EXPOSITORY STUDIES IN I CORINTHIANS

Expository Studies in I Corinthians

Ray C. Stedman

Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1946 (renewed 1973), 1956 and © 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, and are used by permission.

Discovery Books are published by Word Books, Publisher, in cooperation with Discovery Foundation, Palo Alto, California.

ISBN 0-8499-2937-7 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 81-51005

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

1 The Corinthian Crisis (1 Corinthians 1:1-17)

2 God's Nonsense (1 Corinthians 1:18-25)

3 God's Tools (1 Corinthians 1:26-2:10)

4 God's Teacher (1 Corinthians 2:10-16)

5 Carnal and Spiritual Christians (1 Corinthians 3:1-15)

6 How to Destroy a Church (1 Corinthians 3:16-23)

7 The True Minister (1 Corinthians 4:1-7)

8 A Father in Action (1 Corinthians 4:8-21)

9 Scandal in the Church (1 Corinthians 5:1-13)

10 Two Kinds of Lust (1 Corinthians 6:1-20)

11 Answers on Sex and Divorce (1 Corinthians 7:1-24)

12 Alone But Not Lonely (1 Corinthians 7:25-40)

13 Liberty and Limits (1 Corinthians 8:1-9:23)

14 Disqualified! (1 Corinthians 9:24-10:13)

15 The Focused Life (1 Corinthians 10:13-11:1)

16 Essential Traditions (1 Corinthians 11:2-33)

17 The Spirit's Point (1 Corinthians 12:1-6)

18 Gifts for the Body (1 Corinthians 12:7-31)

19 The Way of Love (1 Corinthians 13)

20 Speaking of Tongues (1 Corinthians 14)

21 The Foundation of Faith (1 Corinthians 15:1-11)

22 What If…? (1 Corinthians 15:12-34)

23 The Victory of the Mystery (1 Corinthians 15:35-58)

24 Giving and Living (1 Corinthians 16)

Appendix: First Corinthians in a Condensed Outline

EXPOSITORY STUDIES IN I CORINTHIANS

1 Corinthians 1:1-17

1. The Corinthian Crisis

Some years ago on a Sunday morning I was preaching on a section from the sixth chapter of 1 Corinthians. I was commenting on verse 9 where the apostle says,

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor the idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you.

I remember I was so struck by those words, "such were some of you," that I stopped and said to the congregation, "This was the makeup of the church at Corinth. These people had come out of this sordid background. Many of them, perhaps, still were struggling with much of the aftermath in their lives of these evil things. I am curious as to how many of you here have some of these things in your background." I then did a rather bold thing. I said, "If any of you have anything like this in your background I'd like to ask you to stand where you are quietly for a moment that we might know how much we're like the church at Corinth."

I did not know it, but a young man was present with us that morning who had never been in church before. He told me afterward that he had been converted at a recent Billy Graham Crusade, and he came to church with fear and trembling, not knowing what he was getting into. He said he heard me make that announcement, and he looked around to see if anyone would stand. At first no one did, but then a little old lady right on the aisle got up. Others then began to stand, and soon two-thirds of the congregation was standing. This young man said he looked around at that crowd and said to himself, "These are my kind of people!"

That story highlights a feeling I often have when reading these Corinthian letters. There is no church in the New Testament more like the churches of San Francisco, or New York, or Chicago than this Corinthian church. Corinth was a city of wealth and culture, at the crossroads of the Roman Empire, through which all the trade and commerce of the Empire passed. It was a city of beauty, a resort city, but it was also a city of prostitution and passion. It was devoted to trade and commerce, but also the worship of the goddess of sex.

On the little hill that rises behind the ancient city there was a temple to Aphrodite, and every evening the priests and priestesses--male and female prostitutes--would come down from the temple into the streets to ply their trade. Corinth was known throughout the length and breadth of the ancient world as a city of great and widespread immorality. It was in some ways, therefore, what we could call the San Francisco of the ancient world. The letter might well be titled, "First Californians." Here are the opening words:

Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes…

(If you have read the Book of Acts lately you will know that Sosthenes was at one time the ruler of the synagogue in Corinth. He had been converted, evidently, after a difficult time in that city and now is with Paul in Ephesus.)

To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul is writing this letter from Ephesus in about AD. 56 or 57. He had founded the church in Corinth about five years earlier when he had come alone, driven out of Macedonia by the persecution there. He had left Timothy and Luke behind and had come to Athens, and from there to Corinth. After the founding of the church (which took about two years) he left and went on other journeys. Now he is in Ephesus, and word has come to him that there is difficulty in the church at Corinth.

Troubles and Questions

Paul wrote a letter to the Corinthians (referred to in the ninth verse of the fifth chapter) which has been lost to us. All we know of it is what the apostle says there, that he wrote the letter to the Corinthians telling them that they should not keep company with those who had fallen into immorality. Subsequently, a group of men had come from Corinth to visit him in Ephesus (their names are given in the final chapter of this letter: Fortunatus, Stephanas, and Achaicus), and they had brought word, evidently, of further troubles there. With them they also brought a letter from this church asking the apostle to answer certain questions that they had. First Corinthians is his answer to that letter and the reports that he had received from the Corinthian church.

In some ways, most remarkably, this letter is different from the other letters the apostle wrote. His letters usually began with a rather lengthy doctrinal section and closed with a practical section in which he applied what he is teaching. But here, right from the very beginning, he plunges into the problems of the church, and intersperses a practicality of doctrine with revelations of truth throughout the letter.

This is certainly the most practical of all Paul's letters. Even in this opening greeting, his concern for the church in its various problems is clearly reflected. It begins with an emphasis upon his apostleship. "Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle." That affirmation was necessary because certain ones in Corinth were ready to challenge that fact on the grounds that Paul had not been one of the original twelve disciples. Some were wondering if he were not even a false apostle; therefore, he puts his apostleship first as he writes.

Then in verse 2 he describes the Corinthians as "sanctified in Christ Jesus." Now, in almost all the other letters, Paul's greeting to people is based not upon sanctification, but justification. But here he refers to this group as having been sanctified. These two words are theological terms. Justification is the description of the change God makes within an individual when he comes to Christ. It is what we also call being "born again," an experience that we are hearing much of today. It means an inward change of nature, and therefore a fundamental difference in outlook and attitude because of a deep change within. Now sanctification is the visible result of that in the behavior of individuals. It is all that inner change working out in terms of practice so that you see that someone is different. Paul refers to this with the Corinthians because their behavior was what was in question.

