The Stranger at the Table

[0:00] Okay, Anne's going to come and read for us from Luke's Gospel. Luke chapter 24, verse 13. What is this conversation that you're holding with each other as you walk?

[0:37] And they stood still, looking sad. Then one of them, named Cleopas, answered him, Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened there in these days?

[0:51] And he said to them, What things? And they said to him, Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, a man who was a prophet, mighty in deed and word, before God and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death and crucified him.

[1:11] But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. Yes, and besides all this, it is now the third day since these things happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed us.

[1:24] They were at the tomb early in the morning, and when they did not find his body, they came back, saying that they had even seen a vision of angels, who said that he was alive.

[1:36] Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it, just as the women had said, but him they did not see. And he said to them, O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken, was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?

[1:58] And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself. So they drew near to the village to which they were going.

[2:11] He acted as if he were going further, but they urged him strongly, saying, Stay with us, for it is towards evening, and the day is now far spent. So he went in to stay with them.

[2:23] When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him.

[2:33] And he vanished from their sight. They said to each other, Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on this road, while he opened to us the scriptures?

[2:47] And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem. And they found the eleven and those who were with them gathered together, saying, The Lord is risen indeed and has appeared to Simon.

[2:59] Then they told what had happened on the road and how he was known to them in the breaking of the bread. Amen. Well, the writer Luke that we've just read from in Luke 24, he is a master storyteller in his gospel.

[3:14] And I think the two most moving stories in all the gospels are when Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son in Luke 15, and then this story, The Road to Emmaus, where Jesus approaches these two minor characters that really have played no role up until this point.

[3:31] And in the first, the prodigal son, the very famous prodigal son story, Luke 15, Luke gives you the, Jesus gives you the heart of the father, that the father longs to pursue prodigal sons and daughters and bring them home.

[3:46] And he wants to throw a feast for them. He wants to give you a banquet. In the other, I think, most moving story, Luke 24, we have a mirror of the normal Christian disciple here.

[3:59] And it's so ordinary. It's so normal. It's showing us our own lives. Jesus meets us on the road. And then where does that road take you to? It takes you to the table. At the very end, he takes them all the way to Emmaus, and he lays out for them a feast.

[4:16] There's bread broken. And in the same way, the two most moving moments, I think, in the gospels, perhaps, are when we see that God wants to pursue you and bring you all the way to the table.

[4:30] And that's exactly what we have here in the road to Emmaus story. In the ancient world, kings would win great victories. Julius Caesar won many great victories.

[4:40] And when he would, he would go out and he would parade through the streets of Rome. Pomp and circumstance, crowds would gather. That's the classic work of the ancient king. Now, this is Resurrection Sunday.

[4:53] The greatest victory that there's ever been has taken place. Death has been defeated. That's a big one. That's a big win. And there's no pomp and circumstance. There's no parade.

[5:04] Instead, where is Jesus? On Resurrection Sunday, he is doing something disconcertingly ordinary, extraordinarily ordinary. He's on the dusty road with two minor characters going to a no-name village, Emmaus.

[5:19] We don't even know where it is. We saw that in week one. And what we're being shown here is that Jesus, like the rest of the gospels, continues to show up in ordinary people's lives.

[5:30] He wanted to go to the fishermen and the tax collector and the prostitute and the person who was out of the center of the social order. And here, he's doing the exact same thing.

[5:41] He's showing us the paradigm of the Christian life. That's why Luke calls Christianity the way. It's the same Greek word that gets used here in Luke 24 for the road, that Jesus continues to show up on ordinary roads to ordinary people like us.

[5:57] And eventually, you realize that it's not just that he's come to walk with you on your road, but that you're now walking on his road. And he is the journeyman. He's the one that has already gone before you. He's already paved the way for you.

[6:09] And he is bringing you all the way to the table, all the way to the table. And so what we read about here is the end of the normal road of the Christian life is to finally arrive at Emmaus in verse 28 and to sit down with Jesus Christ at the table and then to see him, to wake up.

[6:30] And so if there's one verb in the passage that really becomes the paradigm structure of the whole story, it's all about sight. So their eyes are closed. They're kept from seeing him in verse 16.

[6:43] And then you can see in verse 31 and 45, first, he opens their eyes by opening scripture. He explains the Old Testament, how the cross was necessary from the Torah, the first five books of Moses and the prophets from Joshua all the way through to Ezekiel and Jeremiah, then to the writings, the Psalms and further.

