Reformed Baptist Church in O'Fallon, Missouri
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Christ’s Love and Life

Sermon Transcript

The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.

Opening: Remembering the Lord

We’re going to take the Lord’s Supper here shortly, and I wanted to share some scriptures with you regarding the Lord’s Supper. First Corinthians chapter 11, we’ll begin there.

First Corinthians 11 starting in verse 23. Paul says, for I received from the Lord that which I delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which he was betrayed took bread. And when he had given thanks, he broke it, by the way I’m reading the New King James which will read differently than some of yours, he broke it and said, take eat, this is my body which is broken for you, do this in remembrance of me. In the same manner he also took the cup after the supper saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood, this do as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till he comes.“ So when we take the Lord’s Supper, or as it’s called communion, twice in this passage Paul says that Jesus told him that when we do this, we need to do this in remembrance of him. Now you probably don’t recall, but when we took communion about a month ago, we also reflected on this idea of remembering. And when we remember the Lord, we’re really remembering a whole bunch of things. And I wanted to focus at that time on remembering that Jesus came, Jesus died for us because of the love of the Father. So as we remember Jesus, we can’t just remember Jesus in isolation from the Father, nor really in isolation from the Holy Spirit. So we’ve been talking, focusing on God’s love. But today I wanted to remember Jesus Himself a little more as we take the Lord’s Supper. Now when we think about remembering, we generally associate it with the past, right? You think of looking backward and remembering something in the past. But the actual idea of remembering not only applies to the past, the word remember also simply means to call something to mind. Call it to mind. Like Hannah needed to remember to tell me about Ben, but what she wanted to tell me about Ben wasn’t, it wasn’t regarding the past, it was actually regarding the future, but she had to remember, right? So it means to call something to mind. So what we are doing here, what we are told to do by the Lord is when you take the Lord’s Supper, call me to mind. Think about me. Reflect on me is what he’s saying. And so as we remember the Lord, I want us to remember not only the past, but also the present and the future. But let’s remember for a moment the past.

And let us remember that Jesus was sacrificed for us because of his great love for us.

His Love in the Past

Look at Galatians chapter 2 for a moment. Paul says in Galatians 2.20, he says, I have been crucified with Christ. It is no, no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. Now we’re going to come back to this verse in a moment. But notice he says that Jesus loved him past tense, and what was the evidence of that love? That he gave himself for me. Remember the words of Jesus in John 15 where he said, there’s no greater love than that a man will lay down his life for his friends. And then Jesus said to the apostles, you are my friends. And of course this was on the eve of his death. So he demonstrated his love through his sacrificial offering up or giving up of his life. We’ll come back to this text in a moment but look at Ephesians chapter 5. Ephesians 5 once says, therefore be imitators of God as dear children and walk in love as Christ also has loved us, and how did he demonstrate that, and given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling aroma. Look at 1 John chapter 3. In 1 John 3, John, the focus of 1 John is to tell us the marks of a real Christian.

And of course, one of those marks is love. And he says, we know that we have passed from death to life because we love the brethren.

He who does not love his brother abides in death. Whoever hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. By this we know love. Now some versions say by this we know the love of God. But if you’re going to insert something there, you would insert the love of Christ. Because it says by this we know love or the love of Christ. How do we know? How do we know? Because He laid down- His life for us. This is how we know. As we think of the love of Jesus, which we are commemorating, we are remembering the love of Jesus as we partake of the Lord’s Supper because the elements represent his body and his blood, his broken body and his poured out blood, which means we remember not just a martyr’s death, but we remember a sacrificial death, an atoning death, a death in the place of others, a substitutionary death for our sins. And this death for our sins was not only a token of His love, but it was the token of His love. Remember what Jesus said, no greater love, no greater love. And this is really what Paul is getting at in Romans 5, which we looked that last week a little bit, if you want to turn there, when he’s talking about the love of God. And, you know, when you talk about the love of God, it’s like, are we talking about the love of God or are we talking about the love of Jesus? And sometimes it’s not clear in the text which, because they just start to merge together, because both the Father and the Son, as well as the Spirit, love, have loved and do love us. So he’s So he’s talking about in Romans 5, he’s talking about God’s love being poured in our hearts, he says in verse 5, Now hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love toward us, and that while we are sinners, Christ died for us. So this word demonstrate means to make conspicuous. In other words, the point of Paul’s argument here is, you know, if Jesus died for good people, you might say, yeah, that’s love. If he died for righteous people or just people, you might say that’s love. But if he died for those who were ungodly, if he died for those who were his enemies, how much more conspicuous is his love? In dying for those who were ungrateful and unworthy. And that of course was you and I before we knew him. And so Jesus, as we look back, as we remember what Jesus did, Jesus demonstrated his love for us through his atoning death. But we also need to remember the present. The present. Because as you read through the New Testament and you see these references to love of Christ, they’re usually in the past tense. Because the reason being that it was his death which was the ultimate manifestation, the ultimate token, the ultimate proof of his love. If anything proved that Jesus loves you, It’s that he died for you. There is no greater proof. What’s the greater proof? There’s no greater proof. And that happened in time in the past. That’s why so often in Scripture it refers to Christ loving us and the He loved in the past. The problem is He didn’t just love us in the past. It’s not as if, well, He loved me then, but He doesn’t now. But we need to be careful with these texts because we can almost read them that way. Well, he loved us, but yes, he did love us, but he loves us now. He loves us now. So when we remember the Lord in the Supper, we remember not only what he did in the past by demonstrating his love for us, we remember that also he loves us now, and that now we remember that Jesus is our life. He is our life. Now, you know, as you read your Bible, and as you hopefully read other books on the Bible and learn some Bible doctrine and things, you’ll come up with a bunch of big words, you know, justification and sanctification and all these words. And they’re important to understand. But the thing you must remember Every blessing that we experience in the present is because of Jesus Christ.

