Manuscript of a sermon I delivered at Brooks Avenue Church of Christ, Raleigh, NC, March 5, 2023.

Talking about the Lord’s Supper from the Old Testament

Today we’re returning to a series that I’m calling, The Way the Good Lord Intended. And the idea is to try and clear all the dust and cobwebs off the essential practices of the Christian life, and strip away the gimmicks off ‘em, and say: What did the good Lord intend these for?

So far we’ve looked at discipleship, with the Great Commission; and prayer, with the Lord’s Prayer. 

So continuing that, today we’re going to be looking at the Lord’s Supper, the way the good Lord intended. 

But today I’m gonna throw you a bit of a curve ball. You know, we talked about discipleship, and the Great Commission says, Go and gather disciples from the nations. We talked about prayer, and the Lord’s Prayer is the prayer Jesus taught us. He actually said, Pray this way.

But today we’re going to talk about the Lord’s Supper from … Ecclesiastes? Our text is Ecclesiastes 9:7-8.

And so somebody’s going to say, Wait, can we talk about the Lord’s Supper from the Old Testament? Isn’t that sort of a New Testament thing?

Beloved, we can talk about any New Testament thing from the Old Testament, and vice versa. God made the Bible work like that. The Old and New Testaments are like your two eyes. You need ‘em both to see Christ and His Gospel clearly. They support one another, they rely on each other.

So let’s listen to this passage. Raise your hand when you hear the Lord’s Supper. Again, Ecclesiastes 9:7-8:

Go, eat your bread with pleasure, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart, for God has already accepted your works. Let your clothes be white all the time, and never let oil be lacking on your head.

Hear that? Bread and wine. I told you the Lord’s Supper was in there. 

And yes—I know this passage is about more than the Lord’s Supper. But it’s also not about less. I’ll get to that more in a moment.

But I want to begin by stating an assumption about how to read the Bible, and especially the Old Testament. In one of His many arguments with the Pharisees, Jesus told them: You search the Scriptures—and He’s talking about the Old Testament, of course—because you think you have eternal life in them. They testify about me! (John 5:39)

So the Old Testament—according to Jesus—finds its ultimate meaning and fulfillment in Him; and by extension in His Church. 

I just love how simply  Augustine summed up this truth: The New Testament is in the Old concealed, and the Old is in the New revealed.

Finding Jesus in the Old Testament isn’t a game of Where’s Waldo? Christ and His Church are on every page—if you have eyes to see. 

Christ is the ark, preserving His people against the judgment of God while destroying the wicked—the same wrath that sweeps them away delivers us. 

He is the ladder Jacob saw between heaven and earth—the Mediator between God and Man.

His is the voice that called out to Moses from the burning bush.

He is the firstborn Son whose blood causes the judgment of God to pass over us.

The Exodus is a picture of baptism. God rescues His people from slavery to Satan, sin, and death by passing us through the Red Sea of Christ’s blood. Our sin and guilt are conquered and washed away, and are as dead to us as Pharaoh’s army washed up on the shore.

And we’re still not even halfway through Exodus yet. And I only gave you a smattering of what’s there. So as a minister of the Gospel, I must and shall preach Ecclesiastes through Christ. 

Ecclesiastes—like the rest of the Old Testament—is a seed that blossoms and matures with the coming of Christ. We are looking at the fruit tree as it has grown and is bearing fruit. To treat it like it’s still just a seed would be quite foolish, indeed. 

One other note before we pluck the fruit from this text and make a feast of it. Beginning the Sunday after Easter, David Mills and I will be relaunching the classes focused on helping our men who preside over the Lord’s Table. We will be contacting some of you soon to get our first cohort together. 

But as for today our road to Christ—which will lead us to Him; to His body which is for us; and to His blood poured out for the forgiveness of our sins—begins at Ecclesiastes 9:7: Go, eat your bread with pleasure, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart.

