Ordering our Thoughts at the Lord's Table

The point: Struggle with the great and perplexing question of how to order thoughts at the Lord's table.

Martin compares the guided thoughts during preaching, where the preacher lays the track, to the Lord's Table, where believers must voluntarily direct their own thoughts, highlighting the personal difficulty of the latter.

than you ever knew before, because you had a framework within which you could order your thoughts. You see, when the Word is being preached, your thoughts are being directed for you. The preacher has thought through the passage or the subject, and as he opens up a given portion or many portions, and you are giving yourself to the Lord in the preaching of the Word, the track of your thoughts is already laid for you. But when we come to the Lord's table, and the elements are being passed, no one is before us guiding our thoughts.

5:30 - 6:06 Read in full sermon

The point: Think thoughts leading to the renewed appropriation of the great blessing of forgiveness of sins procured by the death of Christ.

Martin quotes a hymn to illustrate the joy and appropriation of the forgiveness of sins, emphasizing that the whole of one's sin is nailed to the cross.

The forgiveness of sins from the hand of the God against whom He has sinned. And it's here at the table that we ought to think thoughts leading to the renewed appropriation of that great blessing procured by the death of Christ. It is here that we ought to find our minds running in the track of the hymn writer who wrote my sin. Oh, the bliss of this glorious thought.

13:25 - 13:53 Read in full sermon

The point: Think thoughts leading to renewed consecration of ourselves to the One who died for us and to the ends for which He died.

Martin uses the analogy of someone asking, 'What do I have to show for all my pain?' and applies it to Christ, stating that His people are the great prize and worth of all His suffering and agony.

Now why in the world He put that kind of worth upon you and me, I'll never know. But we are His possession. Often we say, what do I have to show for all of my pain and all of my labor? Christ can ask that question and He is proud to say, I have my people for all of my agony, for all of my pain, for all of my bloody sweat in Gethsemane, for all of the shame of my nakedness upon which crude men stared when I hung upon a cross, for all of my pain, for all of the baptism of the agony of Golgotha.

18:35 - 19:17 Read in full sermon

The point: Recognize that you are bought with a price and are not your own.

Martin shares a personal observation of unconverted young people showing hostility by not making eye contact during preaching, using it to illustrate their rebellion against God and His claims over them.

That's why Paul can say, what, don't you know that you're bought with a price and you're not your own? And that's the problem with you who are unconverted. I look now, even tonight, in the faces of some of you young people, you don't even have the decency to look me in the eye when I preach. And something in me is angry when I see such hostility to God.

20:17 - 20:37 Read in full sermon

The point: Glorify God by living a life to His praise and His glory, either constrained by love or by His justice in hell.

Martin uses the stark image of the unconverted glorifying God in hell as a monument to their folly, while the redeemed and all intelligent beings worship God in their damnation, to emphasize the inescapable sovereignty of God's purpose.

You will glorify me by becoming my willing bond slave and living to my praise or sinking into hell while the host of the redeemed and we'll read it in Revelation 19 next Lord's Day, God willing, and all intelligent beings will worship God in your damnation.

21:49 - 22:13 Read in full sermon