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Examine Yourself Before Communion (1 Cor.
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ย. 2024
- In Out of Context Pt 3: Examine Yourself Before Communion, Walking The Text Content Director Brad Nelson unpacks a passage that is regularly quoted out of context. In 1 Corinthians 11, the apostle Paul instructs the church at Corinth to examine themselves before eating the Lord’s Supper so they don’t eat in an unworthy manner. Two thousand years later, ministers routinely invite their congregations to pause and inspect their hearts before taking communion because of this passage.
But is that what Paul was really addressing? When understood in context, we discover that meals in the ancient world were a way of reflecting people’s status. But Jesus regularly turned this idea on its head by eating with anyone and everyone. For Jesus and his first followers, a meal wasn’t a place to acquire status for yourself. It was a place to assign status to those who didn’t have it! That’s why communion became one of the most powerful ways the Church embodied God’s kingdom.
However, things in Corinth had gone horribly wrong. The Corinthian church had perverted communion by using the meal to reflect people’s status and exclude certain members from the meal. By the end of Out of Context Pt 3: Examine Yourself Before Communion, you’ll have a new perspective on what it means to eat in an unworthy manner, and a fresh appreciation for the power of meals to bring healing in a divided world!
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Thank you, and may God continue to bless you and this channel.
Please keep on making this series.
So good and timely in our culture of division.
Excellent explanation ❤
Excellent brother ❤
God bless you, amazingly explained and very powerful message for the days we live.
May God continue to bless you and giving the wisdom and inspiration.
This serie is fantastic congrats.❤
Thanks for your encouragement!
❤
6:29 social hierarchy is baked into the world
8:30, 9:29 still prevalent in our modern world’s culture
10:04, 10:21 the way of Jesus is for the exalted to be humble and the humble to be exalted. For the rejected/outcasts to be accepted and given inherit value by Christ. He sought after those who no one would associate with or even touch.
10:53 it’s about bringing up the lowly/poor/humble/meek to whom the kingdom belongs.
11:03 in this Banquet of Christ they are invited by the King and have been given His clean clothes to wear and are gifted respect. Here in the banquet they can eat and even speak. They discover through Christ that they have gifts, voices, purpose, and value. Their contribution is seen by Christ as important/necessary/valuable.
11:36 in the kingdom of God the banquet is not a place where you acquire/flex status, it’s a place where you assign/share status to those who lack it in the world’s hierarchy. It’s about bringing others up by bringing yourself down, humbling yourself.
13:41, 14:40 Paul addresses here that they missed all of this above in the way that they gathered to eat.
15:13 They had kept the social hierarchy of the world and dismissed the heart of Christ’s social order.
They missed it by only caring about themselves, not putting others before themselves, not being humble.
In the same vain they get drunk and please themselves and their desires in God’s house which is meant for service of God through service of others.
14:11, 14:40 this is the unworthy manner that Paul is addressing.
The body of Christ, Christ Himself, gave Himself in humility and self-sacrifice/denial to serve the poor/lowly.
Yet they drink and eat the blood and flesh of Christ with a heart of self-service/pleasure and with a heart that neglects/rejects the poor/lowly.
14:30 this is the worthy manner to eat together in mirroring Christ. This reflects the unity of God’s Kingdom and rejects the hierarchal division of the world.
Conclusion:
15:35 there’s nothing wrong about pausing before communion to inspect our hearts and make sure it is repentant.
16:14 But the point Paul was making here was to make sure instead that you (and your church) have a heart of the body of Christ who gave Himself in humility and self-sacrifice/denial to serve and bring up the poor/lowly.
So it is still a message to inspect your heart before communion,
but the point is to make sure your heart aligns with the heart of Christ
“Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, He made Himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to death- even death on a cross!“
Philippians 2:6-8
But...we moderns don't participate in a meal or a table when we eat a wafer, take a sip of juice, while in pew seats...
We don't participate in a full meal. And yet we are still called to look to the Text to discern the principles for what it means to be the gathered body of Christ, today, in the ways that we gather in modern times. And, very often, our gathered communities more readily reflect the divisions of our society rather than the unity of Christ's kingdom.
@@WalkingTheText I understand that completely! And I do thank you for all of your great teaching! I have learned so very much from you all! I should have been more thoughtful before I posted my earlier reply! Please forgive me!
@@bernardware3190 There is nothing to forgive, friend! Your thoughts and response are always welcome. We love engaging with folks who are listening, especially when they're listening as closely as you so clearly are. Also, thank you for modeling such kindness and humility in your reply. Comment threads aren't typically the place you'd find such graciousness. What a gift.
One of the items we didn't have time to cover in this episode was that the banquet style meal was still being practiced in Carthage (according to Tertullian) around 200 AD. However, while some in Carthage were still practicing the meal around 250 AD, the church by then had grown so much that, according to Cyprian: "When we dine we cannot call all the people together to share in our meal." So, some began to "tokenize" the meal during their morning gatherings, and that's the norm we follow today.
Alan Kreider's book The Patient Ferment of the Early Church is a gem not just for the cultural context of communion but for the Early Church in general.
@@WalkingTheText Thank you! By the way, I just read Kreider's Introduction. Looks like I'm about to invest in yet another book! 😆😆😆