Beloved, when you come to the Lord’s Table—do ye come with a cheerful heart? 

I’m afraid that when it comes to the Lord’s Supper, we have been discipled away from eating our bread with pleasure, and drinking our wine with a cheerful heart. 

So today—listen, y’all—I want to shift us into a healthier, more robust, and most importantly, more biblical way of framing the Lord’s Supper. 

Yes, Jesus said: Do this in remembrance of me (1 Corinthians 11:24-25); but the Lord’s Supper is more than a memory. 

And, yes—we are told that as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:26). But the Lord’s Supper is not a funeral.

And yes, we are instructed to: Let a person examine himself; in this way let him eat the bread and drink from the cup (1 Corinthians 11:28). But the Lord’s Supper is not a time for morbid introspection. It is a time to fix the eyes of our faith on Christ. You should know nothing else when you come to the table but Christ, and Him crucified. 

Christ is truly giving Himself to us, and we are bringing ourselves along with our very real sins and sorrows, to Him—to receive true comfort and true forgiveness from His hand. This is why He says: This is my body, which is for you (1 Corinthians 11:24). He is giving Himself to us as often as we eat and drink. He is for us.

So the big paradigm shift I want us all to experience, is that we understand the Lord’s Supper similar to how we do baptism. And that is, as a means of grace.

When theologians talk about a means of grace, they mean that it’s a delivery system through which God pours out actual grace on needy sinners. 

So with baptism, we understand that God is imparting real grace to us—true forgiveness, true reconciliation, true comfort and assurance. 

God has attached a real promise of forgiveness and new life to this physical element of water, and we receive that promise through faith.

We need to see the Lord’s Supper in a similar way. Christ has attached a promise to the bread and the wine, see. This is my body, which is for you. This is my blood of the new testament, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. 

So Christ has placed His promise of His presence and forgiveness in the bread and the wine. He tells us: my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink (John 6:55). That means the bread and the cup are actually giving nourishment and life to our souls.

So when we receive the Lord’s Supper in faith—God is actually doing something in us, and to us, and for us as we eat and drink. Christ is truly present in the bread and the wine. The Holy Spirit is working sanctification in us through it. 

Just like our earthly food nourishes our bodies, the Lord’s Supper produces growth in our souls. It changes us from the inside. It gives us fortitude, it grants perseverance. It erodes our reliance on ourselves and our own works, and points us to Christ’s finished work for us.

It’s not just a memorial. Christ is alive, and present with us as we eat and drink. And it’s more than a memory. Jesus is actually actively working in us as we receive the bread and wine as His body and blood, through faith. 

How do I know all this? Because the Bible tells me so.

I want us to take a few minutes and look at three crucial aspects of how grace gets from heaven to earth in the Lord’s Supper.

First, we’ll be looking at the nature of the Lord’s Supper as fellowship or communion with Christ.

And second and third, we’ll be looking at the role of the Holy Spirit in all this. How the Holy Spirit imparts blessings to us; and how prayer is the vehicle through which the Spirit does His work of giving blessings.

We’ll finish up by seeing why all this should lead us to eat the bread with joy, and drink the wine with cheerful hearts. And how the Lord’s Supper keeps our garments white and anoints us with the oil of joy.

Communion with a Living Christ

So first—and this is so crucial to understand—the Lord’s Supper is communion with Christ. We call it communion for a reason. 

Now, this communion has both vertical and horizontal dimensions. It is cruciform—in other words, it’s cross-shaped. But the priority is the vertical aspect, of the believing soul communing with her Lord. 1 Corinthians 10:16 is going to bear this out:

The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a communion of the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a communion of the body of Christ?

The CSB translates this word communion as a sharing in the blood and body of Christ. The ESV calls it a participation in the blood and the body of Christ. 

Now, we share in it together—we’re communing as a body—so there are horizontal implications, and Paul deals with those in the next chapter. 

But the communion we’re having with Christ is prior to our fellowship with one another; it comes first. 

