Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
My. Yesterday, my kids. So I have three. Three daughters, for those of you who are new. And they got a bunch of stuff from our garage and said, so this is what they do on, like, Saturday. So across the way from our house, there's this lottery house that's being sold. So there's constantly people coming in and.
Mark Clark [00:00:23]:
Out and cars pulling up and they're.
Mark Clark [00:00:25]:
Going into this lottery house. And so obviously my kids, because they're, you know, their father's daughters, they see an opportunity, an entrepreneurial one.
Mark Clark [00:00:35]:
Money, all right? So every Saturday they see all these people coming. So they keep trying to go make money, and they keep coming up with all these things about. And so they'll go and they'll sell lemonade.
Mark Clark [00:00:47]:
Now, it's not really.
Mark Clark [00:00:48]:
It's good money for them. I'm losing money, but it's good money for them. Cause I'm buying $30 worth of lemonade, all right? And my eight year old runs to the grocery store like it ain't a thing. Like, she just goes, whoo. And she'll just get this big.
Mark Clark [00:01:01]:
She'll go boom, boom, boom.
Mark Clark [00:01:02]:
She'll emp the grocery store freezer. It's like they're giving it to us for free. And then they go and they make. So I, you know, pay for it, and I'm 40 bucks in here, but.
Mark Clark [00:01:11]:
Then they make 25 bucks and they think it's the greatest thing in the world.
Mark Clark [00:01:14]:
And so they go and they sell this lemonade. And all these people come in and they're so cute. They sit there, hey, I can get lemonade. And people come up, these big, like, construction workers, and they give them, like.
Mark Clark [00:01:27]:
You know, and so they got lemonade. So yesterday they decide to sell toys. Like all the toys that they're done.
Mark Clark [00:01:34]:
With, they go through their whole thing and they just empty the thing and.
Mark Clark [00:01:37]:
They start putting stickers of prices on these toys. Now these. Look, I watched my mom do garage sales her whole life, all right? She would barter people down. Like it was like 75 cents.
Mark Clark [00:01:47]:
She goes, I'll give you a nickel.
Mark Clark [00:01:48]:
All right?
Mark Clark [00:01:48]:
I'm like, what is that? Why do people. What is this? And people just go, yep, you can take it. It's like, why didn't you just throw it out? It's way less work to sell crap for a nickel than to just throw it away.
Mark Clark [00:01:58]:
So anyways, so my kids are like putting $8 on their old dolls, all right?
Mark Clark [00:02:04]:
Like, way too expensive.
Mark Clark [00:02:05]:
We didn't even buy that thing for eight bucks. All right? So they go out and they spread out the blankets, and they've got everything. They got dolls, they got Barbie houses. They got. And they got prices on all this stuff.
Mark Clark [00:02:17]:
And, man, they put in.
Mark Clark [00:02:18]:
I'm not joking.
Mark Clark [00:02:19]:
Eight hour day. Eight hours they were out there. I'm like, girls, no one's coming. Give up, right?
Mark Clark [00:02:25]:
This is like, classic dad teaching them about grit and perseverance.
Mark Clark [00:02:28]:
Nobody came in. 20 minutes, pack it up, it's over. Just quit in life.
Mark Clark [00:02:32]:
So they're going eight hours working at it, and this kid comes over, this little kid, he's probably four or five years old. He's one of our neighbors. And he walks up and he goes, oh, can I buy this ball? Right?
Mark Clark [00:02:45]:
So they got 40 things all over the place.
Mark Clark [00:02:47]:
And my daughter's like, yeah, you can buy that ball.
Mark Clark [00:02:49]:
It's a buck or whatever.
Mark Clark [00:02:50]:
So he pulls out his little buck and he gives it to him, and he grabs a ball and he goes over, and he walks over here and starts playing with the ball. And I watch my daughter, and she's over here trying to sell, and she keeps eyeing the kid, keeps eyeing the kid, eyeing the kid. And then she leaves the thing and she walks over.
Mark Clark [00:03:07]:
She goes, here, can I see that ball for a second?
Mark Clark [00:03:11]:
The kid's like, what do you mean? She get. And all of a sudden, for the.
