Feasting on God

Matthew 26:26-28 NIV

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, "Take and eat; this is my body."  Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you.  This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

Why Have the Lord’s Supper?

Perhaps you have wondered why we have the Lord’s Supper.  Of course Jesus commanded us to hold the Lord’s Supper and so we do it but that does not explain why He wants us participating in it.  Christian and quasi Christian groups have a variety of explanations for its regular practice.  Some believe that we literally eat the physical body of Christ when we take the bread.  Others say it is just a symbolic ritual that helps us reflect on Christ and what He did for us.  Many think that you gain salvation by eating the bread and drinking the grape juice.  So is it just a religious ritual without any real benefit to us other than getting us to think about God or does its practice have eternal consequences for those who do or don’t participate?

Let us for a moment reflect on the actual words Jesus used when He told His disciples to eat the bread he offered them and drink from the cup.  "Take and eat; this is my body."  Then he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them, saying, "Drink from it, all of you.  This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.”  Consider the two parts to this: 1. Take and eat.  This is my body.  2. Drink from it all of you.  This is my blood of the covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.  In the supper, it is the body of Christ and the blood of Christ that is at the center of it.  What are we told to take into ourselves?  It is the body of Christ and the blood of Christ.

Lest we get confused in this, we are not physically eating Jesus’ flesh or swallowing His blood.  That would be a grotesque violation of God’s law as even after the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the Church is commanded not to drink blood.  Eating human flesh is just as revolting.  Yet consider what the body and blood are.  The body is the substance of Christ; what makes Him who He is.  It is Jesus Himself…His personality, His character, His way of life.  If you want to know how that looks, what His personality and lifestyle is, go no further than the Sermon on the Mount.  There you find how He thinks, the way He does things, His habits and approach to every relationship and task He undertakes. 

The blood is the life of Jesus.  When God commanded His people not to drink the blood of any creature, He insisted, "You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off."  (Leviticus 17:14 NIV)  It is the blood that keeps you alive, what makes you alive.  Without the blood, there is no sustaining force to empower you.  The blood is how you are able to live and thrive.

So what does Christ give us with His body and blood?  We have Him: His personality, His character and the force of His life.  Consider this statement of the Bible.  I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. (Galatians 2:20 NIV)  What an amazing assertion!  Christ can actually live in us.  Not figuratively or symbolically but in reality He becomes a part of you when in faith you accept His entrance into your life.  Jesus made the promise that, "If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (John 14:23 NIV)  We have here the spectacular declaration by Jesus that as close as the Father and the Son are, so are the Father, Son and any of us who love Christ and obey Him.  This is a real union within the Christian; all God possesses in His nature, His holiness, goodness, faithfulness and love becomes the believer’s.  Remember what Jesus taught in John 15?  He is the vine and we are His branches.  His life flows through ours and empowers us in every way.  Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.  "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:4-5 NIV)

Jesus made the promise that His people would do the same kinds of things He did.  I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. (John 14:12 NIV)  He was not pushing for imitation.  He was describing how we would look if we are connected to Him as branches are attached to a vine.  He is comingled with us so that it results in the impossible circumstance of in any way being able to separate where we end and He begins.  We become one.  Consider this declaration in the Bible.  But he who unites himself with the Lord is one with him in spirit. (1 Corinthians 6:17 NIV)  Could this be any clearer?  Much like how bread and grape juice become inseparable from the body once it is digested, so too, when we unite ourselves with the Lord, we become one new being that cannot split into two.  One in spirit is much more than just some sort of fraternal partnership, it is the actual joining of Christ and you into a new creation.

