Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 2307
“For as often as you eat this bread, and drink this cup, you do show the Lord’s death till He comes.’” 1 Corinthians 11:26.
FIRST, let me say that the Lord’s Supper is nothing to us unless we partake of it as spiritual persons in a spiritual way. We must understand what we are doing in coming to the Communion Table. The mere mechanical celebration will be vanity. It may even be a sin. To observe this ordinance aright, you must bring your mind in an awakened state. You must come with holy faith, love and concentrated thought. I pray that we may so come, tonight. I know how mechanical we all get. We even stand up and sing and, oftentimes, we forget what we are singing while the sounds issue from our lips. We cover our eyes in prayer, but we do not always pray. There is such a thing as preaching from the mouth outward, instead of speaking from the heart. And I believe there is a kind of hearing which is dreadfully superficial and can do the hearer no good. Now, if you come to the Supper, tonight, bring your hearts with you! And if your hearts are warm with love to Christ, desire to have them yet more full of love to your Lord.
I remember reading of a Mr. Welch, a very devout minister of the Gospel in Suffolk, who was found weeping one day. And when he was asked by a brother minister why he wept, he said it was because he should love Christ more than he did. That was a very good reason for weeping. Now, let us love our Lord much, tonight, and if we cannot feel the glow of love as we wish to feel it, let us weep to think that it is so. May the Spirit of God come and put life into our Communion, that every child of God, here, may have real fellowship with Christ in the breaking of bread!
But now, let us get to our work. The Lord’s Supper, dear Friends, is, first of all, a memorial. “This do in remembrance of Me.” It is intended to keep alive in our own hearts and in the minds of others, the wondrous fact that the Son of God was here among men and laid down His life a Sacrifice for sin. It is well known that a custom, a rite, a festival, has a very great historical power to keep up in the minds of men the recollection of a fact—and our Lord has selected this common meal, this Supper, as a method by which men should be made to know to the very end of time that He died. There can be no doubt about the death of Christ because through long ages all history bears record that Christian men and women have met together—and have eaten bread and have drunk wine—to keep up the memory of His sufferings and death. This is better than if there had been a statue erected, or than if a document had been written, or than if a brass tablet had been inscribed. We are not without memorials of other sorts, especially are we not without books, but this perpetually celebrated feast—kept up without cessation, kept up in every country on the face of the earth—is one of the very best memorials that the death of Christ can have. All of you who come to the Table, tonight, will be helping to keep alive, in the memory of men, the great fact that Jesus died.
But the Lord’s Supper is more than a memorial, it is a fellowship, a communion. Those who eat of this bread, spiritually understanding what they do—those who drink of this cup, entering into the real meaning of that reception of the wine—do, therein, receive Christ spiritually into their hearts. Their heart, soul, mind feeds upon Christ, Himself, and upon what Christ has done. We do not merely record the fact, but we enjoy the result of it. We do not merely say that Christ died, but we desire to die with Him and to live only as the result of His having died! We take scot and lot with Christ as we come to the table. We say deliberately, “Yours are we, You Son of God, and all that we have. And You are ours and, in testimony thereof, we eat this bread and we drink of this cup to show that we are one with Yourself, partners with You in this great fellowship of love.”
Well, now, if you need a permanent memorial and a perpetual means of fellowship, it will be wise to have a rite or ceremony in which there shall also be a likeness to the fact that has to be remembered! This supper is, therefore, an exhibition, a showing, a setting forth, a proclamation of the death of Christ. That you may remember that Jesus died, there is something here that bears a resemblance to His death. That you may the better have fellowship with Him in His death, here is something which is a vivid picture of that death and which will help to bring it more clearly before your mind’s eyes. That is the subject for tonight’s meditation—this Supper as a showing forth, an exhibition of Christ’s death, “till He comes.”
In speaking of this exhibition, this showing forth, we will consider, first, what it shows. Secondly, how it shows it. And thirdly, how long it is to show it.
I. Thinking of this Supper that we are about to celebrate, we will consider, first, WHAT IT SHOWS. “As often as you eat this bread, and drink this cup, you do show the Lord’s death.”