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The Apostle Paul deals at some length with the institution of the Lord's Supper in the eleventh chapter of First Corinthians, to which we have now come. In an earlier message in this series, I quoted someone who said, "The main thing is to see that the main thing remains the main thing." When you hear that, of course, the question you want to ask is, "What is the main thing that must remain the main thing?" The answer in the Christian life is that clearly, all through the Scriptures, both Old and New Testament alike, the "main thing" is what the person and work of Jesus Christ really mean to you.
I do not mean what you say he means to you when you are talking about your faith, or what you sing about when you sing the hymns of the church in a service like this. I mean what Jesus really means to you when the hour comes for you to make a decision for right against wrong, or for good against evil, and what he means to you when you are under pressure and tempted to explode with anger, or succumb to lust, or whatever. It is very fitting that Paul ends this long section where he has been dealing with the troubles going on at Corinth by holding up a mirror, in effect, before these people and allowing them to see how they were behaving at the Table of the Lord. Nothing is more revealing than to see what your attitude is when you come to this central act of Christian worship, and this is what Paul is doing . In this section, beginning with Verse 17, he is showing them that they are approaching the Lord's Table with a totally wrong spirit. There were two things, he says, that were wrong: First, they were dividing up into very destructive divisions, cliques, within the church. Verse 17: