33 Why We Take Communion (1 Corinthians 11:23-26)

Krisan Marotta: Welcome to Wednesday in the Word. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. Today we're gonna be studying 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verses 23 through 26. This is the 33rd talk in our series on 1 Corinthians. As always, you can find lecture notes for today's talk on the link below the podcast, or you can find them on my website, just go to wednesdayintheword.com slash 1 Corinthians 3 3. And while you're there, you can find previous episodes in this series and lots of helpful information about how to improve your Bible study. There is no charge, no spam, and no ads, only Bible study. Thanks so much for joining me today. We are still in 1 Corinthians 11, and we are looking at the section where Paul discusses the Lord's Supper. You'll recall that in this section of the letter, Paul is addressing questions that the Corinthians have asked him, and in chapter 11, he began addressing questions that relate to how they're handling their worship service. So he talked about women removing their head coverings in the early part of the chapter, and now we're looking at how they're handling the Lord's Supper. Last week we looked at the problem with the way the Corinthian Church was handling communion or the Lord's Supper. The Corinthian Church was having a community meal and celebrating communion, but rather than celebrating as a community, the church was dividing along class and economic lines. The meal was something of a potluck where people brought their own food to the feast, but they weren't sharing. The wealthy were bringing an abundance of food and enjoying themselves to the point of getting drunk while the poor were going hungry. So at this meal where they are supposed to be celebrating their unity in Christ, they are in fact dividing along class and economic lines. And Paul's concern is more than that there are divisions in the church and more than that the poor among them are being mistreated. He finds their actions particularly inappropriate because of what they're gathered to do. Their actions conflict with the very nature of the Lord's Supper. So in the last podcast I argued that the problem is not that they have profaned a sacred ritual, even though they have done that, neither is the problem that they are mistreating the poor among them, although they have also done that. The real underlying issue that Paul's concerned about is that they have revealed something about their lack of understanding and belief. And the way they're handling the Lord's Supper reveals a profound problem with what they believe. It says something about their values and their perspectives and shows those values and perspectives to be worldly and inappropriate. Their actions reveal that they believe the opposite of what they ought to believe, and it calls into question why they're participating in the Lord's Supper at all. If they understood what this ritual meal meant, they wouldn't act this way. And Paul's concluding advice was wait on each other, serve each other like a waiter, attend to the needs of others before attending to your own. Instead of bringing a big feast and ignoring those who have nothing, serve them and wait on them first. So make sure everyone has enough before you start eating. He also tells them if your primary concern is hunger, then just eat something at home and just come prepared to share with the rest. Make this a celebration where we recognize that we are all in this together. Look to see that everyone has something to eat before you start eating so that this ceremony becomes about your togetherness. That's the situation in Corinth as I understand it. And today I want to look at Paul's view of the Lord's Supper, and then next week we'll put these two together. In 1117 through 21, he gave us the specifics of the problem, and then in twenty two he begins to explain why this is such a problem, why he's so concerned. And he starts his explanation in the section we're going to look at today by reminding them what the Lord's Supper is all about. And that's the section I want to cover in this podcast. He reminds them what he was taught about the Lord's Supper and what he taught them so that they can understand the problem with the way they're handling this meal. Now, as you probably know, Jesus institutes this practice we call communion or the Lord's Supper at the Last Supper, which is a Passover meal. Jesus and the twelve are celebrating Passover on the last night before Jesus is crucified, and Jesus takes the elements of the Passover meal and reinterprets them for the disciples. So in order to understand the practice of the Lord's Supper, we first need to understand the Passover meal and how Jesus changed it. The Passover is one of the key events in the life of Israel. The story of the nation of Israel begins with the calling of Abraham. God promised to make a great nation from Abraham's descendants and give them a land. Abraham fathered Isaac, Isaac fathered Jacob, and Jacob had twelve sons, and Jacob's favorite of those twelve sons was Joseph. To make a long story short, Joseph's brothers become jealous of him and they sell him into slavery in Egypt. Through a long involved story, Joseph eventually ends up as second in command to Pharaoh. When a famine hits the land, Joseph's brothers go to Egypt seeking food, and Joseph is reunited with them. Now that story has a lot of ups and downs and twists and turns that we aren't going to go into. The point is Jacob's twelve sons and their families end up in Egypt. Eventually Joseph dies, but the clan remains in Egypt, and the next Pharaoh forgets the promises that the previous Pharaoh