At the close of that same verse he stresses the Lordship of Jesus. He sends the letter to all those "who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ," and that would surely include us. Then he adds, "both their Lord and ours." This was because in this Corinthian church there were people who were turning away from the authority of Jesus, and following after men. Divisions had come into the church, and early in the letter the apostle reflects his concern over their departure from the centrality of Christ.

Bad News and Good News

In verses 4 through 8 the apostle starts with the good news for these people. He has both bad news and good news for them in this letter, but as he always does, he starts with the good news: that which is true of them because they are Christians, regardless of how they are behaving. He lists some of the fullness of provision that they enjoyed because they were Christians.

I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him with all speech and all knowledge--even as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you--so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ; who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul takes note of several things that were true of the Corinthians, and they form the foundation of his approach to them, Freely he admits there were blessings and possibilities and provisions God had given them that they fully and freely shared. First of all, notice that their entrance into the Christian faith was orthodox, i.e., they were saved by grace: "I give thanks to God always for you because of the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus." These people had been pagans, and now they are born again by having received the grace of God.

In this letter there is no problem or wrestling with the matter of legalism. These people were not caught up with wrong rituals (you have that in the letter to the Colossians); they were not involved with disputes over circumcision (you get that in Galatians); and there was no resting upon dead works (you get that in Philippians). Here in Corinthians the problem was license. They had accepted the grace of God in such a way that they did not think it made any difference how they behaved, and that is what was causing the problem.

Now, the apostle admits that they understood the grace of God. There are no questions raised in this letter on the deity of Christ or the virgin birth, or the substitutionary atonement, or the incarnation of Jesus. They all understood that they were set free from their sins by the gift of God through Jesus Christ. Their entrance, therefore, is clearly based upon God's grace.

Furthermore, Paul says, their equipment, having become Christians, is superb: "in every way you were enriched by him with all speech and all knowledge" (v. 5); "so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ" (v. 7). "In every way," he says, "you were enriched."

The word for "enriched" is the word from which we get our word plutocrat. They were rendered plutocrats, spiritually. They had a wealth of enrichment, and Paul points out that it was in two particular areas, in the word and in knowledge. The word for "speech" here is really the word logos, the word of God. This is his admission to them that they were avid Bible students. They did not have the New Testament as we have it--it was not written yet--but they had among them New Testament prophets who were preaching and teaching the same truth that we have in the New Testament. Therefore, they had all the truth available to them that is available to us.

The Corinthians were theologians, very likely, and, as was often true in Greek cities, they loved to get together to discuss philosophies and doctrine and to probe various problems. They were, therefore, able to answer some of the deep and heavy questions with which we still wrestle today. I am sure they could have told you where Cain got his wife. They could have told you what happens to those in other lands who never hear the gospel. They could have told you when the Antichrist would appear. They were Bible students, and Paul recognizes that and commends them for it. They were theologians; they were Trinitarian, supralapsarian trichotomists! (You may not know what that means, but they did!)

Now, more than that, Paul says, they were not lacking in any spiritual gift. In my book, Body Life, I have listed at least 21 different spiritual gifts that are referred to, and, according to Paul, there in Corinth every one of them was manifested. They had gifts of miracles, healings, teachings, tongues and interpretation of tongues, knowledge, and leadership. There was not a single one of the gifts of the Spirit lacking in this church. Can you imagine what kind of fascinating meetings they must have had when they all got together? No one wanted to miss church in Corinth! They never knew whether somebody would be healed, or some miracle would be demonstrated, or some remarkable prophetic utterance would come forth, or somebody would speak in a language they had never learned and someone else would interpret.

But that is still not all. Not only was their entrance orthodox and their equipment superb, but their expectation was right. They were waiting for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ; they understood that when he appeared he would set things right on earth. They were not given to naïve and liberal delusions that they would, by their own efforts, handle all the problems of the world and correct all the evil in life and so bring in the kingdom. They were not propounding self-reliant schemes for earning status and a position of blessing with God. They understood that it was Christ who would sustain them to the end. It was he who would present them blameless before the Father. Paul acknowledges that all this is true of them.

Failure in the Church

But then in verse 9 the apostle seems suddenly to change the subject, and he introduces rather abruptly a description of the fellowship that they needed among them,

God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

This is the key verse of 1 Corinthians. God had called them to a very important relationship. By implication, here at the very beginning of this letter we learn the reason for all of the problems in the Corinthian church. They had not understood the implications of their calling, and the relationship they personally and individually had with Jesus Christ himself. Instead (as we see beginning with the very next verse), the apostle has to deal with divisions, scandals, lawsuits, immorality, drunkenness, quarreling, and with much misunderstanding of the truth about idols and demons and various other matters. It is clear that despite this full provision which they had received, they were experiencing a great failure in the church. They had the ability to do all these mighty things in the Spirit, but not much was happening out in the city. Instead of making an impact on Corinth, Corinth was making an impact on the church. All these ugly attitudes and actions going on every day and night out in the city were beginning to infiltrate the church. Despite all their mighty provision, there was little manifestation of the power of God. It reminds me of Peter Marshall's vivid description of contemporary Christians; "Christians are like deep-sea divers, encased in suits designed for many fathoms deep, marching bravely forth to pull plugs out of bathtubs!"

What was wrong? Well, what was wrong was the Corinthians' lack of understanding of what it meant to have Jesus Christ living within them. I have traveled widely in the course of my work, and almost everywhere I have gone I have found that the major struggle of churches is right at this point. They have lost the sense that Jesus is among them, that they have an individual relationship to the Lord of glory himself. They no longer live their lives in the awareness and the excitement that they are partners with Christ in everything they do. When that begins to fade from Christian consciousness all these troubles that the Corinthians were experiencing begin to crowd in upon us. Therefore, this letter is written to call these people back, as it is written to call us back as well, to an awareness of what it means to have fellowship with Christ.

Fellowship with Christ is the work of the Holy Spirit. It is his task to take the things of Christ and make them known to us, to make the person of Jesus vivid and real in our daily experience. That is what Paul is talking about here--Christ made real to the heart, enabling him to satisfy the thirsts of the soul; Christ providing the power it takes to meet the demands of both the law and the love of God. Fellowship with Christ is not only direction in what to do, it is also dynamic--it is how to do it. Oftentimes churches fall into the habit of trying to draw direction from the Lord with no awareness of the great provision of the dynamic. It is not only guidance he gives us, but resource as well. It is not only an understanding of life, but an undergirding, in order that we might perform it. It is not only a program that he sets before the church, but the power to carry it out.

