Discerning the Body 1975

From 1 Corinthians, chapter 10, verses 16 and 17. The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many, are one body. What we all partake of the one bread, especially since the first of the year, the word that's been coming to us from many voices, but no doubt through the one spirit, is that there is a need for us to draw closer to each other than we've ever known before.

Somehow, we're all beginning to see, or most of us are beginning to see, that if the ministry that we've been given to accomplish is to be performed, and if the power of the Lord for healing is to be in it for all these sick, wounded, broken lives that we're touching, including our own, we're going to have to come into a practice of actual harmony and unity with each other the likes of which we, here, have never seen. Now, as we move toward this unity, we have to be careful that we don't try to take shortcuts. The danger is that we're going to push through to something which is not the unity of the Spirit at all, but nothing but a dead uniformity.

And if we do that, we're going to be worse off than we are now. We come from many, many places, and we're very, very different. And these differences that we have are a blessing.

You know, they're surely a mark of heaven. After this, I looked, and behold, a great multitude, which no man could number, from every nation, and from all tribes, and peoples, and tongues, standing before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, crying with a loud voice, Salvation belongs to our God, who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb. And the beautiful thing we see in this is that, in spite of the fact that they are all wearing white robes, it's still very obvious that they're different.

It's still obvious, you can see it and you can hear it, that they come from every nation, and from all tribes, and peoples, and tongues. The only thing that makes them one is the fact that they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. And praise God for the fact that we also are different from each other.

And praise God that we have different backgrounds, different languages, different races, different age levels, and that the only thing which has drawn us to each other in this place is our need for Jesus. And our love for Him, and our commitment to Him. Nothing else.

Jesus alone is our rallying point. Now what has happened so many times in the past is that believers, seeing the need for unity with each other, have tried to speed things up by substituting some kind of rallying point which is more tangible, it would seem, than Jesus. And so the rallying point then becomes a doctrine.

Like for the Lutherans it's been justification by faith. You can get Lutherans together in five minutes with that doctrine, you know, but not with Jesus. Or predestination.

Or eternal security. Or the thing which is the rage right now is the experience of tongues. You know, and on this side we have the people who are unified by tongues, and over here are the people who are unified by their hatred of tongues.

Or it becomes some view of what the Church of Jesus Christ should be. You know, the institutional people on this side and the anti-institutional people on that side. And sometimes our rallying point becomes our own local fellowship.

You belong to Messiah? Praise God, you're my brother. What? You go to the house of prayer? I'll pray for you. You know? And often we don't utter the last but we think it.

And so we end up with a cult, not a body of believers. And the unity that we say we have is not unity in Christ, and it's not going to last, and it doesn't edify, it stifles, it kills, it blinds, it drains us of all life. It destroys.

The rallying point, you know, has to be Jesus. Now, in the past month and a half, without any heavy master planners getting in a locked room and conducting some kind of secret meeting to come up with a new plan, two things have been laid upon us which I am satisfied have truly come from the Holy Spirit. One, they both have to do with eating.

One, that we have arrived at the time now when we're going to join our brothers and sisters of apostolic days and brothers and sisters all over the place right now who break bread every Lord's Day. Two, that our dinner tables, whether it's in our dining room or our kitchen, in our apartments and homes, ought now to become, more than ever before, places of fellowship as we eat together. And by the way, this eating together of believers is nothing new.

It's been going on since the first days of the Church. Day by day, attending the Temple together and breaking bread in their homes. They partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people, and the Lord added to their number, day by day, those who were being saved.

But, and may the Lord make this clear to us, eating together is not our rallying point. Eating meals together is not the source of our unity. See, and if we take eating together and make this our thing, if we try to make eating together a shortcut to unity, then we end up no different than those who do it with tongues or eternal security or the 144,000.

See, and it's in our nature to do those kind of things. We just love to do that. You know, you remember the time after the Resurrection, Jesus described to Peter what kind of death Peter was going to die.

Right away, Peter wants to know what's going to happen to John. You know, okay Lord, I'm going to be crucified, but what about John? What's going to happen to him? And Jesus said, look Peter, you know, if I want John to remain alive until I come back, what is that to you? You follow me. John doesn't have to conform to the road I call you to take.

John has to conform to the road I call him to take. The road is not the rallying point. I am the rallying point.

And so now with us, our rallying point is not our dinner table and it's not our coffee pot, but rather it is the one bread of heaven and that one cup who is Jesus himself. And if I never eat in your home and you never eat in mine, today, praise God, we eat at Jesus' table. And if we discern the body of the Lord in the eating, we are then by the power of the Holy Spirit drawn into a unity which is of God and which will last and which will accomplish the things God would have him accomplish.

