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March 07, 2010
“Partners”
I Corinthians 10: 1-22
Sunday, March 7, 2010
You are about to be invited to be the recipient of a great privilege. In a few moments you will be invited to receive the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. As we prepare to receive this great blessing, I want to look at some things that the Apostle Paul said about those who receive this sacrament in I Cor. 10: 1-22.
To be fair to our text, I want you to know that Paul is in the middle of a larger subject, that of whether or not Christians should eat at sacrificial meals in pagan temples and if they should eat food that had been offered at such feasts even if it was later served to them in private homes or purchased by them in the markets. He has already ruled that since the gods of the pagans are not really gods, food that has been offered to them or “blessed” by their priests and priestesses has not really been affected in any way and can be safely eaten by Christians who do not believe in those false gods. Christian knowledge and Christian freedom gives them the right to eat such food. Having established that there is such a thing as Christian freedom, he then moved into the passage we are looking at this morning to warn that Christians need to be careful as to how they use their freedom.
Since we are about to participate in the Lord’s Supper, I want to look first at some things he says in the later parts of this passage in verses 16-18. We read: “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing of the blood of Christ? the bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of one bread. Consider the people of Israel; are not those who eat the sacrifices partners in the altar?”
I think the key concepts here are sharing and partners. When we participate in this sacrament we are sharing in the body and blood of Christ, we are sharing in his sacrifice. We are proclaiming to be His partners, we are those for whom he died. And as we commune together we are proclaiming that we are all partners with each other through our partnerships in or with Christ.
The problem is that many of us are like a little boy who lived in my house when he was 3 or 4 years old. That was when he went through his cowboy stage. He had a little vest and a cowboy hat and a bandana tied around his neck. And for a few days he went around the house saying to everyone “Howdy Partner”. He of course had no idea what a partner really was.
We who partake of this sacrament need to think about how we are being partners of and with Christ and how we are being partners with other Christians. How are we working together, and supporting and helping each other in our endeavors of helping others to hear the good news about Jesus and helping others to have faith in Jesus?
Now I would like to turn to the first part of the passage. Verses 1-14. Paul writes about people who had a partnership agreement with God years before. They were the Israelites who came out of Egypt with Moses as the leader whom God sent to them. Paul argues that those Israelites had their own sacramental connections to Moses and God. They were “baptized” into Moses as their leader by following him through the dry sea-bed and through the moist cloud which protected them from the pursuing Egyptians.
In the wilderness they were fed with a miraculous bread-like substance called Mannah and given water which miraculously came from a rock. So, in a sense they were sacramentally bound to Moses and God in a partnership.
You might remember that that partnership did not go well at first. Those early Israelites did not seem to understand that their part of the partnership involved their following, obeying, and trusting Moses and God. They did not trust God and on many occasions complained about where he was taking them and about the miraculous provisions God made for them.
They disobeyed the command against making and worshipping Idols. And they had adulterous relationships with foreign women and followed after their false Gods.
And all of the adults who were over 20 when they left Egypt died in the wilderness (except two, Joshua and Caleb). They died by the sword, by plague and by poisonous snakes.
All of this was written down as an example for all Christians, including the Corinthian Christians to whom Paul wrote and us in our own time and place.
By taking this sacrament we are claiming that we are partners with Christ and each other. In this sacrament we are once again spiritually united with Jesus in his death. But the blessings of this sacrament only protect us when we live up to our side of the partnership. We need to obey and believe in Jesus. And we need to help each other.
Paul wrote in the 19th- 20th verses that the Corinthian Christians who ate with pagans in the pagan temples and perhaps some of them who ate food which had been sacrificed to idols were in danger of being in partnership with demons or satanic forces. We who claim to be partners with Christ through this sacrament need to examine our lives and see if we might be by our behaviors or alliances in danger of being in some anti-Christian partnerships. Be careful, You do not want to provoke the lord to jealousy. You are his partner and he will support you when you are obedient and may act against you if and when you violate the partnership agreement.
Pastor David Horner
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at March 7, 2010 05:34 PM