It is a very good thing to preach and teach regularly about Christian essentials such as the Lord’s Supper. Many preachers these days do not like to preach on, e.g., the Lord’s return, the Lord’s Supper, Baptism, and other essentials because, although Christians agree on the basics, they argue much about the nonessentials, and such preachers would like to avoid such arguments. But, if preachers do this, the only people who end up teaching about such things are the extremists and crazy people who preach nonessentials as if they were essentials. So we need to preach about Christian essentials often, focusing on the parts on which all Protestant Christians should agree.

Accordingly, let’s talk about the Lord’s Supper.

There is a difference between the Lord’s Supper and the Last Supper. The Last Supper was the last meal that Jesus ate with his disciples before his death. But the Lord’s Supper is the sacrament which the Lord Jesus himself instituted at the Last Supper.

We can see that it is the Lord Jesus himself who instituted the sacrament of Lord’s Supper in the command that he gave. Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me”. In the Greek, the verb tense used shows that the statement does not mean “Do this one time in remembrance of me” but rather “Do this and keep on doing it in remembrance of me.”

But what is a sacrament? For Protestants, a sacrament is a promise of Christ that he binds to a physical object such that the way that we receive the promise is by receiving that object in faith.

Because Jesus has bound his promise to these things, it means that we cannot receive the promise in our hearts and disregard the Lord’s Supper. We cannot discard the bread and cup and just believe we are receiving the promise of Christ spiritually when we believe in our heart.

It is the same with Baptism. Through baptism, we enter into the Lord’s death, are forgiven of our sins, receive the Holy Spirit, and are marked to be resurrected bodily to eternal life by Christ on the Last Day. These are the promises which Christ has bound to the waters of baptism. The way that we receive those promises are to “believe and be baptized” (Mark 16:16).

Many Protestants these days wrongly think of baptism not as a sacrament but as a public confirmation of something that has already happened inside our hearts. And they also wrongly believe that the way that we access the promises of Christ is by praying the Sinner’s Prayer. So they wrongly turn the Sinner’s Prayer into a sacrament: They wrongly bind the promises of salvation to that prayer.

Beware of people who do this. They sound very biblical and spiritual. But they are, in fact, setting aside the command of the Lord Jesus Himself. They are replacing the Lord’s command with human thinking. They will affirm that baptism is good, but they think of it as a kind of optional public ceremony. For them, the Sinner’s Prayer prayed in faith is how we enter into God’s salvation.

If you try to reason with these people, they will often say something like, “But what if there is a soldier on the battlefield and he is about to die. He prays to God saying that he is a sinner and believes in Jesus and then immediately dies. But he didn’t get baptized. Are you saying that he was not saved? See, the important thing is the prayer, and baptism is optional.”

But neither the Lord nor anyone in scripture ever said anything like that. In fact, they always hold up baptism as the act of faith through which we enter into God’s salvation (cf. Acts 8:36). This is why throughout history the church has always made provision for emergency baptisms in emergency situations. The early church said that, in an emergency situation, anybody can baptize, and it can even be done without water if none is around.

Why is baptism so important? It is because salvation is a promise that the Lord makes not only to your soul, but to your whole body. The Lord is not only saving you on the inside, but also on the outside, so that we will be bodily resurrected by the Lord Jesus. Gnostic people who teach that we become spirits and go to live in heaven forever when we die have no need for baptism because they do not preach the bodily resurrection.

Martin Luther said, “If you see somebody trying to climb up into heaven”—i.e., by being so spiritual that everything happens in their hearts, not their bodies—”drag them back down to earth”, because the Lord’s will is to save us body and soul. He creates a new heavens and a new earth as the future home for our future bodies.

That is why sacraments are bound to physical things: because we are physical beings, and the Lord’s promises are for our whole being, not only our “hearts”.

We must avoid the mistake of many modern Protestants of disregarding the physical and locating the sacrament in their own hearts or actions rather than in the action of the Lord upon our whole being.

One common side effect of misunderstanding baptism is that some Christians wrongly feel the need to be re-baptized when they “become serious” about their faith. But baptism is not about our realization. It is about the promise of the Lord that he will keep us. If we “become serious” about our faith, that is not a sign that we need to get re-baptized. It is a sign that the Lord has been faithful to the promise he made to us at our baptism.

What makes baptism effective is not what you bring to the baptism, but what the Lord brings to the baptism. In baptism, the Lord marks you as his own. Our role is to accept that passively and to trust that, from that point on, he will fulfill the promises he made to us.

I had the least exciting baptism. I was nervous and I did not know what was going on. But in that baptism the Lord marked me and kept me and brought me to where I am today in my faith. I am thankful that my baptism was so humanly unspectacular because it serves as a constant reminder to me that my Christian life is a gift from him from start to finish. Baptism is not a public confession of seriousness. It is an act of simple trust that the Lord will do what He promises to do.

What we have talked about with regard to baptism applies equally to the Lord’s Supper, because they are both sacraments. But baptism is done one time, but the Lord’s Supper is done repeatedly. And baptism we receive individually, but the Lord’s Supper we receive together. Why the differences?

It is a vital question because the Lord does not make the promises he made on the night of the Last Supper available to us any other way than through the Lord’s Supper. We cannot receive those promises simply through “believing with our heart” alone. He bound those promises to the bread and cup.

