Celebrating the Lord’s Supper in the Right Way, Part 2 — Melchizedek, Testimony and a Clean Conscience

Celebrating the Lords Supper in the Right Way, Part 2, teaches that communion is far more than a little bread and a little juice. It is fellowship with God and with one another, where we testify of His goodness and let the blood of Jesus cleanse our conscience. Dr. William P. Hohman traces the first communion back to Melchizedek bringing bread and wine to Abram after battle, then shows from Hebrews why only the blood of Christ can free a believer from guilt and shame.

Below are the full video, a structured summary of the sermon, every Scripture he uses (linked to the New King James Version on Bible Gateway), a timestamped outline, and practical steps for coming to the Lord’s table with a clean conscience.

Sermon at a Glance

This message was preached at NTC Ministries and posted on October 4, 2022. It runs about 65 minutes and ends with an invitation to receive Jesus and a time of communion together. It picks up from the previous week’s teaching, where Pastor Hohman asked the church when the first communion took place.

Most Christians answer that it was the Last Supper in the upper room. He shows that it actually happened thousands of years earlier, and that this first meal reveals what communion was always meant to be: rest, fellowship, testimony and a cleansed soul.

The Many Names of Communion

Pastor Hohman begins by listing the different names Christians have given to the Lord’s Supper. Each one, he says, shows a different side of what happens when believers come to the table together. The table below follows his list and the meanings he gives.

The love feast, he explains, takes its name from agape, the love of God. That is why Jude 12 warns about people who are spots in your love feasts, feasting with you without fear and serving only themselves. They came to church not to build or help anyone, but used their mouths to divide, bite and speak against the leadership and others.

His point is that communion is a little more than two elements. It is people coming together in the love of God, and anything that breaks that fellowship spoils the feast.

Melchizedek and the First Communion

The first communion, Pastor Hohman teaches, is found in Genesis 14. Four kings invaded the valley of Sodom and Gomorrah, defeated its five kings, plundered their cities and carried off people as slaves, including Abram’s nephew Lot and his family. The Lord told Abram to go, and with just 318 household servants he pursued four armies, defeated them and recovered all the people and goods.

On his return two kings came out to meet him. The king of Sodom came to negotiate: keep the goods, give me the people. But Melchizedek came out with bread and wine (Genesis 14:18–20). There was no deal on the table. He came simply to sit down, talk, fellowship and refresh a man who had just fought a war. That, Pastor Hohman says, was the first communion.

He teaches that Melchizedek was the pre-incarnate Christ. His name means king of righteousness, and he was king of Salem, which comes from shalom, peace. He was both king and priest, something impossible under the law, where priests came from Levi and kings from Judah. Hebrews 7:1–3 describes him as without father, without mother, without beginning of days or end of life, but made like the Son of God.

Pastor Hohman says the pre-incarnate Christ appeared at other times in the Old Testament too. When the Lord stopped to talk with Abraham on the way to Sodom, He said He had come down to see whether what He had heard was true (Genesis 18:20–21). God knows everything, so Pastor Hohman explains that the word means to experience. That is why Emmanuel, God with us, came as a High Priest who was tempted in every way as we are (Hebrews 4:15).

God did not want to destroy Sodom, he adds, but its rebellion had to end. He compares it to Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1–11. Their deaths do not mean God strikes down every liar; the infant church simply had to be protected.

Communion Is Fellowship and Testimony

If 318 men overcame four armies, Pastor Hohman says, there must have been phenomenal stories, and Abram surely told Melchizedek all about the victory. That is what communion is for: coming together to talk about the Lord, His goodness, and how He has helped us. When someone shares a testimony, some people think they are bragging. They are not, he says; you cannot exaggerate God.

He shares his own testimony from Egypt. After he ministered in a Coptic church in the city of Suez and hundreds gave their lives to Jesus, people began seeking him out. A taxi driver took him into the desert to ask what he had told his niece, who had become a different person. The man was born again, and when they prayed for his wife, who had been bedridden with back trouble for two years, Pastor Hohman reports she was healed.

Then the secret police brought him and his young interpreter, Eddie, into an empty room. Pastor Hohman says he felt no fear at all. When the officers stepped out, he took Eddie by the arm and simply walked out. After that, people would approach him on the street or lock a shop door behind him to ask what he was telling everyone. He was eventually invited to speak to more than 250 physicians at the university in Cairo.