Mark Clark [00:03:14]:
Next 10 minutes, my daughter plays with his ball. She, like, starts bouncing it, running after it, bouncing it, running after it. He's sitting there going, dude, you've owned this ball for eight years. You just sold it to me now. And this is the thing that's got me thinking, like, in the midst. If you don't. Sometimes stuff's gotta come out of the chaos so you can see the value in it. And in the chaos, Paul is dealing with all of these things.
Mark Clark [00:03:44]:
He's dealing with their life and their. He's about to shift next week into spiritual gifts and the craziness of prophecy and healing and all this charismatic chaos stuff that's going on in Corinth. And before he does that, he stops at the end of 11 and he goes, let's get the center of the center. Let's pull out from the chaos something that maybe you didn't even value before, maybe you didn't even appreciate it before, but it is the gem in the midst of the chaos. And it's this. Just listen to it.
Mark Clark [00:04:11]:
I didn't even bother doing the screen today. Cause I want you to be more reflective today and just speak this over. You listen to what he says in 1123. And the rest of it for I.
Mark Clark [00:04:23]:
Received from the Lord what I also delivered to you. So he's about to talk about what the church has historically called communion or the Eucharist or the Lord's Supper. People have different things, as they call it. But he says, I got it from Jesus and I installed it in the churches. So he's, he's trying to say there is a sense of tradition that I put in the churches. Now lots of people push back against tradition. Maybe that's some of you. You're agnostics or skeptics or atheists or whatever.
Mark Clark [00:04:55]:
And you're like, I don't like tradition. The church reeks of tradition. That's what I thought growing up. But everything else is non tradition, non tradition good, tradition bad. That tends to be how post modern people think in a kind of a post Christian world where they look at the church and they say the church is staunchy and ritualistic and traditionalist and whatever. But, but Paul goes, no, no, hold on. Actually, there are some traditions, some things, some rhythms, some liturgies, some patterns that I want to install in your life. And here's why.
Mark Clark [00:05:26]:
Because first off, it's a complete false dichotomy to claim that you, as a non religious person, maybe you're not into ritual, but religious people are into ritual. And that's why you want to stay.
Mark Clark [00:05:38]:
Away from each other.
Mark Clark [00:05:38]:
No, no. The reality is I was listening to the most famous podcast in the world.
Mark Clark [00:05:44]:
Right now is a guy named Joe Rogan.
Mark Clark [00:05:45]:
So I don't listen to it cause I like it. It's cultural research. So I was listening to Joe Rogan and he was talking the other day to this guy who eats mushrooms to get high. And he talks about his spiritual world that he connects to the universe. And he goes, and he eats mushrooms and he eats certain drugs and it's all this kind of psychedelic stuff, you know, born right out of the, you know, the 50s and the 60s and all that. But he's right, so. So they talk about, and he's talking about how, you know, I don't believe in, you know, putting, you know, boundaries on me. Limitations.
Mark Clark [00:06:17]:
I mean, it's all about being free. But then the minute he started talking about that, he also talked about how the shamans of the past, when they would cook up these mushrooms and smoke these and do all these kind of things, they had this ritual where you have to do this and then you have to do the smoke and they're kind of relishing, oh, it's so great to be Free. But then they're talking about ritual. And you begin to realize everybody's got ritual. Even if you're the most secularized, agnostic person in the world. The mall is a ritual. The way you shop is a ritual. It's a liturgy.
Mark Clark [00:06:46]:
It's a practice. It's a habit. It's a thing that you do. And the reality is, everybody has one. Because as Augustine talked about, the idea that the only way you're ever gonna change what you end up doing and.
Mark Clark [00:06:59]:
Wanting to do in your life is.
Mark Clark [00:07:01]:
To change what you do. Which is a classic misnomer in regard to Christianity, because Christians constantly think, if I could see, here's the premise of Christian teaching. Often, if I can just teach you the right things, if I can teach you to think right, once you get to think right, then you're gonna act right. And the reality is, Augustine pushed back against it. He goes, it's not necessarily true. Getting people to think right isn't gonna necessarily get them to act right. Because here's the thing, sometimes you need to act right first before you actually begin to think right. And this gets flipped a little bit, which is why.
