Come to think of it No.2 On my oath - when should a christian swear?

They left and found things just as Jesus had told them, so they prepared the Passover. When the hour came, Jesus and his apostles reclined at the table and he said to them, I have eagerly desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer, for I tell you I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God. After taking the cup, he gave thanks and said, take this and divide it among you, for I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.

And he took bread and gave thanks and broke it and gave it to them, saying, this is my body given for you, this do in remembrance of me. In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you, but the hand of him who is going to betray me is with mine on the table. The Son of Man will go as it has been decreed, but woe to that man who betrays him.

They began to question among themselves which of them it might be who would do this. In this new series which I am privileged to take, come to think of it, I want to take you to the subject of oaths. When should a Christian swear? And immediately you might say, well that's not a difficulty because it's pretty obvious that Christian folk don't swear.

But you see, what I'm not saying and what I'm not dealing with on the agenda, so to speak, for these next 20-odd minutes or so, is bad language. That, of course, should not be part of the Christian, though I know many Christians who've had difficulty in curbing temper and in being able to overcome frustration when they would naturally, at the human level, react with verbal ferocity and swear. Isaiah talks about being amongst a people of unclean lips.

He had a ministry to dirty-mouthed people. Now, it's not really that that confronts me as the subject matter to deal with this evening. Rather, I want to talk to you in a different sense about swearing legitimately.

Here is a judge and he can't proceed with the court case unless he brings into the proceedings certain men and women, 12, good and true, and each one has to swear that what they're saying and the way that they will evaluate the case, that it's honest, that they will swear that this is so. Sometimes, once a year, this church is actually thronged with Boy Scouts, and for a long time now, I've been asked to lead these several hundred lads in a service, the peak of which is when they stand before God and in the presence of their leaders and myself, and they take the Boy Scout's pledge. They swear.

Now, in this sense, are there times when Christians ought to swear? And I argue that there are. But before I can proceed by taking you into the significance of the baptismal service and the communion service, it's necessary for me to introduce a word that I've explained once or maybe twice in this sanctuary, and therefore I have to repeat. And some of you who have wizards of memory can switch off for two minutes, then come back to life again and plug in.

I want to talk to you about the word sacrament. You see, you'll never understand what it means to swear as a Christian unless you've grasped what is meant by the word sacrament. How many sacraments do we have in this church? Well, we have two.

I've mentioned them, baptism and communion. But where do you get the word sacrament from? Well, it has to do with the Romans, the Roman legions. One of the commanders, for example, will point to his regiment and he will select one man, and that one man, speaking on behalf of the rest of the members of that particular force, will pledge himself in three or four different ways.

He will pledge himself to obey the commands of the general, to assemble whenever the general requests, never to desert the standard, and to count the Emperor and the things concerning the Empire as so important he puts them before his wife and his family. Now that came to be called the sacrament amongst the Roman legions. One man would speak on behalf of the lot and then write down the line, rank after rank, file after file, with their hand upon their breast, the Romans would say, I pledge it, I pledge it, that goes for me, that goes for me, that goes for me.

The Roman army was brought together in all its divisions and regiments and time after time the oath, the sacrament, would be said. Now don't you see that the Christian church largely grew up in a Latin, in a Roman environment, and some of the best things from that environment were plucked from it, sanctified, made spiritual, and incorporated into the church. And so that Latin word sacrament lives on even in the English vernacular, and we know, at least some of us know, that what we will be continuing with as our worship proceeds this evening and we come around the Lord's table is the sacrament of the Lord's table.

But there are two sacraments. There is the one of baptism, that you do once and for all as a Christian. You swear as you're immersed in the water and raised from the water, you swear before God and your fellows that you have selected by the grace of God, Jesus Christ, as your Lord and your Savior.

Nothing, nothing has priority in your life over the claims of Jesus Christ. You do it once. But you see, my friend, there is a sacrament where you reaffirm constantly what once in your baptismal oath you say.

And that's what I have in mind when I'm talking about when should a Christian swear. A Christian should swear as he comes around the Lord's table. But as I open up the subject, I argue this.

A Christian should swear when he fully understands what he's doing. You see, this bread and this wine that we're going to take in a moment or two, at least I hope large numbers of you will, it is not offered to you in a careless fashion. You see, part of the Roman idea of sacrament was the indication of sign.

A sign could mean something. The banners of Caesar, the Roman eagle, they used to fly from Jerusalem and almost caused a rebellion on the part of the Jews who felt that this was something that in a way denigrated their worship of God. But for the Romans, the flag was a sign that indicated the might of Caesar.

And don't you see that when you take the bread and the wine, they speak, they signal to you the death, the breaking of the body, the shedding of the blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. And you, because you're an informed believer, recognize that it's that death that has brought about your salvation. Therefore, you never engage in your sacramental oath, in your repetition of it, without first of all a prior understanding of what you're doing.

