In his sermon titled 'The Lord's Supper: Acts 2 & 20,' Robert Bosley explores the theological significance and practical considerations of observing the Lord's Supper. He emphasizes the importance of frequent observance, ideally every Lord's Day, citing passages from Acts 2 and Acts 20. Bosley discusses the historical context, noting the fervor post-Pentecost led to daily gatherings, which later transitioned to weekly meetings. He distinguishes between 'breaking bread' as a reference to the Eucharist and simply eating food. The sermon stresses the sacrament as a means of grace and communion with Christ and encourages congregants to approach it with self-examination and thankfulness. Bosley argues that regular participation in the Lord's Supper is vital for the spiritual health of the church and its members.

Now, throughout this series, we've looked at various passages and various points of contention and discussion about the supper. And as we are getting to the end of this series, we've got a few practical questions now to address. We've looked at the theology of the Supper, why it was instituted, what purpose it serves as a means of grace and a way in which we have communion with Christ and with one another. Now we're going to look at some of the more practical issues of today. When do we observe it and how frequently?

And there's been throughout history and especially today a variety of opinions on this question. I've mentioned before the church I grew up in I don't recall ever them ever doing the supper and it's not uncommon for evangelical churches today to have the the the Lord's table once a year, perhaps once a quarter, sometimes only on a month or only on a fifth Sunday. If a month has five Sundays, they'll do it that fifth Sunday. Some churches will do it once a month. And one of the things that made me love this church when we first visited ten years ago was that we have the Lord's Supper every week.

And I believe that is vitally important to the life and health of a church to have and to observe the sacraments regularly. So regular in fact that I believe they ought to be every Lord's Day and I hope we'll see that from these two passages. And so we're going to look and consider two different questions. First, the timing of the supper and second, the frequency of the supper, looking primarily at these two passages. So first, the timing of the supper.

And When I say timing, I'm not so much, I'm not thinking about what time of day or what the order in the service is. You have in mind the question of when during the week should we observe the Supper? When did the early Church, when did the Apostles and the very early Church here in the book of Acts, what day of the week did they observe the Supper and by implication when should we? And I want to propose and defend here from these passages that what we see is the church celebrates the Eucharist when it comes together as the church. You cannot partake of the ordinances of the church without the church being together.

So that is foundational. The church must come together as a church. In fact, I think we'll see, as we've also seen by implication in 1st Corinthians 10, that the sacrament of the Supper is one of the main reasons for the gathering of the church. It's not merely something done in addition to our gathering together. And since our gathering, our assembling together is ordinarily done on the Lord's Day, the first day of the week, that is when we should take the Lord's Supper.

Though I do believe when we see in Acts 2 that we have freedom to take it more regularly if there is a good reason for it, if the church is gathering together. So if you consider what we just read in Acts 2 and Acts 20, in Acts 20 we have a very straightforward observation from the from the pen of Luke. He writes, on the first day of the week when the disciples came together to break bread. Seems very straightforward. We'll define exactly is breaking bread here the supper or not, but we'll get to that in a minute.

In Acts 2 though we see something a little bit different. Look back at Acts chapter 2 verse 46, so continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart. So this is immediately after Pentecost, the thousands were converted there in Jerusalem, and there was such a fervor for the Lord at this time that they were meeting seemingly daily and breaking bread and sharing meals with this united heart and mind together as the body of Christ. Now when we read through this we have a few questions I think that we need to ask and answer. First we need to consider is the breaking of bread that we see in both these passages, is that the same as them eating their food as we see in Acts 2.46?

They broke bread from house to house and ate their food with gladness. Are these the same thing or are they two different things? Second, if they are different, what makes them different? What is breaking bread if it's different from eating their food? And third, why was there a change from a parent daily meeting to meeting once a week on the first day of the week.

So first, is breaking bread and eating their food the same thing or two different things? In my opinion, while they could refer to the same thing, times of simply sharing a meal like we just did, I think it is more likely that they are referring to two distinct things. And I have a couple reasons for this. First, if they are referring to identical actions that people share in a meal together, it seems like an unnecessary repetition to simply say they broke their bread and shared meals if it's all a reference to a shared meal. It seems like an unnecessary repetition.

He could have simply said they broke bread from house to house with gladness or they ate their food from house to house with gladness. But he didn't. He said they broke bread from house to house and ate their food with gladness. And grammatically, in the original language, I think we have an indication that these are two different things. I won't get into the details, but the acts of continuing together and meeting daily and the action of breaking bread are grammatically subordinate to eating.

They are distinct actions that are what make the eating possible. They are something else that precedes them eating. And so I think we see that the breaking of bread and the eating together are distinct or at least they're not completely identical with one another. So if they're not identical, that brings up our second question. If they're different, and I think they are, what is breaking of bread?