But here is a big problem: If you ask the average Christian what the promises are that Jesus made at the Lord’s Supper, they will either not know, or they will guess wrong. That is absolutely tragic, because the Lord arranged that the two central promises he makes to us are to be received through the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They are not ideas we accept in our minds or hearts. They are body-and-soul acts of the Lord through which he ministers to our whole self. So if we don’t know the promise and we fail to partake of it through the sacrament the Lord ordained to give it to us, we fail to receive it. The Apostle Paul told the Corinthians that has dire consequences.

Sadly, the main conversation in many churches about the Lord’s Supper is not about the meaning but about how—and how often—to do the Lord’s Supper.

All of the evidence in scripture and Church history shows that the reason why early Christians gathered together was not primarily to hear a sermon, pray, or give an offering. It was to partake of the Lord’s Supper. When they gathered, they did these other things as well. But it was the Lord’s Supper that prompted the gathering of the whole group of believers in an area.

This changed in the fourth century, when the Christianization of the Roman empire resulted in pagan temples becoming church buildings, pagan priests becoming Christian priests, and pagan sacrifices re-shaping the purpose and understanding of the Lord’s Supper, which could then only be performed by a priest. Over time, the Lord’s Supper and the conditions for partaking of it became so exclusive that not many people were able to partake of it, and not very often.

The Protestant Reformers brought the bread and cup back to the people and back to a regular and central place in the worship service. But modern Christian leaders have begun to take it away again in fear that it would become less special if they did it too regularly. (Why do they never say this about the offering?).

Part of the reason they believe that the Lord’s Supper must be done only occasionally is because they teach the Lord’s Supper as a time for deep, personal, emotional, spiritual reflection that produces repentance and gratitude. But Jesus never indicated in the scripture that the Lord’s Supper should be a deep individual emotional exercise or that it should be for this purpose. At the Last Supper, Jesus did not ask the disciples to take time to reflect deeply on his death for them. Sacraments are not about our emotional experience. They are about Christ’s promises which he gives for our salvation and life. Our role is only to humbly receive what he gives us.

Here is the key point: Baptism is the individual one-time sacrament of salvation. We do it once because we are saved once. The Lord’s Supper is not a second or supplemental sacrament of salvation. The Lord’s Supper is the Lord’s inauguration of the new covenant promised in Jeremiah 31:31-34. The old covenant is the covenant that was given through Moses, which was broken by the Israelites, which led to God divorcing them but promising to reclaim them as his people through a new covenant. We read in Isaiah about the suffering servant who inaugurates the new covenant.

When the Lord became incarnate, he did not “come to die.” He came to proclaim the gospel, the new Israel with himself as the cornerstone, the new covenant with himself as the only shepherd, mediator, teacher, forgiver of sins, and defeater of death. He came to inaugurate the covenant on the night he was betrayed, and then to seal that covenant in His own blood so it would stand forever.

Note that in the Lord’s Supper he builds the New Israel on the foundation of the twelve apostles (cf. Luke 22:28-30, Revelation 21:14). When there is a new covenant there is a new people. But when the Lord makes a new thing, he doesn’t throw away the old thing. He transforms it. When he reconstitutes Israel, he doesn’t throw the old one away, he puts it to death through his word and his own death on the cross, and he raises it to new life in himself. His whole ministry is not him waiting around to die. It is him coming in person to call Israel to himself, to the new covenant he promised to them.

But ultimately he is rejected. All that remained were His closest disciples. He inaugurates the new covenant, conferring upon them a kingdom.

But he still had to be betrayed by even these disciples and he still had to die on the cross because that is always how God makes things new: He puts the old thing to death through his word, and then he raises it to new life in himself. When Jesus was resurrected, he went to the apostles and restored them, and, through the preaching of the apostles, he went in his word to the Israelites who had rejected him. Many received him, and they preached the gospel to the Gentiles, even to us.

To sum up:

• The Lord made the old covenant through Moses, but he made the new covenant with us directly
• When the Lord made the old covenant, he ate with Moses and the elders. In the new covenant, he eats the Lord’s Supper with us
• We receive the Lord’s promises of the new covenant through the bread and cup
• The Last Supper inaugurated the new covenant and now we live in the new covenant
• The Lord’s Supper is the meal at which he gathers us to host us and serve us. It is the sign that the new covenant and all of its terms have been inaugurated and will stand forever, even unto his return

To close, a story:

In the U.S., there was a woman who was a new believer. She saw in the church bulletin that the Lord’s Supper would be next week. She told the pastor, “Great! I will bring the salad.” But the pastor looked at her sternly and said, “We don’t bring a salad to the Lord’s Supper.”

But, actually, the woman understood the Lord’s Supper better than the pastor. For the first Christians, the Lord’s Supper was frequently connected to a full meal. During the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther arranged that after the Lord’s Supper, believers would take loaves of bread—along with the word of God—out to the hungry. This table is the beginning of every meal. Those who eat at this table are our family and the New Israel. From here the Lord provides everything we need, and he serves us from now until the last day, in which he will transform the heavens and the earth himself, along with our bodies, so that he may serve us here, face to face (cf. Luke 12:37).