Because He has procured for us the favor of God and we now stand in grace. It says here in Romans 5, we stand in grace and it’s because of the work of Jesus Christ in the past. But what He did in the past isn’t just in the past. You tracking with me? What he did in the past means there is a present reality for the Christian.. So we remember not only what Jesus did, we remember what Jesus is doing.

We remember that Jesus not only loved us in the past, he loves us now, And now He is our life. We are called to live in Him and live through Him and live with Him.

This is what Paul was saying in Galatians 2. Go back to it. I said we’d go back to it. Galatians 2 where Paul says, in 20, I have been crucified with Christ.

That’s past tense, right? And it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me and the life which I now live, this is present tense, in the flash, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Well, that’s past tense. So what Jesus did in the past is not just in the past. What Jesus did in the past shapes the present reality for the Christian. Because Jesus loved me in the past, he loves me now. Because Jesus died for me in the past, I can live in him, and he lives in me now, in the present, in the present. So when we remember Jesus at the supper, we not only remember his atoning sacrifice, his death, we remember his resurrection life. Amen.

His Resurrection Life in Us

Because if the gospel were only Jesus died for you, then as Paul said, we’d be of all men, [audio unclear] He not only died for us, since Jesus rose from the dead. Jesus is alive. He really is. And as Christians, we ought to know this because He is in our hearts through His Spirit. If we have the Spirit of the Holy Spirit of us, we have the Spirit of Jesus Christ in us. The Spirit of Jesus dwells in His church and in His people. This is the resurrected Christ dwelling in the Christian. You should be all doing your dance party now. Now you should be doing your dance party. Jesus is the author and finisher of our faith. He is both the goal and the means. The Word of God says that Jesus is our wisdom, He is our redemption, He is our sanctification, He is our life. That’s what Jesus is. Is anybody hearing me? So when we remember we need to remember not just what Jesus did through his death, we need to remember that Jesus isn’t in the grave, that Jesus is now alive. We’re celebrating not only as a toning death, we are remembering that he has risen from the grave, he is alive now and he dwells in my heart. So why then be defeated? So why then be downcast? So why then be morose? So why then failure? So why bondage to sin if Jesus is alive? It’s because as Paul said here, he says, I live, you’re looking at 220, he says Christ lives in me. This is a fact. If you are a Christian, if you are a Christian, Jesus Christ is in you through His Holy Spirit. The resurrected Jesus is in you. Say amen. The Holy Spirit apart from faith is not the equation for power and success in the Christian life. You have to believe. I live by faith in the Son of God the Son of God is in me but I still have to live by faith in the Son of God. This is why I’ve been talking so much lately on faith. As I said recently, everything that Jesus accomplished for us, everything he did is true, it’s true. You don’t… faith doesn’t make something true. Faith recognizes what is true and faith appropriates what is already true. And the Word of God says that Jesus Christ is our wisdom. Jesus Christ is our power. Jesus Christ is our sanctification. The Word of God says this so therefore it is true. But I have to live by faith in the Son of God or it’s not true to me. It’s not true in my experience. If I do not exercise faith in the Son of God. So Jesus is alive and he’s living in his people. But his people often don’t even realize it. And many Christians live at a distance from Jesus. They believe in Jesus, believe and come to church and worship Jesus, but it’s a distant Jesus. It’s a far-off Jesus. And they have not learned that the Christian life is a life of grace through faith. Just like our initial justification for God, our initial salvation, if you will, Jesus instituted this Supper. I believe because we, by nature, [audio unclear] And so, you know, we drift. Even the most mature Christian, we drift. [audio unclear] It must be rooted in Jesus Christ. And especially when it comes to service or it comes to evangelism or things of that nature all of this must we must see that It is an outworking of the life of Jesus Christ in us The world doesn’t need our religion. The world doesn’t need our good works. The world needs Jesus. They need Jesus. And a humanitarian organization could have gone to the neighbors and done all the same work that we did.