Without our common share in the body and blood of Christ, there’s nothing sanctifying or redemptive in our fellowship with one another. For Christ is our peace; He makes us one (Ephesians 2:14). 

If we’re not communing in and with the body and blood of Christ, we’re just a bunch of weirdos eating crackers and grape juice.

The big idea isn’t that we’re communing together, but together communing with Christ. We’re coming into a living, personal contact with Christ, with His blood and His body, given to us in the wine and the bread. 

We are communing with the living Christ. There’s a true fellowship with Him, where He is feeding us His blood, which has been poured out for the forgiveness of our sins. We come to His table, and He is feeding us His body—that perfectly righteous body that has fulfilled the Law and all righteousness for us. 

It’s in the eating and drinking itself, from His hand, that we are able to remember Him. 

I love that story in Luke 24, how the risen Christ met two of His disciples on the road to Emmaus. But, it says, their eyes were kept from recognizing him (v16). I mean, He has a whole Bible study with them on the road!

But you know when they finally see who He is? When they all get to the house and sit down for dinner. It says: he took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and began giving it to them. Suddenly their eyes were opened, and they recognized him (vv30-31). 

He was with them the whole time, but they didn’t see Him, they didn’t know He was with them until He broke the bread and gave it to them. 

The Lord’s Supper works a lot like that for us. Christ is often hidden from us—we don’t see Him, aren’t aware of Him, we don’t remember Him—but He has promised His people that we will always find Him in the bread and the cup. We will always be able to fellowship with Him at His table. When we come to the table in faith, by grace we are able to remember Him.

Herman Bavinck once wrote that Christ not only gave Himself for His own; but also gives Himself to His own. 

This is a top-down, from-the-nail-pierced hand of Christ Himself gift to us. And it has His promised attached to it. John 6:56, Jesus says: The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in him. 

There’s a true fellowship, a true giving, Christ truly sharing Himself with us in the bread and the cup. It’s like He’s sitting across the table from us and saying: You are forgiven, and that forgiveness is as real as the blood I poured out for you on the Cross. I am with you, and My presence with you is as real as my body that was given for you. You are in Me, and I am in you. And just as you have a share in My body and blood, you have a share in My resurrection. This promise is as solid and sure as My own resurrected body. Yes, it’s all as real as the bread you’re chewing on, and the wine you’re drinking.

The bread and wine have Christ’s promise attached to them: This is my body … This is my blood of the new testament, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins (Matthew 26:26-28). And that promise is founded on an objective event that actually happened, outside of us: Christ came for you, He lived for you, He died for you, He lives again for you. 

So when we receive the bread and the cup with the open hands of faith—our souls, our spirits, are being nourished by the body and blood of Christ. He’s feeding us assurance of forgiveness, confidence in our standing before God. He’s confirming our faith, shoring it up, fortifying it against the struggles of living in a fallen body in a fallen world. 

So Paul says that: as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:26). That means first, we ought to eat it often, because it nourishes your soul and surely as regular meals nourish your body. And second, that it proclaims the Lord’s death to us—it proclaims that our sins are forgiven, we stand justified before God. And third, that we are to do this until He comes. And so we remember that He is coming back for us. This meal not only feeds our faith, it exercises our hope.

The Spirit & Prayer in the Supper

But how does this grace—which is with Christ in heaven—reach us through the bread and the cup, on earth? That’s what we’re going to take up now.

Sometimes you find answers where you’re not expecting to find them. Just like we found the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper in Ecclesiastes; we’re going to find the path grace to takes from heaven to earth in Ephesians.

Ephesians 1:3. You know, we often gloss over the greetings when we’re reading these New Testament letters. Don’t do that! Some of the meatiest theology in the Bible is found in the greetings of the Apostles. Listen here:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Why do we bless Him—that is, why do we gratefully lift up our hearts and our songs and our prayers and our good works to God the Father? 