Mark Clark [00:07:29]:
See, it's similar to. If you take. You start to understand the brain chemistry. For those of you who take psychology, you begin to understand that the way the brain works is it gets fed certain information. And literally, where you take any kind of addiction, alcohol addiction, porn addiction, shopping addictions, what starts to happen is you do a practice and a habit long enough, and it starts to carve out certain neural pathways in your brain so that the physical is starting first, and it's starting to define the spiritual, the psychological. What you're doing in your habit, it's like working out, right? You can tell I don't work out. I've never worked out. But hypothetically, if I did.
Mark Clark [00:08:10]:
Cause the other day I went and bought one of these bars.
Mark Clark [00:08:12]:
I don't even know what it's called, okay?
Mark Clark [00:08:14]:
From playing against sports. I bought one of those and put a bunch of weights on it. And I did it twice, and I.
Mark Clark [00:08:18]:
Checked if it was good.
Mark Clark [00:08:20]:
But some of you are like, okay, I wanna work out, I wanna work out. And you could sit in the mirror and try to convince yourself, I wanna work out, I wanna work out. But, you know, the only way you ever begin to desire to work out is over time, two, three months, you work out every day, and your physical habit starts to carve neural pathways in your brain. Dopamine starts to get released. A pleasure center of your brain starts to go off and the physical activity starts to then define your desire, your delight, what you want. So you do an action first, then it changes what. What you actually want to do. That's crazy.
Mark Clark [00:08:52]:
Cause Christians don't talk like that. Here Paul is setting a tradition in place. He's saying, you know what? Here's a practice, here's a habit, and I want you to do it over and over again. It's gonna be bread, and it's gonna be wine or a cup. And I want you to do it when you gather. Because the practice itself will start to change your imagination. The practice will come first. And if I force you into the practice, what you want to do will change over time.
Mark Clark [00:09:22]:
So I'm gonna give you two symbols, and I want you to gather around them over and over and over again, almost religiously. Because don't fool yourself into thinking you do anything but religion, even if you're an atheist. You do liturgy every single day. You do patterns that shape what you want to do. And Paul says, I'm gonna give you these two things. Well, Jesus told him to give them in the churches, because when you do them over and over and over and.
Mark Clark [00:09:47]:
Over and over and over and over and again, it will actually begin to change what you want to do. And so Jesus gives us two symbols, baptism and communion. Baptism is to be done once. It's the picture of dying to self. They're both around the death of Jesus, though. And this is why I say it's the center of the center of the center. Every symbol. We can talk about the spiritual life, certain prayers, certain spiritual gifts, mission, worship.
Mark Clark [00:10:10]:
All this stuff centers around the death. The death and the resurrection of Jesus. So here's what he says. I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you. Tradition, ritual. You don't run from it.
Mark Clark [00:10:24]:
It depends on what ritual you're talking.
Mark Clark [00:10:26]:
About, because it shapes you.
Mark Clark [00:10:27]:
He says that the Lord Jesus, on.
Mark Clark [00:10:29]:
The night he was betrayed, took bread. So remember the story where he says, I want you to go get an upper room because this is the last night I'm ever gonna be alive. This is why. He says, this is the last time I'm gonna drink wine until I drink.
Mark Clark [00:10:44]:
It again in the kingdom of God.
Mark Clark [00:10:45]:
Cause I'm dead after this night. And all the disciples are up there, and they've gone into Jerusalem, and it's Passover.
Mark Clark [00:10:51]:
And so they're up and they're celebrating a Passover meal. This is why if you underline your.
Mark Clark [00:10:55]:
Bible, it says betrayed.
Mark Clark [00:10:56]:
The night he was betrayed, he took bread. Where did he get the bread.
Mark Clark [00:10:59]:
So let's talk about what communion is, right?
Mark Clark [00:11:01]:
Where did he get the bread? The bread was.
Mark Clark [00:11:05]:
It was already there because they were having Passover meal.
Mark Clark [00:11:07]:
So Jesus, some Christians think that Jesus kind of came into a vacuum.
Mark Clark [00:11:12]:
He was just like an alien. Just came down like ET and he.
