← ArchiveSunday, September 29, 2013DateSeptember 29, 2013Speaker—Text—Passages in this sermon1 Corinthians 110:16Exodus 121:55Exodus 12:13:18Mark 146:42Romans 3:2017:51TranscriptClick any line to jump there.0:00One of the most important aspects about the day that we observe the Lord's Supper is always that we are reminded from Paul and his book, or in the book of Acts, or I'll get it right here in a minute, in the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 11, where when the church was declining and having its struggles and people were falling sick, some were dying, and it was over there the way they handled the Lord's Supper. They were coming together for agape feasts or love feasts,0:29which was a time of eating meals and some were getting drunk, some were coming and not really caring about the moment that existed for them. And that was that they were also coming for a time of the Lord's Supper. And the Lord's Supper became a very important aspect of the early church's existence because it constantly reminded them, just as the Lord meant for it to, when he himself0:55instituted it in the 14th chapter of Mark and told the church, as often as you do this, do this in remembrance of me to remember my suffering, my pain, my shame. Now, for whatever reason, one thing we want to get away from in life is suffering. We don't want to hear sermons about suffering. We don't want to hear about our own suffering. We really don't want to hear about the Lord Jesus' suffering because he is our1:20conqueror. And being our conqueror, surely why would he suffer? Well, we are reminded that without his suffering and without his willingness and his obedience to his Father, we don't have any means to even gather here today. So it's important that we come here today and that we remember all that the Lord's Supper1:46itself constitutes for us. And I want us to go back today, and I want you to open your Bibles to Exodus chapter 12. And I want us to read scripture this morning. You know, sometimes it doesn't hurt. Sometimes I, you know, in seminary said, try not to read a lot of scripture and try to keep your scripture reading2:12confined. Well, it's impossible really to understand the Lord's Supper without going back, especially for those that are here that are new Christians, for those that don't understand exactly what's happening up here and why are we doing this? What is this tray, these trays up here and what are they filled with? And what are we going to do with them? And what if you're here today and you're lost and2:37you don't know Christ as your Savior? What do you do? Is it going to be an embarrassing moment for you just to pass it by? I would ask you to let it pass by. Because this is a moment that when we come together as believers in Jesus Christ and we realize in a church service like this, we're going to have people that are here that don't know Christ as their Savior. And there may be even people here that have sin in their life and they know they have sin in their life. And it's unconfessed sin that they're3:06struggling with in their life. And it might be a time that they pass it by. But where do we get all this? Where does it come from? Beginning in Exodus chapter 12 verse 1. Now the Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, this month shall be the beginning of months for you. It is to be the first3:29month of the year to you. Speak to all the congregations of Israel saying, on the 10th of this month, they are each one to take a lamb for themselves according to their father's households, a lamb for each household. Now, if the household is too small for a lamb, then he and his neighbor nearest3:51to his house are to take one according to the number of persons in them. According to what man should eat, you are to divide the lamb. Your lamb shall be an unblemished. That's very important and often should be marked in Scripture as an example of foreshadowing of the Lord Jesus Christ. But it is to be an4:17unblemished male, a year old. You may take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the 14th day of the same month. Then the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel is to kill it at twilight. Moreover, they shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and on the lentil of4:42the house in which they eat it. They shall eat the flesh that same night roasted with fire and they shall eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled at all with water, but rather roasted with fire, both its heads and its legs along with its entrails. And you shall not leave5:05any of it until morning. But whatever is left of it until morning, you shall burn with fire. Now you shall eat it in this manner, with your lawns girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hands. And you shall eat it in haste. It is the Lord's Passover. Eat it ready to go. How often do we come5:32to the Lord's Supper? Not prepared to do anything afterwards, but they are to be ready, be ready to move out for they are going to receive through this movement of God in the life of Egypt, in the life of his people, they're going to receive their liberty and their freedom, and they are to be ready to move.6:00The Lord shall be a sign for you on the, the blood shall be a sign for you on houses where you live. And when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague will befall you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt. Now this day, now listen, now this day will be a memorial to you, and you shall6:25celebrate it as a feast to the Lord. Throughout your generations, you are to celebrate it as a permanent ordinance. Mark 14, 12, on the first day of unleavened bread, when the Passover lamb was being sacrificed, his disciples said to him, where do you want us to go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?6:53And he sent two of his disciples and said to them, go into the city, and a man will meet you, carrying a pitcher of water, follow him. And wherever he enters, say to the owner of the house, the teacher says, where is my guest room in which I may eat the Passover with my disciples? And