And secondly, when should a Christian swear? Not only when he's fully informed as to what he's doing, but he should swear this oath on a regular basis, on a regular basis. Day by day in the early church, check the opening chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. Gradually, in a weekly setting, these believers would come together around the Lord's table the first day of the week to do what? To take bread and wine.

But why are they doing it? Because they're saying as Christian soldiers, that goes for me too. That goes for me too. When should a Christian swear? When he fully understands the significance of the emblems, and as regularly as possible.

How? How should a Christian swear? In that chapter that we read, at least a portion of the 22nd of Luke's Gospel, we read of our Lord Jesus moving to the upper room. And when he gets there, the Passover meal has been prepared, and he speaks to the disciples in this fashion. The 15th verse, I have eagerly desired this Passover, to eat this Passover with you, before I suffer.

How should a Christian swear? With a state of desire. A state of desire, or I'll put it a different way. He swears with a hunger.

I had a letter which upset me a little while ago. Not because it was personally applied, but simply because it revealed a woeful ignorance on the part of the one who wrote to me. They said this, or this is the substance of it.

You fully misunderstand the way that one should keep the Lord's Day. The Lord's Day is not a time of fellowship amongst Christian people. It is a time of worshipping God.

Now, what they fully failed to comprehend was this. The early Christians, what were they basically? They weren't rich people. They weren't influential, though there were some from those ranks, but a very minority group.

They came from the working classes worse than that. They came from the bondage classes, the classes of the slaves. And Sunday to them was not a day off.

It was a hard day when they'd had their nose, so to speak, to the grindstone. And it was at the end of the day that they flowed into the increasing Christian centers around the Roman world. And there as hungry men and women they came.

And what do you do to a hungry man or woman? You feed him. And I'm not talking about spiritual food. You feed him literally.

You put something in his belly. You satisfy him. And if you are to read with eyes that are open, the middle chapters of 1 Corinthians, you will discover that when the early Christians came together, they came first of all to be fed ordinarily.

And from that feeding there emerged the Lord's table. That's why the Apostle Paul, when he's writing in the eleventh and twelfth chapters of 1 Corinthians, has to put to right the conduct of some of these slaves. They were greedy in the first part of the meal.

We could criticize them, but most of us have never known what it is to be hungry. Sometimes they had too much to drink. Again, we can criticize them, but the majority of us have never really been thirsty.

They came together at the end of the day, and they had this love feast. They fellowshiped together, and then from that love feast there emerged in the process the taking of the bread and the wine. They'd moved from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from what seemed to be the social to the spiritual, though Paul would not have allowed those two categories.

And as they moved into this set function of taking bread and wine towards the end of the meal, they would be again pledging their solidarity, their unity with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and horizontally with one another. Because Jesus has not called us to be hermits. He's called us to be brothers and sisters in a family.

That's how the early church came. They came to the Lord's table basically as hungry men. And Jesus says to the disciples when he sets up this particular sacrament with desire, I've eagerly wanted to come.

I've said this before and I say it again. The thing that kept me young folks in the faith when I was a teenager, that helped me to keep me balanced when I had all the bashings and the temptations that some of you have in your teenage and your early 20s, was coming to the table and remembering afresh what it was all about. The broken body and the shed blood and appreciating afresh that the sin, the sins that I committed, the waywardness, the backsliding, could be remedied as afresh I made my confession and entered into the full joys of the salvation which Jesus achieved on the cross.

How should a Christian swear, I argue? He or she should swear, should come to the table in a state of desire as a hungry person. And what's more? You are to come with your memory alert. Again, forgive the repetition.

So many times I tell you, the first part of worship is your mind affected. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God with all thy mind. We're not zombies.

I believe evangelical Christians should be prepared to out think anyone else on God's earth. We come with our minds in a state of recall. We don't have our minds in suspension.

We're not driving along with our minds thinking of something else. This is much more important even than driving, though that's a very important area of our lives, those of us who have cars. We come around the table with our minds alert to what has happened, to what Jesus Christ has contributed in order that we might know the blessings of the salvation that his life has wrought.

We come with recall. So many times over these years I've seen couples walk down this aisle as they've come to the front and I've married them. And time after time I've read those well-worn lines from the prayer book that when a man, when a woman gets married, they must do this in a thoughtful fashion.

They must do it in an advised fashion. This isn't something that you enter into lightly. You enter into it with the full blown conviction that this is the right thing for you to do.

And when you swear, when you take that bread and wine, your mind is alert. Can I Gethsemane forget? You remember that line from one of the verses of the hymns? Lest I forget Gethsemane, lest I forget Mount Calvary. You see, there is that possibility.

The hymn writers, they recognize it, that in the passing of the days, from one Lord's day to another, you may forget the amazing death of the Lord Jesus. And so you're brought back to base, so to speak, with your mind alert, with a spiritual hunger and desire to take of the bread and wine and to pledge to reaffirm your oath that as for you, by the grace of God, you've selected Jesus Christ as your Lord and your Redeemer. When should a Christian swear? When he's fully understanding what he's doing, as regularly as possible.

