No one was a prophet, called to preach the word, Tried to cry repentance, but nobody heard, They were busy sinning, No one preached in pain, They wished they hadn't sinned, When they saw the rain.
In context, 1 Corinthians chapter 11 is cut into two. So there's two contexts.
One has to do with man and women appearances.
The second half has to do with the concept of where to have the Lord's Supper.
I'm going to start with this one disclaimer.
Unfortunately, I have to start with when to have the Lord's Supper.
Churches today across, let alone the island of Kauai or the islands of Hawaii, but even across the United States, are having the Lord's Supper at their first service.
Now if a church can't figure out when to have supper, it makes me question of whether they know where to have the Lord's Supper.
And this is important because at the end of the day, nothing in the Bible is incidental, coincidental, or accidental.
And we don't want to put our biases or traditions into what the Bible clearly teaches.
Now I sympathize and empathize for a church when they do this and they have the Lord's Supper in their morning service.
But all that tells me is that Jesus quoted to the Pharisees.
The most given rebuke from Jesus to the Pharisees is, have you not read what the scripture saith?
Because as Christians, we need to be people of the book.
We need to know what the Bible teaches.
Elsewhere it says, you know, ultimately we need to be ready to give an answer to any man that asketh us of the hope of the reason that is in us with meekness and fear.
And to think that we're having the Lord's Supper in the morning just helps me to realize and gauge what it is I'm dealing with.
Now once again, a lot of churches are steeped in tradition and this is why they do that.
But here I preach the word ministry.
We're going to make clear where to have the Lord's Supper and when is that supper?
Obviously evening time.
Supper is the older term for our word dinner.
And obviously for you kids, maybe some people have dinner closer to four, but definitely no later than six unless you're an animal.
You know, dinner is around four to six.
And you know, obviously I'm just playing like dinner is just an evening meal.
And that's important because we're observing the Lord's Supper.
A lot of people don't know this, but the Lord's Supper is a continuation of the Passover and we're going to get there in a moment.
But just so you understand what I mean to first explain when to have the Lord's Supper.
Where do we participate in this?
Some people say, well, we have it at the church building.
I get why they say that, but it's wrong.
David, that's what my pastor taught me.
That's what the church has been doing for hundreds of years.
That's what a Christian brother told me one time.
Well, let's see what the Bible clearly teaches.
Look down if you would at verse 17.
Now in this that I declare unto you, I praise you not that you come together, not for the better, but for the worst.
For first of all, when you come together in the church, the word church is the word for assembling of believers, the congregating of believers.
When believers come together, the walls of a building is not a church.
It is the believers coming together, whether that's under a tent, whether that's in a house, whether that's on a bus stop.
People congregating believers to hear the message of the Bible from an ordained leader, a pastor.
So notice what it says in 18, for first of all, when you come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you, and I partly believe it.
For there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.
So basically the apostle Paul is saying that when you guys come together, I'm about to tell you something, it ain't good.
And I know because there's heresies among you guys.
And the apostle Paul started the church of Corinth, so he's trying to help educate them in this subject.
It goes on to read in verse 20, when you come together, therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord's supper.
Let's reread that. This is not to eat the Lord's supper.
When brothers and sisters in Christ congregate into the building or unified as a church, this is not to eat the Lord's supper.
Am I saying that or is that what the Bible clearly teaches?
And you would be amazed how many pastors, evangelists, deacons, missionaries, I clearly showed them this text.
And their instinct is, well, you don't understand, tradition, the Protestant Reformation, X, Y, and Z.
Look, is my doctrine held upon a Protestant reformer or on the inspired word of God?
And if the inspired word of God tells me that when you come together, this is not to eat the Lord's supper, then take it to the bank.
That's what it means.
And ultimately, when it goes on to read, let's take a look.
It says, for in eating, everyone taketh before other his own supper and one is hungry and another is drunken.
What have you not homes to eat and to drink in or despise the church of God and shame them have not?
What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you in this?
I praise you not.
So basically, the apostle Paul is like, don't you have houses to eat your own dinners in the supper, which Jesus and the apostles observed in the upper room?
Now, if you would turn to your Bibles to Exodus chapter 12, we're going to see where the origin of the Passover came from.
Exodus, for those who don't know, is the second book of the Bible.
We have Genesis and then we have Exodus.
Genesis chapter 12.
It's after chapter 11.
It's before chapter 13.
Exodus chapter 11.
We're going to see God telling Moses and laying out to the children of Israel the Passover.
Now, just a disclaimer one more time, just so you guys know, this is a big reason why we are King James only.
A lot of people don't know that the word Easter is only found one time in the Bible.
It's in Acts chapter 12.
But did you know William Tyndale, who is the inventor of our modern English, made up the word Passover to mean Easter?
Now, Easter in the William Tyndale original New Testament is used some 29 something times.
