Why Church Matters, Part 4
Victory Life Church — Sunday, October 5, 2025
Part 4: “Why the Table Matters”
Link to a downloadable PDF
2025-10-05 – Why Church Matters, Part 4
Summary
The sacraments—especially the Lord’s Supper—are not just rituals but visible signs of God’s invisible grace, tangible reminders of the true story we live in: that Jesus’ broken body and shed blood have overcome sin, death, and the powers of darkness. At the Table, we remember and proclaim that the gospel of Christ is what heals the world, even in the midst of chaos, violence, and despair. Just as Jesus reframed the Passover meal to show that His cross brings freedom and reconciliation, and just as Paul broke bread with shipmates in a storm as a witness of hope, so we come to the Table to be nourished by Christ, to embody His healing in a broken world, and to offer radical hospitality to those around us. This meal grounds us in the truth, fuels us to live as His Body, and sends us out to carry His life and healing into the world—declaring with every act that Jesus is Lord and His cross has won the victory.
Scripture Reading
1 Corinthians 11:23-26 (ESV) For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, 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.” In the same way also he took the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
Introduction
We all live by the dominant story we believe to be true. Each of us develops a story about how the world is and how we are to navigate it. If you were raised in a stable home environment, you internalize a story of safety and stability about the world. If your early development in the home was turbulent or abusive, it forms a story in you of danger, violence, and instability. The challenge of adulthood is discovering how much of the story you have believed is actually true or not. Many of us are bound to lies we believed long ago, and they are running our lives in the background. This is evident on the cultural and political stage. Ideas about who is good and who is evil, what systems should govern our country, and what is best for the country and the world are being debated in our news feeds every day. The reason why there are acts of violence in our nation is that the perpetrators of these acts have internalized a story about who is evil and what they must do to stop it. Stories have power over us in ways we do not fully realize or understand.
In a simple way, good writers know how to play with this power. They weave together a story to draw you into the narrative, crafting an image of what is true and what is not. In some genres, writers subvert this in a twist ending. M. Night Shyamalan, in his early movies, would do this. Christopher Nolan often does this now. They make you think the world is one way, then at the end, they turn it all upside down, making you think differently about the whole story.
The Sacraments
A few weeks ago, we talked about what made the church what it is; one of those things was the “right administration of the Sacraments,” according to the Reformers. The Sacraments of Baptism and Communion (also known as the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharist, or the Table of the Lord) are an integral part of the church’s life. This is not the place to develop the theology of the sacraments, but why they are to be a part of what do we as a church.
In the sacraments, we remember and proclaim the true story in which we live.
A brief summary of “Sacraments.” They can be defined as “ritual actions undertaken by the Christian Church that are understood as visible signs of invisible divine grace.” St. Augustine defined a sacrament as “the visible form of invisible grace.” The Latin term from which the English word “sacrament” comes, sacramentum, was used to translate the Greek term used in the New Testament for a previously hidden but now revealed truth about God (mystērion). Baptism was practiced in the early Christian community as a rite of initiation into the Church. The Eucharist became a central component of the life of the early church, which appears to have originally been a fellowship meal, closely linked with the meal practices in which Jesus engaged during His ministry.
The basic idea is that the invisible grace of Jesus is not just given to us spiritually. The idea is that the real and powerful working of God’s grace in Jesus can also be conveyed to us through physical means. Example: an engagement and wedding ring. The invisibility of a man’s love for a woman becomes tangible when he gets down on one knee and proposes to her, and then places the ring on her finger. It’s just a ring. But to them, it is more than a ring. The same is true at the altar in a wedding. Rings are exchanged along with covenant vows. They are words and rings, but they are more than mere symbols. They mean something beyond the physical items and the words. Something mysterious, spiritual, and real is happening; this is especially true with the holy sacraments. There is more going on than water, bread, and cup. Something real spiritually is being communicated to us when we participate in them by faith.
John 1:14 (ESV)14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
There are so many lies in our culture, so many stories we are being coerced and deceived into believing. It isn’t just the individual lies that are deceptive; it is the stories of who we are, who God is, the kind of world we live in, and the solutions to the world’s brokenness that are narratives being fed to us deceptively that are so dangerous. The sacraments, grounded in the truth of the Word of God, remind us of the story in which we live and proclaim the truth of what will actually heal the world: Jesus, made known through His Church.