Mark Clark [00:11:17]:
Just kind of was this teacher who said these pithy sayings and told earthly stories with heavenly meanings. And he was kind of disconnected. And so you can make Jesus in your own image. You can paint him as black Jesus or Chinese Jesus or white Jesus. You could, you know, which is usually it's. He's white Jesus, you know, he's Chuck Norris Jesus. He's a Swede, you know, with blue eyes and blonde hair. Cause I, you know, that's gonna scare the kids.
Mark Clark [00:11:40]:
And we go look at Jesus. And the reality is he wasn't any of those things. He was part of a religious culture. He was part of a tradition. He was a first century Jew living in Palestine as a poor marginal peasant who was walking around being a rabbi, being a prophet, being a teacher, being a sage, but being the Messiah, being the son of God, being the son. He's claiming all these things and then he gets in the upper room and what are they doing? He doesn't just create a meal from scratch. The bread's there, the wine is there. What are they doing up there? They're having a Passover meal.
Mark Clark [00:12:10]:
And this is what, this is where it gets crazy, because the Passover was already, already in part of the Jewish life and liturgy and the rhythm, the pattern, ritual traditions of what they already did for thousands of years. And what was it? It was the night where the Jews would gather and they would have this whole thing where they do like. There was certain amount of. And it was stacked up in a certain way. And this piece of bread represented because it was all about being set free from Egypt. Yahweh showed up, set Israel free from Egypt to slavery of Egypt, brought them into the Promised Land through the Red Sea. And so they would eat one bread, and it meant this. And then they would eat these bitter herbs.
Mark Clark [00:12:41]:
And it was like the bitter herbs that they had to eat in the wilderness. And then they would do this, and then they would drink wine and they would sing a song and they'd read a passage. This was. This was a two, three hour ordeal, a meal at Passover that they did every year. And. And that's what he's doing. He's in the upper room. Literally even today.
Mark Clark [00:12:58]:
Jews, of course, do this every year. And when they're sitting there, the person running the night looks at one of the children. So when you do these Passover meals, you got all the kids. We used to do these Passover meals.
Mark Clark [00:13:10]:
When my kids were young. And we would kind of do it like a Christological Passover, like, here's Passover.
Mark Clark [00:13:15]:
But here's what Jesus means in the midst of. And you'd sit there and the person would look at one of the kids and they would say, what is more.
Mark Clark [00:13:22]:
Significant about this night than any other night? Because of course, they celebrate at night because that's when God's wrath passed over the Israelites. When they took a lamb, they took the blood they put over the doorpost and the lintel, and then the wrath of God passed over people who had that.
Mark Clark [00:13:36]:
And so he'd say, what is more.
Mark Clark [00:13:39]:
Significant about this night than any other night?
Mark Clark [00:13:42]:
And the kids would say, it was the night Yahweh saved us. It was the night he set us free. It was the night his wrath passed over. You know, and so there's this whole rhythm. So that's what he's doing with his disciples. He's already there. He's doing the Passover meal. But then he says this crazy thing.
Mark Clark [00:13:53]:
He takes the bread. That's why he has the bread. And verse 24, when he'd given thanks, he broke it and said, this is.
Mark Clark [00:14:02]:
My body, which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. Even the remembrance of me. See, this is where it gets chaotic.
Mark Clark [00:14:13]:
You have thousands of years of tradition.
Mark Clark [00:14:15]:
And Passover in Jewish history saying, this is about Yahweh setting us free. And Jesus redraws the Passover meal, the most focused, celebrated moment in Israel's history. He breaks it and he revolves and redraws it around himself.
Mark Clark [00:14:33]:
This is scandalous. If you walk into a Jewish synagogue today and you get Jesus to read these words, and this is scandal. I was reading a Jewish author yesterday who said, literally, as I study the words of Jesus in his life, I would have not followed him as a first century Jew back then and I wouldn't follow him today. Because the way he redraws everything, the way he says, I'm the new Torah, you need to listen to me. He draws himself out to be God. He keeps drawing himself out to be the center of the center of the story. And he blows up all of our paradigms. This is scandal.
Mark Clark [00:15:04]:
And yet he says, you know, this whole Passover meal that you do every year, it's about me now. It's crazy.
Mark Clark [00:15:11]:
And so he says, do this in remembrance of me. Even the remembrance word is from Exodus, chapter 12. In verse 14, God says, here's what I want you to do.