But as we went from Tyndale into the Matthews, the Matthews into the Coverdale, the Coverdale into the Bishops, Bishops into the King James,
the word Easter became less used as a common term for the Passover.
Obviously, it's an easy word to understand.
The angel of the Lord passed over the children of Israel.
So that's why William Tyndale called this day the Passover.
Makes sense.
And that's an interesting subject for language.
But that being said.
Today is actually the Passover.
Say that again.
Today is actually the Passover.
Today is not the Passover.
Yeah, we'll go into that in a moment.
But ultimately, the Lord's Supper is a continuation of the Passover.
And we'll see what it says.
Notice in verse one, Exodus chapter 12, verse one.
And the Lord speak unto Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be unto you the beginning of months.
It shall be the first month of the year to you.
Speak ye unto all the congregation of Israel, saying, In the tenth day of this month, they shall take them every man a lamb,
according to the house of their fathers, a lamb for an house.
And if the household be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next unto his house,
take it according to the number of the souls every man, according to his eating, shall make your count for the lamb.
So in context, just so you're aware, obviously, God is about to pull the children of Israel out of Egypt.
And he's telling them, this is going to be the first month to you.
On the tenth day of this month, I want you to pick a lamb.
Now, this is symbolic in the New Testament.
The Lord Jesus Christ, raise your hand if you're familiar with the holiday Palm Sunday.
Palm Sunday, right?
This is also known as Selection Day.
Jesus Christ makes his triumphant entrance into Jerusalem.
And John the Baptist said, Behold the Lamb of God, which shall take away the sins of the world.
Jesus Christ came into Jerusalem on the tenth day of the first month, Abib.
So he was known as the Selection Lamb.
He was being selected to be the savior of men.
Obviously, they threw palms on the ground, they're yelling Hosanna.
And this is just symbolic of this event that has happened or representing it.
Now, notice it says, Every man bring the lamb to his house.
Did it say bring it all together into one group or take the lamb and go to your house?
Go to your house.
And if the house be too little for the lamb, let him and his neighbor next to his house take it according to the number of the souls.
So let's take our house, for instance.
If my wife and I were living back then and there is a lamb that we needed to slay for the Passover,
we're not going to be able to eat that whole, well, let's rephrase that, we'll probably eat the whole lamb.
But that's just because we have a problem with gluttony.
No, I'm just playing.
It is true to eat a whole lamb is a lot of food.
So if in the scenario of our house we would get with our neighbors,
if they'd be willing to observe the Passover and we would all come together intimately to observe this event.
And this is why when Jesus comes to the upper room, only the twelve disciples are with him.
Not all believers, not all the seventy other disciples, not all the people who follow Jesus throughout his ministry.
Just the twelve.
The intimate group of the elite Christians ultimately.
And Jesus was symbolizing this event.
But let's go on to read.
Notice what it says in verse six.
I'm sorry, verse five.
Your lamb shall be without blemish, a male of the first year.
He shall take it out from the sheep or from the goats.
And he shall keep it until the fourteenth day of the same month.
And the whole assembly of the congregation of Israel shall kill it in the evening.
Now, notice when it talks about where to eat it, it says to eat it in your house.
Where is it to be killed in the congregation?
Everyone needs to slay this lamb.
Everyone's going to present their own lamb.
Then they're going to slay it, take this and go eat it.
This represents when Jesus came into the scene.
The congregation crucified him.
He came to the Jews, came to his own and his own received him not.
And this is fulfilling that event.
Now, the Lord's Supper does not land on Passover day the way we understand it today.
And now I'm going to go into some geeking out of Christian theology.
We as Christians take the Bible to tell us about time, you know, relevancies and all these different things.
In the 21st century of America and in the island of Kauai, we see a day as the morning and the evening, right?
When we wake up and then when we go to bed, that's one day, right?
The Bible sees it differently right off the bat in Genesis chapter one when God's creating the universe.
The evening and the morning were the first day.
The evening and the morning were the second day.
The evening and the morning were the third day.
So according to the Bible, God sees a day rendering from the evening to the morning.
It's not morning to evening, evening to morning.
Now, what does that mean?
Turn to your Bibles, if you would, to Matthew chapter 26.
Matthew chapter 26.
I'm going to try to simplify this so much that even a theologian can understand it.
Theologian.
Smarty pants.
Basically, Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, the book of Matthew, three quarters of the way into the Bible, should land in the New Testament.
Matthew chapter 26.
Before Mark.
Matthew chapter 26.
Notice what the Bible says in verse one.
And it came to pass when Jesus had finished all these sayings, he said unto his disciples,
Ye know that after two days is the feast of the Passover, and the Son of Man is betrayed to be crucified.
So two days from this event is the Passover.
It's coming.
There is not a lot of consensus of the last hours of Jesus.