If we did it truly, as Christians, we did it in the spirit of Christ.

And as Paul said, we are a savor of life or a savor of death. But in either case, they sensed Jesus. There was an aroma about what we did, which was the aroma of Jesus. That’s what Paul is saying. People sense Jesus in us. And this should be our daily testimony, really. When you’re at work, people should know you are different, You should know you are different because they can sense Jesus because he is your life. He is dwelling in you and you are dwelling in him. And so you’re different. I mean, I hope people have said to you something different about you. I hope they’ve said that to you because when you walk with Jesus, there is a fragrance about you. So Paul says that people can sense this person is different. And this is why you can meet somebody, a total stranger, and you can sense they’re a Christian. Have you had that experience? That’s a Christian. Because you sense Christ in them because you know Christ. So as we remember here, the Lord, we need to remember not only what he did in the past,

His Present Work and Our Walk

we need to remember that now what he is doing in the present and our present relationship to him. This is the most important thing. This is it. You know, Tozer, of course, you know I’m a Tozer fan, right? He makes the point that a lot of the problems in the church, and he means broadly, the American church, can be rooted in a faulty view of God. And I agree with that. But I think it’s also fair to say that many of the problems, both in our personal lives and in the church’s life, are rooted in the fact that we’re not keeping Jesus first. That there’s a failure of faith to truly appropriate what we have in Jesus Christ.

In other words, we’re not walking as closely with Jesus as we could. I won’t even say as we ought, because that’s, ought is a guilt word, right? You don’t want to feel guilty. As you could. As you could. And so Jesus has all the hidden treasures of wisdom and knowledge in Him, the Word of God says. Well, let’s read one passage. Go to Colossians, I love this passage. You should meditate on this passage. Psalm 1. We’ll start in verse 9. Paul says, For this reason we also, since the day that we heard of it, meaning or heard it in your faith, do not cease to pray for you, and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing him, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God, strengthened with all might according to his glorious power for all patience and long suffering with joy.“ Boy, that’s important. With joy. Some of us can persevere, but man, we persevere with a bad attitude. Lot of murmuring, lot of grumbling. With joy. ”…giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in the light. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us or transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of His love, in whom we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins. So we’re now in the kingdom of His Son. We’re not in the kingdom of darkness. But this is the passage I just love to meditate on in verse 15, He, the Son, Jesus, He’s the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible. Whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers, all things were created through Him and notice, what were they created for? For Him. There’s your purpose-driven life, folks. You were created for Jesus. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. They’re held together. And He is the head of the body of the church, who’s the beginning, the firstborn from the that in all things he may have the preeminence. For the fullness was pleased to dwell in him. The entire Godhead was pleased to dwell in the Son when he was on the earth. Meditate on this: Jesus is the most important thing in the Christian life. I don’t know what does. Preeminence in all things. One more passage. Philippians. Philippians 1. Paul is, you know, possibly going to be like, you know, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Because then I go get to be with Jesus. So he was torn between staying and leaving. He says, verse 19, for I know that this will turn out for my deliverance through your prayer and the supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ According to my earnest expectation and hope that in nothing I will be ashamed But with all boldness as always so now also Christ will be magnified in my body whether by life or by death. For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. But if I live on in the flesh, this will mean fruit from my labor, yet what I shall choose, I cannot tell. For I am hard pressed between the two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better. It’s a lot better to go and be with Jesus than to hang out with you guys. That’s what he’s saying. It’s like, I love you guys, but if I really had my choice, I’d rather go and be with Jesus. But since I’m here, I’m going to live with Jesus. It wasn’t, I want to go be with Jesus or stay and not be with Jesus. Right? Those aren’t the options. It’s either we live with Jesus here, amidst all the sin and distractions and other things, or we live with Jesus there in glory. But we live with Jesus either way, is what he’s saying. Nevertheless to remain in the flesh, the more needful for you know, the Lord was probably telling him he’s going to stay for their benefit. But he lived with Jesus and he walked with Jesus. And in chapter 3 he says this about Jesus. Verse 7, what things were gain to me, these I have counted loss for Christ. Yet indeed I also count all things lost for the excellence of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having my own righteousness, which is from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith, that I may know him, of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings being conformed to his death. Knowing Jesus was the most important thing for Paul. And when you look at Paul’s life and all that he endured and all that he accomplished And for the Lord, it wasn’t just for the Lord. It was in the Lord and through the Lord. You’re hearing what I’m saying?. The reason he had a profound impact was because of Christ in him, Christ being his life. When we talk about various things in the Christian life, it’s very easy to turn things like prayer and worship and service and evangelism into a new form of works of legalism. But what they ought to be is an outflow of the reality of Jesus in my life. When I got saved, I was trained how to evangelize, but nobody had to challenge me to do it.

