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#14.

The Lord's Supper Proclaims Our Union With all the Members of Christ's
Body
1 Corinthians 10:17 Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body; for we all
partake of the one bread.
It is clear that in celebrating the Lord's Supper, our brothers and sisters in the early church all ate
from one loaf (as the word "bread" above may be rendered). Paul tells the church at Corinth that
this is intentional, full of meaning. They are to understand by all eating of the one loaf (which
represents the body of Christ) that they all belong to the same body in Him.
We saw earlier that our union with Christ Himself is pictured in the Supper (see 1 Corinthians
10:16) but Paul here wants to emphasize that if we each are joined to Christ then of necessity we
are joined to each other also. We do not each eat in isolation of our own little loaf, but we eat of
the common loaf. So the Supper has something very important to proclaim about the unity of the
church.
Many fellowships today use more than one loaf to celebrate the supper, or distribute a single loaf
that is already broken into individual pieces. By proceeding in this way, they lose much of the
message that the Supper proclaims about the unity of the body of Christ - a powerful reminder
that believers are not islands but are joined closely and irrevocably to one another as surely as
they are joined to Christ.
Someone may question whether this is really an important aspect of the Lord's Supper. The
answer is clear in the pages of Scripture - it is critical. Much flows from a proper understanding
of the union of believers in one body in Christ Jesus. For example, we would direct the reader to
our earlier series of reasons to enjoy fellowship to see how the union portrayed and proclaimed at
the Table is meant to be worked out in practice in the life of the church - the "body ministry" of
true fellowship is essential and the Supper reminds us as often as we eat it that the Lord has
made us to need one another and to be bound together as one in our common Lord and Savior.
But we only have to turn to the next chapter of 1 Corinthians for a striking demonstration of how
important this is in the sight of God. When the church at Corinth came together to eat the Lord's
Supper, some went hungry while others got drunk (1 Corinthians 11:21). They ate a meal that
proclaimed that they were members together of the one body of Christ, but their manner of
eating and drinking showed that this was far from true in practice. The result, according to Paul,
was that it was no longer the Lord's Supper they were eating, but a rather hideous mockery of it
(1 Corinthians 11:20) - an opportunity for gluttony, drunkenness and favoritism to abound. This
was a failure to rightly judge (or discern) the body of Christ (i.e. the church - 1 Corinthians
11:29) and therefore the Lord had brought discipline upon the fellowship, through which some
were sick and others had died (1 Corinthians 11:30).
So the Lord takes it very seriously that the members of His church are living together as a united
body when they come to take the Supper that outwardly proclaims this is true of them. To the
extent that a church eats this meal when there are divisions and unloving behavior present among
them and unrepented of, that church may expect the Lord to discipline the members responsible

for this terrible sin.


In closing though, let's reflect on the very positive aspects of this imagery. It is very special to
eat a meal with brothers and sisters in Christ whom we love deeply in the Lord, realizing that the
meal confirms and underlines for us the truth that we are one in Christ Jesus, bound by bonds
that are tighter and stronger than those of mere earthly families. We should look forward, then,
to every opportunity to take the Supper and to affirm these bonds between us, forged through the
broken body and shed blood of our Savior.
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