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Oasis Higher Ground Trainings Draw Near Others - Chinese - English Languages
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The Church
(18th in the series of expositions on Communion delivered on April 1, 1979)
1 Cor 10:16,17 says:
The cup of blessing which we bless, is it a participation in the blood of Christ?
If we turn the sentence from the question form and condense it somewhat, the sentence would be: "The cup of blessing is participation in the blood of Christ," ('is' means 'is the means of'). So the cup of blessing is the means of participation in the blood of Christ. Upon fundamental spiritual principles in the Bible, faith must have a concrete means of expression. This is what the whole book of James is all about, that unless faith becomes active and expresses itself, it is completely dead. Faith has to be active in its expression.
Today we may say: 'I believe that Jesus died for me', but this is not enough for the NT because this belief or 'faith' may not have any concrete expression. We do not just believe with our mind, it is never enough to have verbal profession and intellectual belief. Everything must have expression in concrete action. For example, if we said: 'I accept the death of Christ for me and the life of Christ for me (i.e. salvation)', we do not just accept it in our brain (intellect) or in our heart (emotion). There is a concrete form of accepting it. This is precisely where the sacraments come in, the sacrament of baptism and Communion. When a person in the NT said 'I believe and repent of my sin, and now I am ready to be united with Christ in His death and resurrection, he does not just sit there; he must get up and get baptized. In being baptized, he washes away his sins, and is buried and rises again with Christ. This is a concrete action.
Faith expresses itself concretely in the action of baptism. If people just sit back and say 'I believe', his faith is weak and will never come alive. It will never become vigorous because it has no action. From the moment we repent of our sins, and commit ourselves to Christ, immediately we are baptized and our faith expresses itself in public action. Faith is never a hidden discipleship, it has to be in the heart and it must be expressed in public action. Communion is the same. How do we participate in the blood of Christ? We take the cup of the blood of Christ and we receive it to ourselves in a concrete way. So faith becomes an action. It is no longer an internal belief, but faith is being materialized and objectified in action. We participate in the body of Christ by taking the bread before God and through faith. The NT teaches that faith always expresses itself in public action.
We have taken baptism as a step of obedience and then in Communion the Lord Jesus provides us the means of participating in His body and in His blood. How can we participate?
Let us look at [1 Cor 10] v18:
Consider the practice of Israel, are not those who eat the sacrifices partakers of the altar?
How would the Israelites participate in the altar? What does the altar mean? The altar is nothing other than the means of atonement, the means of salvation where sins are atoned for in Israel. It also foreshadows the coming of Christ. (Before the coming of Christ this is the only means of atonement.) Now, how can we express our faith in God's provision for the atonement of our sins? By eating the sacrifice. The body and blood of Christ is the NT equivalent of atonement of sins as the altar in the OT
So when we come to the table, our faith is being transformed into spiritual action. But the action alone is not enough. Faith must be there in order to eat of the sacrifice meaningfully. In the same way, just taking part of the Communion is not enough, because we are not exercising any faith but when our faith is being expressed into action then our faith will grow from strength to strength. We take the first step in expressing our faith through repentance and committing to Christ in baptism. Then in Communion, it reminds us that baptism is not the end of faith but is only the beginning.
What does it mean to participate in the blood of Christ? To answer this question, we have to ask the next question: What does the blood of Christ mean? The blood of Christ means Christ's atoning death for us and His life for us. The life, Leviticus tells us, is in the blood. Christ blood does not only express His death but also His life for us. This we can see as examples in Rom 3:25, 5:29; Eph 1:7, 2:13. So by faith we participate concretely, openly, our reception, our salvation in Christ, that we are saved by the death of Christ and also moment by moment that we depend upon His life to live.
Communion reminds us that salvation is an on-going process, just like we have to eat food, that we have to depend upon the body and blood of Christ in order to live.
The body of Christ is the church of Christ (Eph 1:23, Col 1:18) that means when we partake of the body of Christ, we participate in the body, that we are a Christian and we are the community of saints. If we put it into picture language, we can say that as we eat of the bread, which is the body of Christ, then the body of Christ is in us, and that Christ is in us. The Bible tells us that when Christ is in us, then we are in Christ also. This is the whole sequence of spiritual reasoning, which involves a definite spiritual principle.
As we take of the bread, the body of Christ, we partake of Christ Himself - Christ in us and we in Christ - and we are a member of Christ's body. This takes us to one last point that only if we participate in the blood of Christ do we participate in the body of Christ and vice-versa. We have already seen that the blood of Christ represents the salvation of God provided for us in Christ, and that the body represents the Church. Thus now, if we change the statement, it reads: only if we have the salvation of Christ do we belong to the body of Christ and vice versa. In other words, the church and salvation can never be separated.
There is a mistaken notion going around these days that we can be saved individually as though the church does not exist, that Jesus becomes our personal property. There is some truth in it that we must have a personal relationship with the Lord, but the danger of it is in saying 'personal Savior' as if we can have some part of the Lord Jesus as our private property. This is not NT teaching; Jesus is nobody's private possession. We cannot have a personal faith in the sense that we can believe in Christ and ignore all other persons. The biblical teaching is this: that only do we receive the blood of Christ (salvation) if we receive the body of Christ (the church). We do not receive Christ until we have received the people of the church; we do not love God unless we also love our neighbor. We do not possess God without having also our neighbor because the church is Christ's body. We are not going to say that I love the head but I do not want the body. If we want to have Christ, we must have Him with His body, which is the church.
As Paul said in this passage (1 Cor 10:16,17) that I participate in the Communion makes evident that I participate in the body of Christ. Does it mean that we all together constitute one body? We are saved by being part of the body of Christ. We cannot say I want the salvation but I do not want His body, His church. So, salvation is found only in the church of Christ. By church, we do not mean individual churches but the universal church throughout the world. It does not matter under what label so long as there is true love for God and true love for His people.
Summary:
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The meaning of the Communion is that we express our faith in concrete action. We take of His body and of His blood. Anyone who partakes unworthily is guilty of Jesus' body and blood. Therefore make sure that we truly repent of our sins before partaking of the Communion as we take very concretely by faith in the action of the body of Christ.
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The blood means simply the salvation for us in Christ and the body means the church.
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We cannot have the one without the other. This two always go together and only because we are now a member of the body of Christ do we partake in His blood, i.e., in His salvation. Therefore never neglect the church and think that we can be saved without the rest of the church, that salvation is purely an individual matter. This is the result of Western individualism and has nothing to do with biblical teaching at all. We are saved only as part of the family of God. Christ died in order to save His body of the church and it is not that He saved each person as an individual.
So Paul concluded by saying in v17, "We who are many are one body united in Christ."
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Communion Series:
- Worship
- A Sharing in the Body of Christ
- God's Expression of Love to Us
- Pressing toward the Mark of the High Calling
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