[7:02] And the language Luke uses, it says, when he opened the Bible and he showed them Jesus in the Old Testament, he opened their eyes to see, he opened their minds. The second way he gives sight to the spiritually blind in this passage is he brings them to the table.

[7:17] And so in verse 32, when they sat down, he broke the bread, we're told they could see him. One commentator I found this week gives a really helpful summary.

[7:30] This is week, if you're visiting today, this is week three, looking at the same passage, the road to Emmaus. And so I just summarized the past two weeks. And I found a commentator this week that I thought summarized what we've said so far, really hopefully.

[7:41] And so this is what he writes. It is both a wonderful, unique, spellbinding tale and a model. And Luke surely knew this for a great deal of what being a Christian is from that day to this day is the very thing we see in Luke 24.

[7:58] The slow, sad dismay at the failure of human hopes, the turning to someone who might or might not be able to help, the discovery that in scripture, though unexpected, there lay keys which might unlock the central mystery and enable us to find the truth.

[8:15] Then the sudden realization of Jesus himself warming our hearts with his truth as the bread is broken at the table. So today we come to the table, the bread being broken at the table from verse 28.

[8:27] Jesus is in the business of giving human beings sight from their blindness. He does so with the word last week and with the table this week. And so let me give you this morning two realities, two realities that the table of Emmaus teaches us that we were made for, two things that you were made for that the table of Emmaus shows you.

[8:48] And then just one thing you can do with that today. Okay, so first the two realities. The first is this, we shall be like him. And the way the New Testament works is the writers of the epistles, they draw on the wonderful works of God throughout the history of redemption and they take from God's wonderful works, truths, statements, we call that doctrine.

[9:14] And you've got this great moment in one of John's letters, 1 John, where he gives you, I think, two statements of doctrine that are basically just the unfolding of the Emmaus table.

[9:27] And here they are. This is what John says in 1 John 3, 2. We know that when Jesus appears one day, number one, we shall be like him. And then number two, because we shall see him as he is.

[9:40] So there's the two realities that we were made for. These are just the doctrinal statements of the road to Emmaus. And the first is, one day you shall be like him.

[9:51] Now, we talked in week one about how Jesus shows up on the road to these two travelers and they can't see him. They're spiritually blind, but also they're physically blind in that moment.

[10:02] The physical blindness stands in for spiritual blindness. And they can't see him because of spiritual blindness. They thought he was gonna redeem Israel from Rome. They wanted circumstantial salvation, not salvation from their sins.

[10:16] But there's another reason they can't see him. And the other reason they can't see him is because Jesus' body was different. They can't tell it's him because he did look different.

[10:27] And so we see that in John 20. Mary Magdalene is there. She's in the garden with Jesus. She thinks he's the gardener. And she can't see that it's Jesus. He's different.

[10:39] And then in John 21, the disciples are fishing and they look out and they think it might be him. Even when they're on the beach with him, John says, they thought it was him, but they dared not ask.

[10:53] Jesus looks different. You know that if you've seen somebody, you know somebody, a beloved who's died. Early degradation of a human body causes a person to look different.

[11:08] And boy, what must that difference be in a resurrected, glorified body? If death causes us to look different, how does, what could resurrection possibly do to the human self?

[11:24] And here, one of the reasons they can't see him is because Jesus is not the same anymore. He looks different than he wants to. So this is what the theologians say. They say this, the very same body of Jesus that hung on the cross, that died, the very same body that died on the cross now operates under a new condition, a new set of physical laws.

[11:45] Now, what we have here is the very same body of Jesus Christ, yet they can't tell because he's changed. And just later on in this passage, Luke 24, 39, he goes, he shows up with the 11 and he says, look at my hands, look at my feet, see the scars.

[12:02] What is he saying? He's saying, it really is me. This is my body. So it's very important to see that Jesus is saying there in that moment, the body that died on the cross is the body that is standing before you.

[12:14] Look at the scars. Look at my hands and my feet. After that, he picks up a piece of cooked fish and eats it. He's not a ghost. Ghosts don't digest fish.

[12:24] But Jesus' resurrected body died just a fish. He breaks bread. He eats the meal with them. He digests the bread. He's a real physical body. It is the body that he died with, that he is raised with.

[12:36] But at the same time, it's different. And so in this moment at the Emmaus table, he eats with them though he vanishes. Later on, he shows up to the 11. The door is locked though he appears in the room without going through the door.

[12:50] And what we're seeing in this moment is that there is something the same and something new. Sometimes people will talk about the resurrection body as if it's like a caterpillar going into the cocoon and becoming a butterfly.

