01: You as often as you do this, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
SPEAKER_01: Not only do you proclaim the Lord's death, I want to just say when it comes to proclaiming the Lord's death, we fall in one of two categories.
SPEAKER_01: Either the Lord's death is personal for you or it's historical.
SPEAKER_01: It's something that happened thousands of years ago.
SPEAKER_01: You can believe in that and never experience that.
SPEAKER_01: It's just historical, like the Titanic.
SPEAKER_01: I believe the Titanic happened, it's historical, but it's not personal.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't lose anything on the Titanic.
SPEAKER_01: Leonardo DiCaprio didn't come save me on the Titanic.
SPEAKER_01: And so I can talk about the Titanic all day long in a historical mindset.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, I believe that happened.
SPEAKER_01: Here's how it happened, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_01: But I didn't experience the Titanic.
SPEAKER_01: I saw the movie and I still did not experience the Titanic because that is an historical event for me.
SPEAKER_01: The cross is both historical and personal.
SPEAKER_01: You have to ask yourself, is this personal for me?
SPEAKER_01: When he says, proclaim the Lord's death, do I understand what he's saying there?
SPEAKER_01: Do I have a personal proclamation?
SPEAKER_01: And then finally he says, Examine.
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, verse 27.
SPEAKER_01: The text gets a little thick.
SPEAKER_01: Why is that?
SPEAKER_01: Because the table, coming to the Lord's table is God's means of purifying the church.
SPEAKER_01: Listen very carefully.
SPEAKER_01: The Lord's table is God's means of purifying the church.
SPEAKER_01: It keeps you and I from getting in the habit of just living in sin and shrugging and going, Well, Jesus died for my sin.
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: He died not just for your forgiveness for sin, but your freedom from sin.
SPEAKER_01: And so we we we come with some sobriety.
SPEAKER_01: Verse 27 says, Whoever therefore eats the bread and drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and the blood of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Let a person examine himself then, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup.
SPEAKER_01: For everyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself.
SPEAKER_01: This is why many of you are weak and ill and some have died.
SPEAKER_01: But if we've judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged.
SPEAKER_01: When we judge by the Lord, we are disciplined so that we may not be condemned along with the world.
SPEAKER_01: That's the difference for the Christian and the non-Christian.
SPEAKER_01: The Christian, when he feels judged by God, when you feel convicted by God of sin, you don't feel condemned, you feel disciplined.
SPEAKER_01: You feel like there's somebody in your life that loves you enough to tell you that's wrong.
SPEAKER_01: That's discipline.
SPEAKER_01: If you have children, you're not loving your children if you don't discipline them.
SPEAKER_01: God loves you and I so much that He will discipline you when you sin.
SPEAKER_01: That's not hate, that's love.
SPEAKER_01: It's the nature of relationship.
SPEAKER_01: And so, three words I want us to think about.
SPEAKER_01: And the last one is just examine.
SPEAKER_01: Just examine, just take some time.
SPEAKER_01: If you've never observed communion with us here at Grand Park, what will happen in just a minute is I'll pray a prayer, and Clyde will come and he'll just kind of play.
SPEAKER_01: He may sing something over us, and we'll just spend a little bit of time just kind of getting our head and our heart ready to come to the table and remember and and celebrate the sufficiency of Christ offering up his body and shedding his blood.
SPEAKER_01: Now, by the way, if you come to my station, I'll I'll probably tell you this, but let me just say this to everybody.
SPEAKER_01: Uh uh when Christ holds up the cup and says, This cup is a new covenant in my blood, the covenant is as certain as that which it depends upon.
SPEAKER_01: The covenant is as certain as that which it depends upon.
SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like if you went into a business agreement with somebody, that agreement is as certain, the outcome is as certain as the character of the person who you shook hands with or signed a contract with.
SPEAKER_01: The covenant is as certain as the nature of the person it depends upon.
SPEAKER_01: And so the new covenant that's in his blood, it is sealed and it is ratified, it is signed by the blood of Jesus, and it depends upon the character of God.
SPEAKER_01: It is that certain.
