1 Corinthians Session 34 – 2026
We are in 1 Corinthians 11, beginning from verse 17, and we are now walking into the understanding of the Lord’s Supper.
1 Corinthians 11:17 | Now in giving these instructions I do not praise you, since you come together not for the better for the worse.
We often assume that it is always better to be inside a church than outside of a church. But in this verse, the apostle writes that although it is good to come together as a church, the Corinthian church was coming together not for the better, but for the worse.
This will become a very important verse for us as we enter into this study. Why would the Apostle make this statement?
The apostle will explain in detail why he makes this statement, and that will be the core of our study today. But we must understand that this statement is made in the context of the Lord’s Supper.
If we do not understand what the Lord’s Supper is, and if we partake of the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner, then we are coming together not for the better, but for the worse.
Before we dive into this, let us understand where we are.
We have been learning about the conduct of worshipers inside the church—that Christ should not be veiled, that He is the head of the church, and that He should be the only evident witness of the body of believers.
And with that context, we understand that the reason the church comes together is so that they may know Christ and be the visible testimony of Christ in this fallen world.
The problem the Holy Spirit will now point out to us is not a new issue. I would say that this problem has been the theme of this whole book: the unity of the body of believers.
To remind ourselves how a body can be united, we must understand that the only way the body can be united is when every believer gathers with one accord, which is to know Christ.
It is Christ, and the Spirit of Christ, who unite us—not we ourselves.
Let us continue to read from verses 18–22.
- The problem | 1 Corinthians 11:18-22
1 Corinthians 11:18 | For first of all, when you come together as a church, I hear that there are divisions among you, and in part I believe it.
1 Corinthians 11:19 | For there must also be factions among you, that those who are approved may be recognized among you.
1 Corinthians 11:21 | For in eating, each one takes his own supper ahead of others; and one is hungry and another is drunk.
1 Corinthians 11:20 | Therefore when you come together in one place, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper.
1 Corinthians 11:22 | What! Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you on this? I do not praise you.
The church was not united because there were divisions and factions inside the church. These divisions were present because people were being recognized and treated according to their social status.
Understand that this book was written around A.D. 53–55, only about twenty years after the resurrection of the Lord, and yet we already see divisions in the church. People were being honored because of their social standing.
But surprisingly, this is not the first time Scripture gives this rebuke. We read a similar rebuke in the book of James, and James gives us more detail about what was happening inside the church.
If we consider James to be the brother of the Lord, he was killed around A.D. 62, and many scholars place the writing of James before A.D. 50, which would be before the writing of 1 Corinthians.
This is what James writes through the Holy Spirit in James 2:1–8.
James 2:1| My brethren, do not hold the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ the Lord of glory with partiality.
James 2:2| For if there should come into your assembly a man with gold rings, in fine apparel, and there should also come in a poor man in filthy clothes.
James 2:3| and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes and say to him, “You sit here in a good place,” and say to the poor man, “You stand there,” or, “Sit here at my footstool.”
James 2:4| have you not shown partiality among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?
James 2:5| Listen, my beloved brethren: Has God, not chosen the poor of this world to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom which He promised to those who love Him?
James 2:6| but you have dishonored the poor man. Do not the rich oppress you and drag you into the courts?
James 2:7| Do they not blaspheme that noble name by which you are called?
James 2:8| If you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” you do well:
Scripture says that when you are divided because you want to honor the rich and ignore the poor, you have failed in the royal law of loving your neighbor. James continues by writing that if you break this one law, you have broken the whole law.
And the reason this law is broken is because there is no unity in Christ. The church has not understood what it means to be the body of Christ.
This was the problem: when the rich and well-known came in, they received special treatment in the church. But when the poor came in, they were neglected so that the rich could be taken care of.
The church is the gathering of believers who are united in Christ Jesus our Lord. In the early church, this gathering was often held in houses, as we see in several places in Scripture.
This also means that as the body grew, there would have been limited seating. Most likely, the rich were allowed to sit. Those who had a name in society were allowed to sit. But the rest may have had to stand.
This was the same spirit displayed by the Pharisees, whom the Lord rebuked for desiring the best seats and the places of honor.
Just a few years after James was written, the Apostle Paul writes to the Corinthian church because the same kind of problem is happening there. And in Corinth, this division is even more evident during the breaking of bread.
