Remembering

DEVOTION

1 CORINTHIANS

REMEMBERING

1 Cor 11:23-26

23 For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, 24 and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, "This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me."  25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, "This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me."  26 For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

NIV

 We get to look at one of the most quoted portions of scripture, well at least on a regular basis. We have to know that they had more then a loaf of bread and a goblet of wine that evening, yet that is what our ritual has become. If we examine this fully we can see that the bread was broken before dinner and the wine was passed around after dinner, we just delete the dinner part, and of course change the whole thing by substituting either wafers, broken crackers, little premade something’s and of course don’t forget the grape juice. What we do is nothing at all like what Jesus and His disciples did, but we do it in remembrance of His death, so that has to count for something. Perhaps this remembrance has more to do with each and every time we as a family, sit down at the dinner table and spread butter on our fresh baked bread we just picked up at the store, and as we sip from a glass of wine while dining together, than some rite performed once in a while, whenever the pastor decides he wants to fit it into a service, at church. Maybe this is something we should be doing on a daily basis rather than maybe a weekly, monthly, or once in awhile time frame. Maybe this is a way of life, a lifestyle of remembrance. Is our saying grace, or giving thanks before each meal a form of this remembrance? Maybe we should rethink what we say during this time of thanks. Who started this “grace before meals” thing anyway? If we examine the scriptures we are to give thanks to the Lord for everything all the time, but we only say so before food. How some tradition has started and become such a routine for us is not always the truth. If we were to adhere strictly to what the scripture says here we would have bread and wine at every meal we sit down together and we would do so proclaiming the Lords death until he comes. Just thinking about that brings us to another thought. Do all the pastors say as we either come up and get the “elements”, or wait for them to be passed around to us, that we are proclaiming the Lords death until He comes? He is coming, and we have to remember that, we have to remind ourselves not just once a month at church, but on a daily basis that Jesus is coming back for us. We can’t just live out our lives, even as a believer, without living in such a way that we may not be ready for His return at any moment. We cannot get so comfortable with all our creature comforts that we are not even looking for Him to come. Sure we know it in the back of our mind, but it is the foremost thought in our mind? Maybe we need to be breaking that bread and drinking from that cup each and every day. Maybe then we will remember.