Lord's Supper
edited and compiled by from the writing of J. B. Watson
"This do in remembrance of me."
Wherever,
throughout all the world,
the Gospel of Jesus Christ has been preached, and men and women have come
to a knowledge of Christ, groups of saved people will be found gathered
together that they might observe the direction of those words:
"This do in
remembrance of me."
If a first century Christian could be transported through
all the centuries, and set down here in our twentieth century as an observer in
some of those gatherings, he would not be able in many of them to discern a
single feature that had survived since the first century. So overlaid with human
traditions and with priestly assumptions, with alterations of this sort and
that,
with additions, has the original ordinance become that, sad to say, this would
be
true. But still, it may be held that even now, in this late hour of our
dispensation, such an observer could happen upon companies of people who
upon the first day of the week observe this ordinance in a way very similar to
that away back in New Testament days.
First Corinthians eleven gives the divine warrant for the service of the
Lord's supper, and in chapter twenty of Acts we have a New Testament
example of a local church meeting together to remember the Lord in the breaking
of the bread. There is surviving to our day a letter from the second century
written by Justin Martyr, in which he give details for the breaking of bread
which differ very little from the New Testament Scriptures. He says,
"We all
hold this united assembly on Sunday, because that is the first day of the week,
in which God turned aside darkness and matter, and made the world, and
because Jesus Christ our Savior on that day rose from the dead."
Later in the
letter he says:
"On the day called Sunday there is an assembly in one place of
all the Christians who dwell in the cities or in the country, and the memorials
of
the apostles or the writings of the prophets, are read as time may
permit."
(Justin
Martyr, Apology I, trans. L.W. Bernard,(Cambridge, 1967, p. 61) So that when
they
came together in the second century they did it on the first day of the week,
they came together for the purpose of breaking bread, and they took
opportunity in their gathering to minister the Word of God.
Now imagine yourself one only yesterday born again, knowing scarcely
any thing of Christian doctrine or practice, just as they were in the city of
Corinth. Suppose you were to visit such a company of Christians on the first
day of the week, and finds them sat down around a simply-spread table which
bears two simple emblems𤪳read and wine. As the service proceeds, the
question arises in your mind; why do they do this? If you were to ask a
believer after the service, they might say something like this: "Why, we do it
because our blessed Lord asked us to do it. On that very night when His heart
was as full of sorrow as it was of love, He looked into the faces of His own
that
were clustered around Him and said to them with longing in his heart:
'This do
in remembrance of me.'
" We do it because he asked us to do it. This is really ,
the fundamental answer. You may read tome a foot thick on the Lord's supper
and you will never get beyond this truth. Wonderful it is, after all that the
learned
men say, to discover that this is still the very heart of the matter.
Lord's Supper as a Memorial Feast
Now there are other reasons for why we celebrate
the Lord's Supper. It is
a memorial feast. When we come together around the Lord's Table, we come
having Himself before our thoughts. At the supper we turn aside for a time from
the demands of business life, and family life and turn our inward gaze upon
Christ
alone. A hundred and one lawful things fill our thought at other hours, but when
we take our place at the Lord's Table we empty our hands and minds of all of
these, and Christ fills our memory. At the Lord's Table memory functions at its
very highest level, for there it occupies itself with our Master and Lord. At
the
Lord's Table the Holy Spirit is the King's Remembrancer indeed, for He brings
the Lord before our souls in all His glory and fullness from eternal glory to
Bethlehem to Calvary and back to His throne in heaven. At the Lord's Table
every eye is fasted on Him. It is a memorial feast. There is still more to the
memorial feast. The Lord's Supper is the Lord's divine method to drive us back
week by week to the center and heart of our faith: Christ. The Lord who knows
our needs more than we know ourselves, saw how needful it was to bring us back
to the very heart, core and foundation of our faith, again and again. Sunday by
Sunday our hearts are set aflame anew by the mighty mystery of Calvary. The
world is so full of many voices that might well drive us away the true center of
things, but not many days will pass till the Lord's day comes anew and we
fulfill
his wish, and memory and mind and thoughts and affection are all brought back
face to face with the infinite wonder of Calvary's most bitter cross.