In the sacraments, we remember and proclaim the true story in which we live.
The Table That Heals the World
Our world is so broken, it’s heart-wrenching. Every week, we see news reports of horrendous acts of hate and violence. Our public dialogue is at a fever pitch. There are horrors and tragedies we are exposed to, not just in our country, but around the world. There are war zones, with innocent civilians stuck in the middle of these deadly showdowns; there are genocides, civil wars, earthquakes, extreme poverty, 3rd world debt, terrorism, ecological disasters, governmental corruption, sex trafficking, and school shootings. Not only are we seeing these tragedies all over the world every day, but if the algorithm actually shows you what’s going on in the lives of those you are connected with, your feed gets a daily dose of cancer diagnoses, personal tragedies, miscarriages, barrenness, divorce, dementia, neglect, and death. Our typical response to these is often fear and anxiety, despair and hopelessness. We usually want to turn a blind eye and focus solely on ourselves and our own little world, pining for safety and control. But what is God’s response to a world in such brokenness?
Luke 22:19–20 (NLT)19 He took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” 20 After supper he took another cup of wine and said, “This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice for you.
The world is broken because of sin and death; there is a real devil who is working through broken and sinful humans within a world infected with death. The gospel of the Lord Jesus is that through His death and resurrection, we can be made alive, forgiven of sin, delivered from the powers of sin, and have victory over the devil.
Colossians 1:13–14 (NLT)13 For he has rescued us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into the Kingdom of his dear Son, 14 who purchased our freedom and forgave our sins.
“When Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about, he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.” ~ N.T. Wright
Jesus was celebrating the Passover meal with His disciples. This was the meal to celebrate and remember the Exodus event: God’s judgment of the Egyptian slave-masters, mercy on His people through the blood of the Passover lamb, and the deliverance from slavery. One thousand five hundred years later, the Jewish people in Jesus’ day would say, “We are the same family that came out of Egypt. This meal makes us one. We celebrate Passover to remind ourselves that we are God’s freedom people. He made us free and wants us to be free.” Jesus reframed the entire Passover meal around His actions in His suffering and death. This Table, reshaped by Christ, becomes a new symbolic action. By participating in this meal, we are saying something new. Jesus didn’t give His disciples a theory to make sense of His death; He shared this meal with them. And this meal meant something. By celebrating the Lord’s Supper now, we are acting out that meaning. We are acting out the story of the world’s reconciliation into God’s peace.
Colossians 1:18–20 (NLT)18 Christ is also the head of the church, which is his body. He is the beginning, supreme over all who rise from the dead. So he is first in everything. 19 For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, 20 and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.
When we come to the Table of the Lord to celebrate the Lord’s Supper, we are declaring that this is the story we are living in: we are declaring that the gospel of the Lord Jesus is what will heal the world, delivering us out of sin and death. The Table of the Lord “announces to the principalities and powers, the unseen forces in the world, that Jesus is Lord, and that his cross has won the victory over all evil.” The bread and the cup remind us of where our healing comes from: Jesus.
1 Peter 2:24 (NLT)24 He personally carried our sins in his body on the cross so that we can be dead to sin and live for what is right. By his wounds you are healed.
“Jesus— the real Jesus, the living Jesus, the Jesus who dwells in heaven and rules over earth as well, the Jesus who brought God’s future into the present—wants not to just influence us, but to rescue us; not just to inform us, but to heal us; not just to give us something to think about, but to feed us, and to feed us with himself. That’s what this meal is all about.” ~ N.T. Wright
When All the Stars Are Gone
The Table of the Lord does more than just remind us of Jesus’ death and resurrection; it also fuels us for His service. By partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, we are energized to BE His Body in the world. As we experience the healing of the Lord Jesus, we bring that healing to our part of the world.
Where the wounds of the world are, the body of Christ brings healing.