he himself will show7:17you a large upper room, furnished and ready. Prepare for us there. The disciples went out and came to the city and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover. They went through all that we just read in Exodus in preparation for this event to be recognized by our Lord Jesus Christ.7:45And when it was evening, he came with his twelve. And as they were reclining at the table and eating the Passover, Jesus said, truly, I say to you that one of you will betray me and one who is eating with me. And they began to be grieved and to say to him one by one, surely not I. And he said to them,8:08it is one of the twelve, one who dips with me in the bowl. For the Son of Man is to go just as it is written of him. But woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would have been good for that man if he had not been born. And as they were eating, he took the bread. And after blessing it,8:33he broke it and gave it to them and said to them, take, this is my body. And he took a cup. And when he had given thanks, he gave to them and they all drank of it. And he said to them, this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of8:57the vine until the vine until the day when I drank it new in the kingdom of God. I have three very, very simple points that I want to share that I think explain to us the power and the importance of the observance of the Lord's Supper. And I think it is three points that we must come to understand9:24as we learn about God. Because there's so much to learn about God in this Lord's Supper that if we're not careful, we learn about the elements and we may even learn about the meaning. But what are we learning about God? What are we learning about this God that created all things for his pleasure?9:47Well, I think we're learning, the first thing that I think we're learning, that in God and in God alone is the presence of all provision. I want you to think about that. It is in the book of Exodus, and it again is proclaimed in the book of Mark and in the New Testament, and that God is the God of10:12provision. What one thing do we all fear in life more than anything else? And that is someday not being provided for. Somehow, someway, something's going to happen, and I'm not going to be able to provide for myself. I'm not going to be able to provide for my family. So then where will my provision come from? The tragedy is that if I were to give an exam and have everyone to answer10:38the question, everyone in here would say, I know my provision comes from God. Do you? Do we? Do we live like we know that our provision for life comes from God? Do we live like we understand that the job we have comes from God? The mission that God has called us to comes from God? The equipping11:07that we have to do the work of God comes from God? Everything we have, everything we're going to be, everything we are, is of God and comes from God, and our God is big enough to provide. You know, it is an awesome thought when you sit back for a minute and get away from the clutter. It's kind of like going out in the country on a clear spring or fall night when you can just go out and11:37look up. Last night, I went outside for some reason. I don't remember what, but I just wanted to look up, and I looked up, and the moon was very small, but I looked up, and I saw some stars, and I thought, you know, it's sad. I can remember this so well. Going to my grandmother's house back years ago,11:59and I was only a small child, maybe seven, eight, nine years old, and us going out in the yard, do y'all remember when people used to go outside and watch Sputnik go by? Didn't y'all ever do that? Am I just dreaming that? Okay, good. I see some heads shaking, so I'm not crazy, but we did. We'd go out, and we'd stand,12:24and we'd line up, and I can remember all my cousin's line. There it is. I couldn't tell Sputnik from the millions of stars that I saw. I mean, in a minute, they'd say, oh, did you see that fallen star? And I'm going, where'd it fall? You know, I was young, but I remember that. But what I remember was being out in12:48the country, and I'm talking about back then, it was out in the country, and you could look up, and the sky was full of trillions, it seemed like billions of stars. You kept wondering how they kept bumping in from each other. So many of them were there, and I was out last night, and I looked up, and I thought, the bottom of the Milky Way is missing. You know, and then only half, maybe, you know, not even a third,13:18and then I thought, you know, one of the ways my preacher, one of the ways my grandmother, one of the ways that the people around me taught me how big God was then was when we looked up at the stars, and there's so many of them that God knew every one of them. And so he was a big God. You know,13:46I remember when we were little, God was big. But the bigger we get, and the smarter we get, and we go out, and now we look up, and we see only a few stars, and we think, has God gotten smaller, and weaker, and less able. And how do we teach the provision of God in a situation like that?14:12When you read Exodus, God says, go find a lamb, but find an unblemished lamb. And that reminds me that only God can create perfection. But God can provide.14:43The Lord's Supper reminds us of the provision of God. When we came, before we came, when they came, to the end of an era for Israel, as far as the message of God and redemption was concerned, they came to the end of the Passover and to the beginning of the Lord's Supper.15:04Now, the Lord's Supper, unlike and just like the Passover, called for a perfect sacrifice. Only this time, the sacrifice had to be God, and it had to be man.15:32So, in other words, it had to be a God-man. It couldn't just be man. God couldn't just pull Peter up and say, Peter, you're going to be the Lamb of God, the sacrifice for the sins of the world, because Peter was stained with Adam's sin. And God couldn't look out there and say,16:02hey, well, there's John the Baptist. What an obedient preacher and prophet he's been. I'll use him. He wouldn't work. And