Made New Among You

The intercepted errand

In August of 1830, Joseph Smith set out on an ordinary errand: he was going to buy wine for the sacrament. He never completed the purchase. A heavenly messenger stopped him on the road — and the instructions that angel delivered became Section 27 of the Doctrine and Covenants, one of the most quietly astonishing revelations in the book.

It gives three instructions about the sacrament, in three verses:

First: "it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory" (D&C 27:2). The element is flexible — this is why the cup in our chapels holds water — because the ordinance's power was never in the vintage. It lives in the eye single.

Second: "you shall partake of none of it except it is made new among you" (27:3–4). Whatever fills the cup must be fresh, and it must be yours — made among you, from your own vines.

Third: "ye shall not purchase wine neither strong drink of your enemies" (27:3).

Read quickly, it sounds like liturgical housekeeping. Read slowly — the way an angel apparently thought it was worth interrupting a prophet to say — and it is a complete safety protocol for the most precious liquid in the covenant. The last essay ended with the wine being poured. This revelation is about protecting it. Because it turns out the wine of the covenant can be endangered in exactly two ways: it can be counterfeited, and it can go stale. Section 27 answers both.

Never buy from the enemy

Start with the strangest clause: don't buy sacramental wine from your enemies. As practical counsel to a tiny church surrounded by hostile neighbors, it made plain sense — who knows what an enemy puts in a bottle? But the Lord's own first clause ("it mattereth not what ye drink") invites us to read the whole instruction at the level of meaning. And at that level, the enemy-wine clause names precisely how sacred things get poisoned.

Not by attack. By catering.

Think about how false ideas actually enter a faith, a family, a heart. Almost never by assaulting the table — frontal attacks get recognized and resisted. They enter by supplying it: teachings fermented somewhere else, poured into the covenant's own vessels, and served under the covenant's name. The idea that God's love must be earned. The idea that some souls are beyond saving. The idea that the ends justify the means, that fear is a form of faith, that grace is a transaction with a price list. None of those were pressed from the gospel's vines — every one was bottled in the enemy's vineyard — and yet all of them have been served, at one time or another, in sacred cups, blessed and passed down the rows, because pressing your own wine is slow and the enemy's vintage is always conveniently in stock.

That is what the clause is guarding against. The covenant community must press its own wine: its teachings from scripture and the Spirit, its practices from revelation, its ideas about God from God. A people that won't do the slow work of pressing its own will end up drinking someone's — and the enemy delivers.

Drink it new

The second danger is subtler, and the Lord's word for guarding against it hides in the most famous sacrament sentence he ever spoke. At the Last Supper: "I will not drink henceforth of this fruit of the vine, until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom" (Matthew 26:29). The Greek word there for "new" doesn't mean recent. It means new in kind — fresh in nature, renewed in quality. (It is, in fact, the very word for the "new bottles" in the wineskin parable — the wine and the vessel share a vocabulary because they share a fate.)

Which exposes the second way the covenant's wine is lost: not replaced by counterfeit, but allowed to go stale in the cup. The same prayers, recited past. The same emblems, taken on autopilot. The covenant still standing — covenants don't expire — but the remembering of it gone cold: remembrance performed as procedure. Nothing false has entered; something living has simply stopped being kept alive. The enemy doesn't need to switch the wine if he can change the drinker.

And now look at what the sacrament prayer actually does — because it's gentler than we usually describe it. We sometimes talk as if the prayer were a weekly contract: you always remember him, and then you get his Spirit — terms and payment. But be honest: read that way, every one of us breaks the contract before we're back in the pew; nobody's remembering survives Monday intact, or even the closing hymn. That can't be what's happening, and it isn't. Listen to the prayer's actual verbs: the priest asks God "to bless and sanctify this bread to the souls of all those who partake of it" — the prayer sanctifies the emblems, makes them living to our souls — and what we witness is that we are "willing": willing to take his name, willing to remember, willing to keep his commandments (Moroni 4:3). Willingness, not a performance bond. The bread and the cup are blessed to us precisely so that the remembering can live in us — the ordinance is God supplying the very thing it invites, the way rain doesn't charge the field for growing. Always remembering isn't the fee for his Spirit. It's the life his Spirit feeds — and the table is where that life is fed, weekly, because remembering, unlike the covenant, runs low. That's why the emblem repeats: not because anything expired, but because we get hungry.

Put the clauses together and Section 27 hands us a complete rule for everything we allow into the sacred places of our lives — call it the vintage rule, in four parts: made among you (pressed from your own covenant life, not imported), poured with an eye single (offered for God's glory, not appearances), drunk new (kept alive by remembering, never allowed to go stale), and never purchased from the enemy (no matter how convenient the bottle looks). Any cup failing any clause is where the trouble comes in. Our own history has a sobering witness here: in the 1830s the Saints received glorious spiritual outpourings — and within two years, many of the strongest had fallen away, not because the wine was false, but because vessels had gone rigid and old ideas (about wealth, about status, about how God's work must succeed) had been carried into new covenants. Fresh wine, aging bottles, and imported vintages: the pattern is old, and the protocol exists because the danger is real.

The armor at the feast

Then the revelation does something wonderful, and almost nobody notices the hinge.

After the wine instructions, the Lord lifts his eyes to a horizon: the day is coming, he says, when "I will drink of the fruit of the vine with you on the earth" — and he begins naming who will be at that table: Moroni, Elias, John the Baptist, Elijah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Adam, Peter, James, and John, "and also all those whom my Father hath given me out of the world" (D&C 27:5–14). The sacrament, it turns out, is pointed at a feast — a gathering of every era of God's family at one table, with the Lord himself pouring. (Hold that image; it's where the next essay lives.)