Even the position I'm going to tell you, it can really only boil down to one of two positions.
Scholars throughout history and even secularists have never pinpoint the exact events of the death, burial, and resurrection.
The resurrection, for sure, we all understand was the first day of the week.
But that being said, there seems to be apparent contradictions.
So many atheists and so many secularists will always try to accuse us of our faith and say that the Bible has contradictions.
Now their lack of understanding of timeline and these things is not our fault.
Now we can illuminate them on these subjects, but unfortunately the Bible teaches,
The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him,
and neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
It takes a spiritual person to understand a spiritual book.
And when it says right here that in two days is the feast of unleavened bread, let's keep reading.
It goes on to say,
Then assembled together the chief priests and the scribes and the elders of the people
unto the palace of the high priest, who was called Caiaphas,
and consulted that they might take Jesus by subtlety and kill him.
But they said, Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar among the people.
And we're going to skip the next section for sake of time, but take a look if you would at verse 17.
Now the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, the disciples came to Jesus, saying unto him,
Where wilt thou that we prepare for thee to eat the Passover?
I want you to get the picture of how we see this being laid out.
If the evening and the morning are the first day,
I can't show you for sake of time or like on a calendar,
because it would be nice to have a big display to like show you exactly how it lines up.
But ultimately, Wednesday evening is called the next day into Thursday morning.
So Wednesday evening, Thursday morning, from the sake of God, that's one day.
Thursday morning or Thursday evening, Friday morning, that's another day.
Then you have Saturday evening, Sunday morning, that's another day.
So this event, the Lord's Supper, you know what people call communion,
where they went into the upper room, it's calling this the first day of unleavened bread.
It's around now, basically. It's around this evening time,
and the disciples are asking, Where do we prepare for the Passover?
There's a certain room, we're going to go over there.
Now, what meal do they eat at the Lord's Supper?
Do they eat a lamb or do they eat bread?
They eat bread. Now, here's the thing.
We didn't have enough time to look at it in the Old Testament,
but one of the meals eaten with the Passover was unleavened bread.
Why? Because remember, they need to gird their loins and get ready to run out of Egypt,
and they need to not bring leaven for their dough, but have unleavened bread.
The whole entire event of the Passover is not just the one day that starts the feast known as unleavened bread.
The Passover, and then for seven other days, is known as the Feast of Unleavened Bread.
And the Bible likens them as the same.
Now, if you would, just so you're not taking my word for it, look at Mark, chapter 14.
The next gospel over, you have Mark, chapter 14.
Mark, chapter 14. Amen. If you got there, right on.
Notice what it says in verse 1.
After two days was the feast of the Passover and of unleavened bread,
and the chief priests and the scribes sought how they might take him by craft and put him to death.
And let's go ahead and take a look at verse 12.
Actually, let's first look at verse 10.
This is going to be a word tongue twister, which I sat here and banged my head on long enough to finally understand what it meant.
Because what are known as parallel passages are passages of the same story in different accounts.
Matthew has this, Mark has this, Luke has this, and John has this.
They are worded slightly differently, not because of a contradiction, but because of perspective of the apostle.
And they're worded different for our admonition upon whom the ends of the world may come.
Now, let's take a look at verse 10. It says,
And Judas Iscariot, one of the twelve, went under the chief priests to betray him unto them.
Now, here we go. I'm going to slow it down.
And when they, who's the they in that sentence? What's the antecedent?
The Pharisees.
And when they heard it, they were glad.
The Pharisees were happy that Judas was going to betray Jesus.
When they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money.
Who's the him? Judas.
And he sought how he might conveniently betray him.
Who's the first he? Judas.
Who's the last him? Jesus.
Tongue twister. It's good to understand grammar.
And just looking at that passage, I had to really understand that.
But then it goes into verse 12.
And the first day of 11 bread, when they killed the Passover.
Who's the they in that sentence?
The Pharisees.
Because the congregation comes together and puts to death the lamb.
That's what was done in Exodus.
Israelites as a whole, but obviously the religious leaders are the one sacrificing the lamb.
Who is the sacrifice?
Jesus is getting put to the cross that day.
So basically what this is teaching is that that Lord's Supper that they had
was indeed Passover according to the biblical concept of a day of the evening and the morning being the first day.
Wednesday evening, they were eating unleavened bread and juice or what we call wine
as an observant to start the Lord's Passover.
The next day after the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus gets betrayed by Judas, gets brought to the council,
sentenced to death, put on the cross, dies.
Now they didn't want to take him.
They didn't want to put him to death on the holiday because it would cause an uproar, which it already did.
Because when they're offering Jesus to the Roman soldiers,
Pilate says, who will you pick, Barabbas or Jesus, to try to placate the people because there's an uproar going on.
Not everyone, like the Pharisees, were twisted in their mind to think that he did not deserve this.