[13:05] And that is not a good metaphor for the resurrection. Jesus is not like a caterpillar that went into the cocoon and became a butterfly. No, because he's not transforming from something that he once was, a mere caterpillar, into this gorgeous butterfly.

[13:17] No, he is him. This is him. It's his body. Yet, what we're seeing is an image, a reality of what it's like to have an Edenic body in the midst of a corrupted space-time.

[13:33] We've got here a body that belongs in Eden existing within the corrupted world. And you're just getting a slight, very mysterious, to be sure, glimpse of what that kind of body behaves like.

[13:46] And the promise of the road to Emmaus, of the table, is that as they sit across him, it's implied, they shall be like him.

[13:58] And John comes later and says it in 1 John 3. He says, you will be like him. Your physical body will be just like his. You will eat fish. You will break bread and digest.

[14:09] You will be a physical body, but you, at the same time, will be transformed. He, Paul says, in 1 Corinthians 15, he said, the metaphor you need is that his body was sown into the ground like a seed and that it's raised up imperishable.

[14:24] The perishable goes down, but the imperishable comes up and that the imperishable is now, quote, Paul says this, a spiritual body. Now, that sounds almost like he's saying, you will become a great spirit, but that's not what he means.

[14:37] Spiritual body in 1 Corinthians 15, what does it mean? It means, your body will be transformed by the Holy Spirit. You will be a Holy Spirit transformed body, physical body, just like Jesus Christ here before he went into heaven.

[14:51] Look, when you, I'll move on, let me say this, when you stand next to your grave, the next time you do, know that what you are really looking at at that grave side, for a believer, somebody who has walked the Emmaus road with Christ by faith, you are looking at a person, you are there, remembering a person, who has been sown into the ground as a seed that will come up again as an imperishable body.

[15:19] And if you come today by faith, walking the road, Jesus has met you on the road and you're walking the road by faith, your body will be sown. Somebody will stand at your graveside and they will say, they are a seed now and they will be raised an imperishable body.

[15:34] How about it? Do you want that? You will be like him. The gospel does not offer you an escape from your body. It offers you a healed body, a resurrected body.

[15:47] You will be whole. You'll be you. Jesus Christ's body really was broken at the cross like bread so that you one day can have a healed body, a physical body that is whole again.

[16:00] He didn't come to make you float on the clouds. He came to redeem your whole being. And that's what the first thing the table promises you, the future.

[16:13] You will be like him. Your body will be like his. Secondly, the last promise here, 1 John 3, 2, what does it say? Not only you shall be like him, but you will see him as he is.

[16:25] Now, verse 28, it's the end of the day. They've been traveling down the road to Emmaus all afternoon, experiencing the greatest Bible study there ever was.

[16:37] And they're tired. It's probably getting dark. And here it says that he acted as if he were going farther than them. So Jesus, when they finally get to where they were going, Emmaus, he acts as though he's going to carry on.

[16:54] Why? He wants them to want him. He wants them to invite him into their home. And so, they respond.

[17:05] It says, they strongly urged him to stay. So it's, I mean, there's this sense in that Greek verb there that they sort of kind of almost yank his arm into the room and say, you're not going anywhere. You know, that was a very good Bible study.

[17:17] Please do not leave. We want more. And so they pull him in. Now, they're probably staying at either one of the travelers' homes, Cleopas' house. Seems like they're from Emmaus.

[17:27] Or, they're renting an inn. And so, Cleopas or the other guy, the other person is paying for it. Whatever way it works, it's definitely clear that the text, Luke wants us to see that Cleopas and the traveler are the hosts.

[17:44] They're bringing Jesus into their home. And they're going to feed him. They're going to pay for whatever it costs to have him. And then that's where the passage, as it turns towards the table, begins this great reversal.

[17:58] Because it's their house. They're the hosts. They're supposed to be paying for everything. And in verse 30, when the bread is brought out, it says that he took it, he blessed it, he broke it, and he gave it to them.

[18:10] Now, these are the same four verbs as the feeding of the 5,000. Three of the four verbs show up in the institution of the Lord's Supper the night before Jesus died in Luke's Gospel.

[18:22] Three of the four. And at a first century Jewish table, the host, the owner of the home, the man in the family, he has the job to break the bread.

[18:37] And so the way you would start a first century meal showing hospitality to somebody is that the man of the house who owns the home would begin the meal by the breaking of bread. They are the host.

[18:49] They're meant to be hospitable to him. As soon as they sit down at the table, it's Jesus that takes the bread off the table and breaks it. And immediately, there's a great reversal happening.