SPEAKER_01: And so you can have a not great period of time in your relationship with God, and he doesn't take it back because it doesn't depend on your behavior, but it depends on the character of God, and the consistency of God is what calls us back into the relationship.
SPEAKER_01: I asked one couple that came to our station in the first service, how long have you been married?
SPEAKER_01: And they said, like 42 years.
SPEAKER_01: And I said, Has it been perfect?
SPEAKER_01: And the lady laughed, and the guy's like, uh and I said, But you didn't leave because you're not always gonna keep the rules, but the relationship is what brings you back, and so it is with a covenant.
SPEAKER_01: Marriage is a covenant, Christianity is a covenant, and God says, I'm always going to be faithful, even when you're faithless.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna keep being faithful.
SPEAKER_01: Let that bring you back today.
SPEAKER_01: Let me voice a prayer.
SPEAKER_01: Father, we uh want to do what the Bible says.
SPEAKER_01: We want, don't want to just um we we remember we want to proclaim the Lord's death, and now we want to examine ourselves, not to see if we deserve this, but to see if we understand, make sure that our head and our heart are calibrated to what's fixing to happen, that we don't think it's ritualistic or we don't think, oh, it's just communion today.
SPEAKER_01: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_01: It's a huge undertaking.
SPEAKER_01: So I pray for those that are here in the room and those in our online community, if they have elements that they would just spend some time even now kind of posturing and preparing themselves, not groveling, but being humbled underneath the fact that the Bible says that greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends.
SPEAKER_01: You said to your disciples, I no longer call you servants, but friends.
SPEAKER_01: So over all of this today, God, we've got to hear that the God of the universe looks at us and says, The cross is my indication to you about the nature of uh of relationship I want to have.
SPEAKER_01: So, Father, let this be as intimate as it needs to be.
SPEAKER_01: We remember that we proclaim your death and its sufficiency for our life.
SPEAKER_01: And now, Lord, we just spend some time examining ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: So, Holy Spirit, brood over us as we think and we prepare, for we do so in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: We ask you just to be seated for a second.
SPEAKER_01: Cloud's just gonna play.
SPEAKER_01: We like to, whenever we observe communion, we like to end with just a just a period of consideration.
SPEAKER_01: So I'd like you just to take some time and just think about what you saw and what you sensed this morning.
SPEAKER_01: There's a sufficiency to the body and the blood of Jesus that we do not find in anything or anybody else.
SPEAKER_01: We just sang the great hymn of the faith that reminds us that we lose all our guilty stains.
SPEAKER_01: And so your sin is not to increase your determination, it's to enhance your perspective.
SPEAKER_01: As a Christian, you're not a sinner who's trying to act like a saint.
SPEAKER_01: You're a saint.
SPEAKER_01: God has changed your nature, and occasionally you forget that and you choose to sin.
SPEAKER_01: But that doesn't change the nature of who you are.
SPEAKER_01: Let's think about these things for a moment before we dismiss.
SPEAKER_01: And we are humbled.
SPEAKER_01: So thank you for the opportunity to come to the Lord's table, to remember, to reorient ourselves around your sufficiency.
SPEAKER_01: We just want to baptize all of our insufficiency in your sufficiency and say, Thank you that you are more than enough.
SPEAKER_01: So, Holy Spirit, brood over us.
SPEAKER_01: Help us to be reminded that we are not just forgiven for sin, we've been set free from sin.
SPEAKER_01: No longer has power over us.
SPEAKER_01: Comfort those who mourn and invite those who wander.
SPEAKER_01: We pray all this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: And everyone said, Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: If you're a guest, I want to say thanks for being part of our service.
SPEAKER_01: You're always welcome here.
SPEAKER_01: You're always welcome, okay?
SPEAKER_01: If you have any questions about anything you saw or heard today, some of us will be available down front when you're dismissed here in a second.
SPEAKER_01: We'd love to answer your questions or pray with you.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we'd like to conclude our service with a spoken blessing.
SPEAKER_01: So if you would stand to your feet.
SPEAKER_01: Hold your hands out.
SPEAKER_01: In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: I mean