The reason this matters, he explains, is that our relationship with God is hands-on. God spoke the rest of creation into existence, but He formed man with His hands and breathed into him the breath of life (Genesis 2:7). When we give our lives to Jesus, He takes out the heart of stone and gives a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26–27) and writes His laws on our hearts and minds.

At the Last Supper, Jesus gave thanks, broke the bread and gave the cup of the new covenant for the remission of sins (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). But they also sat around the table, ate and talked. Fellowship in the love of God is the very foundation of communion. That is also how we overcome the devil: by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimony (Revelation 12:11).

Why Guilt Keeps Us From the Table

Pastor Hohman says the Lord told him the church needed to understand a clean conscience before he went further in the series. He explains that the Hebrew word for soul, nephesh, carries the sense of an animal life that goes back and forth, like trying to hold a cat that does not want to be held. That restless, anxious soul is what God wants to restore.

Psalm 23:3 says, He restores my soul. Most people hear Psalm 23 only at funerals, but he says it is about our life right now. Many born-again Christians still carry a feeling they cannot explain to anyone: something is not right, something they cannot get over. What they were before Christ still dominates their minds.

That guilt keeps people from fellowship with God. When His presence fills a service, they want to run, and they feel safer among people who do not know God. Some say they will not go to church in case lightning strikes. Pastor Hohman compares it to Abram turning away from Melchizedek’s bread and wine to go and deal with the king of Sodom, because the king of peace made him feel uncomfortable.

He recalls a young couple who visited the church when it met in a small Genesee building. When the power of God moved and people fell under it, the wife kept asking her husband what was happening, and he told her not to move. Over dinner, Pastor Hohman explained what they had experienced. They were born again the next week, were baptized in the Holy Spirit, and grew strong in the Lord.

The blood of Jesus does not only cleanse us from sin, he says. It purges the conscience of every evil thing we have done and every evil thing done to us. Both produce shame, and God’s covenant guarantees freedom from it. He calls guilt and shame one of the most crippling conditions a Christian can have, because it makes believers doubt God’s Word when they do not see it working in their lives.

The Lords Supper in the Right Way: A Clean Conscience

Much of the Old Testament, Pastor Hohman explains, is a type and a shadow; a shadow shows that something is there but not what it looks like. Jesus came to show exactly who God is. He never made anyone sick, and every good and perfect gift comes from the Father of lights (James 1:17). The law came through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus (John 1:17).

Hebrews 9:9–10 says the old sacrifices could not make the worshiper perfect in regard to the conscience; they were imposed until the time of reformation. The law was holy, he says, but its weakness was us, born under the first Adam. So God brought a second Adam, Jesus, a priest born of Judah, the King of righteousness and peace in the flesh.

He shows what that looks like in the woman caught in adultery (John 8:3–11). Her accusers left one by one, and Jesus said, Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more. He did not excuse the sin, Pastor Hohman says; He came to clear her conscience.

Hebrews 10:1–4 explains that if the sacrifices had worked, the worshipers, once purified, would have had no more consciousness of sins. Instead they were a yearly reminder, because the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sins. The sacrifice covered the sin, he says, but you still felt like a criminal. Now Jesus has made us kings and priests (Revelation 5:10).

David wrote that the Lord redeems the soul of His servants and none who trust in Him shall be condemned (Psalm 34:22), in the psalm tied to the time he feigned madness before Abimelech. Pastor Hohman applies it to every sleepless night spent caught between a rock and a hard place.

Then comes the heart of the message, Hebrews 9:11–14: Christ entered the Most Holy Place once for all with His own blood. If the ashes of a heifer cleansed the flesh outwardly, how much more shall the blood of Christ cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? He links this to Jesus telling Mary not to cling to Him because He had not yet ascended (John 20:17), and later inviting the disciples to handle His flesh and bones (Luke 24:39).

It does not matter whether you did the wrong or someone did it to you, he says; either way your conscience feels it, and the devil wants to hold people in that bondage for life. But perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18). Those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24), not with an unclean conscience. He made Jesus who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).

