Touré Roberts - Now You Can

Somebody, a high five before you take your seat! Please be seated. My absolutely wonderful and incredible Cola brand partner, Pastor Sarah, is here tonight. Baby, can you stand? I just call her honest and gorgeous. Come on, gorgeous, in the natural and in the spirit! Cibola, body praise the Lord; you know it’s true! I thank God for her.

So tonight, we’re going to commune, and for those of you who don’t really understand what communion is about, I want to break it down a little bit. Sometimes we can get caught in somewhat of a religious kind of thing, and we do things religiously without understanding their power. Let me say something right now: Jesus would never instruct us to do something that did not have spiritual power. I’m going to say it again: Jesus takes no delight in things that have only natural effects; He is Spirit.

So when He talks about baptism and communion, it’s not just so that we can check off something on our religious checklist. There is a spiritual and supernatural benefit to it. Are you tracking with me? Baptism—if you’ve been baptized here, we baptized a few dozen people several weeks ago—but when you get baptized, it’s more than just an outward expression. That is how we’re taught; it’s an outward expression, which I agree it is, but it’s more than that. When you get baptized, something happens. There’s a dimension in the spirit that is opened up to you. Now you have access to things that you did not have before, and I personally believe that communion is like a baptism.

Well, something spiritual happens. Something breaks at baptism. When you go underwater, I don’t think about your past being broken; strongholds are broken, yokes are broken—things that need to leave your life, things that need to be drowned in the Red Sea between where you are and where God is taking you—get drowned in the water of baptism. That’s why if you haven’t been baptized, it’s kind of like a promo commercial for the next baptism, and you want to be baptized. Communion is the same thing.

So let’s talk about what communion is. First of all, Jesus said do it often. He brought them in there just before making His way to the cross, and He had the Lord’s Supper. He said, «Take, eat; this is my body that was broken for you.» Then He says to take a drink of the wine; this is representative of the blood of the New Covenant. Right? He does this, and He says, «Do this often.» He says, «As often as you do this, you do show forth"—or proclaim, the Greek word for proclaim—the Lord’s death; watch this, «until He returns.»

So in this communion, you are proclaiming the Lord’s death in this dimension of time until a future time when He comes. I take my time here; He’s saying that while you are on your way to Me, while you are on your way to becoming, I need you to do this often. Because when you do this often, you are proclaiming… this turned today to say death and life is in the power of the tongue. Just say it real quick: you are proclaiming the Lord’s death until He returns.

Now, I used to really not understand that because I thought, «Why do we want to proclaim the Lord’s death? Is not the resurrection more glorious?» I mean, the death is so bloody, and you know, it’s sad. We used to wonder why Good Friday was good because it didn’t seem good for Jesus, right? You know, it just seemed like we should be celebrating His resurrection. Shouldn’t the proclamation of His resurrection be the thing that we want to proclaim? He says in that text—He’s not talking about the resurrection; He says, «I need you to proclaim My death.»

Why is Jesus so interested in our proclamation of His death? The reason is that in His death, things that need to die died. Okay, I see; we look at it as Jesus dying, and that is legitimate, but I see it a little differently. Because there was something that happened to Jesus before He died, and if we look at 2nd Corinthians chapter 5, verse 21, it says that God made Him—talking about Jesus—for He made Him, who knew no sin, to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Okay, so He’s saying that Jesus, who knew no sin, or who had no sin, became sin. Oh, hallelujah! The Greek word for sin, which you’ve heard me teach before, is «hamartia.» It literally means to miss the mark, to fall short, to come up short. I feel God! This means that God has an idea of who we are, and this thing called sin causes us to fall short of who He created us to be. We were created in His image and in His likeness; we had dominion, we had authority, we had a perfected state. Anything… and we, by the way, were not created to die. So all these things—death, sickness, brokenness, pain, dysfunction, emotional disorders, physical disorders—all these things are part of this thing… hamartia… part of these things that cause us to miss the mark.