And then, without a pause, verse 15: "Wherefore, lift up your hearts and rejoice, and gird up your loins, and take upon you my whole armor."

Wherefore — because the feast is coming — put on armor. The armor of God, the famous inventory from Ephesians 6, is issued in this revelation as banquet dress. Which suddenly makes sense of the strangest parable in Matthew: the guest thrown out of the wedding "for he had not on a wedding garment" (Matthew 22:11–13) — he was a soldier out of uniform. And Revelation confirms it from the bride's side: her wedding array is "fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints" (Revelation 19:8). You dress for the war and for the wedding in the same clothes — because there is an adversary who contests every step of the aisle, right up to the door of the feast. The armor's stated purpose says it too: "that ye may be able to withstand the evil day, and having done all, that ye may be able to stand" (27:15). Stand — at the door, at the table, in the presence. The armor is what you wear to arrive.

Walking the armor

So walk the inventory, piece by piece, and watch it describe the covenant life this whole series has been building:

"My whole armor." Whole — the fulness word. Partial armor is an amputated gospel, and the adversary's strategy writes itself: he strikes the missing piece. Whatever part of the gospel a person or a people drops — the gifts, the daily disciplines, the word itself — that's exactly where the darts land.

Loins girt about with truth. The armor begins at the loins — the body's seed-center, the generative place — and it begins with truth. Readers of our first series will feel why: Alma taught us to treat the word as a seed and test it by its fruit, and the whole battle of this life is fought at the seed level, between true seed and the enemy's counterfeits. To gird your loins with truth is to guard the source — to make sure that everything you generate, everything you plant in your children, your friends, your conversations, your own heart, is true seed. The father of lies sows first and sows fakes; the soldier of the feast is girded so that what goes out from the center of his life grows straight.

The breastplate of righteousness. Remember who wore the original breastplate: Aaron, the high priest — with the names of all Israel engraved on its stones, carried "upon his heart, when he goeth in before the Lord" (Exodus 28:29). The breastplate protects the heart — the soil where every seed lands — and it carries other people's names over it. Righteousness guards the heart, and a guarded heart carries the people.

Feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace. The Lord gave this phrase a precise definition in our own dispensation: "the preparatory gospel... the gospel of repentance and of baptism, and the remission of sins" (D&C 84:26–27). The preparation of the gospel is faith, repentance, baptism, the sacrament — everything this series has walked so far: the softening of the heart, the making of the vessel, the table that keeps it supple — all the ordinances and first principles that prepare us for the reception of the Holy Ghost. And here is the gift hiding in the inventory: that preparation is part of the armor. It isn't discarded when the fire comes; it becomes the footwear — the thing between you and the rough ground for the entire march, carrying you forward with every step. You never outgrow the gate and the table. You walk on them. And it is the preparation of the gospel of peace — an army shod in repentance, baptism, and the weekly bread is an army marching to a wedding.

The shield of faith, "wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked." The darts are lies gone airborne — accusations, panics, whispered sentences designed to lodge and ignite. And faith quenches them for a simple reason: a dart's payload is always a lie about God or a lie about you, and faith is prior personal acquaintance with both parties being slandered. The dart strikes someone who already knows the Character in question — and goes out like a match on wet ground.

The helmet of salvation. If salvation is, at its heart, remembering whose child you are, then the helmet guards exactly what it must: the mind, the memory — the forehead, where scripture says the Lord writes his name on his people (Revelation 22:4). The adversary's favorite attack has always been identity theft: you are your record, your worst day, your old name. The helmet is the sealed remembrance that you are not. Lose it, and every other piece eventually gets stripped from a soldier who has forgotten whose armor it is.

And the sword of the Spirit, "which is my word." The armor's one and only weapon. Now stand back and take stock of the whole kit, because its most important feature is what's missing: truth, righteousness, peace, faith, remembered identity, and the word — there is no instrument of compulsion anywhere in the inventory. A soldier fully equipped in the armor of God cannot force anyone to do anything; coercion simply isn't standard issue. To compel, bribe, shame, or threaten, he'd have to bring the enemy's equipment onto the field — he'd have to purchase from his enemies — and the same revelation already forbade the purchase in verse 3. Section 27 guards the cup and the kit with one clause. God's people fight the whole war with persuasion, love, and the word — because those are the only weapons their Captain issues, and the only ones he ever used.

At the door

The revelation ends the way a wedding eve should: "praying always, that ye may not faint, until I come: and behold, and lo, I will come quickly, and receive you unto myself. Amen" (D&C 27:18).

Praying always, until — there's our word again, from the prison: even until, now posted as the watchword at the door of the feast. And then the Bridegroom's own signature: I will come quickly, and receive you unto myself. Read whole, this little revelation born from an interrupted errand is the wedding's security detail, issued in one breath: guard the wine — pressed among you, poured single-eyed, drunk new, never bought from the enemy; dress the guests — in armor that turns out to be the garment; arm them with nothing but the word; and post them, praying, at the door, because the days of waiting are the ones running out.

But that leaves the biggest question of this series still on the table — literally on the table. A feast with every dispensation's prophets seated at it. A Bridegroom. A garment. A cup the Lord has sworn not to drink until he drinks it with us. What exactly is this event the whole gospel keeps dressing us for?

The answer is hiding in the covenant's own name — and it is more beautiful than we were ever taught to expect. The new and everlasting covenant, it turns out, is a wedding.

That's where we go next.

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You shall partake of none of it except it is made new among you.