Again, the rich and socially accepted people were probably eating first. Most likely, the poor and those who served the table ate last, and many times, they may have had nothing left to eat.
So the Apostle asks, “Is this why you come to church? Is it just to eat? Do you not have houses? If you are hungry, can you not eat in your own home and then come to the gathering?”
Very early in the life of the Jerusalem church, we see a similar concern in Acts 6. The widows were being neglected in the daily distribution. This prompted the apostles to appoint servant-leaders who were full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom. Spiritually mature men were chosen to serve the tables.
According to the body of Christ, the higher you are placed, the lower you are expected to stoop in service. The Apostle writes that he is a bondservant—a slave—not only to the Lord, but also to everyone whom the Lord called him to serve.
But inside the Corinthian church, people with social status were being treated the same way they would have been treated outside the church. There was no unity in the body of Christ. Slaves were probably still treated as slaves, and masters were still treated as masters, even though in Christ there is no such division.
To give a brief understanding of the food being referred to here, the early church met regularly as a local body. Believers in a local place would gather in a home, and Acts 20:7 shows believers coming together on the first day of the week to break bread.
When they came together, there was teaching, prayer, fellowship, and the breaking of bread (Acts 2:42).
This is similar to how we meet today. We meet three or four times a month. When we meet, we have the Word, worship, prayer, and fellowship around the table. We eat together and break bread together.
The book of Jude refers to these gatherings as love feasts, or agape feasts. This love feast separated the believers from the pagan world around them.
In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul treats their gathered meals as inseparable from the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, because they were eating before the Lord as the gathered body of Christ.
When believers come together, they are the body of Christ, and they are the visible representation of Christ.
Around A.D. 111–113, Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor, wrote about Christians gathering on a fixed day before dawn, singing hymns to Christ, binding themselves to holy living, and later gathering again to share ordinary and innocent food.
In the New Testament, the Lord’s Supper is presented in the context of the gathered church. In 1 Corinthians 11, it appears connected with the shared meal, or the love feast. It is not presented as something detached from the fellowship of the body.
This love feast was also connected with what the early church called the Eucharist. The word Eucharist comes from the Greek word eucharistia, which means thanksgiving. This reminds us that the Lord gave thanks before He broke the bread.
So this meal was understood as a thanksgiving meal. Later, the word also entered Latin usage as eucharistia, and it is still used in many historic and orthodox churches today.
But by the early third century, in writings associated with Hippolytus around A.D. 215–220, we begin to see a clear distinction between the Eucharist and the believers’ sharing of bread together.
This may have happened for several reasons: order, church discipline, and perhaps also because of the abuses we read about in 1 Corinthians 11 and James 2.
Since there were divisions in the body, the church increasingly separated the bread and the cup from the larger fellowship meal. But that is church history, rather than Scripture.
So, in the context of 1 Corinthians 11, we should understand that the love feast, the believers sitting together and breaking bread, the shared meal, and the Lord’s Supper were closely connected. They were not treated as separate events.
Christ was not present only in the Eucharist and then absent from the rest of the meal. No, Christ is present with His gathered people. Christ is present as believers break bread together, because when we gather, we are the body of Christ.
The book of Revelation calls out to believers to open the door, so that Christ may come in and sup with them. That is the picture of fellowship at the table with the Lord.
We are not merely eating before one another; we are eating before Him. We are eating with Him. He is among us. He is present at the table with us. We are one with Christ, and therefore, we must be one with one another.
- The Same Night
Now the Apostle proceeds to give us the understanding of the Lord’s Supper, so that we, the believers, may understand what it cost for us to be redeemed and gathered as the body of Christ.
1 Corinthians 11:23 | For I received from the Lord that which I also delivered to you: that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which He was betrayed took bread;
The Apostle states that what he delivered to the church did not rest on human opinion or secondhand religious tradition. He received it from the Lord Himself.
The Apostle was not present in the room when the good Lord broke the bread before He went to the cross. But what he now says is not merely secondhand information. He received it from the Lord Himself.
And now it is given to us in Scripture by the Holy Spirit, so that we may know and be instructed in the meaning of the Lord’s Supper.
So far, the conversation has been about the love feast and the gathering of believers. But in this verse, the Apostle takes their gathered fellowship meal and brings it under the meaning of the final supper the Lord had with His disciples.
Why the Last Supper?