he couldn't say, well, you know, I'll just wait a few years, and I'll wait a few centuries, and maybe in a few centuries, if I wait long enough, that some woman and man somewhere will give birth to a good person, and I'll use them.16:32But he couldn't, because time is eventually, as we know, it's going to come to an end. So the Bible tells us that God provided, that God provided the Passover Lamb, or the Lord's Supper Lamb, and it was the God-man, Jesus Christ. While we could not have gone out into any barn, or any area,17:02or any area, and found anything that would have met the need that God demanded for man's sins, the Bible tells us that God provides. So one thing that we do when we take this cup and we take this bread today is that we understand God's provision. Secondly, I want us to understand God's perfection. And if I'm going to understand God's perfection, I've got to understand my what?17:32Imperfection. You know, there are a lot of people in our world that are blind to this. There are a lot of people in our world that think they're just as good as anybody else when none of us are any good at all. And you know, all you have to do is study the Scriptures, and you read in Romans chapter 3, verse 20, and it says, none are good, no, not one, none, none even seek after God. You know, that's enough. We don't need a whole tribe,18:00but He does give us all that. But when it says none are good, then we need to understand, you know, we're not good. Now, we call ourselves good old boys and good old girls. And probably in our eyes, we're good old boys and good old girls, but in God's eyes, my friend, we're sinners in desperate need of forgiveness. You know, it's not until we grasp the perfection of God in Christ Jesus18:30that we truly understand the bigness of God again. That here is God, and you know, I read this, and I study this, and I know I went to seminary, and I can read the Bible, I've got books, but I think it's something that only God can plant in the mind of man to understand. But there's God in glory, and He comes to earth and becomes a man,18:59and in becoming a man, He becomes just like I am only. He doesn't have my sin. Because He's not the first Adam or a product of the first Adam, He is the second Adam and a product of God working through woman to bring about His perfect sacrifice. Perfection in God's eyes. Now, there are people19:30that think they're going to go to heaven because they get good enough. Well, I want to tell you something. How many of you have ever looked at something through a magnifying glass and thought, wow, you really see a lot more than you realize? We got one of those magnifying mirrors at the house. Y'all know what that is? Yeah, it really details you. You know, like you go, ooh.19:59You know, sometimes you just look at it and go, whoa. And then you flip it over, and you go, oh, much better. You don't see near the imperfections. I don't think I'll forget going to my first science class, biology class in high school and getting our first microscope and putting slides underneath it20:27and looking at those slides and trying to learn what those slides were so that the next time we looked at those slides we could actually name it and how you could look at that little slide and you could look at the bubble in the slide and you didn't see anything and it just looked like a little drop of water. But when you put it under there, you saw these ugly creatures.20:56You know, God's perfection is bigger than the best we can give because we are not perfect. God is. And God looks through the eyes of perfection. Until he provides the perfect sacrifice. Jesus Christ. So, while the Israelites were out,21:23could you imagine what it must have been there in Egypt that evening as these men were given the command knowing that something big was about to happen and they were fixing to head out and they're going out and they're looking through their livestock and they run across this one. They said, oh, here's a good one. No, he's got a limp and they run across this one and they get it. No, it's got some spots on it and they run across and finally they find that perfect lamb, that perfect one21:52that shows pure perfection in every area and they pick it up and they take their very best to God for sacrifice, for the saving of their life. And you see, in God's perfection, Jesus Christ, who should not have been offered as a sacrifice because he was perfect,22:22becomes the only one who can be the sacrifice because he is perfect to provide life for us. So, as we come to the Lord's Supper, we think of God's provision. We think of God's perfection. And then, we think of the presence of God's protection because it is only when we come to understand22:51to understand that God's provision through his perfect lamb is our only means of salvation that we know God's protection. And I want to tell you, there's not anybody in here that doesn't want to be protected. I mean, some way, you know, you want to be protected by your husband or you want to be protected by your alarm system. You know, nowadays, you buy a car, it's got 14 airbags to protect you in it, you know. I like that commercial23:20where that genie, you know, the woman said she wants her car to protect her son and she said, no, she really meant and he blows up in a big bubble. And I thought, you know, if you could put a three-year-old or a two-year-old in those kind of bubbles, it really would save a lot of doctors' appointments and emergency room calls because, you know, we want protected. Let me tell you something. The Bible declares from Genesis to Revelations23:49that God's wrath will fall upon the ungodly and only those that are protected will survive. And the only way we're going to know the protection of God is to know the perfection of God and to know the provision of God in Jesus Christ. because Jesus Christ is God's provision24:19for our protection and it is His perfection that declares our righteousness and He places His perfection or His righteousness on us as a robe of white purity so that we are protected in the presence of God. It makes a whole lot