We know, obviously, we know what eating their meal together, eating their food together is. Now, some scholars and probably today the majority take this to mean that the breaking of bread is a reference to the common Jewish practice that we see throughout our Bible, where the host at a meal would break the bread and distribute it to his guests to signify the start of the meal. And that's definitely possible. But remember, that is what Jesus himself did when he instituted the supper. He broke bread and he passed it out.

He took the Jewish custom and he invested it with new meaning and a sacramental significance when he said, take, eat, this is my body after he broke the bread. And consider just a few verses before this, we're in Acts 2 46, but look at Acts 2 42. Was it say that those who were converted devoted themselves to they continued said faster they were devoted to the Apostles doctrine fellowship the breaking of bread and the prayers This reference to the breaking of bread in Acts 2 42 is almost universally agreed to be a reference to the Lord's Supper. These are the things that the church devotes themselves to. This is what they continue in.

This is what makes up the life of the Church, these four things. Doctrine, fellowship, the Lord's Supper, and prayer. This is what the Church comes together for. And it seems unlikely to me that just in the space of a couple sentences, the breaking of bread would signify something different. Especially when we consider this language of breaking bread becomes almost a semi-technical term for the ordinance as we saw in 1st Corinthians 10 where the Apostle Paul said, is that the bread which we break a communion with the body of Christ?

And we see later on that this breaking bread is used consistently by Christians to describe the Eucharist. Now, later use of a term doesn't necessarily mean that that's what it's always meant in preceding times, but I think it can give us a clue because of how ubiquitous this term was used to describe the Supper later in the early church. For example, the book known as the Didache, which is our earliest non New Testament Christian book that we have, it says, quote, on the Lord's own day gather together and break bread and give thanks, end quote. And this is a clear reference to the Lord's Supper. And so it seems to me that's highly unlikely that what we have in verse 46 is something different from verse 42, and that what we have in Acts 20 verse 7 is something different.

It seems that this breaking of bread is consistently used to describe participation in the Lord's table. Okay, so they're different. The breaking of bread is the Eucharist. Why the change from daily to Sunday? We'll read in Acts chapter 2 that continuing daily with one accord, but by the time we get to Acts chapter 20, the meeting is weekly, once a week, on the first day of the week, Sunday.

Why this change? I think there are a few things we need to consider here. First, remember these events, we're reading them in one book, but in time these events happened about 25, 28, almost 30 years apart. Acts 2 is the very beginning. It's a time of great revival and fervor.

The Spirit of God has been poured out in an amazingly unique way at Pentecost and thousands are converted after hearing one sermon. It's an amazing unique event in church history. That is going to affect those people for a while. They're not going to immediately go back to normal everyday life after that. And this happens in revivals.

If you look at the story of revivals in church history, it's not uncommon for when a revival strikes an area for those churches to be full every day for weeks or even months on end because there's a unique hunger, a unique thirst for the Word of God, the fellowship of the Saints, and even the ordinances. But it doesn't last forever. And Honestly, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. We're not built for that level of activity and fervor to last our entire lives. We're human, we're finite.

We also have other obligations and duties that we must take on and carry out. We need to rest, we need to work, we need to be with our families, we need to do these things. So in those times of revival when there's great fervor and activity and everyone it seems is at the church all day every day for weeks on end, that's a great blessing for that time. It's not necessarily a bad thing when people get more into a normal routine and people are meeting again on just Sundays. I don't think that's necessarily a sign of a lack of fervor we'll say.

We're not built for that level of activity, not yet anyway. So I think when we consider that at Pentecost there's this effectively a revival and all this great fervor, that is different from almost 30 years later in a church that has been planted and it's been around for a year or so that they are meeting on a weekly basis in a more normal situation that we see throughout church history. I don't think that we can make any judgment on the on the Christians at Troas or on ourselves today or our brothers and sisters today that we don't meet every single day. I don't think what we see at Pentecost is supposed to be what we do every day throughout all of church history. Second, I think an argument could be made that daily is an exaggeration, that instead it's not meaning literally they were meeting every single day, it could simply mean they were meeting regularly.

Or even if the church was meeting every day, that doesn't mean all of them, all 3, 000 plus, were meeting together every single day. It could simply mean that there were Christians gathering every day, but not necessarily everyone. Because I've been very hard to fit that many people in someone's house in the middle of Jerusalem. So As time moves on from the period of the beginning of the church and this revival at Pentecost, we see the church moving from daily or at least more frequent gatherings to the more orderly formal once-a-week gathering on Sunday. And of course, as we've already seen, we see that in Acts chapter 20, but we also see it in 1st Corinthians 16.