Mark Clark [00:15:22]:
I want you to do the Passover.
Mark Clark [00:15:23]:
Meal as a memorial of what I did.
Mark Clark [00:15:26]:
I want you to remember what I did in Egypt. So Jesus is memorable, making Christian in his. He's revolving all of this around himself.
Mark Clark [00:15:36]:
As the body that's broken for you. Now, here, now, three things I want to do. He says in the same way also, he took the cup and after supper, saying, this cup 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 the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. Then he says this.
Mark Clark [00:16:06]:
Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks.
Mark Clark [00:16:08]:
The cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the blood, the body and the blood of the Lord.
Mark Clark [00:16:14]:
So this is why we, when we.
Mark Clark [00:16:15]:
Do communion, we say, if you're not a Christian, you don't believe in Jesus, then just let it pass. Don't even, don't worry about it if you haven't made the decision yet. But if you want today to meet him for the first time, then you part.
Mark Clark [00:16:25]:
But he's saying, if you do it.
Mark Clark [00:16:26]:
In an unworthy manner, you're going to.
Mark Clark [00:16:28]:
Drink and eat judgment on yourself, he says. Then he says in verse 28, here's.
Mark Clark [00:16:32]:
Our first movement of 3. Let a person examine himself. If you got a Bible, underline that or double tap it, whatever, examine himself then. And so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. So here's what I want you to do. The first thing I want to do is before we partake of this, revolve the whole service around this, is examine yourself. Where's your life at before you partake of this? What are your sins? What are the things that have entangled you? I want you to examine. I'm going to give you three, four minutes.
Mark Clark [00:17:07]:
We're just going to play music, and you're going to sit and close your eyes and you're going to listen.
Mark Clark [00:17:16]:
To the silence, to the music, whatever.
Mark Clark [00:17:19]:
And I want you to go inside yourself. He says, you gotta examine yourself. And I don't think in our culture we examine ourself enough because every time we get alone, we get on our phones, we get into bed, we get in our phones. From the moment we fall asleep to the moment we get up, we never examine.
Mark Clark [00:17:33]:
We never examine. He says, if you wanna understand what this means, go inside your own soul. Go inside your Heart, go inside your mind. Go inside your sins. Go inside your childhood. Go inside your young adulthood. Go inside your marriage. Go inside your old age, whatever you're at.
Mark Clark [00:17:47]:
Start to examine your life, your soul, the state of it, before you.
Mark Clark [00:17:53]:
Partake of the cup and the bread, actually examine your life. So I want everybody close. Close your eyes.
Mark Clark [00:18:00]:
I can see you right across the sites.
Mark Clark [00:18:02]:
I can see you, all of you. Even the cinema sites. I see you. Don't look at me like that. Okay, I want everyone to close your eyes for the next four or five minutes. I was reading yesterday that the Eucharist, of course, it's a Greek word that means gratitude or thanks. So you gotta understand, what we're about to partake in is a feast of gratitude. And I was reading yesterday about this writer, and he talks about the fact that in the Lord of the Rings, the, the book, not the movie, Pippin, one of the characters, Hobbit, he's in the city and the city's besieged and it's going to go down.
Mark Clark [00:18:45]:
He's gonna die. And off in the distance, he hears a horn, the horn of Rohan. And the riders of Rohan come in and they, they, you know, they, they. They eliminate the. Some of them, a bunch of them die, and they take the city and they set everybody free. And, and, and, and, and Tolkien says in the book the Pippin, for the rest of his days, whenever he heard a horn in the distance, he would start to cry.
Mark Clark [00:19:12]:
And the reason that he would start.
Mark Clark [00:19:13]:
To cry is because it was this palpable sound that reminded him that people died for his freedom. And even if he was the most grumpy person in the world, that day, he would hear a horn and it would remind him that every morning he gets up is a gift of grace. But someone had to die for him to live it. And so he would cry in appreciation of the moment. And here's what I think Jesus does when he gives us communion. We examine ourselves. And communion is the horn in the distance.
Mark Clark [00:19:45]:
Communion is the thing that you feel.
Mark Clark [00:19:48]:
And you taste and you touch and.
Mark Clark [00:19:52]:
It'S a reminder to you that every day of your life is a gift of grace.