When any one of us forgets this, we drift into the terrible syndrome of recognizing the Lord on Sunday, and from Monday through Saturday living our life on our own without any recognition of his presence with us. He is no longer Lord of all our life, but only a part of it. If he is not Lord through our life all day long then he is Lord only of the margins, only of the left-overs, only of the weekends. The church is called to an understanding of the presence of Christ in the human heart to supply to it the dynamic, the sense of adventure, the innovative spirit that opens doors in unusual and unanticipated ways, tending adventure and color to life.

Now this was what was missing in Corinth, and as we open this letter and go on into it further, we will see how in every case the apostle calls them back to that. They were suffering divisions because they had lost sight of the Lordship of Jesus. They were immoral because they had forgotten that the members of their bodies were the members of Christ. They were in lawsuits with one another because they had failed to see that Jesus was judge of the innermost motives of the heart. They were quarreling because they had forgotten that others were members of Christ's body and, therefore, they were members one of another. All that the apostle does to heal the hurts at Corinth is to call them back to an awareness of fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ.

Appeal for Unity

Now the apostle Paul begins dealing with incipient division in the church at Corinth, in a powerful appeal for unity, verse 10:

I appeal to you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and there be no dissensions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.

Paul always expresses great concern about the possibility of a split in the church. You may be reminded by his words in verse 10 of the similar passage in his letter to the Philippians where, in chapter 2, he says to that church (vv. 1, 2),

So if there be any encouragement in Christ, any incentive of love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord, and of one mind.

You may recall also that in writing to the church at Ephesus he exhorted the elders there to be careful to "maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace" (Ephesians 4:3).

Church unity is a very important matter, and because of its significance Paul puts it first in the list of problems he has to deal with here at Corinth. Many of the other problems were flowing out of this division within the congregation. Here in verse 10 he briefly shows us the ground of unity, and the nature of unity in a church. The ground, of course, is the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. "I appeal to you," he says, "by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." Their relationship to Christ was the only unifying factor of the church. There is no other name big enough, great enough, glorious enough and powerful enough to gather everybody together, despite the diversity of viewpoints and the differences of background or status in life, than the name of Jesus. That is why the apostle appeals to it. He recognizes that we share a common life if we have come to Christ; we are brothers and sisters because we have his life in us. He is the ground, always, of unity. And more than that, we have a responsibility to obey him, to follow his Lordship. Therefore, the only basis upon which you can get Christians to agree is by setting before them the Person of the Lord Jesus, and calling them back to that fundamental base. This is what Paul does here.

He describes the nature of unity in this way, "that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment." That does not mean that everybody has to think alike. With all the differences among people it is impossible to get them to think alike. But yet the apostle says they are to be "of the same mind." Now how could that be? I think the letter to the Philippians helps us here, because in the passage just quoted Paul goes on to say, "Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus." He then describes for us the mind of Christ as a willingness to give up rights and personal privileges and take a lower place. Then comes that great Christological passage where he describes Jesus,

…who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:6-8).

That is the mind Paul is talking about. When everybody decides to put the things of Christ first, and is willing to suffer personal loss that the honor and glory of Christ might be advanced, this is what brings harmony to a congregation. That is always the unifying factor in a church, and that is the mind that is to be among us, the mind that does not consider itself the most important thing.

I remember a few years ago being at a Family Congress in St. Louis, Missouri. One of the evening speakers was Dr. Oswald Hoffman, the very capable and powerful preacher on the Lutheran Hour radio program. He was introduced in a rather extended and flowery way, but he came on and in his great booming voice said, "I'm not Dr. Oswald Hoffman, the great preacher of the Lutheran Hour. I'm a nobody--just like you!" I've not forgotten that incident because it seems to rue to capture the very attitude Paul is describing here. Who are we, that we should put our interests and our desires ahead of those of the Lord for his church? The church never belongs to anybody but the Lord. This is what Paul uses as the basis for unity in this church--not only the attitude of selflessness, which is the mind of Christ, but the responsibility to submit to his Lordship, the common responsibility that we have together.

Paul goes right on in verse 12 to describe the forms that these divisions were taking in the church of Corinth:

What I mean is that each one of you says, "I belong to Paul," "I belong to Apollos," or "I belong to Cephas," [another name for Peter] or "I belong to Christ."

There was the real trouble at Corinth. These were not full-blown schisms yet; they had not split off into other congregations, but there were four cliques, or factions, within the congregation. There were, first of all, the loyalists who said, "We are of Paul. He started this church. We came to life in Christ by Paul, and Paul is the one we're going to listen to above all others." Undoubtedly there was a big group that followed Paul. Then there were the stylists, those who were attracted by different styles of preaching, and they had especially been drawn to Apollos. From the Book of Acts we learn that Apollos was an outstanding orator in a world that loved and appreciated oratory. He was a rhetorician who was especially capable in the allegorical style of teaching of the Old Testament. I am sure there were many in Corinth who were saying, "Oh, I love to hear Apollos! He's a great preacher, a warm, capable, eloquent man, who can make Scripture come alive!"

Then there were the traditionalists (there always are), those who say, "Well, I don't know about Paul or Apollos. Let's get back to the beginnings. Let's go back to Jerusalem. We are of Peter." (Peter, evidently, had been through Corinth and had preached there.) So they said, "When Peter came, we really felt that we were on solid ground. After all, he was one of the first apostles that Jesus himself called." So they were quarreling over the relative merit and authority of these various teachers.

There was still a fourth group, and in some ways I think they were probably the worst. They were drawing themselves up and saying, "Well, you may be of Paul or of Peter or of Apollos, but we are of Christ! We go back to the Lord alone. What he says we'll listen to, not Paul or Peter or anyone else--it makes no difference to us." With that spirit of self-righteous smugness they were separating from the rest, dividing up the congregation and quarreling with one another over these things.

Now, you do not have to be very old to recognize that this is still a problem in the church. The same viewpoints are still dividing people. There are those who are emotionally attached to some great Christian leader who has helped them, and they will only listen to him. They read only his books or listen only to his tapes. And there are others who are drawn to some speaking style that has attracted them. They love to listen to someone because he turns them on emotionally. There are still others today who follow after some school of thought. It is the popular thing today to cry, "Back to the Reformation!" If someone comes along preaching the doctrines emphasized during the Reformation he will get a great following among the people who think that the Reformation was the whole sum and substance of all great Christian truth.

Some people will pick other matters of doctrine to affirm. There are the Calvinists and the Arminians and the Dispensationalists--these represent some of the things held up as the "summum bonum" (the highest good) in theology. If you survey the church scene all over America today you will find people dividing up this way. Some say, "I am of Gothard," and others say, "No, I am of Bright." Still others say, "We are of Schaeffer," and others, "We are of Graham," or, "We are of C. S. Lewis."