Because He has blessed us. We love Him because He has first loved us. We bless Him because He has blessed us first. We are grateful to Him because he has been gracious to us.

How has He blessed us? He has blessed us in Christ. Our faith unites us to Christ. It grabs hold of Him with one hand, and grabs hold of you with the other. It joins us to Christ and draws us into Him. Now your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). You have been covered in Christ’s obedience in place of the filthy garments of your disobedience. His seamless garment of righteousness, in place of your tattered rags of sin. His holy robe to cover your shame. These are all yours in Christ. 

But wait—there’s more! In Christ we are blessed with every spiritual blessing. Here’s something you really, really, really need to understand. When the Bible talks about something being spiritual, it doesn’t mean interior or inside us—our emotions and affections. When the Bible says something is spiritual, it’s telling you where it comes from. Its source is in the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit applies all the blessings and benefits Christ has won for us. Election. Effectual calling—that is, how God opens your heart to receive the Gospel. Justification—the grace in which you stand. Sanctification—the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit to make you more holy, more like Christ. Glorification—your sure hope of a future bodily resurrection, when Christ returns and makes all things new.

All of these blessings come to you—look at this—From the Father; in the Son; by the Holy Spirit. All Three Persons of the Trinity work together to bring these blessings from heaven down to earth! 

They originate from the Father—every good and perfect gift is from Him, James 1:17; they are realized in the Son; and they are given to us by the Holy Spirit.

And these blessings are in the heavenly places. But here’s what you need to understand. These blessings are not all stored up in heaven for us to enjoy when we get there. Again, this is talking about where they come from. The grace of the Triune God comes down out of heaven above to the earth below—just like when God rained down manna on the Israelites in the wilderness, to feed them. 

And what did Jesus say? I am the Bread of Life. The one who comes to me will never be hungry, and the one who believes in me will never be thirsty (John 6:35). 

Now, let’s apply that to the Lord’s Supper. The grace comes from heaven to earth by the Holy Spirit. We commune with Christ in, with, and through the Spirit. The Spirit of Christ in us is feeding us, nourishing us, as we eat the bread and drink the cup. 

The Hoy Spirit “closes the gap” between heaven and earth—He completes the circuit, as it were. He brings the blessings of Christ to the people of Christ, through ordinary bread and wine. In John 16:14, Jesus promised us that the Holy Spirit will take from what is mine and declare it to you. In the Lord’s Supper, the Spirit declares to us that our sins are forgiven; that we are God’s children in Christ—beloved sons and daughters, with whom the Father is well-pleased.

Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup, the Holy Spirit is working in us, inviting us to taste and see that the Lord is good; and reminding us: blessed is the man that trusteth in him (Psalm 34:8).

Praise God from whom all blessings flow! Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—one God, world without end. Amen!

Now—we’ve been talking about the Lord’s Supper as a means of grace. These are the delivery systems, remember—the channels through which God pours out grace from heaven on needy sinners here on earth.

The other means of grace—the places where God has promised that if we seek Him, we’ll find Him—are, of course, baptism, where Christ embraces us in the water, and the Holy Spirit seals us to Him. 

And then there’s the Word of God—especially when it is preached: So then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God (Romans 10:17). When the Gospel is preached, it actually has the power to create faith in an unbelieving heart.

And the other means of grace is prayer. We pray in the Holy Spirit—our intercessor on earth. And we pray through Christ—our Man in heaven—to the Father. 

So I want to talk about the role prayer plays in the Lord’s Supper. Because we do pray over the bread and wine, just like Christ did when He gave us the Lord’s Supper. 

Again—1 Corinthians 10:16, we heard it earlier; it talks about the cup of blessing that we bless. We bless the Lord’s Supper, just like we say a blessing over any other meals—like Sunday dinner, or Thanksgiving dinner.

Prayer attends the Lord’s Supper. It’s a means of grace that opens up a conduit for God to pour our still more grace on us—grace upon grace, as it were.

