Elements of the Lord's Supper

Order of Service

• Scripture Reading — Isaiah 25:6-8
• Scripture Reading — Psalm 104:14-15
• Sermon
• Closing Prayer

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Sermon Title: Elements of the Lord's Supper

Scripture: Isaiah 25:6-8; Psalm 104:14-15

I. The Question Before the Church

• A. The central question: What are the proper elements of the Lord's Supper according to Scripture and tradition — bread and wine, or bread and grape juice?
• B. The occasion for raising the question: Overture 81, submitted to the PCA General Assembly by the PTOIC Presbytery (April 20, 2026), petitions the RAO to require both wine and grape juice be offered and clearly identified at General Assembly celebrations of the Lord's Supper.
• C. The overture is not binding on local churches, but it invites every congregation to examine its own practice.

II. The Biblical and Historical Witness for Wine

• A. The opening texts establish wine as a gift of God and a symbol of eschatological joy.
  1. Psalm 104:14-15 — "wine that makes glad the heart of man" is part of God's good provision from the earth.
  2. Isaiah 25:6-8 — the eschatological feast on the mountain includes "a feast of well-refined wines," pointing forward to the marriage supper of the Lamb.
• B. The synoptic accounts of the Last Supper consistently use the phrase "fruit of the vine" (Matthew 26:26-29; Mark 14:22-25; Luke 22:17-20), which the universal church interpreted as fermented wine for over 1,800 years.
• C. The one New Testament use of gleukos (new/fresh grape juice) occurs in Acts 2:13, where mockers accuse the disciples of being drunk on it — implying that even new wine contained alcohol.
  1. Peter's response in Acts 2:15 appeals to the hour of the day, not to the absence of alcohol, confirming that gleukos was an alcoholic beverage.
  2. This is the only Greek word in the New Testament for unfermented juice, and it is not the word used at the institution of the Supper.
• D. Unfermented grape juice as a communion option was not historically possible before Thomas Bramwell Welch applied pasteurization to grape juice in 1869, making shelf-stable, unfermented juice available for the first time. By 1893 it was marketed as "Welch's Grape Juice."

III. The Confessional and Constitutional Witness for Wine

• A. The Westminster Confession of Faith 29.3 specifies wine as the element signifying the blood of Christ.
• B. The Westminster Larger Catechism, Questions 168–170, defines the outward elements of the Lord's Supper as bread and wine.
• C. The PCA Book of Church Order, chapter 58-5 (constitutional), explicitly states that the table is to be "furnished with bread and wine."
• D. The consistent use of the word wine — not "fruit of the vine" or "cup" — across multiple places in the Westminster Standards and the BCO reflects the church's historic interpretive judgment that the scriptural phrase denotes fermented wine.

IV. Pastoral Considerations and Conclusion

• A. Wine is the scriptural norm; grape juice is a modern accommodation rooted in the late-nineteenth-century temperance and holiness movements, not in exegesis or tradition.
• B. Legitimate pastoral concerns must be honored — including the consciences of those in recovery, those who have suffered the abuse of others' intemperance, and those with a physical allergy to wine — without allowing those concerns to define the normative element.
• C. Whatever practice a congregation holds, communicants must never be made to feel that receiving grape juice means they are not truly partaking of the sacrament.
• D. The Lord's Supper is a foretaste of the great marriage supper of the Lamb (Isaiah 25:6-8; Revelation 19:9), and the elements in the hands of the communicants ought to match as fully as possible the language, imagery, and story of Scripture.