Clearly Paul is deeply troubled by this. It is a serious threat to the life of a church to find people choosing favorite preachers to the degree that they do not want to listen to anyone else. Now, we all have our favorite preacher, and up to a point that is not wrong. There are some people who minister to us better than others, and it is only natural that we should listen to them and follow them. But it is the exclusiveness that Paul is concerned about here--people who do not even want to come to a service if someone other than their favorite is preaching. That is what Paul speaks about.

Christ Parceled Out

In verse 13 Paul gives us three clues as to what is wrong with this kind of thing. To all of this he asks of Corinth, as he would ask of us,

Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

Here are our first clues as to what is wrong with this kind of cliquishness in a church. The first thing, Paul says, is that it tends to chop up Christ and parcel him out as though his person and his work came in various packages; thus you lose a true perspective of the whole of Christian theology. When you follow one man you are getting a view of Christ, but there is no teacher in the church who has ever come along--including the apostle Paul himself--who has ever set forth a totally complete view of Christ. That is why we have four gospels, because not even one of the disciples who was with the Lord was capable of giving us a complete enough view of Christ. It took four viewpoints to report his earthly life and ministry accurately enough to us. God, therefore, has designed that there be many teachers, many preachers, many viewpoints, in a church. In the Body of Christ at large there are many who can make a contribution to our understanding of Christ.

The second thing Paul says is, "Was Paul crucified for you?" There he indicates that the problem with cliquishness is that it tends to overemphasize the significance of the human leader. It builds him up too much; it makes him a rival, to some degree, of the Lord himself. People begin to think things about their favorite that are not true, and expect things from him which he is unable to deliver. I have had to do some degree of battle with this myself. I have had people say to me, "Oh, Mr. Stedman, when you speak I see things so clearly! I hang on every word you say. Whatever you say, I believe." (I have been trying for a long time to get my wife to accept that!) That is a very dangerous attitude, and yet we tend to think of individuals as being the channel by which deliverance can come to our heart.

But it cannot come that way. Paul is putting his finger right on the problem when he asks, "Was Paul crucified for you?" Not a single Christian teacher ever lived who can help us be forgiven one single sin, not one. Not a single teacher ever lived who can heal the hurt of a broken heart, or supply energy and adequacy to someone who feels worthless and unable to function in society, not one. Not a teacher among us today or at any other time is able to open the mind and the eyes of the heart and reveal to us the glory and majesty of God, not one. That is not the work of men; that is the work of God himself. He chooses various channels through which to work. We must allow him the privilege of doing that. They will not all be the same flavor; they will not all have the same characteristics. We reveal our immaturity when we insist that only those with certain characteristics are the ones we will listen to, or we feel can bless or strengthen our lives. No man is the Savior; no man can deliver us except Jesus. All are mere teachers; there is only one Lord. He said so himself. "One is your master; all of you are brothers."

Distorted Symbols

The third danger of groups is given in the latter part of verse 13, and on through the next few verses:

Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I am thankful that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius; lest any one should say that you were baptized in my name [Then he thinks of another group that he baptized.] (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any one else.)

Here the apostle makes clear that the tendency among groupies is to distort the meaning of symbols. They take an innocent teaching medium (in this case baptism), and make it into an identification badge. Many of us are familiar with this common phenomenon of human psychology; some symbolic thing of use to us is so important that we finally make it a badge of the group to which we belong.

As a young Christian during World War II, I was stationed in Hawaii, and I became acquainted with the work of the Navigators. At that time it was under the leadership of its founder, Dawson Trotman, and it was my privilege and delight to be a close friend of his, to have spent a good deal of time with him and to come under the influence of his teaching and his methods. The Navigators in those days did a great work in the navy throughout both the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and hundreds of young men were led to Christ through their efforts during the war years. I used to attend a Navigator group which met in Honolulu on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes two or three hundred sailors, all of them Christians, would be there. We had some great meetings and great times together. It was a glorious work.

But you could always tell the Navigators because there were three things that marked them. First, each had a Scofield Reference Bible tucked under his arm; that was the only "Authorized Version." Then every Navigator who was anybody at all had to have an index drawn in on the pages of the Bible, a kind of a ladder that gave you a clue to where the books were so that with your thumb you could turn up any book in the Bible almost instantly.

The third thing every Navigator had was a little black notebook covered in rough-grained leather. On opening it you found a loose notebook with many of the small, half-page materials on which the Navigators printed their Bible helps. Now these things were good. There was nothing wrong with them; they were helpful, but it was not long before they became status symbols, and they were used, not always intentionally, to put down those who did not have them. They became symbols of prestige that resulted in divisions among the men.

Almost every group does this. Something shows up sooner or later as an identifying badge that marks them as "special." That is what they were doing with baptism here in Corinth. Some were saying, "Well, Paul baptized me." Others were saying, "Apollos himself baptized me." And there were some who said, "When Peter came through, he baptized me. And, after all, Peter even walked on water!" That was a mark of status with them, and Paul says it is all wrong. It would destroy the unity of the congregation and provide an inaccurate testimony to the Person of Christ before the watching world. So he says, "I didn't baptize many of you. I thank God that only a few of you can say that about me."

Now, in one verse he introduces the cure for these divisions (v. 17):

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom [i.e., literally, "wisdom of words"], lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

This introduces one of the greatest passages in the Bible, setting forth the difference between the wisdom of man and the wisdom of God. He says, in effect, "You don't cure divisions in a church by identification badges. Christ did not send me to take scalps or to cut notches on my gun handle as to how many converts I've won." (Now, he is not saying that it is wrong to baptize; he himself did it and acknowledges that he did, He does not say we should stop baptizing because of this problem.

He simply says, that is not why he was sent.) "I was not sent to emphasize symbols, but, positively, I was sent to preach a whole gospel, not even one emphasizing style (not in wisdom of words), but that which emphasizes content." The facts in the gospel are what will set us free, and particularly, he says, the word of the cross.

The cross of Christ is what will heal the fragmentation of Christians wherever they are. When you call them back to an understanding of the meaning of the cross, you will find all the divisions disappearing; they fade away like the morning mist When you get men's eyes off the status symbols and call them away from following men to the Person of Christ and his cross, all the divisions will disappear. There has been no other cure that I know of through the years. The cross of Christ cuts across all human value systems. It wipes out all the petty distinctions that people make among themselves. The cross strips away our illusions and brings our pride tumbling down from that high place where it exalts itself against the knowledge of God. Paul is going to go on to describe this radical force so different from anything else in the world. No man would ever have planned the cross. If it had been left up to us to plan the program by which God would change the world we would never have included a crass. This is a radical principle that we need to thoroughly understand, because when we understand the cross there will be no room left for divisions.

