Examine Yourself Before Communion (1 Cor.

In Out of Context Pt 3: Examine Yourself Before Communion, Walking The Text Content Director Brad Nelson unpacks a passage that is regularly quoted out of context. In 1 Corinthians 11, the apostle Paul instructs the church at Corinth to examine themselves before eating the Lord’s Supper so they don’t eat in an unworthy manner. Two thousand years later, ministers routinely invite their congregations to pause and inspect their hearts before taking communion because of this passage.

But is that what Paul was really addressing? When understood in context, we discover that meals in the ancient world were a way of reflecting people’s status. But Jesus regularly turned this idea on its head by eating with anyone and everyone. For Jesus and his first followers, a meal wasn’t a place to acquire status for yourself. It was a place to assign status to those who didn’t have it! That’s why communion became one of the most powerful ways the Church embodied God’s kingdom.

However, things in Corinth had gone horribly wrong. The Corinthian church had perverted communion by using the meal to reflect people’s status and exclude certain members from the meal. By the end of Out of Context Pt 3: Examine Yourself Before Communion, you’ll have a new perspective on what it means to eat in an unworthy manner, and a fresh appreciation for the power of meals to bring healing in a divided world!

https://bit.ly/outofcontextpart3

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