of difference now, doesn't it? When we take this bread and we hold it24:48in our hands and we think of the body of Jesus Christ and we think about that day, that evening that Jesus gathered His disciples and after having admonished one of them was not of them and would actually betray Him would still yet gather with the others and be able to get this awesome message across that now God no longer required man to go out and search for a perfect Lamb because that perfection does not exist25:17but that now God has provided the perfect Lamb and as I thought about that, I thought about a passage and I'm not even sure how it relates but I wanted to read this passage because it's one of my favorite chapters in the book of Revelation because of what it says. It says, Then I saw in the right hand of Him who was seated on the throne a scroll written within and on the back sealed in seven seals and I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice25:46who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seal and no one in heaven or on earth under the earth are able to open the scroll or to look into it and the prophet says I begin to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. There was no one worthy.26:14Think about that. There was no one that they could see that was perfect. So how is this going to happen? And he says that he began to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or look into it and one of the elders said to me, Weep. Folks, listen to this. This is when your God gets big. Weep no more.26:43Behold the Lamb of the tribe of Judah. The root of David has conquered so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals and between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders I saw a lamb, a perfect lamb, an unblemished lamb, the lamb, that only true lamb standing as though it had been slain with seven horns27:13and with seven eyes which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. And he went and he took the scroll and from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne and when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the 24 elders fell down before the lamb each holding a harp and a golden bowls of full of incense which are the prayers of the saints and they sang a new song saying, Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals for you were slain27:42and by your blood you ransomed people from God for God from every tribe, language and people and nation and you have made them a kingdom of priests to our God and they shall reign on the earth and then I looked and I heard around the throne and the living creatures and the elders the voice of many angels numbering madres and madres and thousands and thousands saying with a loud voice Worthy is the lamb who was slain to receive power and wealth and wisdom28:12and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing and I heard every creature in heaven and on earth under the earth and in the sea and all that is in them saying to him who sits on the throne and to the lamb because of honor and glory and might and forever and ever and the four living creatures said amen and the elders fell down in worship my friend it's hard not to fall on our face before this table when we realize that every cup and every morsel of bread represents that lamb standing in glory28:41slain for you and me oh we ought to take this moment and cherish as though it were our last meal for the lamb of God set the table it was the lamb of God that provided the sustenance it was the lamb29:09of God perfect protecting and powerful it brings us to share as church the Lord's supper as we begin this invitation it is a unique29:37invitation it is an invitation for you if you do not know Jesus Christ as your personal savior listen I don't want you to raise your hand and I don't want you to stand up I want you to come down here and I want to talk to you and I want to make sure that you understand that as a believer in Jesus Christ it's not a passing fad that we've entered into but a life changing30:07changing lifestyle to the glory of God and if you have sensed that God is bringing you to this church as a part of its membership we will take you and we'll bring you back so you can share the Lord's supper and you can go back out again for any information but I can't consciously overlook an invitation time at this time30:36and as soon as we finish our invitation our deacons will have made their way forward to the front pews and we will begin our Lord's supper but during this invitation time if God is calling you to repentance because of sin in your life oh listen to the Holy Spirit of God speak and let the Holy Spirit of God speak that he may31:05lead you to the cleansing confession and mercy and repentance of the Lord Jesus Christ so that you hold the bread and hold the cup not unworthily but worthily because your faith and trust is in the one and only perfect Lamb of God let us pray Father as we gather at this time and as we enjoy our fellowship together God we thank you31:35thank you that we can as a church come and and as the body of Christ celebrate the body of Christ celebrate the bread of the Lamb of God and understand that that's living bread this is living bread God this is bread that reminds us of God's provision as he offers perfection which we could not find within ourself so that we might be32:04might be protected God as we come together today and take of this cup may we be reminded that again we hold a symbol of the very blood that poured so freely off Calvary and down that cross and dripped onto that ground the blood of the only Lamb that can wash away our sins32:34our sins for the Bible tells us without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sin and thus again God provides the only blood that can wash away our sins the blood of his own son Jesus Christ the Lamb of God slain before the foundation of the world yet alive and standing at the altar God today I pray your Holy Spirit awaken us33:02awaken us to the greatness of God and his love through the sacrifice of his son in Jesus name we pray amen would you stand
