Word of Salvation – Vol. 47 No.20 – May 2002

 

The Proper Celebration of the Lord’s Supper

 

Sermon by Rev MP Geluk

on Lord’s Day 30 (Q&A 80-92 Heid Cat)

Scripture Reading: 1 Corinthians 11:17-34

Suggested Hymns: BoW 159; 321; 32:1,3,4; 117

 

Congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In this sermon we give our attention to further Scriptural teachings on the Lord’s Supper, as summarised for us in Lord’s Day 30 of the Heidelberg Catechism.  These deals with THE PROPER CELEBRATION OF THE LORD’S SUPPER.  There are several things for us here to consider, the first of which is…

1.  Christ’s sacrifice was necessary only once

 What we’re saying here is that Christ’s death on the cross was sufficient to forgive all the sins of all those God has chosen to save.  The letter to the Hebrews emphasises this many times.  Let me quote from it: “Unlike the other high priests (Old Testament priests are meant) he (Christ) does not need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for the sins of his people.  He sacrificed for their sins once for all when he offered himself.” (7:27).  “So Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people…” (9:28).  “We have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.” (10:10).  “…this priest (Christ) had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins…” (10:12).

What these verses from Hebrews are saying is that, “…our sins have been completely forgiven through the one sacrifice of Jesus Christ” (A.80).  In our Lord’s Suppers, just before we eat the bread and drink the wine, the minister says that the body of our Lord Jesus Christ was given and His blood poured out “for a complete forgiveness of all our sins”.

When we hear that then we might only rejoice about our worst sins being completely forgiven.  But it’s more than that.  Christ’s death has wiped away all our sins – past, present and future.  There is no barrier left standing between God and us.  And not only our sins are forgiven but all the sins of all God’s people, whenever they lived or live.

At the Lord’s Table the most important Person is Christ.  Our main attention is to be on Him.  Not on that piece of bread we eat or that little bit of wine or grape juice we drink.  That’s why we say before we eat and drink in the Supper, “That we, then, may be nourished with Christ, the true Bread from heaven, let us lift our hearts to heaven where He is, our Mediator, at the right hand of the Father.  Yes, to heaven for Christ is there, on the throne.  He is no longer on the cross.  In fact, the finality of Christ having paid the full price is pointed to when He Himself said on the cross, “It is finished!”

That we may see this so clearly is largely the result of the Reformation’s struggle with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.  That teaching said that Christ does not forgive you of your daily sins unless the priest daily celebrates Mass for you.  The Roman Catholic Church says that every time the priest celebrates the Mass, Christ is offered anew on the altar for sins committed.  Hence, the ritual in the Mass of breaking and eating the bread, and the wine being poured out and drunk, becomes immensely important.  It’s believed that Christ is being sacrificed again for your new sins.  Therefore it is also believed that the bread and the wine literally turn into the body and blood of Christ.  In the Roman Catholic Church, therefore, the bread and the wine are not mere symbols.  Great care is to be taken when the bread and wine are handled.  In fact, the bread and wine, once consecrated, are worshipped and adored.

The Reformers fought against all this with all their might and called the Mass a form of idolatry.  For the victorious Christ in heaven is not worshipped as He should be, but a false Christ on the altar.   The Reformers said: let us not believe that the believer’s sins have to be dealt with repeatedly in the Mass.  Instead let us rejoice that Christ’s death on the cross has wiped away all our sins once and for all, and that He is now on the throne in heaven victorious and glorious.  This is the reason why we say in the Lord’s Supper Form: “Let us lift our hearts to heaven where He is, our Mediator, at the right hand of the Father.”

2.  A personal confession

The proper celebration of the Lord’s Supper also requires a personal confession of the participant.  The Bible says, “For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1Cor.11:26).  By you taking the bread and the cup, you are saying that you believe that Christ has also died for you and that He is your Saviour through whom you are now justified before God.

