Judging Ourselves at the Lord's Table

When we come to the Lord's Table, I thought of the cross, which has got two poles. One is the vertical pole and the other is the horizontal pole, what makes a cross. And I see that that speaks of two relationships.

One is with the Lord and the other is with each other. And both of these must be right, because in the Lord's Table we are remembering the Lord's death. And that death was on a cross.

And we are told in 1 Corinthians 11, let everyone judge himself and so let him eat and drink. 1 Corinthians 11, verse 28. And then it says in verse 31, that if we judge ourselves rightly, we will not be judged in the final day.

If the Lord loves you and you are one of his special children, then if you eat without judging yourself, you'll be disciplined by the Lord, verse 32. So as to save you from being condemned. But I've seen a lot of people who break bread without judging themselves, who are not disciplined.

I've seen that through the years in many churches. I know there's wrong in their life, but they break bread with others. And I wonder why they are not disciplined.

Either they are not really God's children or God is long suffering with them. And in some cases, he's given up on them. So it's very sad to come to that condition.

So I would encourage you, judge yourself rightly. Don't judge anybody else. You are the one who's breaking that and eating it.

You're not breaking it and giving it to somebody else. You don't even have to judge your wife. She has to herself break and eat it and you yourself break and eat it.

It's a wonderful occasion to remember that each of us must judge ourselves and then partake. It's a very simple rule because God's given us all a conscience. And that conscience will tell us where we are wrong.

And we can try to justify ourselves, which is like fighting with our conscience, saying, no conscience, shut up. I'm not going to listen to you. That would be dangerous.

So I see in the Last Supper, when they met together, and Jesus said, one of you is going to betray me. You know, in all the Gospels, it says, they said, is it I, Lord? Is it me? They didn't look around and say, I think it's that guy that the Lord is speaking about. And though some may have suspected Judas Iscariot, they didn't even ask that.

Is it Judas Iscariot? Every one of them said, Lord, is it I? That is how they broke bread that day. And that's an excellent example to follow when we come to the Lord's table to ask ourselves, Lord, is it me? Is it me that needs to judge myself before I take part here? Don't worry about even your wife or your husband or anyone you know well, or anyone you think is a criminal. Your only question is, it's between you and the Lord.

Remember this in the final day. You will not have to answer to God for somebody else's behavior. No, we know that.

It's only us. He's not going to ask me about, he's not even going to ask me about my wife or anybody. He won't even ask me about my children.

He'll ask them separately. I need to judge myself. And judging ourselves is compared in the letter of James to looking in a mirror.

When you look in a mirror, you see what type of person you are. James chapter 1, verse 23. He's like a man who looks at his face in a mirror, and he sees maybe some black spot there.

But then he goes away and he ignores it. Ignoring it does not remove that black spot. We must wipe it off.

And the law of God is like a mirror, but you don't use the mirror to wipe the stain. The law will not help you to wipe the stain. For that you need repentance and the blood of Christ to remove whatever stain the Lord shows in your heart.

So that is a reverent way in which we come to the Lord's table. What are the two, I told you the two arms of the cross, what are the two things that we need to ask ourselves? You remember Jesus summed up the law as love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. That's the vertical.

And love, Jesus said, love one another as I have loved you, which is higher than the Old Testament love one another as yourself. So I need to judge myself in this vertical direction. Is there anything which nobody else knows about between me and God, which isn't bothering my conscience, which I have not set right? You may not be able to set it right right now, but if you tell the Lord, I'll do it Lord at the first opportunity.

Like Zacchaeus, he told the Lord, I'm going to repay four times what people have taken from people. The Lord said he's accepted. So even though it may take you time to set right some of those things with others, you're accepted today.

If the Lord sees you're sincere in the vertical direction, something you alone know, maybe your wife also doesn't know or your husband doesn't know, something in your heart that's not set right between God and you and God has spoken to you about it. And then in the horizontal direction, if there's anything between you and particularly anyone else partaking of the bread here, 1 Corinthians chapter 10, of course, relation to everybody in the world, but they are not here breaking bread with us now, but particularly those we break bread with. 1 Corinthians 10, verse 16, the last part.

The bread which we break, it's a sharing in the body of Christ that is represented here. We are not the whole body of Christ, but this is an expression of the body of Christ. And when we break bread together from the same, all those pieces of bread came from one bread.

We are saying we are one bread in Christ. Because there is one bread and we who are many are one body, we partake of that one bread. And when he uses the expression of the body, we know how there's any part of our body dislocated or broken.

It constantly reminds us you can't have a broken bone, any part of your body and not know about it. Day and night, you'll be reminded of that broken bone till you fix it. Now, if a person has a broken bone and he doesn't feel it at all, it's a sad condition.

That means his brain is not registering something wrong in the body. So I want to encourage you, be very sensitive to the voice of the Holy Spirit and say, Lord, I want to listen to the voice of the head. Is there any person with whom I need to set things right before I take part in this bread? And then if a man judge himself, he will not be judged.

May God help all of us to take part worthily.