I Corinthians 1:18-25

2. God's Nonsense

We usually think of the gospel as something that non-Christians need to hear, but the New Testament makes very clear that it is also Christians who need to understand the gospel. Believing the gospel is not only the means by which you become a Christian; it is also the means by which you are delivered in your Christian life from all the causes of disagreements, factions, dissensions, pressures of lust, and so forth. The heart of the gospel, Paul says, is the cross of Jesus Christ, and he brings us to that in verse 17 of chapter 1:

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

The theme of this next section is the power of the cross, and Paul is going to show us clearly, in a very profound passage, what the cross does in human thinking and in human affairs The cross, of course, has become the symbol of Christianity today. People wear it on chains around their necks; we use it as decorations in various places. We have become so familiar with the cross that we have forgotten much of the impact it had in the first century. For these early Christians, and for those among whom they lived, it was a horrible symbol. We would get much closer to its impact today if we substituted an electric chair for the cross. Wouldn't it seem strange, driving across this country, to see church steeples with electric chairs on top?

The cross is not the whole of the gospel. Some people have misunderstood that from this letter, because Paul said that when he came to Corinth he came determined not to preach anything among them "save Jesus Christ and him crucified." Before this letter is over, however, the apostle is going to write a great section on the resurrection of Christ. That is part of the gospel, too. But the cross was particularly needed in Corinth, as it is needed in our American churches, because the word of the cross is the cure for all human division.

The Fundamental Conflict

Paul now goes on to speak of this astonishing power of the cross (v. 18):

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart"

The cross is significant in Christianity because it exposes the fundamental conflict of life. That is what these verses declare to us. The cross gets down below all our surface attempts at compromise and cuts down the basic difference behind all human disagreement. Once you confront the cross and its judgment of life, you are either committed to error or committed to truth.

We must understand very clearly what Paul means by "the word of the cross." First of all, it means the basic announcement of the crucifixion of Jesus. The cross is a fact of history. If you have come into contact with some of today's modern cults you know that what they present, basically, is philosophy: various ideas about human behavior and how to control it. A whole spectrum of religious groups is based upon various philosophical concepts.

But when you come to Christianity you do not start with philosophy. You start with facts--inescapable facts of history that cannot be thrown out or avoided. One of them is the incarnation of Jesus, the fact that he was born as a man and came among us through strange and marvelous circumstances Another of the great facts of our faith is the crucifixion Jesus died. He was nailed to a tree. It was done at a certain point of time in history and cannot be evaded. This fact is an essential part of the word of the cross, part of the gospel that we declare to people everywhere. Something strange happened to Jesus of Nazareth. He died a strange death. He did not deserve it, but by the judgment 0f the Romans and Jews alike he was put to death for a crime he did not commit. That is part, but of course not all, of the word of the cross.

This phrase primarily refers to the judgment that `the cross makes upon human life. Paul later calls it "the offense of the cross." When you say Jesus was crucified you are saying that when the man universally acknowledged to be the finest man who ever lived took the place of any one of us, or any person who has ever lived, he deserved nothing but the instant judgment of God: death at God's hand. That is therefore a judgment on all of us. That is what people do not like about the cross. It condemns our righteousness. It casts aspersions on all our good efforts, wipes them all out and says they are totally worthless before God. A single individual, yielding to the God who made him, and filled with the power of God designed for him, is worth far more than all the created universe. But a man without God is a totally worthless being whose only value lies in the possibility that that divine life can he reinstated in him. That is the word of the cross, and that is what Paul means when he speaks of the cross as the symbol of the Christian life.

He goes on in this verse to tell us that this word always produces two reactions. It did so in the first century and still does today--exactly the same two. First, the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing. The word folly here literally means "silly." It is silliness, absurdity, nonsense, to those who are perishing. If you have ever tried to witness to somebody who feels that he is a self-made man and worships his creator, you will have discovered the folly of the cross. To tell such a man that all his impressive record of achievement is worth nothing in God's sight, that it does not make him one degree more acceptable, that it is nothing but wasted effort, is to immediately run into the offense of the cross. He will call that doctrine silly, absurd: "You mean to tell me that all this impressive array of human knowledge and wisdom that has been accumulated for centuries, with all the great achievements of mankind to relieve human misery through the technological advances of our day, that all that is absolutely worthless? Nonsense!" That is what they said in the first century and that is what they say today. You may even be thinking yourself, "If that's what the Bible teaches, then I think it's ridiculous." That is the foolishness of the cross.

The other reaction is that the cross is "the power of God to those of us who are being saved." (Note that the perishing have not perished yet; they are on the way to perishing. Nor have the saved been fully saved yet; we are on the way to that final salvation yet to be realized.)

But to us who are being saved, the cross is the key to the release of all God's power in human life. It is the way to experience the healing of God in the heart, the deliverance from the reign of sin, and the entry into wholeness, peace and joy. The cross is an inescapable part of that process.

Those are the two reactions. To prove that this is not something merely for a moment in time but always God's way with man, Paul quotes the words of God from Isaiah 29:14:

"I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart."

If you look it up in the Book of Isaiah you will find that it was uttered at a time when Judah was being confronted with an invasion. The northern borders of the land were being attacked by the Assyrian army, and all the statesmen and politicians of the day, including King Hezekiah, were trying to find a way out of this dilemma. (It reads very much like the present-day crisis in the Middle East) They were trying to find a way by human ingenuity and political scheming to either make a mutual defense treaty with Egypt, or somehow turn off the wrath of the Assyrian army and thus escape imminent invasion.

But God spoke through the prophet Isaiah and announced that he would deliver his people without any help from the politicians. The Book of Isaiah goes on to record how God did that very thing. The Assyrian army came right up to the gates of Jerusalem and surrounded the city. King Hezekiah could see the hordes of Assyrians, mocking and taunting the Israelites. Their leader, Sennacherib, sent a letter to the king ordering him to surrender, but the king spread it out before the Lord and prayed over it. And God answered. He sent an angel who in one night slew 185,000 of the Assyrian soldiers. (History says that a plague broke out in the Assyrian camp, and overnight 185,000 died. The Authorized Version puts it in a rather remarkable way: "When they woke up in the morning, behold, they were all dead men.") God did exactly what he said he would do. He did not ask for any human help. He did it alone, and the land was delivered. Now, Paul picks this up and says it is the way God works, and especially, he works that way in the matter of human redemption.

Where Is the Wise Man?