Now that makes your Lord’s Supper participation a personal confession every time again.  It means, of course, that you need to have some knowledge of the Bible’s teaching about Christ, as to who He is and what He has actually done as the Saviour from sin.  And you need to know what the Bible teaches about faith.  Without that basic knowledge, your participation in the Lord’s Supper becomes mechanical and mindless.

Furthermore, your participation also implies that you reject any other faith but the Christian faith and any other lord but Christ.  If you in your personal views believe that the Christian faith is optional and that other religions are as good and valid, then Christ does not want you at His Table.  Christ teaches in His Word that He is the only Saviour.

Or if you believe that your good works can also save you, then again, you are saying that Christ is not the only Saviour.  And if you believe that religious leaders or gurus, presidents or governments can save you, then once more, you have not made Christ your only Lord.

You will have realised, no doubt, that all along we are very much dealing with the question: Who may come to the Lord’s Supper?  Already you must see that this can never be an automatic or a routine coming.  It calls for faith, knowledge and discernment.

Simply put, those who may come to the Lord’s Table must hate sin, they must love Jesus, and they must want to do His will.  Now that is not a new teaching.  These are not additional requirements.  It is basic Christianity.  I must know my sin, know my Saviour, and know how I should serve Him.  It doesn’t have to be more.  But it can’t be any less either.

The Catechism, answering its question as to who may come to the Lord’s Table, puts it this way: “Those who are displeased with themselves because of their sins, but who nevertheless trust that their sins are pardoned and that their continuing weakness is covered by the suffering and death of Christ, and who also desire more and more to strengthen their faith and to lead a better life.”  And that is a beautiful Scriptural answer.

So how old do you have to be in order to make such a personal confession?  Two years old, six years old, twelve, sixteen, twenty?  Different churches, including our own, have for years struggled with the question about children’s participation of the Lord’s Supper.  A study of Scriptural data on this subject and an overview of how churches fared when children were allowed to come to the Lord’s Table at a young age, has indicated that it is unwarranted to set a specific age.  A set age does not automatically enable someone to make a personal confession of the kind we’ve just been talking about.  A person who turns 12, 14, 16, or 18 years of age, is not all of a sudden going to be spiritually ready.

When we are talking about children at the Lord’s Supper, then we are not to think of just any child.  We must be thinking of the children of the covenant, children of believing parents, children who already belong to the church because of the promise of God to them that He is their God and they belong to His people.  Now when is such a child, spiritually mature and able to confess that he hates sin, loves Jesus, and wants to do God’s will, well, that brings us to our third point…

3.  The implications for the church

The remark is often made that Lord’s Supper participation should be left up to the individual.  All that the church needs to say is that it is only for believers.  When that has been made clear, then people can decide for themselves.

Individual responsibility is, of course, a very necessary requirement always.  If one of our young people from the catechism classes wants to know when he or she can go to the Lord’s Supper then I answer, “when you are spiritually ready for it.”  But I have to explain that of course.  So l go on to say that those who may come to the Lord’s Table must hate sin, love Jesus, and want to do His will.

Now at that point the church could then leave it to that boy or girl to make up their own mind as to whether or not they are spiritually ready to come to the Lord’s Supper the next time it is held.  And if the church allows the youth to make up its own mind, then the church would have to do the same with everyone else.  And guests, too, could also be made welcome to the Lord’s Table as long as they hate sin, love the Saviour, and want to serve Him.  It is their personal responsibility and no one else’s.  This kind of arrangement can then also do away with the distinction of communicant and baptised membership.

But if the church were to do it that way, then would not the elders of the church neglect the Lord’s command to them to have spiritual supervision over the church, which must include supervision over the Table of the Lord?  Are not the elders of the church responsible to the Lord of the church to make as sure as they reasonably can that those attending the Lord’s Supper know in a scriptural way what it means to hate sin, love Jesus and serve Him?