Corporate Proclamation of the Lord's Death
The Lord's supper is an announcement, a
proclamation, corporate
preaching of the Lord's death. I have heard Christians say: "I can remember the
Lord without any rite or ceremony." I have heard Christians who neglect the
Lord's Table excuse themselves by saying they remember the Lord every day. I
hope they do. I am sorry for any Christian who does not. However, the Lord's
supper is so central to the purposes of God that He has decreed and ordained
both
that in the dispensation before it occurred and in the dispensation since it
occurred,
there should be in the world by His people a corporate recognition and
proclamation of that mighty event. In Israel year by year, the Paschal feast
pointed
to the Calvary that was yet to be, and in the Church for more than twenty
centuries,
the Lord's Supper has pointed to Calvary. The church corporate shows forth the
Lord's death鍟he most important event couched between two eternities. The
Lord's death; the death that annulled death. The death that drew the sting of
death.
The one death, since death entered, that was completely voluntary, but also the
only
death that has every been undertaken by divine authorization. The death which is
life to those believe on Him. Let no man say that he can neglect the Lord's
command:
"This do".
For it is an ugly temper in a man's soul when he assumes
to be able to get on without something that the Lord has deemed necessary.
It is also a confession of our hope.
"You do show the Lord's death
𠓾ntil he come."
You say: "What is it all about, the death that abolished death?
You Christians are no different from other people. You still have to attend
funerals." But when we are gathered together around the Lord's table, we are
saying wait. We are waiting. The first installment of victory over death is
already
in glory. We are waiting for the trumpet sound and he ancient graves are stirred
by his command, and we meet together in the air, to be forever with the Lord. We
are saying with one voice, we are saying to an unbelieving world, we are saying
to
hostile spiritual powers, we are saying to the reinforcing of each others
faith, we
are saying to the pleasure of our God and Father:
"We do this till He come."
Divine Blueprint for Participation at the Lord Supper
How should we observe the Lord's supper? At the
very birth of the Church,
back in the beginning of the book of Acts, the Bible says they
"broke bread".
They continued steadfastly in the Apostles doctrine, in breaking of bread, and
prayers (Acts 2:42). In the twentieth chapter of the Acts, it says:
"And we
sailed
away from Philippi after the days of unleavened bread, and came unto them at
Troas in five days, where we abode seven days. And upon the first day of the
week, when the disciples came together to break bread Paul preached unto them"
(Acts 20:6-7). I want you to notice that, in order to be present when the
disciples
came together Paul waited full seven days in Troas. He apparently arrived there
on what we would call a Monday morning, and consequently, in order that he
should meet all the saints when they came together as was their custom on the
first day of the week, he tarried seven days at Troas. When you come together as
an assembly, that is, when Christians meet in the capacity of a church, you come
together as such on the first day of the week primarily to remember the Lord in
the breaking of the bread. They came together as a local church that was formed
by the Holy Spirit, to be a witness for Christ in that locality. But that is
not all.
"The cup of blessing which we bless is it not the communion of the blood of
Christ? The bread which we break, is it not communion of the body of Christ?"
The prayer over which we pray a blessing is a united giving of thanks. When
they came together there was a united giving of thanks, for the bread and for
the
wine. Every Scripture about the Lord's Supper make this plain, that all
Christians
present in the Church in a spiritual oneness partook of the bread and the cup.
Spirituality and the Lord's Supper
Some comment: "You have no priest to administer
the sacrament." Look
into the Scriptures and if you find such a person then all New Testament
churches will also have such a person. But you will look in vain, for the Bible
never speaks of such a person. The New Testament Greek scholar Dean Alford
writes: "The blessing of the cup and the breaking of the bread were not the acts
of the minister as by any authority peculiar to himself, but only as the
representative of the whole Christian congregation present. The figment of
sacerdotal consecration of the elements by transmitted power is as alien from
the
Apostolic writing as it is from the spirit of the gospel." When a brother rises
in
this hall some Sunday morning, and gives thanks for the bread, he is only
expressing the united thanksgiving of every Christian present. He is not a
minister in any other sense than that.