made to Joseph, and the descendants of Jacob's twelve sons end up in slavery in Egypt. They don't have their own land, they don't have the promises given to Abraham, and God has been silent for a long time. Then God decisively intervenes. He calls Moses, and through Moses God delivers them from their slavery in Egypt. Through a series of plagues, the Egyptian Pharaoh finally agrees to let them leave, and the last of those miraculous plagues is what is celebrated in the Passover. We'll pick up the story in Exodus eleven. This is just verses four and five. Moses said, Thus says the Lord, About midnight I am going out into the midst of Egypt, and all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne, even to the firstborn of the slave girl who is behind the millstones, all the firstborn of the cattle as well. So God warns the Israelites that on a certain night all the firstborn are going to die, but they will be spared if they follow this ritual. And in Exodus twelve he tells them to sacrifice a lamb and put some of the lamb's blood on their doorposts, and the angel of death will pass over them when he comes to take the firstborn. That's the Passover. Now for our purposes, I want to note three things. First, in the Passover, God's judgment is coming, but God's people are rescued from that judgment through the blood of the Lamb. So when the angel of death comes to take the firstborn, he passes by the houses with the blood of the lamb on their doors. So this is God's judgment against Pharaoh and the people of Egypt, but the Israelites are spared that judgment because of the blood of the Lamb. Second, the Passover is the time when God finally and decisively delivers the Israelites from their slavery in Egypt. This is the event that breaks Pharaoh so that he agrees to let them leave. God delivers them and he takes them into the land he had promised Abraham, where they are to live as his people, slaves no longer. Now there are some bumps along the way, but we're not going to go into that story either. So finally, the third thing I want to note is this time of deliverance is also the inauguration of a covenant that God makes with the house of Israel. So God brings the people out of Egypt and eventually takes them to Mount Sinai and he gives them the law, what we call the old covenant. There are terms to this covenant, and God says, I will be your God and you will be my people. And that's a very important phrase through the Old Testament. I will be your God and you will be my people. So the idea is I will be the one that you look to for life and blessing, and you will find that life and blessing in me. So all of this, the escaping judgment, the deliverance from slavery, and the establishment of the covenant comes about through Moses, and these are the events that they celebrate in the Passover meal. And this event was crucial in the life of Israel. Every generation that lived in the land was there because of this event. They would still be in Egypt as slaves if God had not intervened. The problem is as time goes by, we forget. Generations come and go who've always lived in the land, and this is normal life for them. This significant event in their national life becomes ancient history. It's just a story they've been told, unlike the generation that lived through it. The generation that lived through the events of the Passover could remember what life was like before and what life was like after. They could remember the terror of the plagues and the fear of judgment and the escape provided by the blood of the Lamb. They had personal memories. It was part of them, part of their story. Now, I recognize as the events of Exodus unfold, they are ungrateful and hard hearted by and large, but it would be easier for them to remember than all the following generations. In my family, we like to tell the story of my father's father moving to St. Louis with four dollars in his pocket and working as a barber to put himself through medical school. My father's family eventually became prosperous and all his sons were able to go to medical school and build comfortable lives. And my father remembers moving out of poverty through his father's hard work. Because I knew my grandfather and I heard him tell the story, it was more of an event for me. But for my children, they never met their great grandfather. For them, it's just a story. They roll their eyes at it. They've always lived in comfort, and the sacrifice and the hard work of their great grandfather is just some vague story to them. They didn't live through it, they never met him. It's something they easily forget and take for granted, and they've always had comfort, never lived with scarcity, so for them if that just seems normal. It feels like something they ought to have. The story that someone sacrificed to get them to that place lacks any power. It's not part of their experience. I think that's the same kind of situation that the Israelites find themselves in when they're in the land. This story of miraculous power and grace and deliverance is just ancient history. They've always lived with the fruits of it, and it's easy to forget where it came from. And I think that explains in part why God instituted this memorial meal. This Passover ritual is to remind them what God did. In instituting the meal, God says this day is going to be a memorial for you, and he uses this language to tell them this is to remind them what God has done for them. For example, this is Exodus twelve fourteen. Now this day will be a memorial to you, and you shall celebrate it as a feast to the Lord. Throughout your generations you are to celebrate it as a permanent ordinance. And then in twelve seventeen, you shall