Let a man examine himself and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself. The unity comes not through the eating, but through discerning the body as we eat.

First of all, we have to discern the body in the bread itself. Take and eat. This bread is my body, given for you.

Take and drink this cup. It is the new covenant in my blood, shed for your sins. And we will discern the body of the Lord in the bread and the wine when we see this meal for what it really is.

In this meal, excuse me, Jesus is offering himself up for us, laying down his life, giving himself for our sins. How in the world can we ever take this meal lightly, even if we were to eat it every day? When we see this food, first of all, as the atonement, Jesus offering himself up, and then also as our very food, our sustenance. Our life comes out of partaking of his death.

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up in the last day for my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. My flesh and blood are food and drink, see, because they quicken, they give life.

And it's our responsibility, by faith, to discern the body and the blood offered up for us every time we eat and drink the bread and wine. And secondly, we need to discern the body of the Lord in the assembly. And we hear a lot these days about body ministry.

And a tremendous amount of, tremendous temptations are coming to try to take shortcuts. And we hear about the gifts of the Spirit being manifested through the body, and that's beautiful. See, but what do we do then? I'm going to take a shortcut, we're going to get a few believers together in our living room, and we're going to pray and speak in tongues and prophesy and lay hands on each other, and that's the ministry of the body? No, it's not.

It could be. And it sometimes is, but all too often it's much too cheap. The body of Christ on this earth is made up of members who have presented their bodies to God, with Jesus, in His mind and spirit, to become a corporate living sacrifice.

And that's the only body of Christ in our bodies there is. The bread on the altar becomes the body of Christ because it was offered up as the sacrifice, and now as our food. See, and this assembly here is the body of Christ, or a manifestation of it, to the extent that we truly, in union with our Lord, offer our bodies as living sacrifices.

And it's so easy for us to say, I'm crucified with Christ. It's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. It's easy to say it, but are we doing that? We discern the body, to discern the body of Christ on the earth, in the assembly, means, first of all, that I offer my body up to the Father, and in doing so, I'm joined to those brothers and sisters who are doing the same.

To discern the body in the assembly means, really, that we deny ourselves for each other. We lay down our lives for each other. Constantly go out of our way and inconvenience ourselves in daily, hourly acts, simple, down-to-earth acts.

You know, where we go out of our way and where we, with joy and patience, suffer misunderstandings and hurts. In fact, we go out of our way not only for our Christian buddies, but for our brother and sister that we don't have anything at all in common with with Jesus. Let me say it once again.

The body of Christ on earth is only those who have indeed offered their bodies as a living sacrifice to God. Nobody else. And we can discern the body in the assembly only as we become part of that sacrifice.

Hereby perceive we the love of God because He laid down His life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren and when we eat this bread and wine, that's exactly what we're doing. We're agreeing to lay down our lives for each other. As a flock, I believe that we've come to the place of the man in our Lord's parable who goes to his friend at midnight and says, friend, lend me three loaves.

A friend of mine has arrived on a journey and I have nothing to set them for. These people are coming with their problems, their famished spirits, their broken, wrecked lives and we don't have bread to give them. And after pounding on heaven's door and after making it clear to the Lord that we're serious, we finally are told by Him, all right, here's the bread.

As much as you need. This is my body, take it. And in it you will find my spirit.

Now what we need to learn is not, is that the bread of the Lord is not only our food, but it's the loaf that we become part of, that we now are in fact bodily joined to the Lord to be broken and given for the quickening and the sustenance and the healing of all these twisted, broken lives that are coming to us left and right and are hungry, dying to see the reality of God and they will never experience this through us unless we are indeed broken with Jesus. And we will learn that lesson. To be broken, bread, and poured out wine.

First and foremost, by serving each other, forgiving each other, breaking bread from house to house, denying ourselves for each other, going out of our way for each other, inconveniencing ourselves until we come to the supreme inconvenience of giving our lives over totally and completely, even in death. Now that's what it means to take the bread and wine. And if we're willing to go through with a whole lesson that's involved in the bread and the wine, if we're willing to learn to be that bread, then very soon we will we will experience what it means to be the body of Christ on earth with the power to seek the lost and heal the sick.

We will have the power which we have so many times in the past lacked and which we now lack to bring men from darkness to light and women from the power of Satan to God. We will have found our place and our function in the body of Christ on earth as the body guided by the spirit prepares this world for its final hour. Let's pray.

Just pray Lord God that this day you would deliver us all from ourselves, from our apathy, from our stubbornness, from our hardness of heart, from our attitudes, from our unwillingness to bend, from our pride, from our self-consciousness, from our false humility, and from this desire to keep what we really are secret from everybody else. Help us to just throw open the doors Father to you and the windows to each other as we break bread together in Jesus' name. Amen.