I wanted to tell people about Jesus. I wanted to. And I think that as the closer we walk with the Lord, the more His heart beats in our chest, the more we get a passion for the lost, the more we have a passion for service, the more that we have a passion for prayer and worship. These things are a product of our relationship with Jesus Christ. They are really the fruit of His life in us. The only person that can live the Christian life is Jesus. I wanted to talk about the future, but we’ll do that some other time. I’m going to say one more word, before we take the Lord’s Supper. You know, I’ve been thinking about sin, and I was actually reading something by Tozer, And although he’s one of my heroes, I actually disagreed with something he said. And there’s a very subtle thing that goes on. And even though we say we believe in the atoning death of Jesus and we say we believe in grace, our nature is so bent on works. And it’s extremely subtle. And even though we might claim it isn’t so, it is so. the evidence that it is so is this distance between us and God. That’s the evidence because grace means the veil has been torn open and we’ve been invited in. So why, if the veil is open and we’re invited in, why are we in the outer court? That’s the question. The gospel is the veil is open, you’re invited in. Okay, then why do we read about sin in the New Testament? If our sin is taken care of, then why do we see passages that tell us not to sin? Do you know why? Well, what we tend to do is we tend to think it’s because, oh, well, if I sin, then I have to stay on the outer court. then I have to stay on the outer court. But that’s not true. That’s not true at all. Your sin, whether you committed it this morning when you kicked the dog, or you yelled at your kid on the way to church, or cursed at your spouse, or did whatever you did, or whether it’s your sin tomorrow morning, your sins have been reckoned privileged with. every last one of them. And if you don’t believe that, you’re not believing the Gospel. Okay? Well, I’m not answering the question, why then does the Bible ever talk about sin? If our sins are taken care of, then why ever mention sin? Because sin destroys our fellowship with Christ on our end. Not his end. Our end. We, if we’re not walking as we ought, will feel guilty or feel this distance between us and Christ. And we think it’s Him. We think He’s saying, stay in the outer court until you clean up your act. And actually, Tozer made a statement in one of his books implying that, well, if you want to be full of the Holy Spirit, you have to take care of all your sin first. Now, I want you to think about that. Does anybody who’s not full of the Holy Spirit, are they able to take care of their sin? No, because the Holy Spirit empowers me to get victory over my sin. The gospel of grace, the invitation of grace, is that everything is given to us that we need, and we just appropriate it by faith. We don’t appropriate it by worthiness. We don’t appropriate it by works. We don’t appropriate it by what we do in the sense of anything meritorious with God. These elements are trying, Jesus is trying to teach us. He wants us to remember this. We must constantly remember this. that the way is open and our distance is not because of Him, it’s because of us. And the reason we need to deal with sin in our lives is not so He will love us, not so He will accept us, it’s so that we will have a moral affinity with Him, that we’ll be like Him, we’ll understand Him, Well, enjoy Him. Sin destroys all that. Not on His end, on our end. It’s us drawing back. It is not God pushing us away. So whenever you hear me at any time in the future talk about an issue of sin, for the Christian it’s not a legal question. It’s that we’re being called to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. We are keep my commandments. It’s not a legalistic judicial thing. You can’t walk in harmony with someone when you’re in disagreement with them. Your sin, and we all sin, is not a barrier between you and God from God’s end. You have been reconciled to him. Do you understand? You have been reconciled. The sin question from a judicial point of view is taken care of once and for all. And this supper is a celebration of that. It is reminding us of that because we drift, we go into the temple and those rare moments where it may be in corporate worship, or a rare moment when we’re in the Word and prayer and we’re truly fellowship with the Lord Jesus and there’s a genuine communion of spirit with spirit and then we go about our week and we drift back out of the inner court. And they go, I need to get back to that and then we think we need to work, we gotta work. For by grace you are saved even now, through faith. It is not a works. Amen.

Closing Prayer

So let’s stand, have the worship team up, we’re going to take the Lord’s Supper and as we do so, we take it in faith, we take it celebrating what Jesus has done not only in the past but we’re celebrating our current communion. This is why we call it communion. Our current communion with Jesus made possible in the present by what he did in the past.

Amen.

Lord Jesus, you are the glorious one. You are the famous one. We thank you not only for what you did, we thank you that now, this very moment, you are inviting each one of us to your table. You are inviting us into communion with you. And I pray, Lord, for every one of us to have a deeper, deeper understanding of grace and a much deeper, much deeper understanding of grace and a much deeper walk with you because of grace. We love you Lord and we thank you for what you have done and for who you are in our lives.

Amen.