The supervision of elders over the sacraments does not mean they are making the Lord’s Table their Table.  Elders have supervision over the preaching of the Word also, but it never becomes their Word.  It always remains God’s Word and God’s Table and the elders’ responsibility is that it stays that way.  Without any supervision the Word of God and the sacraments soon become what people want them to be.  And the history of the church has shown that to be the case many a time.

The Holy Spirit inspired the apostle Paul to write to the church in Corinth and explain to them what the implications were of Lord’s Supper participation.  Not only did it mean that participants proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes, but they also had to guard against an unworthy manner of participation.  For that meant sinning against the body and blood of the Lord (1Cor.11:27).  To prevent that from happening,  “A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup” (vs.28).  Unworthy participation invites judgment from God (vs.29).  In fact, that’s what happened in the Corinthian church.  Some church members were weak and sick, some had died (vs.30).

So here we have Christ, the Lord of the church, telling an apostle to do something about the way in which some members of the church participated.  It was not left to the individual member’s responsibility only.  And the Lord’s concerns were not only expressed to the culprits who were dishonouring the Lord by their sinful behaviour but to the whole church.  Here and elsewhere, where the Lord instructs elders to watch over the church, it is made clear that the church as a whole also bears a responsibility for how we observe the Lord’s Supper and for the people who partake.

The elders’ spiritual discipline over the church through their contact with the members enables them to supervise the Lord’s Table.  And guests need to be asked if they are members in full communion of a church that accepts the authority of the Bible and the Lordship of Christ and in a manner that is compatible with our own confession of what the Bible teaches.  In our day and age someone, be it a church member or a guest, can easily say that the Bible is God’s Word and that Jesus is Lord but what is their understanding of that?  Will there be a true fellowship in the Lord around His Table?  Now that’s not always so easy for the elders to find out, especially not at the last minute.  Mistakes and misunderstandings can happen and have happened.  But it is better to keep working with an imperfect system of supervision, than not to have any supervision at all.

Moreover, when Paul instructed the church in Corinth about its responsibility regarding the Lord’s Supper, then he began by saying, “…when you come together as a church” (vs.18).  Lord’s Suppers, like baptisms, are church sacraments.  They were not meant for get togethers of Christian families or retreats for church leaders.  Families get together because they want to be together or celebrate a function.  And some people in the church go to retreats for fellowship, training, discovering, and so on.  They are perfectly free as Christians to pray, read and study the Bible, listen to speakers and do things that Christians normally do.  But the New Testament sacraments were specifically given for the church in its public worship of God where elders can exercise their spiritual supervision.

In this connection we must also see that whilst the Lord’s Supper replaced the Passover, the New Testament speaks quite differently about the Lord’s Supper than the Old Testament does about the Passover.  The first Passover was a family affair with the children present.  Whether infants participated is difficult to say.  The Bible does say that parents had to answer the questions of children who had some idea of what was going on (Ex.12:26).  This would suggest – and certainly the New Testament does that strongly – that participation in ceremonies and sacraments was not to be done mindlessly, uninformed and mechanically.

Some base their support for children at the Lord’s Supper on the fact that they were present at the Passover.  But Passover celebrations were quite different in character.  They took place only once a year, and lasted a week.  There is even a shift from a family celebration to observing it at the tabernacle, and later the temple, and it is unlikely that the whole family was present.  Jesus celebrated the Passover just with His disciples.

Are we, with all this, saying that there is no place for children at the Lord’s Table?  On the contrary, let us in our fourth point look at…

4.  Further considerations

It has been said and rightly so, that the children of God’s people are not the church of tomorrow but like their believing parents belong to the church of today.  As covenant children they, too, share in God’s beautiful promises of salvation in Christ.  Their baptism is a sign and seal of that.  But they also share in the obligations of the covenant.  These are the same as for adults, namely, to hate and repent of sin, to love the Lord Jesus, and to follow that up with serving and obeying Him.