[19:00] They begin to realize what Luke wants you to see and that's that he is the host. He has become the host of the meal. This is his house.

[19:11] He's the one in charge. And when it says he kept going, he acted as if he were going to go further the whole time you learn that Jesus was actually the one that was showing hospitality to them.

[19:26] Now, it is very common in Christian evangelical cultural idiom to say things like I invited Jesus into my heart.

[19:40] I asked Jesus into my life and that's how I got saved. And I understand that language. It's not bad. There's so much about it that's so true, right?

[19:51] But when we say I became a Christian because I invited Jesus into my heart, we're using language that suggests that we are the master of our own domain, the master of my heart.

[20:03] I am the master of my heart and I very generously opened the door to Jesus to let and said, oh, you can come in now. And when you come to the Emmaus table, what you find out is that when you think you're inviting Jesus into your life, he's actually the one that's been showing hospitality to you the whole time.

[20:21] You know, when you think that you are the host of Jesus coming into your heart, it's actually that Jesus has been the one inviting you into his home the entire path. You know, he comes up and shows up to you on your road and then eventually you realize actually this was his road.

[20:37] And it's a simple truth, a simple application, but I think one of the things the Emmaus table says to us is that you are not your own, I am not my own, that your life doesn't belong to you.

[20:50] You know, it destroys the illusion of control. It breaks through and tells you, you don't, it frees you because you don't, you don't have to be in charge of your own life. You don't have to make your own meaning. You can be liberated by the fact that, that God is actually the one who's in control.

[21:05] He's actually the one that's showing you hospitality, never you him. And so every time you invite him in, it's only because he's first invited you into his life. And so we've got this wonderful German catechism from the 16th century.

[21:19] Somehow I get to a German reference, 50% of the Sundays we have, and here we are, it's been a couple weeks. And so the wonderful reference from the Heidelberg catechism, which says, what is your only comfort in life and death?

[21:31] That I'm not my own, but I belong in body and in soul and life and death to the faithful savior, Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the host of this meal.

[21:43] He's invited us onto his road. He's invited us to his table. And when they realize that in verse 30, they're at the table, he's broken the bread and given it to them. All of a sudden we read, they could see him.

[21:56] Their faith now becomes sight. And you see, he showed up on their, on their road, in their lives. He brought them down the road by opening to them the scriptures.

[22:09] He showed them himself through the scriptures. And then here, you know, they needed to see that the cross was in the Old Testament all the time. That the cross had always been preached from the Old Testament.

[22:22] Then as they sat down at the table, they finally could see him. He opens their sight. Now, what is that? What's going on here? This, what we're reading about is the destination of every single Christian.

[22:35] So if you're a believer in this room today, if you walk with him in some measure by faith today, the destination of every single believer is to sit down at Jesus, sit down with Jesus at the table and to see him.

[22:51] And the theologians call that the beatific vision. This is the paradigm. What we're reading about in Emmaus is the paradigm of the ordinary Christian life. And the ordinary Christian life ends the moment that you sit down at the table with him one day and your eyes are open to see Jesus Christ in person.

[23:10] It's called the beatific, the blessed vision, the visio dei, the vision of God. It is the reality you were made for. It is the hope of every single human being. Now today, you might desire all sorts of things and our desires are such a jumble of messes, aren't they?

[23:27] But the truth is the reason that we're never satisfied in this life with anything, the best things that we get, we still ultimately are discontent. It's because the desire underneath every single desire is that you would come and sit at the table with God and see him.

[23:45] It is the very thing you were made to be like him and you were made to see him. You will see him as he is and that's the promise. The Emmaus road is the normal pattern of the Christian life and at the end of the Christian life, you sit at the table at the banquet feast with Jesus Christ and you get to see God face to face.

[24:04] Now this is the tension of the Old Testament and it really is the most persistent ache, heartburn of the Bible.

[24:15] The movement from Genesis 3 forward, there is a persistent burning, yearning, aching all throughout that's woven all the way to this moment of longing to see God. So you remember Moses when he is on the mountain of Sinai, Mount Sinai, what does he say?

[24:30] He says, please Lord, show me your glory, let me see your face and the response that God gives is one of both mercy and terror at the same time.