One might say: "You do not even have a presiding elder to see that the
service is kept in an orderly way." No, we do not. Look in chapter eleven of
First Corinthians and find such a person if you can. You will have to put on a
very powerful pair of reading glasses to find even the shadow of such a person,
and if ever one was needed, it was at Corinth at that time. Drunken hands were
being put to the cup of the Lord in Corinth, and if ever it was needful to
reduce all
this confusion, it was there. Well, how is order to be obtained. The apostles
simply reaffirms divine principles to them. That is all. Let the Holy Ghost send
home the Word of God to their hearts, and that will reduce chaos to order. Let
them bow their wills to the Word of God, and seek to be guided by the Spirit of
God. Brethren, at the Lord's Table, if the Word of God means anything, we have
this: the Lord in the midst of us, the Spirit of God within us, and the Word of
God behind us, do we want anymore. It is the body and blood of the Lord that
are before us in symbols, and all through the Bible it is the Lordship of Christ
that is emphasized, and if only the hearts of God's people understood what it
means to have the Lord in the midst, then they will need neither priest nor
presiding elder, but they will have sufficiency in the guidance of the Holy
Ghost.
When I have put together all that is written about the Lord's Supper, I have to
notice this: a peculiar absence of any rules; what seems to be a deliberate and
designed vagueness as to details. You will not find a word in the New
Testament as to the composition of the elements. Bread. Read where you will,
it is bread. There are some who say that the Lord's Supper must be celebrated
in the evening. The Scripture says: the first day of the week. It does not say
any more than that.
"As often as you eat this bread..."
Isn't that delightfully
free, lifting us above these details?
The Lord's method always required that we should have spirituality of
mind. When we fall from spirituality, then we begin to make rules, and to
bring in human expedients, to take the place of the beautiful simplicity and
spirituality. "You say: This meeting, that seems to have no a leader, does it
work?" It does this: it calls for constant exercise of heart on the part of the
Lord's people, and God wants that from us all the time. If we fall into a
routine, then the fall is great, all we all feel it. It means a solemn
self-scrutiny
before we come to the Lord's supper. It means a sincere heart and our eye
completely upon the Lord. It means that we shall come up in the Spirit, on the
Lord's day. Yes, it means all of that. But thank God it does. These are just
the things we need to be kept fresh in, and that we need to be kept falling
from.
Now there is nothing whatever in this simple feast that merely pleases
the flesh. No. when we come around that table, with its simple emblems, there
is nothing there that will please that which is merely sensuous, aesthetic. No
peals of thrilling music, no arched temple full of soft light that come through
windows of stained glass, no purple and gold upon the vestments of the
priests. No high altar of carved marble, no incense, filling the whole place
with
its heavy perfume. Nothing of all of this, that is so pleasing to the natural
and
sensuous aesthetic in man. But if it is only in a barn or a cottage kitchen, or
a
simple meeting house, where the twos and threes meet, because He said:
"This
do in remembrance of me",
and do so in all dependence upon Him, in all
submission to His Lordship, in all sincerity, seeking to be guided by His Holy
Spirit, those are hours nearest to heaven. Those are the minutes when the soul
realized the presence of the Lord in a measure beyond all other hours. Then it
is that the love of Christ melts our hears and causes our eyes to overflow.
Then it is that we look at the man of Calvary, and then it is that we stoop and
kiss the Conqueror's feet. Then it is that we see afresh the wounded hand and
side, and say with Thomas,
"my Lord and my God!"
Endnotes
J. B. Watson (1884-1955) was the long time editor of Witness Magazine,
co-author of "On
the Sermon on the Mount", and a respected Bible teacher for many years in Great
Britian.
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" The Lord's Supper
was meant to be a
frequent feast of
fellowship. It is a
grievious mistake of
the church when
the communion is
held but once a
year, or once in a
quarter of a year;
and I cannot
remember any
Scripture which
justifies once in the
month. I should
not feel satisfied
without breaking
bread on every
Lord's Day. We
cannot think of the
Lord's death too
often."
C. H. Spurgeon
(1834-1892)
" 'In remembrance of
me', does not mean
'in memory of me'.
The word
'remembrance'(Gk.
anamnesis)- denotes
a bringing to mind,
or an awakening of
the mind, the
affectionate calling to
mind the Person and
what He is by virtue
of His atoning
sacrifice...moreover
what is of paramount
importance lies in the
repeated phrase 'in
remembrace of me'.
Where the hearts of
the saints are thus
attracted to Christ,
the gathering
together to partake
of the Lord's supper
will have a soulstirring
effect."
W. E. Vine
(1873-1947)
"He broke the
bread and then
our Lord adds,
'This is my body,
which is broken
for you'. Hence
in every gospel
narrative the
writers do not fail
to record the
breaking of
bread. The
breaking of
bread depicted
that which
should soon
occur to his own
body, by which
he should
become the
atoning
sacrifice".
F. W.
Krummacher
(1796-1868)
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