Mark Clark [00:19:58]:
Your salvation itself is a gift of grace. And you should cry about it physically.
Mark Clark [00:20:05]:
In your soul, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, whatever. It should be so powerful to you that it's a horn in the distance. It's a reminder you got set free by somebody else's blood or today is a gift of grace. And no matter how grumpy I am, no matter if someone wronged me, this body and this blood, set me free.
Mark Clark [00:20:33]:
And my soul shall rejoice. So examine yourself, and then we'll partake. Now that you've examined yourself, the sins you've done and the sins that have been done to you, he says, this is my body, which is for you, Jesus body. In order to sacrifice for your sin, the first thing he gets you to reflect on is, my body was totally broken, beaten. When they got whipped in that culture, some people would even die from the whipping itself. It would rip ribs out, intestines would come out, their backs would be slashed open. He gets crucified. The crown of thorns, the nails.
Mark Clark [00:23:47]:
Body broken, body broken. And so he says, take the bread and always remember the body that was beaten and messed up and broken to death for your salvation. Because even in the Exodus imagery, they would gather that night and they would eat the bread and they would say, this is the bread of our affliction that we ate in the wilderness as Israel. And the kids would eat it, and they remember that they had manna in the desert.
Mark Clark [00:24:20]:
This was the bread of our affliction.
Mark Clark [00:24:23]:
This is what we were suffering in.
Mark Clark [00:24:25]:
The wilderness, eating bread. That's what they would be talking about at the Passover meal. And they'd be reading those passages, the bread of our affliction. The bread of our affliction. And then Jesus comes and he goes.
Mark Clark [00:24:37]:
This is my body. I get to go and be afflicted for you so that you don't have to be. You don't have to suffer, you don't have to die, and your kids don't have to die. See, in that culture, you would sacrifice children so the gods would turn their wrath away from you. And he goes, the reason my body's getting broken is because you don't need to send your kids to death anymore. You don't have to die yourself anymore because God sent his kid, God sent his son, God sent me, and my body is being afflicted is being broken for you. Martin Luther says these words. Think about how it might apply to you with the concept of Jesus being killed.
Mark Clark [00:25:28]:
He says, Jesus Christ lived in the midst of his enemies. At the end, all his disciples deserted him on the cross. He was utterly alone, surrounded by evildoers and mockers for this cause.
Mark Clark [00:25:46]:
He had come to bring peace to the enemies of God. So the Christian too belongs.
Mark Clark [00:25:51]:
Listen to this.
Mark Clark [00:25:52]:
Think about your life. Think about your life for a second. What you do on a nine to five normal seven days a week. Think about how you spend your time.
Mark Clark [00:25:58]:
And then listen to the words of Luther.
Mark Clark [00:26:01]:
So the Christian tomb belongs not in the seclusion of a cloistered life, but.
Mark Clark [00:26:09]:
In the thick of foes. There is his commission. The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be in the kingdom of Christ. He wants to be among friends, to sit among roses and lilies. Not with the bad people, but with the devout people. Oh, you blasphemers, Luther says, and betrayers of Christ. If Christ had done what you are doing, who would ever have been spared? So think on the body.
Mark Clark [00:26:47]:
And one commentator says, this, this moment, this body. We're gonna get the ushers right now. Just pass. Pass the bread across all the sites. We're gonna pass the bread, and I.
Mark Clark [00:26:56]:
Just want you to hold the bread.
Mark Clark [00:26:57]:
Don't smush it in your hand, all right?
Mark Clark [00:26:59]:
Being impatient.
Mark Clark [00:27:00]:
And that's what children do. Okay? I want you to just hold the.
Mark Clark [00:27:05]:
Bread in your hand.
Mark Clark [00:27:08]:
This is the body. That's what it symbolizes. Broken for you, busted up for you, destroyed for you.
Mark Clark [00:27:18]:
Isaiah says, he was beaten so badly.
Mark Clark [00:27:20]:
You couldn't even tell he was a man anymore. So as this bread passes, hold it, don't eat it.
Mark Clark [00:27:31]:
And understand that this is more.
Mark Clark [00:27:34]:
This moment is more about. And I know this is weird in a modern culture, this moment is more.