And Ephesians 3:16ff can provide us with a model for how we might pray over the bread and the cup—either as the one who’s blessing them, or as a pray we say inside ourselves as we receive them.

Listen to what it says: I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he—He is God the Father—would strengthen you with power.

Remember that your heavenly Father is not stingy or a cheapskate—He gives according to the riches of His glory. He gave and gives His only-begotten Son to you. Pray that He would strengthen you with His power, as you eat the bread and drink the cup.

And look: He gives this power to us, to sustain us and strengthen us and fortify our faith through his Spirit in your inner self. See that? Once again, we see that the grace of God comes from heaven to earth through the Holy Spirit. 

And this strength imparted through the bread and wine in our inner self. That is—God’s Spirit is ministering to your spirit. Therefore we are not discouraged. But even if our outer self is wasting away, yet our inner self is being renewed day by day (2 Corinthians 4:16). The Lord’s Supper is one of the regular means God uses to renew the inner man. The Spirit strengthens our feeble faith. He stirs up hope and joy in us. He reminds us that we are chosen and beloved of God, and so lifts up our heads.

And you pray all this so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. You notice how we’re calling upon all three Persons of the Godhead again? So yes—Christ already dwells in our hearts by faith. What this means is that the Spirit would give us a constant sense of His abiding presence with us—as we sing in the old hymn. 

We remember Christ as we eat the bread and drink the cup; but it’s more than a memory. It’s a real, living fellowship with our Savior. Our faith in Christ transforms ordinary bread and wine into communion with Him.

And the outcome is that we would be rooted and grounded in love. In Christ, God [the Father’s] love [is] poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (Romans 5:5). The bread and the wine, the body and blood of Christ, bear witness to the Father’s perfect love for us. 

And His love in us bursts the old wineskins of our hearts. It casts out our fears—fear of God’s wrath, fear of condemnation, fear of not being impressive enough. And His love gushes out of us in joyful worship and good works.

Why we can eat our bread with pleasure and drink

And that brings us back to Ecclesiastes. It says: Go, eat your bread with pleasure, and drink your wine with a cheerful heart. Imagine Christ, your crucified and risen Lord saying those words to you, as He hands you bread and wine. 

And you say: Why, my Lord? How can I eat and drink this with a cheerful heart, which cost You everything? And He says—listen to the end of the verse: for God has already accepted your works. There is nothing left for you to do to satisfy God. Christ has done it for you. O Lord, you will ordain peace for us, for you have indeed done for us all our works (Isaiah 26:12).

You can offer your body to Him—and that includes obviously your worship and your good works—as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God. Your works—as incomplete and imperfect as they will always be—are holy and acceptable to God, because Christ has made you holy and acceptable to God. The Lord’s Supper proclaims that to you every time you partake in it. Christ has redeemed you from Satan, sin, and death. Now we are we are able to serve [the Lord] without fear, in holiness and righteousness before him all our days (Luke 1:74-75).

One last thing, and then the lesson is yours—I hope this has worked up a mighty appetite in you—[Slide 12] now you can let your clothes be white all the time. For the bread and wine proclaim to Christ’s death to us, which forgives all our sins. Come to the table confessing your sins, because he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). He will keep your garments white. And never let oil be lacking on your head. Every Lord’s Day, Christ prepares a table for you in the presence of your enemies—the Devil, a fallen world, and your sinful flesh. And he anoints your head with oil. He says to Satan, the world, and your flesh: This one is mine. You can’t have her. See, I have anointed her for my service. Sealed her by my Holy Spirit. And I feed her with myself—my own body and blood.

Today if you’re here, and you haven’t put on your white garment—the seamless robe of Christ’s righteousness—today is the day of salvation. He will receive you in the water of baptism, just as He will give Himself to you in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper. He will anoint you with the oil of joy and a clean conscience by pouring out the Holy Spirit on you. Please come now as we stand and sing.