1st Corinthians 16 verses 1 and 2 Paul writes, Now concerning the collection for the saints as I have given orders to the churches of Galatia, so you must also do. On the first day of the week, let each of you lay aside something, storing up as he may prosper, that there be no collections when I come." And this is significant because Paul is telling the Corinthians that they are to do what the churches in Galatia are also doing. They're to collect offerings when they gather on the first day of the week. He's assuming first day of the week gathering is normative for the churches both in Greece and in Asia Minor. It's the normal practice.

So what do we see when we consider the timing or or what day should we celebrate the Supper? I hope you from these passages you can see that the church observes the Supper when it comes together as the church and this is ordinarily done on the first day of the week, Sunday. Now second, the frequency. How often should this be done? Now we have established that the early church celebrated the supper on Sunday.

How often, How many Sundays in a row did they do it or did they do it and not do it for a few, for a while? What was the common practice then? Well, I think it's implied in these two passages that the supper was taken every time they gathered. Well, why? Because as Acts 2 42 shows, the new converts devoted themselves to these four things, the Apostles doctrine, the breaking of bread, the fellowship, and prayer.

And these are the four things that you will find when the church gathers together. It's part of the purpose of the church assembling and these four devotions are what makes the church the church. We gather even today to be instructed by the Apostles doctrine, not directly from the Apostles but mediated through our elders. We gather for the purpose of having fellowship together, we gather for the purpose of prayer together, And we also gather for the purpose of partaking of the sacrament. And this purpose language is very evident in Acts 20.

Go back to Acts chapter 20, verse 7. On the first day of the week when the disciples came together to break bread, That to break bread is a purpose statement. That is the reason that they are assembling, at least partially. If the church gathers each Lord's Day, which Acts 20 and 1 Corinthians 16 seems to assume, then part of the reason for that gathering each Lord's Day is to observe communion. And we see this was consistently observed throughout the early church.

Consider this description of a typical worship service in the middle of the second century. So we're a hundred years later. An early church Father by the name of Justin Martyr wrote this, on the day called Sunday there was a gathering together in the same place of all who live in a given city or rural district. The memoirs of the apostles, meaning the New Testament, or the writings of the prophets are read as long as the time permits. Then when the reader ceases, the president in a discourse admonishes and urges the imitation of these good things.

The president is what he calls the elders. Start calling you President Brown. Next we rise together and send up prayers. When we cease from our prayer, bread is presented with wine and water. They watered down the wine.

That was common practice in the other church. We'll get to that next time. So note the elements in Justin's description of worship. The Apostles' doctrine in the form of their writings, the memoirs, the fellowship and gathering together, their eating together, their participating in the Lord's Supper, and their praying after the sermon and before the sacrament. It's Acts 2.42 put into practice.

And it's what we do each Lord's Day with some modifications of course. And I don't know about you, this is kind of an aside, I don't know about you, but this excites me. That we can look at church history and say, oh that seems so familiar because God has been building His church and sustaining His church for 2, 000 years. That excites my heart. Hopefully it does you as well.

And this is why Calvin in the Reformation said to his opponents that they knew that the way that the Reformed worship was closer to the fathers than what the Romanists did in his time. But this is what we do each Lord's Day. And speaking of the Lord's Day, the very language used there, I think, points to having the supper every time we gather on Sunday. We have the Lord's Day is referenced in Revelation 1-10, where John refers to being in the Spirit on the Lord's Day. He uses a very unique word called, a word kuriaque, that is translated as Lord's.

And this is not the same word that is used to translate a phrase such as like the day of the Lord. It's not the same. The Lord's Day and Day of the Lord are very different. Instead, he uses the word kuriaqe, which has something like the connotation of pertaining to or especially belonging to the Lord. And there's very little doubt among anyone that when John says the Lord's Day, he's referring to the Sunday.

And that unique word in Kuriyake only is used one other time in our New Testament. 1 Corinthians 11 20 when Paul chastises the Corinthians because of their division, they are not eating the Lord's supper. The supper particularly belonging to the Lord. So to me the conclusion is inescapable. The Lord has a special day that particularly belongs to him in a unique way.

And on that day, his people unite together and partake of a special meal that particularly belongs to him in a unique way. The Lord's Day is for the Lord's Supper. The meal and the day go together. They go hand in hand. This is why the early church participated weekly.

This is why the Reformers argued for weekly communion. And that's why we do it weekly here at Hope. I hope that's clear. So with my last couple of minutes here, what does this mean for us? First, I want it to be an encouragement to you.

We gather together each week in part for this purpose, to observe the Lord's table. We take this memorial meal each Sunday as a means of grace and as a means of communion with Christ. So understand what we're doing. Each Sunday we come together as we've seen in the previous expositions. We are taking these elements in the ordinance not merely as an empty ritual where we just taste the elements and have some mental exercises happening in our mind.