I believe Scripture wants us to understand the cost that was paid for us to be made the body of Christ.
This is the core understanding Scripture wants us to remember: we must understand what the Lord had to pay for us to be redeemed from this fallen world, so that we can gather together today as His body.
The Corinthians were treating the body carelessly because they had forgotten what it cost for them to become the body.
We will study the significance of why the Apostle points us back to that night. He is teaching us to understand the unity of the body of Christ.
So what was special about that night?
In this same verse, the Apostle stresses that the meal he wants us to understand is the final meal the Lord had before He was crucified.
It was the day of Passover, and the meal the Lord had with the disciples that night was the Passover meal. That is the meal the Apostle wants us to remember.
In Luke 22:15, the good Lord says that He desired to have this specific meal with His disciples with great longing. Let us read those two verses from Luke:
Luke 22:15| Then He said to them, “With ferventdesire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer:
Luke 22:16| for I say to you, I will no longer eat of it until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.
The word desire is a very strong word. The Greek expression carries the idea of, “With desire I have desired.” So the translators added the word fervent to help us understand that the good Lord waited and longed for that day, when He would have this Passover meal with His disciples.
This was not the first Passover the Lord had after His ministry began, and it was probably not the first Passover He had with His disciples. But this specific Passover was very special, for it was the Passover that fulfilled all the Passovers.
The Apostle points us to this specific Passover, as he states that the good Lord had this Passover meal on the night He was betrayed.
Let us unpack this understanding a little more.
As you remember from Genesis 1, the good Lord counts a day as evening and morning. The Jews also counted the day as evening and morning, unlike us, who usually consider a day from morning to evening.
So, on the same night the good Lord had the Passover meal, He was later betrayed and arrested. The next morning, which was still the same Passover day, He was crucified. He breathed His last and was also buried before the day ended.
This was done so that Scripture could be fulfilled. The prophecy that was set in motion on the first Passover was fulfilled on this Passover day.
We have already read this in 1 Corinthians 5: the good Lord did not only fulfill the Passover; He became our Passover (1 Corinthians 5:7).
To give a brief recap of the first Passover, we read about this in Exodus 12. The good Lord commanded Moses and the Israelites that each house should select a lamb without blemish.
This responsibility was given to the father of the house, who was considered the head of the house.
And in our last study, we walked through the understanding of who the head of man is. It is the Lord, and He is also the head of the church.
So understand that the Lord God was not only the Passover Lamb. He fulfills every part of the Passover.
He is the One who provides the Lamb.
He is the Lamb.
He gives Himself as the sacrifice.
He is the Head of the table.
He is responsible for the Passover meal.
And He gathers His household under the covering of the blood.
(John 1:29; John 10:17–18; Hebrews 10:5–10; 1 Peter 1:18–19)
The only thing left for the household to do was to receive the meal and eat. The Passover meal consisted of the lamb, the unleavened bread, and the bitter herbs.
This is the meal the good Lord is sharing with His disciples. The blood that was applied to the lintel and the doorposts, the Lord now connects to His own blood. And the unleavened bread that was shared at the table, the Lord now connects to His own body.
Christ not only fulfilled the Passover. He is our Passover.
Look at Exodus 12:26. We will read verses 26 and 27 alone.
Exodus 12:26| And it shall be, when your children say to you. “What do you mean by this service?”
Exodus 12:27| “that you shall say, “It is the Passover sacrifice of the Lord, who pass over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians and delivered our households.’” So the people bowed their heads and worshipped.
Exodus 12:27 teaches us that this is the Lord’s Sacrifice.
And that is exactly what the Lord was fulfilling on that night. He became our Passover, so that we may be redeemed from this corrupted world, which is set for destruction.
- The Lord’s Supper
1 Corinthians 11:24 | and when He had given thanks, He broke itand said, “Take, eat, this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”
1 Corinthians 11:25 | In the same manner. He also took the cup after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood. This do, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of Me.”
1 Corinthians 11:26 | For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death till He comes.
The good Lord gave thanks. That is why we always approach the Lord with thanksgiving, for the work is already done. When we come to the communion table, we remember that He has already completed what He promised. He has become our Passover.
The Lord took the unleavened bread and broke it. Scripture teaches us in the book of Isaiah that He was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. Though His body was given and He suffered for us, we also know that His bones were kept intact, for Scripture teaches us that not one of His bones would be broken.