How should a Christian swear? As a hungry person he comes to the table, therefore he swears with desire. He comes with an alert memory. Finally, why should a Christian swear? Why the sacrament? Well, our Lord asked us to.

One of the best testimonies I ever heard in the tab was a very simple one. It was a young lady who was being baptized and she stood so sweetly and serenely here. Not a Polish speaker, thank God for the simple speaker who comes along and just pours out their convictions to a feelingful congregation.

And this she had to say, explaining why the oath of baptism was going to be undertaken by her. She said, if you love someone, you do what you can to make them happy. I love the Lord Jesus and he has said that those who confess him as Savior are to be baptized.

Therefore, for that reason, I am being baptized. Why do I take the oath? Why do I swear? Jesus said, and there aren't that many requests that he made to his followers, do this in remembrance of me. I swear with an upward look, my eye upon the eye of Christ, I pick up what he wants.

I swear because of the impact that it has upon those who know me who are not Christians. You see, this oath differentiates between the unbeliever and the believer. There aren't that many people who take communion because there aren't that many people who are Bible believing Christians.

And therefore, we who, to quote the Apostle Paul in the first letter of Corinthians, we who discern the Lord's body, who recognize the value of the death of the Lord Jesus, by so making our oath, swearing, taking our vow in a sort of knock-on way, we are witnessing outwardly to an unbelieving world that as for us, the Lord Jesus reigns supreme in our lives. Why should a Christian swear? Because he has his eye on Jesus. He has his glance also on other people.

But more than this, a Christian takes the sacramental oath of the Lord's table with his eye on his fellow believers. I made the point that God hasn't called us to be monks. I'm rather glad of that, or hermits.

I'm even more glad of that. I could tolerate being a monk now and again, but a hermit, no way. I like my own company for about half an hour and then I get fed up.

I'm glad of other people. Do you know one of the things that rejoices me? I speak most sincerely as a Christian in terms of the secondary blessings of belonging to the Lord Jesus. Well, it's you.

You see, we're bound together with cords that can't be broken. That will sound sickly sentimental to some people, not you folk here, I'm sure. But it will.

But you see, there is that that brings Christians together. So wherever you are, and we've got brothers here and sisters from Brazil and India and other parts of the world this evening, wherever we are, we're bound together. Why? Well, you see, it's the oath, isn't it? That goes for me.

I'm from North India, but the bread and the wine, my commitment to Christ, that goes for me. I'm from Latin America. That goes for me.

The bread and the wine, I'm committed to Christ. Therefore, if I am committed to Christ and he is committed to Christ, together we are brothers. You see, this whole notion that you can worship God and forget about the communion of the saints is utterly absurd.

We are called together vertically to worship the Lord and horizontally to share the blessings of God with one another and that the communion as we take a piece of bread which comes from one loaf, so we show our solidarity, our unity amongst each other. Why should a Christian swear? Finally, because taking the bread and wine anticipates the return of Jesus. You see, he says, you remember in the inauguration feast, with desire, have I desired this feast? I'm looking forward to it.

And yet, you know, it was his first and it was his last. No longer, he says to the disciples, will I take the fruit of the vine. No longer will I drink wine with you.

Not for many a generation, but the day will come when I will return. And when I come in the power of my kingdom, then I will eat and I will drink with you afresh. You've got the upward look, you catch the eye of the Lord Jesus.

You've got the outward look, you're speaking to men and women. There's the inward look as you're thinking in terms of the Christian community, but there's also the forward look. One more meal, one less occasion before the King comes back.

We pledge ourselves every time we round the Lord's table that the King, the Emperor, the Lord Jesus is supreme in our lives. We would die for him. We love our wife, our husband, our mum, our dad, our children, but there is a love par excellence greater than all those worthy and pure loves.

It is the love for the Christ. And we acknowledge the first call on our lives is the call of Jesus. And therefore we swear.

Isn't it rather sickening, my friend, that most oaths in terms of swear words in the colloquial sense are words of blasphemy because the devil has plundered the idea of oath-taking and the fruit of the lips which should have been offered to the praise and the glory of God has been besmirched and polluted. But we who are Christians, we push the devil by God's grace on one side and say, no, we will take our oath week by week. Verbally and visually, we will pledge to the King of Kings our loyalty, our obedience, our service.

If that's how you think, then I'm asking you in the name of God in a few moments to take bread and wine and reaffirm afresh your commitment to him. Let's sing. 329.

I'm not ashamed to own my Lord or to defend his cause. Here's the sacramental oath being repeated verbally by Christian soldiers. We have a little refrain that's coming on the overheads that you stick in between each verse.

I didn't express that very eloquently. You sing between each verse. 329.