also observe the feast of unleavened bread, for on this very day I brought your host out of the land of Egypt. Therefore you shall observe this day throughout your generations as a permanent ordinance. And then skipping down to twelve, this is twenty four through twenty seven. And you shall observe this event as an ordinance for you and your children forever. When you enter the land which the Lord will give you, as he has promised, you shall observe this rite, and when your children say, What does this right mean to you? You shall say, It is a Passover sacrifice to the Lord, who passed over the houses of the sons of Israel in Egypt when he smote the Egyptians, but spared our homes, and the people bowed low in worship. And then skipping over to chapter thirteen verse eight through ten, you shall tell your son on that day, saying, It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt, and it shall serve as a sign to you on your hand and as a reminder on your forehead, that the law of the Lord may be in your mouth, for with a powerful hand the Lord brought you out of Egypt. Therefore you shall keep this ordinance at its appointed time from year to year. So the Passover meal was intended to be a time to remind themselves what God had done for them. Through this ritual meal, the Passover became part of the lives of each successive generation. They couldn't personally remember the time that God led their people out of Egypt, but they could remember this ritual meal that they celebrated year after year after year that commemorated the event. So what was the value of this celebratory ritual meal? What did God want them to get out of it? In what way does this meal serve as this kind of memorial? Well, first and most importantly, there is teaching. There is explicit language about the story of the Exodus. The father who's hosting the meal explains to the rest of the family why they're doing this meal and what it means and what it's all about, and each part of the Passover was discussed. The father was to use this meal to explicitly teach and remind his family what God had done for them. Second, several aspects of the meal were symbolic reminders of the Exodus. So the lamb and the blood reminded them how God passed over the Israelites and delivered them from the judgment he inflicted on the Egyptians. They ate a lamb and they put some of the blood on their doorpost. It was to remind them of their deliverance from God's judgment. The unleavened bread was to remind them that they had to leave so fast they had no time to prepare leavened bread. This is the kind of bread they had to eat because they were in a hurry. They were to eat this meal dressed in their traveling shoes and clothes to remind them that they had to be ready to leave. The bitter herbs were to remind them of the bitterness of their lives in Egypt and so forth. So each of the elements of the meal were to symbolically teach and remind them what God had done for them. Now they could have just had straight teaching about the Passover, but the rituals gave them this tangible and visible experience. This intangible thing that happened in the past becomes a tangible reality in our lives today. Eating together in almost all cultures everywhere is a uniting event. Eating together is significant. Sitting down and eating together brings us together. Food and drink are refreshing, they're satisfying, they're tangible. The sights and the smells and the tastes help us remember, and we associate certain foods with certain events. But the tangible experience still requires teaching. We need someone to stand up and say, this is what this meal is all about, and this is why we do it. So we have teaching, we have the elements of the meal being symbolic, and third, the meal unites the Israelites as God's people. They come together as a family to eat this meal, knowing that all the families of their tribe are also eating the same meal and going through the same ritual, and all the tribes of their nation are eating the same meal. It ties them together. They celebrate and they celebrate together. It's part of who they are and makes them a people, and they know they're eating the same meal that their ancestors have been eating for generations. So it brings them together as a people. So here's what we need to know about the Passover meal to understand First Corinthians eleven. At the Passover, God brought deliverance, freedom, and a covenant. God visited his judgment on the land, but the Israelites were spared because of the blood of the sacrificial lamb. God delivered his people from slavery in Egypt, and God inaugurated a covenant with the Israelites such that he would be their God and they would be his people. And this ritual meal was to remind them of these things that God had done for them. In the Exodus, God decisively acted in history to deliver the Israelites and make them his people. This Passover meal was a meal they celebrated together to remind them what God did. The Passover said to them, We who are eating this together have inherited the benefits of what God has done. We're here, we're eating this meal because we are the people God has chosen. We have inherited the promises of Abraham, and we are God's people. And they remembered the events through the teachings and the symbols and the sights and the smells and the tastes of this meal. This meal had symbolic elements to remind them what God had done for them, and it was an event they did together as the people of God. Okay, I think we're ready to look at what Paul says in First Corinthians eleven now. We're going to pick up in verse twenty-three and go through twenty-six. For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus in the night in which he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way he took the cup also after supper, saying, This is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. All right, Paul starts this little section by saying, For I receive from the Lord that which I also delivered to you. When Paul says I receive from the Lord, he's telling us that his understanding of what Jesus said comes from Jesus himself. He is a reliable witness to the events, even though he wasn't there, because the one who established the ritual in the first place told Paul what it meant. Now you'll remember Paul was not one of the original twelve disciples, so he was not present at the Last Supper when Jesus instituted this, but Paul tells us that he received his understanding directly from the risen Jesus. After his resurrection and ascension, Jesus commissioned Paul as an apostle and taught him directly. So Jesus is celebrating a Passover meal with his disciples on the night that he's arrested and right before he's crucified. And Jesus takes the elements of the Passover meal and he reinterprets them in light of the cross. And notice we have the same three events in Jesus' death on the cross that we have in the Passover. We have deliverance from judgment, freedom from slavery, and the inauguration of a new covenant. Jesus is going to be crucified the next day, and this is a great event of deliverance for us. But it's not the Hebrews being delivered from the judgment of God visited on Egypt. Jesus is delivering God's people from the coming judgment of God at the culmination of history. In addition, instead of being freed from slavery in Egypt, God's people are finally going to be freed from their slavery to sin and death and futility. So because of the cross, God's people will be delivered from their sin and death and futility and be granted life in his kingdom. And instead of being given the law at Mount Sinai, Jesus' death and resurrection is going to inaugurate a new covenant. So we have the same three elements. Let's start by looking at deliverance. What did the body and the blood of Jesus accomplish for us? I want to look at the account in Luke's gospel because I suspect Luke got his information from Paul. And this is Luke chapter 22. I'm going to start in verse 14 and go through about twenty, I think. When the hour had come, he reclined at the table and the apostles with him. So he's speaking of Jesus. And he said to them, I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I say to you, I shall never again eat it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God. And when he When he had taken the cup and given thanks, he said, Take this and share it among yourselves, for I say to you, I will not drink of the fruit of the vine from now on until the kingdom of God comes. And when he had taken some of the bread and given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, This is my body which is given for you, do this in remembrance of me. And in the same way he took the cup after they had eaten, saying, This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. So Jesus speaks of this new covenant in his blood. Now what do we know about a new covenant? Well in a rather famous passage the prophet Jeremiah announced that God will establish a new covenant. This is Jeremiah thirty one verses thirty one through thirty four. Behold, days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah, not like the covenant which I made with their fathers in the day I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, although I was a husband to them, declares the Lord. But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord, I will put my law within them, and on their heart I will write it, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. They will not teach again each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying Know the Lord, for they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest of them, declares the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more. Now there's a lot we could talk about in this passage, but I want to highlight three important elements that relate to Passover and communion. First, the foundation of this new covenant is the forgiveness of sin. God's going to give them all these good things that Jeremiah is predicting, because, as he says in thirty one thirty four, I will forgive their iniquity and their sin I will remember no more. Second, they're going to be freed, they're going to be delivered from their hard and hostile hearts. They broke the old covenant. They forgot God, they turned away from him, but the new covenant will be different. Instead of writing the law on stone tablets, God's going to write the law in their hearts. They are going to become the kind of people who want to and can keep the law. And they will want to follow God and obey him and not turn away from him anymore, and they will seek him and find life. And as a result, God says, I will be their God and they will be my people. This time it's going to work. Because he's going to put the law on their hearts. So through Jeremiah, God says, I'm going to make this new covenant with you where I will forgive your sins, I will write the law in your hearts, and I will be your God, and you will be my people. And this time it's going to work because I'm going to change you from the inside out into the kind of people who will seek me and find life, and you will not break this new covenant. Now, how is all this going to come about? How is it that God will forgive our sins and turn us from a rebellious, hard-hearted people into a people who seek to follow him? How is he going to bring this new covenant about? He's going to do it through what Jesus did on the cross. Look at Luke twenty two twenty again. And in the same way he took the cup after they had eaten, saying, This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood. Through his death on the cross, Jesus is inaugurating the new covenant, which Jeremiah talked about. Jesus gave his body and blood for the forgiveness of our sins. And he tells us this explicitly in Matthew's account. While they were eating, Jesus took some bread and after blessing, he broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, Take, eat, this is my body. And when he had taken the cup and given thanks, he gave it to them, saying, Drink from it all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins. So his death brings about the forgiveness of sins. This is analogous to the Passover. The blood of the lamb caused the angel of death to pass over and spare them, and the New Testament makes it clear that Jesus is the true Passover lamb, and it is his blood which will cause God's judgment to pass over us and our sins to be forgiven. So this is first Corinthians 5 7. Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened, for Christ, our Passover, also has been sacrificed. Again, Paul's saying Jesus is the true Passover sacrifice. This is John 1 29. The next day he, that's John the Baptist, saw Jesus coming to him and said, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. So Jesus gave his body and his blood so that God's judgment would pass us over. We deserve condemnation. Our Creator has every right to reject us because that's the kind of people we are. We're selfish, we're immoral, sinful, vengeful people. We are not the holy and good creatures we ought to be. Our greatest problem is that one day Jesus is going to return in judgment, and there is only one way to escape it, and that is through his blood. So in the Lord's Supper, we celebrate the deliverance from God's wrath and his future coming judgment and the forgiveness of our sins through the blood of Christ. Second, just like the Passover was a celebration of how God freed them from slavery in Egypt, the Lord's Supper is a celebration to remind us that God has freed us from our slavery to the sin in our hearts. Paul describes himself in Second Corinthians as a minister of the New Covenant, and he describes that covenant using Jeremiah's language in terms of the Spirit of God writing the law in our hearts. Unlike the old covenant, where the law was written on stone tablets, and we were free to ignore it and break it, then in the new covenant, the law comes from within us, and it determines who we are and what we value and what we choose. Because we have been forgiven, God is blessing us through his spirit to transform us from these rebel sinners into people who love and want to obey him. So Moses led Israel out of slavery in Egypt, but the greatest slavery we face is the slavery to sin and death, and Jesus is the one who can free us from that. And then third, through his death Jesus has called us to be a people for himself and for God. It is now supremely true that he is our God and we are his people. Christ is the head and we are his body. He bought us, he redeemed us for himself so that we could belong to God through him. So through the body and the blood of Jesus, we have one rescue from judgment, forgiveness of sin, and an inheritance in the kingdom of God as his people. That's what Jesus' death on the cross did for us. So what then does this meal that we call the Lord's Supper have to do with that? Well, first, like the Passover meal, the Lord's Supper is intended to be a remembrance. It is intended to remind us of the great deliverance Jesus accomplished for us. And we are in the same need of reminders that the ancient Hebrews needed. Just like the Hebrews living in the land needed a reminder that they lived there because of what God has done for them, so we believers today need a reminder that we stand to inherit the blessings of life and redemption because of what Jesus has done. God will forgive our sins and bless us through his spirit because of the sacrifice of Christ. If I had been there and seen him die and seen him resurrected, I wouldn't need a reminder. That powerful event would be stamped on my memory. But it's been a long time. I wasn't there. And that could easily become the stuff of story in ancient history to us. We need to be reminded what God has done for us, and we need a way to make it part of our personal story. So Jesus says, do this as often as you do in remembrance of me. This is the language of the Passover. Do this as a remembrance. He's taking the meal intended to commemorate the Passover and says, You're now going to do this to remember something else. This is now a remembrance of a greater deliverance, my death to free you from sin and make you the people of God. Now when Jesus returns, we won't need to be reminded what he did for us. But in the meantime, while we're in this in-between time, we need to be reminded because now it's easy to forget. So in the Lord's Supper, we proclaim the Lord's death. We have these elements that are designed to remind us that He died to bring about these blessings for us. And just like the Passover, there are at least three ways this memorial meal functions. First, most importantly, there is teaching. There is language that says what Jesus did and what his death accomplished for us, and that his death brought about this deliverance from judgment, freedom from slavery, and the inauguration of a new covenant. Second, the two aspects of the meal symbolically remind us of Jesus' death on the cross. So the bread reminds us of his body that was broken for us, and the wine reminds us of