The ChurchSample

What are the sacraments?

The sacraments include baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which are signs of God’s grace that we experience together in worship.

The Protestant Church celebrates two main sacraments: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Sacrament is just a word the Church uses to refer to ways in which God and his people have special relationship.

Baptism symbolizes participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus. We are buried with Jesus when we are lowered below the water, and we are raised with Jesus when we come up out of the water. This event shows how we are made a new creation in Christ and a member of the body of Christ.

The Lord’s Supper is not a sacrament which marks our entrance into the Christian faith, but rather our continual participation in it. Jesus himself instituted the sacrament not long before his death. When he did so, he deliberately evoked the story of the Exodus.

At the time of the Exodus, when God was going to rescue Israel out of Egyptian slavery, he told his people to slaughter a lamb and to take bread and wine to symbolize their salvation from death. This meal was called the Passover. When Jesus took his disciples into an upper room a few days before his crucifixion, and when he took bread and wine and offered them to his disciples as a symbol of his own body and blood, he was connecting his sacrificial death with the Passover.

Jesus was saying that his own crucified body and blood would be the means by which they’d be rescued from sin and separation from God. So when we receive the Lord’s Supper, the bread and the cup that symbolize the body and blood of Jesus, we receive the benefits of Jesus’ death and resurrection. We eat and drink in the remembrance or recognition of the salvation that Jesus won for us.

Take some time today to thank God for saving you through his Son; it is that grace we experience together at the Lord’s Supper.