Mark Clark [00:27:41]:
I want you to reflect on Jesus, what Jesus did for you, not about you yet. I don't want you to think about you. I know modern devotional life, you get bored if it's not about you, quickly. But this moment isn't about you yet.
Mark Clark [00:27:55]:
It's about. It's about him.
Mark Clark [00:27:57]:
It's less about our salvation and more about our Savior. Right now.
Mark Clark [00:28:03]:
For the next few minutes, once you have that bread, close your eyes. You've examined yourself, and now you examine the Savior, his broken body. Powerful words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It is not that God's help and presence must still be proved in our life. Rather, God's presence and help have been demonstrated for us in the life of Jesus.
Mark Clark [00:28:40]:
It is, in fact, more important for.
Mark Clark [00:28:42]:
Us to know what God did to.
Mark Clark [00:28:46]:
Israel in God's son, Jesus Christ, than to discover what God intends for us today.
Mark Clark [00:28:52]:
Then listen to this line. The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than. Than the fact that I will die. The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I will die. The bread bus. Through your proclivity to think about you. To think about your body, your clothing, your house, your car, your fleshly impulses and desires, and he goes it's my body that matters. So spend a few minutes reflecting on the body of Jesus broken for you.
Mark Clark [00:31:48]:
In the same way he took the cup and after supper, saying, this cup. The cup was this. There's one cup. They drank from it all. And it kind of symbolized this unity, which we can't do that. Partly because it's gross, partly because thousands of people across sites, it doesn't work anymore. Even though churches do their best to try to retain this imagery of unity. But it's a beautiful image because it says, we're one church.
Mark Clark [00:32:16]:
So, yeah, we meet across five different locations. But we're. We're one church, one vision, one mission, one. One heartbeat. And, and it's, It's.
Mark Clark [00:32:24]:
It's a unifying.
Mark Clark [00:32:25]:
It's not just about you and God. It's about community. That's what communion is. This, this sense of. There's. There's a larger picture. So they had one cup. It was the cup.
Mark Clark [00:32:34]:
This cup, he says, is the new covenant in my blood. He's. It's. It's a. It's a. There was already a song going on in their history where they look forward, Jeremiah, look forward.
Mark Clark [00:32:44]:
There's going to be a new covenant.
Mark Clark [00:32:45]:
Where God establishes a covenant through his blood and through the power of the Spirit.
Mark Clark [00:32:51]:
Not like the covenant of old, he.
Mark Clark [00:32:53]:
Says, but a new covenant that he's going to establish. And so Israel was waiting hundreds and hundreds of years saying, there's going to.
Mark Clark [00:32:59]:
Come a new covenant.
Mark Clark [00:33:00]:
One day. It's going to ride. Someone's going to show up and bring.
Mark Clark [00:33:03]:
About a new covenant that's in our heart by the Spirit.
Mark Clark [00:33:06]:
And Jesus uses that word and he.
Mark Clark [00:33:08]:
Says, it's a new covenant, but what is it?
Mark Clark [00:33:10]:
It's in my blood. And we kind of read that and pass over blood in the Old Testament was the sacrificial. You'd kill the animal, you'd spill the blood. Blood was always life.
Mark Clark [00:33:19]:
And he's saying, here's the, here's the.
Mark Clark [00:33:20]:
Reality of the new covenant. It's going to actually be in my blood. Because their imagery had a lamb that was slain and a blood sacrifice. And it was a substitute for you. The lamb. You kill the blood, you put it over the doorpost. And then it was a substitute. God would say, okay, I won't take my wrath out on you, because it.
Mark Clark [00:33:40]:
Was already taken out on the lamb for you.
Mark Clark [00:33:42]:
And now Jesus is coming. He's saying, I'm your substitute.
Mark Clark [00:33:45]:
My blood is going to be shed.
Mark Clark [00:33:47]:
My life is going to be taken out of me. In that typology so that I can save you and you can't save yourself. And so he establishes the new covenant. He says, 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 the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. That's fascinating because he's not saying you just preach.
Mark Clark [00:34:13]:
You proclaim his death until he comes.