That brings us then to Paul's analysis and examination of the wisdom of the age versus the wisdom of God. Now we are about to look at a very profound passage It is one of the most amazing examinations of a problem that every generation, without fail, has to face: How much should we trust our own wisdom? How much reliance should we put upon our ability to solve our own problems in whatever realm or dimension of life we care to investigate? (This is a particularly helpful passage to students at school.) Paul answers in verses 20 and 21:

Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who

believe.

He begins with three questions, but essentially he is asking this one question: "What true standing does human wisdom give to you?" Here we come up against the matter of how much value are academic degrees. I am not setting aside degrees; they do represent something of value, but how much of the true value of a life can be detected by the degrees that a person has? The implication of these questions is: none!

Paul is referring to the two universal approaches to gathering knowledge and wisdom. The first is the scribal, or Jewish approach-the study of the wisdom and writings of the past. The Jewish scribes gave their whole attention to reading the Scriptures and ancient writings of wise men, trying to gather it all and reduce it to practical applications for their day. But Paul asks, "Where does that get you?" The answer is: nowhere! Not with God, anyway!

Well, what about the debater of this age? That was the Greek approach. The Greeks loved to get together to debate the philosophies of their day. We would call it the dialectic approach. Paul is raising the question, "Where does that get you?" Again, the implied answer is clearly: nowhere! What is it worth? Nothing! That is a harsh judgment, isn't it?

At this point we must make an important distinction. There is a difference between human knowledge and human wisdom. Knowledge is the discovery of truth, and God always encourages it; he gave us minds to use. God has set man on a search to unravel and discover the millions of secrets he has hidden in the universe--many of the greatest, I am sure, yet undiscovered. Man is given the gift of reason to search these out. To give yourself to a discovery of the laws of physics and what is behind matter is perfectly proper. To give yourself to investigation of the wonders of the human body, of medicine and pathology, is perfectly right. To set yourself to discover the secrets of the stars, or the secrets of the workings of the human mind and the psyche in psychology--these are all perfectly correct. But that is knowledge, the discovery of truth. Wisdom is something else. Wisdom is the proper use of truth. This is where scripture always throws down the gauntlet.

The Bible says there is something faulty about human wisdom--it does not know how to use truth. All truth discovered through human knowledge is misused, abused, twisted, and distorted. This needs especially to be emphasized today because so many Christians worship human wisdom and feel that secular writers know more about the use of knowledge than Christians do. There is no question that many secular writers do know a great deal more about truth than do many Christians. But what we must clearly understand, and what this great passage will help us understand, is that when it comes to the right application of truth, secular minds are for the most part juvenile. They are inept, they do not know what to do with their knowledge. And so are a lot of Christians who follow along these same paths, who have not approached the use of truth from the revelation and the wisdom of the Word of God.

Amazingly, even thoughtful secular writers will distinguish these differences. Recently I was reading an excerpt from Vance Packard's book, The People Shapers, in which he explores the possibility of molding the minds of men and altering human behavior by scientific process. He concludes with these worth:

A person can be high in learning ability and memory, and still remain a fool. The two do not add up to either brilliance or wisdom in thinking. Until someone comes along with a pill for wisdom, we might better aspire to become a more human society, rather than a more brainy one.

In verse 20 the apostle asks another question, "Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" He is asking in essence, "What is the true nature of human wisdom?" And his answer is, "Foolishness!" It is ridiculous; it always sounds impressive, it radiates optimism, and it even seems to work for awhile in a limited area of application. This is what confuses us so. But when it is all over it has succeeded in changing nothing That is what we need to face. That is the fact which history confirms. Every generation wrestles with the self-same problems, and that remains true as far back as you can go into the farthest reaches of human history. That is why one generation never seems to learn from another. The great German philosopher, Hegel, was quite right when he said, "History teaches us that history teaches nothing." That is why old age always points to youth and says Won't you listen? Won't you pay attention?" And youth invariably Points back and says, "Look what your philosophy made us! Look where you got us! We're not going to pay any attention to you." That is the story of history.

Winston Churchill once said these remarkable words:

Certain it is that while men are gathering knowledge and power with ever-increasing speed, their virtues and their wisdom have not shown any notable improvement as the centuries have rolled. Under sufficient stress, starvation, terror, warlike passion, or even cold, intellectual frenzy, the modern man we know so well will do the most terrible deeds, and his modern woman will back him up.

The Stupidity of Ignoring God

Why is this true? In verse 21 the apostle puts his finger right on the problem:

For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom…

That is the problem. What is the major fault of the wisdom of man? Well, despite his pretentious claims to have penetrated the secrets of life, he has failed to discover or even to acknowledge the greatest fact of all--God himself. The great Being behind all that exists is God, and for man to ignore the most important fact of all is nothing but sheer stupidity. That is why, in our public school systems, there is a conspiracy of silence to keep God out. No one hardly dares to mention his name. Teachers are careful not to allow the investigation of natural phenomena to lead to the conclusion that behind these phenomena is a being of great wisdom, power and might. They use euphemisms instead: "Nature, karma, destiny, fate." Or, if they are driven into a corner, "Providence"--but not God. Now, that is another incredible fact. In all the reasoning of the mind of man he fails to discover the great Force behind all psychology, the great Reality behind all the appearances that Science investigates. With all our brilliance we end up like little children who fail to see a great giant towering in our midst because we are so happily engaged in swinging on his shoestrings. No wonder T. S. Eliot says in The Rock:

All our knowledge only brings us closer to our ignorance, and all our ignorance closer to death, but closeness to death, no nearer to God. [Then he asks the question that hangs over this whole generation.] Where is the life we have lost in living?

A Simple Story

Now what is God's answer to this? Well, Paul gives it to us in verses 21 through 25:

…it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Creeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Creeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

What a strange answer that is! God has chosen to set aside both the searchings and the demands of proud, stubborn people who demand miracles or else they will not believe, in order to confront them with what is basically a simple story of a crucified Messiah. We had a clear example of these demands in recent newspaper reports of the discovery of a shroud marked with the image of a man, supposedly the burial shroud of Jesus. It immediately evoked tremendous popular attention. Why? Because something about us wants God to perform a miracle or else we will not believe. We are right where the citizens of Nazareth were when Jesus came among them. They asked him to do a sign, but he would not do it "because of their unbelief."

To the proud skeptics who demand miracles and to the foolish intellectuals who insist on explanations or else they will not believe, God gives the same answer. The story of a crucified Messiah is held out to them as the only hope for deliverance. It is preached by simple men and women, not brilliant people, not great, trained minds, not deep-thinking philosophers, but common, ordinary Citizens--housewives, slaves, artisans, craftsmen, whoever, for anybody can tell the story of a crucified Messiah. And yet that story, believed in, effectively accomplishes what the wisdom of man and the power of man cannot do--salvation! People are actually delivered from themselves, and from their sins.