Humility is not thinking less of who God made you. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he (Proverbs 23:7). Two people can receive the same counsel, he observes, and one succeeds while the other fails because of what they believe about themselves. By one offering Christ has perfected forever those being sanctified (Hebrews 10:11–14), and if our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart (1 John 3:20–21).

If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; behold, all things have become new (2 Corinthians 5:17). Behold means look, he says: look at yourself the way you would look at a sunrise. He closes with Psalm 55:18: He has redeemed my soul in peace from the battle that was against me. That is what Melchizedek did for Abram, and what communion does for us.

Coming to the Table This Week

As the elements were served, Pastor Hohman read Hebrews 10:16–25: God remembers our sins no more, so let us draw near with hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience. It is like a hot bath after a day of hard work. Here are practical steps from this message on the Lord’s Supper in the right way:

• Bring a testimony to the table. Like Abram with Melchizedek, share what God has done for you when believers gather.
• Stop begging for forgiveness you already have. Accept that the blood of Jesus has cleansed your conscience and receive it by faith.
• Refuse to replay old failures. Whether you did the wrong or someone did it to you, let His blood wash the evil conscience away.
• Do not agree with a low opinion of yourself. See yourself as a new creation, the righteousness of God in Christ.
• Guard the love feast. Do not use your words to divide or bite at others when the church comes together.
• Keep assembling. Do not forsake gathering together; encourage one another toward love and good works.

Timestamped Outline

• 0:00 The names of communion and the love feast
• 1:08 Spots in your love feasts: Jude 12
• 2:14 Abram and the four kings
• 3:25 Melchizedek brings bread and wine
• 4:29 King of righteousness, king of peace
• 6:44 The Lord comes to see Sodom
• 8:58 Communion and testimony
• 10:12 Revival in Suez, Egypt
• 12:04 Questioned by the secret police
• 13:52 A hands-on relationship with God
• 16:09 Overcoming by testimony; the soul
• 17:25 Psalm 23: He restores my soul
• 21:12 Why guilt makes people run
• 23:31 The couple in the Genesee building
• 26:43 Types and shadows
• 28:58 Hebrews 9:9–10: the conscience
• 31:24 The woman caught in adultery
• 32:24 Hebrews 10:1–4: consciousness of sins
• 37:16 Hebrews 9:11–14: the blood of Christ
• 44:27 Perfect love casts out fear
• 49:22 Hebrews 10:11–14: made perfect forever
• 56:00 A new creation: 2 Corinthians 5:17
• 57:05 Psalm 55: redeemed from the battle
• 59:32 Communion and Hebrews 10

Frequently Asked Questions

Is communion only about the bread and the cup?

No. Pastor Hohman says the body and blood of Jesus are central, but communion is a little more than those two elements. At the Last Supper the disciples sat around the table, ate and talked, and Melchizedek’s meal with Abram had no business attached, only rest and fellowship. Communion includes sharing testimonies, encouraging one another and enjoying the love of God together.

Why did Ananias and Sapphira die if God is not out to strike people down?

Pastor Hohman says people often take that story to mean God will kill anyone who lies, and he says that is not who God is. In his view the church was in its infancy and had to be protected. He compares it to the judgment on Sodom: God did not want to destroy it, but the rebellion there had to be stopped for the sake of everyone else.

Do I need to confess every past sin before taking communion?

His emphasis is that the cleansing comes from what Jesus has done, not from reparations or self-atonement. God has already forgiven you, he says, so it is not about begging Him. It is letting Him, in fellowship, cleanse you from an evil conscience, just as Melchizedek refreshed Abram. Under the old covenant no effort could quiet the conscience, but the blood of Jesus can.

Scripture References

All passages open in the New King James Version on Bible Gateway:

• Genesis 14:18–20 — Melchizedek brings bread and wine
• Hebrews 7:1–3 — king of righteousness, king of peace
• Jude 12 — spots in your love feasts
• Psalm 23:3 — He restores my soul
• Hebrews 9:11–14 — the blood of Christ cleanses the conscience
• Hebrews 10:1–4 — no more consciousness of sins
• Hebrews 10:16–25 — hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience
• Revelation 12:11 — the blood of the Lamb and our testimony
• 1 Corinthians 11:23–26 — the Lord’s Supper

How this summary was made: written with AI assistance from the sermon’s own transcript and checked against the Scriptures listed above.

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