Mark Clark [00:34:16]:
Every time you do communion. To who? To the world. Yes. Ephesians talks about the idea of there's principalities and powers. Ephesians 3, part of the purpose of the church is to proclaim the manifold wisdom of God to the principalities and those powers. There's one of my teachers at Regent, years ago, his name is Daryl Johnson. He talks about preaching and he says. I remember hearing him say one day, if I showed up at church to preach and I looked out at the audience and no one showed up that day to church, what would I do? Like, I show up and I got my sermon prepped and I stand in front of the church and I guess, you know, just everyone just.
Mark Clark [00:35:00]:
They said, I don't want to go here anymore, and there's empty seats.
Mark Clark [00:35:02]:
What would I do?
Mark Clark [00:35:04]:
And he goes, I'd still preach the sermon because somebody's listening. There are principalities and powers behind the veil that need to hear about the power proclamation of Jesus. You proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. This is a spiritual event, what you're about to do. And so you partake. Let's pass the cup. It's a tray with juice in it. Don't put your fingers in it, just put the bread in it.
Mark Clark [00:35:37]:
This is the blood. And then partake the new covenant in my blood. Do this in remembrance of me. And once you partake again, if you're not a believer, just let the tray pass by you. Someone who's trusted in Christ, and maybe you're someone who says, today I want to meet Jesus. Someone who died for my sin, rose again for my salvation. That you partake. You're welcome.
Mark Clark [00:36:05]:
It's an invitation. You partake of the cup. And then I want you to close your eyes. Paul says that Jesus said, do this in remembrance of me. Let me close by reflecting on the word remembrance. The trouble with the English word remember, one writer says, is it's kind of weak. It's lost its power. When you hear remember, what do you think it means? You think it means recall.
Mark Clark [00:36:53]:
Oh, see, how nice you recall.
Mark Clark [00:36:55]:
But the English word remember means more than that in Order to get back to the power of it, you need to realize what the opposite of remember is. Dismember. We think you dismember. He says the word member means a part of a body. To remember means not just to recall. It means to graft, it means to sew in, it means to fuse back. It means to take something that's actually not part of your being and make it part of your being again. So if you're bitter, if you're filled with anxiety here right now, today, it may mean on the one hand that you just haven't believed in Jesus yet, or it may mean that you're someone who've believed in Jesus up here in your mind, but you haven't taken him into your members yet.
Mark Clark [00:37:54]:
You haven't ingested, digested, infused, grafted in to your very person yet. And that's why you're eating.
Mark Clark [00:38:05]:
That'S why you're drinking.
Mark Clark [00:38:08]:
You've.
Mark Clark [00:38:10]:
You've dismembered the power of Jesus from your actual life.
Mark Clark [00:38:15]:
You've believed in him.
Mark Clark [00:38:17]:
And Jesus says, I don't want you, just believe in me.
Mark Clark [00:38:23]:
As you have your eyes closed, let me read to you the words of John 6 and then I'll pray for us. John 6. Jesus says this. 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. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. I don't want you to just believe in me. I don't want you to just believe the gospel. I want you to eat it.
Mark Clark [00:39:10]:
I want you to digest it. I want you to feel it. I want you to taste it and smell it and touch it and sow it back into your life so that it actually has power. Father, we are grateful that you do not leave us without these symbols, without these rhythms of life to remind us in the midst of the chaos, in the midst of our sin, that you're actually continuing to pursue, pursue us, not run away from us. And you take our sin as far as the east is from the west because of what is represented here, the broken body, the shed blood. This is the center of the center of what the church is about. And I pray for two kinds of people. The Christian who is here, who needs to remember in the purest way to bring back into their members the power of the cross of Christ in their life because they've stopped feeling it.
Mark Clark [00:40:11]:
They believe it, but they don't feel it. They don't digest it it's not part of who they are do that work among us and then to the person who's never believed that the power of the death the body and the blood of Jesus would just right now they would feel it in their soul in their mind in their bodies and understanding that you are pursuing them you want them to know you and that they would give their life to you and not just believe as intellectual ascent but they would truly eat of the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood experientially so that not what they do changes but what they want to do changes at the core of who they are and we know the power of this moment is that you can do that on the spot that doesn't have to wait Holy Spirit I pray that you move and even as we respond and sing in worship that you would meet us you would change us you would speak to us in Jesus great name we pray Amen It.