We all remember the mess of Watergate and the sickening discovery of a basic illness so deeply involved in our whole national life that it touched the highest office in the land. Associated with it was an arrogant, ruthless young lawyer named Charles Colson. We have heard the story of how the word of the cross reached that "hatchet man" of the Nixon administration, and how he is now devoting his life to the rescue of men in prison. He has been changed by the power of God.

I love to dwell on this because I think Christians have forgotten what it is God has put in their hands in the gospel. What a marvelous gospel this is! Paul seems, in verse 25, to bow before the wonder and majesty of this astonishing God who can devise such a simple but effective gospel.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God [the nonsense of God] is stronger than men.

What man cannot do, God accomplishes by a simple word about the crucifixion of Jesus and its judgment on the wisdom of man.

Here is what C. S. Lewis says about the nonsense of God in The Problem of Pain:

It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell. Yet even this he accepts. The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. And by trouble, or fear of trouble on earth, by crude fear of the eternal flames, God shatters it, unmindful of his glory's diminution. I call this "divine humility," because it's a poor thing to strike our colors to God when the ship is going down under us, a poor thing to come to him as a last resort, to offer up our own when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud, he would hardly have us on such terms. But he is not proud. He stoops to conquer. He would have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to him, and come to him because there is nothing better now to be had. [Macmillan, New York: 1943, p97].

Thus "the word of the cross" shatters the pride of man. When we learn in it the truth about human life we find we are dealing with a reality that strips off the illusions and delusions of a secular age and introduces us to bedrock reality--the true view of life as God sees it. That is the beginning of our deliverance from evil.

1 Corinthians 1:26-2:10

3. God's Tools

I have entitled this chapter "God's Tools" because it deals with those whom God uses to change the world. I could have entitled it "God's Fools;' because the startling truth Paul declares here is that God often prefers fools to use as tools when he wants to do a really great work in the world. Here are Paul's words (Chap. 1, v. 26):

For consider your call, brethren; not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth; but God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.

The apostle is dealing with the wisdom of the world versus the inscrutable, marvelous wisdom of God, which is often regarded by the world as foolishness or silliness. These Corinthians were exalting the wisdom of the world, and so dividing into various factions, following certain men, and glorying in men's ability, power, and wisdom.

To answer this the apostle shows us how God works, using a simple contrast; these Corinthians themselves are his "Exhibit A." He says, "Look at yourselves, consider your own call, look what has happened in your own life." He then points out two rather obvious but important facts they were evidently overlooking in their thinking. First, he says, "There are not many mighty among you, are there?" Fortunately, Paul did not say "any" mighty. Lady Hamilton, an evangelical believer among the English nobility in the early part of this century, used to say she was saved by an "m," because if it had said not "any" mighty or "any" noble, she would not have made it.

There in Corinth only a few had some standing in the community. Sosthenes (he is mentioned at the beginning of this letter) and Crispus, who both had once been the rulers of the synagogue, were there and they, perhaps, were men of repute. At the close of the letter to the Romans (which Paul wrote while he was in Corinth), he mentions a man named Erastus, who was the city treasurer. A man named Gains, who was evidently a wealthy businessman in Corinth, is also mentioned there. But that is about all the Scripture records of men who were of repute or knowledge in the congregation. The rest were the common, ordinary people of the city, those whom the world regarded as foolish. Many of them were slaves, perhaps, unknown people, "plain vanilla" people, like you and me.

Some of them were weak, the apostle says. They had no political or military clout; they were not men of influence, and they had no "in" with city hall. They were without power, apparently, to affect life around them, yet God chose them. They made up what we would call the working classes--artisans, tradesmen, the little people of the world.

Undiscovered Secrets

Paul points out that God even chose things "that are not to set at nought the things that are," that is, future events which had not yet come to pass, upon which great issues would ultimately hang. Perhaps Paul is referring here to certain chronologic secrets that had yet to be discovered. In those days they knew nothing about radio, television, and communications such as we know today, but all that was known to God. Perhaps some of the predictions of scripture about the last days rest for their fulfillment upon some of the things that have not yet been found. These are what d works with, "things that are not, to bring to nought the things that are." So, if you are feeling that nobody recognizes you, you ought to rejoice that you are a Christian because power and influence with men are not necessary for you to be greatly used of God. He often delights in setting aside the impressive things of men.

This does not mean that God does not use people of status and stature as well. He does, but only, remarkably enough, when they have learned that their usefulness is not derived from their position or their abilities, but rather from his presence in their lives. Is it not strange that we think so highly of the wisdom of the world when God thinks so little of it? Jesus said once, "What is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God" (Luke 16:15), and what Paul is saying here seems to flow from that fact. What men put great store by is often set aside totally by God; it is abomination in the sight of God.

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who was for many years an outstanding pastor in London, says this:

We Christians often quote "not by might nor by power, but by my spirit saith the Lord," and yet in practice we seem to rely upon the mighty dollar and the power of the press and advertising. We seem to think that our influence will depend on our technique and the program we can put forward and that it would be the numbers, the largeness, the bigness that would prove effective. We seem to have forgotten that God has done most of his deeds in the church throughout its history through remnants. We seem to have forgotten the great story of Gideon, for instance, and how God insisted on reducing the 32,000 men down to 300 before he would make use of them. We have become fascinated by the idea of bigness, and we are quite convinced that if we can only stage, yes, that's the word, stage something really big before the world, we will shake it and produce a mighty religious awakening. That seems to be the modern conception of authority.

Unfortunately, that is too true today; it seems to be the basic philosophy of the church. It is, "Seek ye first the Lily Foundation and all these things will be added unto you." I find people everywhere who seem to think that it takes money to do God's work, that nothing can happen unless you get money first. It seems to me that this is a reversal of the whole position of Scripture, for in Scripture you do not begin with money, you begin with ministry. Anybody can be a minister of God. That is the glory of the Church, because God has put us all in the ministry. If you begin to do what God wants you to do, right where you are, and God begins to work through you, all the money ever necessary to cause that ministry to grow to perhaps worldwide dimensions is always available. Money follows ministry, not the other way around. How far we seem to have drifted from this. I think God delights in every generation to prove again, by some unusual demonstration, this great principle that Paul declares. God deliberately chooses the weak and the obscure and uses them in great power to remind us that it is not status, prestige, bigness or money that makes ministry for God effective.