[24:40] You know, he says to Moses, no rebellious sinful human could possibly see the face of God, my face, and live and so the response is terror that you were made to see God but the tension of the Old Testament is that you cannot see God because of your sin and your rebellion and yet God takes Moses and he puts him in the cleft of the rock and allows him to see just a glimpse of his glory and God is saying to Moses there, you know, Moses was the one person in the Old Testament that's called the friend of God who can see my face and yet when it came time to see his face, Moses couldn't see his face and that's the tension.

[25:17] How can a rebellious sinful human being see the very sight that you were made to see and the face of God and David, remember David, we sang about it Psalm 27 just a moment ago, David says in Psalm 27, I long to see the beauty of God's face in the land of the living.

[25:41] 1 John 3, 2, you shall be like him in the land of the living, you shall see him as he is and David said, I want to see the beauty of the face of the Lord in the land of the living and you see all the tension that's built up in the Old Testament of how are you going to get what you are made for is found when you come to the New Testament and Paul's words, in Christ, the veil is removed.

[26:04] We all with unveiled faces, we will behold the glory of the Lord and we shall see him as he is and the great tension that is the great problem of being human and yet sinful is all culminating to this moment when you're being shown in the Emmaus Road that the very path of the ordinary Christian life by faith is that if you will walk the road by faith, one day you will have sight.

[26:28] You will have the very thing you were made for. Every desire that has been unmet in this life, everything that you have chased and has been just meh, will one day find its utter fulfillment.

[26:43] It's great fulfillment. Fulfillment in a way you can't possibly understand today. I can't possibly understand today in seeing the beauty of his face at the table, at the banquet feast and just listen to the language.

[26:55] You know, it shows up all across the New Testament. We read it in our call to work, I'm sorry, Old Testament. We read it in the call to worship today from Genesis chapter 3 where we long for the condescension of God into the Garden of Eden all the way to Revelation 19, the marriage supper of the Lamb.

[27:12] Isaiah 25 says, Isaiah 25 says, at the banquet feast, he will swallow up death forever. Isaiah 55, come every one of you who thirst to see him.

[27:22] Come without money. You don't need money. Come without price. You can come to the banquet table of the king. It's been promised all throughout the lineage of the Old Testament and this is the moment where you're simply being told this is not for the all-stars of the Bible.

[27:37] This is not for the heavyweights of the Bible. This is not just for Moses. Moses was one of the heavyweights. David, you know, Mary, this is, this is, what does it make you think?

[27:49] This is for ordinary people. People that don't even have names, minor characters that are going, that living in small towns and places that don't matter that much. I wonder if you could say today, would the psalmist in Psalm 42, as the deer pants for flowing streams, so my soul longs for God.

[28:13] As a deer comes thirsting for water, so my soul longs to see God. Whether or not you feel that today or not, that is what you were made for. And what we're being told here, let me put it in the words of Augustine.

[28:29] Augustine, at the end of the city of God, that massive tome he wrote about the fall of Rome, he uses these verbs to describe this moment and he says, in that day at the banquet, we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise, and that shall be for us the eternal Sabbath.

[28:55] This isn't, I think the reason that this is in the Road to a Man story is because this isn't the hope for the Christian elite. This is for anybody who comes and follows Jesus on the way, who comes by faith.

[29:07] God is, God is keeping a seat at the table for you. So let me finish with this. One thing you can do with this today as we close and it's simple, come to worship tonight because we're going to celebrate the Lord's Supper.

[29:26] So I know it would be wholly appropriate for us to celebrate the Lord's Supper this morning, but we are celebrating the Lord's Supper tonight. And the reason that's the invitation, the application is because in verse 30 when Jesus breaks the bread and he blesses it and he gives it, there are so many commentators that for some reason say, kind of go out of their way to get ahead of this and say, this is not the Lord's Supper.

[29:52] And that is my very favorite, by the way, my very favorite commentator on the whole Bible goes out of his way to say, this is not the Lord's Supper. However, it's half true. It's half right.

[30:03] Why? Well, remember, remember your Westminster Shorter Catechism. Okay. Question 92. Let's all say it together. No, I can't say it either.

[30:14] Don't worry. I definitely cannot say it. I had to look it up. I wrote it down. In fact, question 92, what is a sacrament? And here's the answer. A sacrament is a holy ordinance instituted by Christ wherein, and here's the key, by sensible signs, physical signs, bread, wine, water, Christ and the benefits of the new covenant are represented, sealed, and applied to us.

[30:39] Here's the key word. I know that's hard to listen to. When in the sacraments, we have sensible signs, physical signs, bread, wine, water, that represent to us the benefits of Jesus Christ in the new covenant.