Scripture also teaches us that we are members of His body, of His flesh, and of His bones. He was wounded and bruised for our sins, but the body He redeemed would not be broken.
So, it was for our sins and our transgressions that the Lord was broken, so that we may have life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.
And the Lord commands that we eat the bread, which points to His body, and drink the cup, which points to His blood, in remembrance of Him.
What is it that the good Lord wants us to remember?
He wants us to remember what He has done for us. He wants us to remember the work that was completed on the cross. The promise He gave to Adam and Eve was fulfilled. Man’s eternal curse has been broken, and the price of sin has been paid. That is the gospel.
This is where we will now spend some time today, for we need to understand a few things in this passage.
Understand this: the good Lord has finished all that He set out to do. As we saw in the first Passover, the only thing expected of the household was to receive and eat the Passover meal.
So we need to ask this question:
Lord, how do I receive and eat this Passover meal? How do I eat Your body? How do I drink Your blood?
Do I simply walk up to the altar, receive the elements, say a prayer, sing a hymn, walk away, and live my life? Is that all it is?
Later on, we will read that we need to partake in a worthy manner. But what does that mean? What is expected of us?
- The Church History
Today, we consider communion as an ordinance. What is an ordinance? In our English dictionary it would be considered as a ‘law’. But in our church usage, it is considered as a command which the Lord instructed the church to keep.
Across most Christian traditions today, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are universally accepted as practices of the church.
Focusing on communion, the danger in every generation is that what the Lord gave as a remembrance can easily become an empty custom or a religious duty. Therefore, throughout church history, the church has continued to teach and debate the meaning of communion.
Today, we consider communion an ordinance. What is an ordinance? In our English dictionary, it would be considered a law. But in our church usage, it is considered a command that the Lord instructed the church to keep.
Across most Christian traditions today, baptism and the Lord’s Supper are universally accepted as practices of the church.
Focusing on communion, the danger in every generation is that what the Lord gave as a remembrance can easily become an empty custom or a religious duty. Therefore, throughout church history, the church has continued to teach and debate the meaning of communion.
The medieval Catholic church later defined the Supper in terms of transubstantiation, which means that the bread and the cup became the literal body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
During the Reformation, this Catholic understanding was challenged. For example, Luther challenged this understanding, but he still held to the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in communion.
Calvin rejected that understanding and taught that believers spiritually feed on Christ crucified.
Today, many churches explain communion with the language of ordinance, obedience, remembrance, repentance, examination, and proclamation.
But understand the context of our study within this chapter. 1 Corinthians 11 is the clearest chapter in Scripture where the Lord’s Supper is explained as a practice in the church. The Apostle links this communion to the Eucharist, the thanksgiving meal, and to the meal shared by the body when believers come together as a church.
As we studied earlier, anytime the body gathers together, understand that you are the body of Christ. Christ is among you, and you, as a body, are breaking the bread and taking the cup with Christ.
- The Bread, the Body of Christ
1 Corinthians 11:24 | and when He had given thanks, He broke itand said, “Take, eat, this is My body which is broken for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”
So, going back to the text, let us try to understand the answer to the questions we asked earlier.
Lord, how do I receive and eat this Passover meal? How do I eat Your body?
Let us go to John 6. The whole incident around this chapter happens during the season of Passover (John 6:4). Scripture explicitly makes that statement so that we are aware of the Passover setting. This is the same link the Apostle also reminded us of when we walked into the Lord’s Supper.
The good Lord feeds more than five thousand people, and then He goes to the other side of the sea. The people follow the Lord and come to the place where He is.
The Lord rebukes them because they are seeking Him only because He fed them. So the good Lord tells them not to labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to everlasting life.
So now the people ask the Lord what work they should do so that they can receive this everlasting food. And the Lord answers this question. Let us read that in John 6:29.
John 6:29| Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He sent.”
This is the answer the Lord gives: you eat this everlasting food by believing in the Lord.
But they do not stop there. They continue to ask questions, and the Lord proclaims that He is the bread of life. The fathers ate manna, but they died. But those who eat this bread of life will not die, but will have eternal life.
So now the Jews understand that Christ is calling Himself the bread, and that the only way they can have eternal life is by eating His flesh. So they ask the question: how can this Man give us His flesh to eat?