They all realized that he doesn't deserve this.
But the Pharisees are going around trying to create contention and be like, no, no, no, he's a blasphemer
because he, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God, but was made of no reputation.
And ultimately, all I'm trying to get you guys to understand is that the New Testament event that we celebrate,
the Lord's Supper, is a continuation of the Passover.
We no longer as Christian observe the Passover, the New Moons, or the Jewish holidays,
because the book of Hebrews clearly teaches, you know, meats, drinks, and divers washing,
and cardinal ordinances imposed onto them until the time of the Reformation.
These cardinal ordinances or sacrificial rules no longer apply to us because Jesus fulfilled these laws.
You and I don't need to kill a lamb on the 14th day of the month and bring it in on the 10th day of the month
and eat it together as a family in our house because Jesus Christ was our Passover.
And this goes into the subject of the three days and three nights that he was dead and buried and then rose again.
And that's what we're celebrating today.
The resurrection of Christ. I preached earlier this morning that some people try to compartmentalize what's more important to the gospel.
Is death or is burial? Is sinless perfection? Is virgin birth? It's all encompassed.
What's more valuable, a husband or a wife? What's more valuable, the father or the son?
No one is more valuable than the other. They all have different function, like we saw earlier in 1 Corinthians chapter 11,
the first after the chapter talked about a woman praying or prophesying, having her head uncovered.
And then it talks about a man. If he has long hair, it's a shame unto him.
So ultimately we have different roles and different functions.
And when it comes to where to have the Lord's Supper, when matters because it's a supper,
where matters because the Bible clearly taught.
And if you would turn back to 1 Corinthians 11, we'll end there.
1 Corinthians chapter 11.
If this didn't matter, would the Holy Spirit inspire the apostle Paul to put half of a chapter into the Bible on this subject?
Of course it matters.
And that being said, like we talked about in the beginning of this sermon,
we're not a church. I want nothing more than for us to become a church one day.
Nothing more in the world would make me happy to see us become a church.
We're not. We're a ministry. We're in my house.
A lot of churches started off in a house and that's great.
I'm not down on house churches. I think that's a biblical model of how all these churches got started.
But that being said, we're a ministry.
So for us to observe the Lord's Passover is appropriate for us here.
Now as we grow in number and we become to get, I would personally say past 15 or 20,
this probably will not be the place where we observe the Lord's Supper, but in individual members houses.
When a brother or sister decides they want to observe the Lord's Supper, that's between them and their family.
What did Jesus say?
Do this in remembrance of me as oft as you do this.
Which doesn't mean every Easter.
It doesn't mean once a month.
It means whenever you want as a family in a house, observe this event.
Now, yes, the Passover was a certain day of the year, but we are not observing the Passover.
It's a fulfillment, the Lord's Supper.
And ultimately, I don't have enough time to get into it, but I'm just going to touch it really quickly.
It needs to be unleavened bread and it needs to be juice, not alcoholic wine.
Because the Bible likens yeast or fermentation as sin and the same thing with leaven.
You know, elsewhere it talks about, for instance, but where are you the leaven of the Pharisees?
Because leaven leavens a lump and a little leaven will leaven the whole lump.
A little sin will make big, ultimately.
So for people to think that Jesus was going around drinking alcoholic wine with people is foolishness.
And I'll get into that later on as we grow and we get into those sermons.
Wine in the Bible does not only mean alcoholic, it also means juice.
One verse to give you a thought on that is, for instance, in Isaiah 65, 8.
Thus saith the Lord, as the new wine is found in the cluster, and one saith, destroy it not, for a blessing is in it.
Song of Solomon, the only time the word juice is ever found in the Bible.
I would lead thee and bring thee into my mother's house, and would instruct me, I would cause thee to drink of the spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate.
So the new wine, or the wine in the cluster of a grape, when you grab grapes and you squeeze them, what comes out? Juice.
Now if it sits long enough, it will turn alcoholic.
And the Bible says, look not thou upon the wine when it giveth itself a right, when it changes its color in the cup, proving that there's two types of wine.
Wine that is fermented, wine that is not fermented.
Bread that has leaven, bread that does not have leaven.
Why would the Lord want us to have leavened bread and alcoholic wine to represent sin on the Lord's Supper?
He wants it to be unleavened and juice.
The title of this sermon this evening is Where to Have the Lord's Supper.
We're going to have it in the house.
And, Lord willing, as we grow, we'll have it in all our houses, if you guys are up to it.
Let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer.
Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for allowing us to be here, to gather together, to hear your word.
Please help us in our evening, in our week, to bring you honor and glory, not only to remember your resurrection today, but every day.
Help us to reflect your love towards us, and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,
to open our mouths boldly to make known the mysteries of the gospel to the lost,
and help us to just bring you honor and glory.
In Jesus Christ's name we pray, amen.
We'll see