Now the Bible instructs parents to bring up their children in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and in the baptismal prayer the church prays for their conversion.  All this underlines the fact what a responsible task the Christian family and church have towards its children.  Put in very simple terms, this task consists of leading covenant children from their baptism to the Lord’s Table.  But it is easier said than done.  For somewhere in between their baptism and coming to the Lord’s Table, these covenant children must come to a personal faith in Christ.  That is what all Christian parents pray for and it is the reason for the church’s instruction of the faith to its youth.

And now the question must not be – how long do children of the covenant have to wait before they are allowed to come to the Lord’s Table?  But – how soon can they take their place there?  The Lord has promised them a place.  The church and their believing parents must do everything to help them want to be there.

The teaching about the Lord’s Supper in 1Corinthians 11 calls for participation which is done out of faith and with a heart that is born again, because only such a heart can meaningfully understand why the body of the Lord was sacrificed on the cross.  Without that basic understanding participation in the Lord’s Supper would merely become mindless, mechanical, and dishonour the Lord.  This is not passing judgment on children who don’t have such a faith yet.  It is simply saying that it takes time for such a faith to grow in our children.  There is no need to fret when such spiritual maturity is not yet there in our children.  It is simply letting children be children.  We must not demand or expect things from them when they are not spiritually ready for it.

What about allowing believer’s children to participate on the basis of them belonging to a Christian family?  Can the church allow believing parents to decide when to take their children with them to the Lord’s Table?  And if John or Carolyn have sinned and are not repenting, or are unbelieving, then the parents can exercise their spiritual supervision and keep their children from the Lord’s Table.

But, however important Christian families are for God’s church and the kingdom, Christ calls the individual believer and not the Christian family to come to the Lord’s Table.  In the act of participation in the Lord’s Supper, the believer stands by him or herself.  There they come face to face with the Saviour, Jesus Christ, on their own.  The Lord looks at the individual heart and says, Christian, come and follow me.  At the Table one has to leave father or mother, son or daughter.  The Lord’s Supper is not a family matter, it is a matter between the Saviour and the one saved.  It is like that when one decides to no longer follow the world but surrender to Christ.  It is like that one when one publicly professes faith in the Lord.  And it is like that when one meets Christ the Redeemer and Judge on the day of one’s death.

In conclusion, when you hear it said, and you may have been the one who said it, that our young people are expected to do their public profession of faith at the age of eighteen or thereabouts, then please note that the church has never officially said this.  It is one of these assumptions that church members have made.  A person can make public profession of his or her faith when the Holy Spirit has guided that person through the Word to repentance, faith and service, and thus making that person wanting to proclaim the Lord’s death at His Table.  It’s when they are spiritually ready for it.  And the Lord may lead our covenant children to desire participation in the Lord’s Supper in their middle teens or even early teens.

We, somehow, have made this tradition for ourselves that you have to be in your late teens or early twenties, and after having finished with all the catechism courses, before you do your public profession of faith.  This event has sometimes become a big social occasion with friends and relatives invited, and congratulations received from all and sundry.  We should get away from this tradition.  Throughout the year there ought to be opportunity for our Christian youth to publicly profess one’s faith and be admitted to the Lord’s Table.  The person who is spiritually ready for this can make this desire known and the elders of the church will assess that person to see if the love for and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus, willingness to fight sin, and a wanting to live holy before God, is scriptural.  The young person concerned continues on as usual in the catechism classes until the courses have been completed.  And if a month or so later another young person is led by the Spirit to go the same way, then we joyfully go through the same procedure again.

We have looked, then, at the proper celebration of the Lord’s Supper.  We rejoice that Christ’s sacrifice was necessary only once to wipe away all our sins.  We stressed that a personal confession is called for when coming to the Lord’s Table.  We also saw that the church, through the elders, has a responsibility, as well as the persons themselves, in deciding who may come to the Table.

And, lastly, we made some suggestions that could help our covenant youth come to the Lord’s Table when they are spiritually ready for it.

Amen.