his blood that was shed for us. It's interesting to me that Jesus didn't take the lamb and make that the symbol that we use to remember, because he is much more directly connected to the lamb symbolically in the New Testament. He's called the Lamb of God, He's called the true Passover lamb. So why didn't he perpetuate the lamb as part of the ritual? Well, I'm speculating, but I think it's because the lamb would become another sacrifice, and we don't need another sacrifice. There is no need for that anymore. Jesus made the final ultimate sacrifice. He paid the price for our sins once and for all, so to keep sacrificing a lamb would confuse the message, because that part is done. Instead, Jesus takes the unleavened bread and one of the cups of wine and makes them symbolic of his body and his blood. And then third, this meal is a ritual that we his people do together. It unites us as believers. We come together as a community of believers to say we're in this together. We together stand to inherit the promises of the new covenant because of what Jesus has done for us. We are his people, we share in this together. And we saw this in 1 Corinthians 10 as part of his argument in the meat sacrifice to idols section. Paul argued that this ritual meal is something we do together as the people of God to unite us. When I participate, I'm saying, These are my people. This is the body I want to belong to. When we participate in the Lord's Supper, each of us is saying, I am part of God's people. I am part of the body of Christ, and like you, I stand to inherit life and blessing because of what Jesus has done. He is our God, and we together are his people. So I would sum up the Lord's Supper the same way I summed up the Passover. First, God's judgment is coming, but his people will be spared because of the blood and body of Jesus Christ. His sacrifice rescues us from that judgment. Second, God will forgive our sins and deliver us from slavery to sin and death and futility because of what Jesus has done. His sacrifice makes this possible. And third, through Jesus, God inaugurated a new covenant such that He will be our God and we would be His people. And we are to remember Jesus' death and what His death did for us through the teachings that surround the meal and the symbols of this meal, and we do this together. So in this meal we have the same three elements. We have the teaching about what God has done through Christ, we have the symbolic elements to remind us what God has done through Christ, and we do this together as the people of God because of what Christ has done for us. Now, if you've studied church history, you'll recognize that what I have just argued about the Lord's Supper is not a universally held view. Through the ages there has been much debate over what the Lord's Supper means, and there are many different views. There's a Roman Catholic view, the Eastern Orthodox view, a Reformed Protestant view. There are different views within Reformed theology, there are different views within Protestant denominations, and so forth. And many of the views involve the idea, more or less, to some degree more or less, that there is some grace of God that is mystically attached to participating in the Lord's Supper. Some people will go so far as to claim that the body and the blood of Jesus is actually miraculously physically present during the meal, and some others would say no, it's just there spiritually. Many would say it is a sacrament and mean by that that it is a ritual that must be performed by a duly ordained minister of the gospel, and that it imparts grace to me in some physical or spiritual or mystical sense, more or less. Swingley, one of the early reformers, taught that the Lord's Supper was merely a memorial meal intended to remind us of Christ's death, as I have just argued, and his ideas were rejected by the establishment, but I think he got it right. In any case, you should understand that this view I have just argued for that this is primarily a memorial to help us remember what God has done, that is debated, and at least at one time in history was the minority view. But to me, this is how the evidence points. To call this meal primarily a memorial in no way diminishes it for me. Remembering what Jesus did for us is highly significant and important and meaningful. I think that's one of the best things we can do. And anything that helps me focus on what is true and right and important is highly valuable. Jesus' death is the key event in human history and in my own life, and anything that reminds us what God did through his death is supremely valuable and important. So to me, understanding this meal primarily as a memorial in no way diminishes its value and significance and importance. Now, in the next podcast, we're going to put all this together. We're going to look at what Paul is upset about and the way they're handling the Lord's Supper and what he wants them to do instead. And we'll tackle the question of what does he mean by taking the Lord's Supper in an unworthy manner? And how would we take it in a worthy manner? Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but shows you how to figure it out. I don't accept advertising on my website, nor do I ask for donations. I pay for this podcast out of pocket because it's really important for me to give this information to you. But it does encourage me to hear from you about what you've learned, so please leave a positive rating on your favorite podcast platform, or drop me an email, and you can always tell a friend. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coast. You can find his music on heartfeltmusic.org. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.