Consider carefully this insistence in the Bible of just how profound is your union with Christ.  It is because of him (God) that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God — that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. (1 Corinthians 1: 30 NIV)  Let us look closely at this statement for a moment.  It is because of God’s decision that we are put into Christ and made a part of Him.  Because of that, each Christian has His wisdom and not only that, His righteousness and His holiness and His deliverance or redemption.  The union of you and Jesus Christ is complete.  It results in all His perfection becoming yours.  And how can this be?  It is by faith in Christ, that simple acceptance that He truly did die for your sins and raise you up into a new life with Him joined to you.  When you eat the bread and drink the grape juice, you do so with the same faith that saves you from your sins.  You eat it and it becomes a part of you just like the love and holiness and goodness and rightness of Jesus is a part of you.  We do take God into us when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper.  Not in reality but in actuality.  The bread does not become His earthy flesh and the juice does not become His gooey blood but better than that, He actually becomes a part of us because by faith we take the bread and the grape juice and make it ours in a union between us and Christ that truly make us one.

Across The Hedge Part 1

1 Corinthians 3: 1-7 GJW
And I brothers, I was not able to speak to you as spiritual ones but as in the flesh, as to babies in Christ. 2 Milk, I gave you to drink, not solid food because you couldn’t handle it and even now you aren’t able to handle it. 3. For still you are fleshly ones for whereas there is in you boiling jealousy and contentiousness; are you not ruled by fleshly desires and walk just like men? 4. For when a certain one of you might say, “I myself am of Paul” but another, “I am with Apollos”, are you not just like men? 5. For what is Apollos? What is Paul? They are servants through whom you believed and only as each one of you were given by the Lord. 6 I myself planted, Apollos watered but the Lord was making the growth happen. 7 Consequently, neither the one planting nor the one watering is of any consequence but only the one causing the growth, God.


In our local paper the other day was a front page story about a set of neighbors who live in a peaceful little cul-de-sac, neighbors who have been friends for years. Their property is separated by a hedge one of them planted long ago as a decorative upgrade. They have watched each other’s kids reach adulthood, gone to one another’s parties and looked after one another’s homes during vacations. One of the neighbors recently put up a yard sign calling for a “no” vote on proposition 8. His neighbors in turn put next to the hedge in their yard a sign calling for a “yes” vote on proposition 8. Last week while his neighbors were gone, the one with the “no” sign went over and cut down the part of the hedge on his neighbor’s side and forced them to move their “yes” sign from where it had been placed against the hedge.

Now what could engender such rage and frustration that a friendship lasting two decades could be ruined by dueling lawn signs? The Apostle Paul would say it is just people being people. He uses a term that that is often found in his letters to describe the part of us that just won’t do what God wants, the flesh. Some refer to the flesh as our “sin nature”, others call it our “anti-Christ personality”. We all have it. The flesh is what pushes us away from God’s character and avoids anything that smacks of real holiness. Now it is not just Non-Christians who can be ruled by their anti-God personality, Christian people also are left leaning here. Paul calls us babies when we let our flesh take the lead in how we act and live.

Paul said that many of the Christians in Corinth were acting like babies because they were forming alliances and choosing sides. Some were for Apollos, others for Paul. The points of contention were irrelevant. It did not matter why they were disagreeing, the fact that they were clearly marked them as babies. Paul uses two terms to describe the approach these Christians had to their faith. The first is “sarksinoi” and simply means that they were flesh people; in other words, the tendency to think and live outside God was part of their character. But Paul takes his diagnosis a bit further by insisting that the Christians in Corinth were “Sarksika”; they were dominated by their flesh instincts. The anti-God personality was the operating system making these Christians who they were.
This created quite a problem for Paul as he tried to lead them. He was unable to speak to them through the Spirit of God. Now how does this sort of communication work? A person dominated by the Holy Spirit can talk of anything the Spirit directs and it is made clear to the person both in how they think but how they begin to act by means of the Holy Spirit. Coercion, guilt tripping and begging are not needed to bring about the needed change. The Spirit gets the message across and coordinates the new direction. Without the Spirit of God, there is almost no Godliness, little Christian love and peacefulness and not much interest in pursuing hard after Jesus. The fruit of the Spirit described in Galatians 5: love, joy peace patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are anything but actualized…important maybe and desired but not rooted and grounded in the person.