This is what the Lord proclaims. Let us read from verses 53 to 56.
John 6:53| Then Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you have no life in you.
John 6:54| Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.
John 6:55| For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.
John 6:56| “He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.
This was a very hard saying for the Jews. They understood that their fathers ate manna in the wilderness to live. But Christ said, “I am better than manna. I am the bread of life. You need to eat My flesh and drink My blood to have eternal life.”
And here is the important note: only when you do this can you abide in Christ. So we need to make sure we understand how this is done.
The Jews did not understand this, and Scripture says that many of His disciples walked away because they did not understand it either. You would assume Christ would explain it further, and He did. But it was still hard for them to understand.
This was His explanation, John 6:63.
John 6:63| It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.
The disciples who did not believe that Christ is the Son of God left the Lord. The Lord looks at His twelve disciples and asks them, “Do you also want to go away?” And this is how Peter responds in John 6:68.
John 6:68| But Simon Peter answered Him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.
His disciples understood what the Lord spoke. They understood that the Lord was not calling them to physically eat His flesh, but to understand the spirit behind His words. That is why Christ said the flesh profits nothing. What you physically eat does not give you any profit. But it is the Word of God that profits you.
The natural man cannot understand this. It must be understood through the Spirit of God. That is when it transforms you.
In multiple places across Scripture, the Lord proclaims that we need to eat His words: Psalm 1, Revelation 10:9, Ezekiel 3:3, Psalm 119, and Jeremiah 15:16. The good Lord said that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.
When you read this Word through the Spirit, and the Spirit teaches you Christ, that is when you have eaten the Word. It is only through Christ, by the Spirit, and through the Word that you can be satisfied.
We will not cover the understanding of the blood in verse 25 today. But as we close this study, I want to quickly go down to verse 27.
- Are you worthy?
1 Corinthians 11:27 | Therefore whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and the blood of the Lord.
The question is not, “Are you worthy?”
For in ourselves, we can never be worthy to commune with the Lord. But understand this: in Christ, we have been made accepted, cleansed, and brought near by His precious blood.
If you have not received the Lord, there is no question of discussing the Lord’s table, for this table is for those who have believed by faith that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and that through His death and resurrection, we have been saved from this world into eternal life.
The question is not, “Are you worthy?” The question is, “Are you partaking in a worthy manner?”
The word used is anaxiōs in Greek, which means unworthy, or in an unworthy manner. It carries the idea of being careless and not knowing the value or worth of what has been given to you.
The root word carries the idea of weighing something according to its value and finding whether it corresponds to what it ought to be.
There was an expectation when the weight was placed in the balance, but it was found wanting.
This is the understanding of eating the flesh of the Lord.
Not that we would simply come up to the altar, say a prayer, and repent of our sins, but rather, the question is this: what are we doing with this heavenly sacrifice, which was provided to us free of cost?
Remember the question we asked when we started the study. The Apostle takes the Corinthians into the Lord’s Supper because they do not understand the cost the Lord paid to purchase them and unite them as the body of Christ.
That is the same question before us today.
Are we aware of the cost that was paid for us?
Are we aware of what was paid to make us worthy to sup with the Lord?
What are we doing with the Holy Spirit who was given to us? Are we seeking the Lord through the Spirit, by the Word?
Are we growing in His knowledge?
Are we sitting at His feet?
If we never spend time with Him, and if our desire is not to know Him but only to get ahead in this life and meet our daily needs, then Scripture says that perhaps we will be found wanting.
Scripture teaches us that we need to examine ourselves so that we do not have to be surprised at the end of days.
We have the Spirit with us.
We can ask Him to examine us.
The Lord has given us His Spirit and His Word. The bread has been given. The only requirement from the body was to receive the food and eat it.
And we cannot eat this food only once a month. No, we need to eat this food every day, like the tree planted by the rivers of water, constantly desiring and thirsting for this heavenly food.
This is only a partial understanding, for we are yet to walk into the understanding of drinking the cup of the Lord.
Ask yourselves:
Are you reading the Word of God?
Are you praying through the Word of God?
Are you meditating on the Word of God?
Are you feeding through His Word
Are you grazing in the green pasture which He has led you in?
In Christ,
Noel Kingsley
We open the Scriptures to see Christ.
We study the Word to know Christ.
We cling to the promises to grow in Christ.
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