We are not called to save the world; Jesus is the Savior of the World. However, we are His Body, and where we are, we are His ambassadors; where we are, He is. We may not be able to address all the world’s brokenness and bring healing, but we can enter our neighborhoods and communities to represent Him and bring His healing. This is why we are to “often” come to the Table of the Lord, so that we remain calibrated to the gospel beyond our minds and hearts, but also our bodies and taste buds, so that we carry His healing into our world.
“The Christian vocation is to be in prayer, in the Spirit, at the place where the world is in pain, and as we embrace that vocation, we discover it to be the way of following Christ, shaped according to his messianic vocation to the cross, with arms outstretched, holding on simultaneously to the pain of the world, and to the love of God…Read the Scriptures on your knees…Come to the Eucharist and see in the breaking of the bread the broken body of Christ given for the healing of the world. Learn new ways of praying with and from the pain, the brokenness, of that crucial part of the world where God has placed you.” ~ N.T. Wright
One story in Scripture that exemplifies this powerfully is found in Acts 27. Luke, the author of the Gospel by his name and the book of Acts, has been very strategic in how he anchors his writing around a table. Numerous times through these books, he uses the basic formula of taking the bread, “blessing it, breaking it, and giving it.” Much of Luke’s Gospel features Jesus around a table, and most of the time when Luke wants us to see something important, it’s centered around bread or a meal. There are two critical moments in Luke-Acts where Luke uses the Greek word “eucharisteo,” from which we derive the English word for the Lord’s Table, the Eucharist. It means “thanksgiving,” or “giving thanks.” These two scenes are the Passover scene with Jesus and His disciples in Luke 22, and Paul in Acts 27.
Luke 22:19 (NLT)19 He took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
“Eucharisteo” (Eucharist): “thanksgiving” — “Charis”: grace or gift
Contained within the word eucharisteo is the Greek word for “grace” or “gift,” “charis.” There is a connection between receiving the gift of Jesus Christ with thanksgiving and giving thanks over bread, which makes us think of the bread of life.
Acts 27:1-44 — A Storm at Sea
The Apostle Paul is imprisoned and being taken to Rome because he has appealed to Caesar. On the way, they are sailing, and the ship is having great difficulty making progress to the point where it is dangerous. Paul recognizes something about this difficulty and tries to warn them:
Acts 27:10–11 (ESV)10 saying, “Sirs, I perceive that the voyage will be with injury and much loss, not only of the cargo and the ship, but also of our lives.” 11 But the centurion paid more attention to the pilot and to the owner of the ship than to what Paul said.
This is one of the challenges in our day. The people of God have been trying to warn the powers that be in culture that something is not right, we are in trouble, and there is something we must do to salvage this generation. However, the experts have chosen not to listen, instead opting to heed other voices of influence, and things have worsened.
Acts 27:18-20 (ESV) 18Since we were violently storm-tossed, they began the next day to jettison the cargo. And on the third day they threw the ship’s tackle overboard with their own hands. When neither sun nor stars appeared for many days, and no small tempest lay on us, all hope of our being saved was at last abandoned.
This is an apt metaphor for the day we are living in, as sailing in the ancient world required navigating by the sun and the stars. If you cannot see the sun or stars, you have no idea where you are going. Our culture has tried to blot God out of our worldview, out of the public square, often ridiculing those who would still cling to faith in the Lord. In a sense, our culture has obscured “the sun and stars” and has tried to navigate life, culture, and society without the essential elements of navigation. Instead, wealth, technology, and political power have been the means by which people navigate life and society. Look at where this has left us! We are “violently storm-tossed” in our world, so full of hate and despair. Public dialogue has been lost to shouting matches and clever media talking points, even into violence, as we have seen so clearly. What do we do in the midst of a culture so lost?
Acts 27:21–25 (ESV)21 Since they had been without food for a long time, Paul stood up among them and said, “Men, you should have listened to me and not have set sail from Crete and incurred this injury and loss. 22 Yet now I urge you to take heart, for there will be no loss of life among you, but only of the ship. 23 For this very night there stood before me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship, 24 and he said, ‘Do not be afraid, Paul; you must stand before Caesar. And behold, God has granted you all those who sail with you.’ 25 So take heart, men, for I have faith in God that it will be exactly as I have been told.