[30:53] That's the key word, right? Represent. This isn't the sacrament of the Lord's Supper. No, it certainly isn't. Because in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, when the bread is broken, when the wine is poured, you have a representation of the most real thing.

[31:07] But when the risen Lord Jesus is sitting at the table with you, you don't need the sacraments. Are you at the Lord's Supper? Well, boy, you are. Every time you eat with the risen Jesus, you're sitting at the Lord's Supper.

[31:20] This is the Lord's Supper. It's not the sacrament, but tonight we celebrate the sacrament that points us to this moment. And see, that's got to create in us the question, am I approaching the table in the right posture?

[31:33] And I don't mean that in a way to say that you've got to be in the right condition in order to come to the table. Not at all. You know, there are a couple problems I think that we have as we come to the Lord's table quite often. One is, we come to the table routine and just thinking about it as mere memorial.

[31:51] Only looking backwards to the death of Jesus and absolutely we should. But what we're being told about here is that every time you come to the Lord's table, it is there to create a stirring in your heart for the moment that you will sit across from the table with Jesus Christ and you will see him as he is and you will be like him and you will stare at the beauty of God's holy face at the banquet feast.

[32:13] That's what the Lord's Supper is there to do. Not just a funeral, not a mere memorial. Jesus isn't dead. He's pointing you forward to this, it's the end of the road to him. It's the end of the Christian life to banquet with Jesus Christ himself.

[32:25] The other problem we have when we come to the table is we often say, you know, do I really deserve to sit at the table with Jesus? Have I repented enough?

[32:37] Have I made myself worthy enough? And the answer is of course not. Of course you haven't. Of course you've not repented enough. Of course you're not worthy.

[32:47] And the promise of the table, the invitation of the Lord's table is that you do not come on the basis of your merits. Don't treat repentance as a merit. No, you come on the basis of his merit.

[33:00] You come not because you have strong faith and great repentance. You come because you are weak coming to a strong redeemer. And, you know, the night that he was betrayed, he broke the bread and he gave thanks and he blessed it and he gave it to them just like he does on the Emmaus table.

[33:18] And in the ordinary Passover meal, there is lamb. That's the main dish. There's lamb on the table. But that night before he was betrayed, there was no lamb there. Not on the table.

[33:29] There was no lamb on the table the night he instituted the Lord's Supper. Why? Because the lamb that was to be broken was standing at the head of the table. The lamb of God whose body was broken to take away the sins of the world was the one hosting that feast.

[33:45] And here is the resurrected lamb at Emmaus hosting this feast and saying to you, this is the promise for you. You, you will sit at a table one day where Jesus Christ will stand at the head and he will break bread and he will hand it to you and you will see him as he is and you will be like him.

[34:08] And that is the eternal Sabbath and that is the everlasting hope. I will close with this. You know, if you, if you go out, it is hard to do this in Scottish summer, but if you go out in Scottish winter in the highlands in the middle of the night, middle of the day maybe, I don't know, but middle of the night and you try to walk on a path through the Monroe's, you know, it is pitch, let us say it is pitch black.

[34:35] Maybe you are in a forested area, it is pitch black and you get out your torch, your flashlight and you shine your light. But when the sun rises the next day, when it is noontime the next day, do you keep your flashlight on, your torch on?

[34:49] No. The sacraments are your torch in the middle of the darkness. But when the sun rises, when the feast actually comes, when Jesus Christ returns, you don't keep the torch on, you don't need it anymore, right?

[35:07] The sacraments are here to give you strength for the journey in the darkness, the road, the road to Emmaus until you actually get to Emmaus, until you get to the celestial city, until you get to the banquet table and Jesus Christ himself, the realest thing is there physically with you and that is the hope of every human being, not just for the Christian, that is the hope of every human.

[35:30] It is the only way to be truly satisfied. John Owen says, no person shall ever behold the glory of Christ by sight in the life hereafter, who does not in some measure behold him today here by faith.

[35:46] And so that's the invitation. You've got to walk the road to Emmaus by faith if you want to one day see him by sight. And so come to the table tonight, come to the hymn this morning by faith.

[36:00] Have you ever been to a, you've been to a wedding reception and they, the feast, they put the little placards with your name on them wherever you're supposed to sit. Jesus Christ has your name, Christian, at a place, at his table in the life that is to come.

[36:17] You got to walk that road by faith now and one day it will be sight. Let's pray. Father, cultivate our desires to see Jesus. Give us a vision for the beauty of the face of God in the land of the living.

[36:31] We pray in Christ's name. Amen. Amen. Amen.