Rather this is one of the ways whereby we have communion with Jesus. We are united to our risen Lord when we take the bread and the wine. It is one of the ways in which he extends his grace to us, that we would be conformed to his image. It seems so small, some bread and some wine. How does that affect us?

Well, by God's Spirit, He uses it to transform us, to conform us to Him. We receive the elements and physically we receive bread and wine, but spiritually by faith, we feed on Christ and we are nourished by him. And when you receive these things in your hands, you're reminded that Christ's body was broken for you, that his blood was shed for you. And now you receive those benefits on his own day when you receive his supper. So let this be an encouragement to you that we do this every week.

What a gift God has given you. A gift to have the sacrament at all, but especially to be in a church like this that does rightly observe it every week. Second, let it spur us on to thankfulness. Let's be thankful to Christ for this marvelous gift. Be thankful to Him for His sacrifice.

We take the elements and we see the symbols of the broken body and the shed blood and we give thanks. That's why it's called Eucharist, the Eucharistia, the Thanksgiving. We have a new and better covenant. Israel commemorated their redemption from Egyptian slavery once a year. You, as a new covenant Christian, get to celebrate your redemption from sins slavery every week.

When you partake of this Thanksgiving feast, a feast with meager outward elements but a feast for your soul. Christ has redeemed you from the curse of the law and he has redeemed you from death and hell that you deserve and he redeemed you with his own body and his blood and so now you receive his body and blood through the symbols. Be thankful to him when you receive it for this marvelous gift. Thirdly, It should be a reminder to us to not neglect these things. Now at this church, as Reformed Baptists, we have a very high view of the Lord's Day already.

The Lord's Day is the Christian Sabbath. It's a day for us to gather together, to refrain from our normal routines of life and have our hearts reoriented to God. But we can fall into a trap of our impulses. What sets the Lord's Day apart is the preaching. And that's true.

And that's good. We need to hold on to a high view of the importance of the preaching of the Word of God. That is absolutely vital for the health of a church. But at the same time, when we gather together, we should be looking forward not only to the preaching but also to the communion. Don't neglect it.

When we come together and when you're getting ready to come here the Eucharist should be on your minds. We should look forward to it each Lord's Day. That's one of the reasons why it's such a shame that so many neglect the Supper and churches only serve it once a month or even less. They will argue that they're making it more special. In reality, they're neglecting it and doing the opposite.

So this should create in you a desire to not neglect the Lord's Supper. The Apostles observed it regularly every week. The early church observed it every week. Let us not neglect such a marvelous gift from God. Eagerly anticipate it and eagerly partake in it.

And lastly, it should be a cause for self-examination. We should eagerly partake, but you should only partake if it is for you. Because remember what we're doing when the elements are distributed. Paul says that we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes when we participate in the Eucharist. It's a visible sermon.

The bread and the wine are a visible sermon, proclaiming the gospel to you again. And every time you hear the gospel, this is a time for self-reflection, a time for self-examination. Not have you lived up to your standard of for the your behavior over the last week, but How is your heart toward the Lord? Are you truly trusting in Christ? Or has something else pulled your affections away?

Let it be a time of self-examination where the elements are brought out and you have this visible sermon proclaiming the gospel to you again and the elements come to you in your seat, are you able to participate and take them because you've already received Christ by faith And you're reaffirming your commitment to Him? Or must you let them pass because you've still not received Christ Himself? Let it be a time of examination. And if you must let the elements pass, again not because you think you're not worthy enough, that's not the point, that's not what 1st Corinthians 11 means. Are you able to participate with faith?

And if not, come to Christ. Come to his table. Come to your Lord and live. Repent and believe the gospel and be fed by Christ. To begin your faith and to continue living your life, come to Christ and live and then partake of this meal every Lord's day.

Let's pray. Our Father, we come to you so thankful, so grateful for what you have done in giving us this wonderful gift. Oh Lord, we thank you for the gift of the Supper, but we thank you above all for what the Supper points to. We thank you for giving your Son, that you, in spite of our sin and rebellion, you loved us and desired that we should be with you and you gave your Son to satisfy justice on our behalf. Oh Lord, we thank you for the gospel, thank you for your Word, and yes Lord, we thank you for the Lord's Supper What a gift you have given us you have been far more gracious to us than we could ever deserve And I pray Lord that you would glorify yourself each Lord's day as we assemble together to hear from you and to receive your ordinances.

Oh God may you glorify yourself in this church and in each believer who's here. And Lord I pray that you would not let one, not let anyone go. That you would draw each one who hears your word here week after week. That you would draw each of them to yourself that they may know and receive and rejoice in Christ as their Lord and Savior. In His name we pray, Amen.