Do you see the beauty in this? Paul, in a sense, does say, “I told you so.” However, he does not gloat or rub it in their face; he does not scream at them or leave them to their fate. He encourages them. “Take heart!” Because Paul belongs to the Lord and worships Him alone, God granted those who are with Paul safety. God’s promise to Paul extends to the ones who are with him, even though they are not followers of Jesus. In fact, they are the soldiers who are taking him to his execution! Yet Paul encourages them. Later, some soldiers try to escape through the life rafts under pretense, but Paul warns them not to leave the ship, and they listen. So many people are trying to save themselves under their own self-made religion. We are here to simply warn them, and yet invite them to salvation in Jesus. Then Paul commits an act of radical hospitality. He breaks bread with the soldiers and the crew.
Acts 27:33–36 (ESV)33 As day was about to dawn, Paul urged them all to take some food, saying, “Today is the fourteenth day that you have continued in suspense and without food, having taken nothing. 34 Therefore I urge you to take some food. For it will give you strength, for not a hair is to perish from the head of any of you.” 35 And when he had said these things, he took bread, and giving thanks to God in the presence of all he broke it and began to eat. 36 Then they all were encouraged and ate some food themselves.
Paul, in the midst of a chaotic and hostile environment, acted “eucharistically.” He witnessed to the grace of Jesus in a moment of chaos and crisis. Even “when all the stars are gone,” and when we no longer see heaven, we no longer can see how to navigate the complexities and chaos of the modern world through some transcendent reality, when there is so much hate and violence, believers can set a table of radical hospitality and testify that there is a God who is the source of all things, a God whose grace is given to us in Jesus Christ, who gave His life that we might have hope and salvation.
Conclusion
This is our mission: bring the life of Jesus to the world.
“[W]hen we find skeptical unbelievers trying to survive a shipwreck, our calling is to offer radical hospitality…like Paul on a ship that was not under his command, we can find a way to reach out to those in the world and stand in the midst of their questions and pain, their disappointments and fear. We can take bread, bless it, break it, and give it to them. We ourselves can become the bread that is blessed, broken, and given for them, for their lives– yes, even for the life of the world.” ~ Glenn Packiam
This is why the Table matters: it feeds us the Bread of Life so that we might bring life to the world, which is so dark and broken, ravaged by sin and death. Even when all the stars are gone, we can point to the grace and salvation that is found in Jesus Christ alone.
Citations and Read More
Eugene R. Schlesinger, “Sacraments,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al.
Augustine of Hippo, “On the Catechism of the Uninstructed,” 26.50
Rom 11:25; 16:25; 1 Cor 15:51; Eph 1:9; 3:1–9; 5:32; 6:19; Col 1:26–27; 2:2; 4:3; 1 Tim 3:9, 16; Rev 10:7
Early Christians baptized converts to the faith to signal their entrance and initiation into the Christian community (e.g., Acts 2:38–41; 8:4–13, 34–38; 9:17–19; 10:44–48; 16:11–15, 25–34). Baptism is associated with repentance, forgiveness of sins, and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit, but not in any sort of systematic way in the book of Acts.
Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper. The three Synoptic Gospels record a similar formula for the meal: Jesus blesses bread, breaks it, identifies it with His body, and distributes it to the disciples; He blesses the cup, identifies it with His blood, and distributes it to the disciples; all of this is to be in remembrance of Him (Matt 26:26–29; Mark 14:22–25; Luke 22:14–23). Acts portrays the apostolic Church as continuing the practices of apostolic teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer (Acts 2:42). Acts also contains references to the church gathering to break bread (Acts 2:46; 20:7–11).
Ephesians 2:1-10, Colossians 2:13-15, Romans 6:1-14
N.T. Wright. https://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/articles/the-cross-and-the-caricatures/
N.T. Wright. The Meal Jesus Gave Us, p. 77
N.T. Wright. Simply Christian, p. 154
N.T. Wright. The Challenge of Jesus, pp. 189-191
Glenn Packiam. Blessed, Broken, Given, pp. 183-184