Take a Peanut

In my early Christian life I remember reading of the life and ministry of Dr. George Washington Carver, the outstanding Negro scientist, who in the early part of this century was used of God in great ways among the black people of the South. Dr. Carver, a great believer and a choice servant of God, said that one day he prayed, "Lord, teach me the secrets of the universe." He said God said to him, "George, that is too big a subject for you. I want you to take a peanut, that is more your size, and work on that." So he began to explore what was in the peanut, and now it is a matter of record that he found over 325 different uses for it. He revolutionized the technology of the South. God used this simple, humble believer to open secrets of the universe that he hid from everyone else.

Remember how Jesus once put it, "I thank thee, Father…that them has hidden these things from the wise and revealed them to babes" (Luke 10:21). I have always loved that phrase from the eighth Psalm where David is rejoicing in the beauty and the glory of the heavens above.

When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,

the moon and the stars which thou hast established;

what is man that thou art mindful of him,

and the son of man that thou dost care for him?

Verse 2 of that psalm always puzzles people,

…by the mouth of babes and infants,

thou has founded a bulwark because of thy foes,

to still the enemy and the avenger.

What this refers to is that God chooses to open the mouths of children and mere striplings and use them, oftentimes, to do what the wise and the important have been unable to accomplish.

One of the greatest awakenings of the nineteenth century began in Cambridge University in England when D. L. Moody and his singer, Ira B. Sankey, came to that center of learning. In 1950 when I was traveling with Dr. H. A. Ironside, I met an Episcopal rector in Virginia who had been a member of that class in Cambridge when D. L. Moody came. He told us the whole University was outraged that this backwoods American preacher would dare to appear and speak in the center of culture of the English world. They well knew that he "murdered" the King's English. (Somebody once said that D. L. Moody was the only man he ever heard who could pronounce Jerusalem in one syllable!) So this rector said that he and others of his classmates who were not Christians determined that when Moody spoke in the chapel at Cambridge they would hoot him off the platform.

Moody began by asking Sankey to sing. (Sankey must have had a wonderful voice, because whenever he sang audiences quieted and listened to him.) As soon as he finished, Moody stepped to the edge of the platform and, looking directly at the students who were gathered there, he said these remarkable words, "Young gentlemen, don't ever think God don't love you, for he do!" This young man said that he and his classmates were dumbfounded by that beginning. Moody went on and in a few minutes he again said, "Don't ever think God don't love you, for he do!" Something about the very ungrammatical structure of these words captured them. The intense earnestness of this man spoke right to their hearts, beyond all the superficial, external things. That man said he later sought out Moody for a private interview, and Moody led him to Christ. A great awakening came to Cambridge University at the hands of that humble servant of God.

Now, God does this again and again to remind us that though he made the human mind, and he encourages us to use it to search for wisdom and knowledge, there is only one place we can learn to use this knowledge rightly--in relationship to the Lord Jesus Christ out of the wisdom and understanding of the revelation of God in the Scriptures.

Why does God do this? Why does God seem to be so against all the "wisdom of the world," as Paul calls it here? Is he jealous of man? Is he the kind of God who loves to put people down? It sounds almost vindictive, does it not? The answer is given to us in verse 29, where Paul says God does this "so that no human being might boast in the presence of God."

But why is God against human boasting? We are all experts at it, but God does not like it. Why? Surely he is not jealous of us; no, the answer is that human boasting is always based on an illusion, but God is a realist. Those who boast in themselves or in their abilities think they have some power in themselves to succeed, and God knows that this is a lie. They are deceiving themselves; they are living in a fantasy world. Therefore, the kindest thing God can do is to find a way to puncture that sinful pride, collapse that platform of prestige, and shatter that illusion of self-sufficiency. This he does by using the obscure and the weak and the things that are oftentimes regarded as foolish.

Some years ago I read an article by a businessman friend of mine who recounted his own experience in this regard. He learned this the painful way. He writes,

It's my pride that makes me independent of God. It's appealing to feel I am the master of my fate; I run my own life, I call my own shots; I go it alone. But that feeling is my basic dishonesty. I can't go it alone. I have to get help from other people, and I can't ultimately rely on myself. I am dependent on God for my very next breath. It is dishonest of me to pretend that I am anything but a man, small, weak and limited. So, living independent of God is self-delusion. It's not just a matter of pride being an unfortunate little trait and humility being an attractive little virtue, it's my inner psychological integrity that's at stake. When I am conceited, I am lying to myself about what I am. I am pretending to be God, and not man. My pride is the idolatrous worship of myself, and that is the national religion of hell. [Howard Butt, Jr., in an article in CBMC Contact, © 1954].

That is right in line with what the apostle is telling us. God sets aside the wisdom, the pride, and the boasting of man because it is based upon an illusion, a fantasy, that men have in themselves power to act.

To Walk in a Different Way

Paul then sets forth for us in another beautiful passage the secret of true wisdom. What is it? It is the ability to recognize that though you may have little of what the world thinks it takes to succeed, if you have Jesus, and have learned to count on his power moment by moment, you have the secret of true success. Many Christians know that, but they do not act on it when the moment comes. The whole purpose of the Scriptures is to teach us to walk in a different way, to live by a different power and to do so with respect to everything we do. The simplest tasks are to be done in the power of Christ.

Look at what Paul says now, in verses 30 and 31:

He [i.e., God] is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and redemption; therefore as it is written, "Let him who boasts, boast of the Lord."

There is an interesting structure to the Greek sentence here. What Paul says is, "He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made to be our wisdom, even our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption." In other words, righteousness, sanctification and redemption are the explanation of what wisdom involves.

Elements of Wisdom

You will remember that wisdom is the right use of truth, and it always takes three basic elements to be wise. First, there must be a true perception of what is, an understanding of the nature of reality. If you are going to be wise about any situation you may face, you have to understand what forces are at work, what is happening, what is involved and what is driving them. Therefore, one of the fundamentals of wisdom is the ability to distinguish the true from the false, to understand reality.

Second, there must also be a true evaluation of worth; you have to be able to distinguish between what is trivial and what is important. Have you ever had the experience of arguing with somebody, perhaps your wife, or your husband or your children, and it started out over some small matter but then you became very involved in it? You grew hotter and hotter, and they grew hotter and hotter, and soon you ended up nose to nose, shaking your fists at one another, with your voices raised. Suddenly it occurred to you, "What are we arguing about?" You began to see that you had built up a trivial matter into a mountain of meaning and it was foolish to do so. We are all guilty of that, but to act wisely you must be able to put things in perspective and keep them there so they do not get out of focus.

The third element of wisdom is the ability to blend the two essentials of human life, truth and love, into that harmonious balance that keeps everything right on keel; to be honest yet patient, to be both frank and gracious. That is what we see so beautifully in Jesus. How honest he was, how frank he was, and yet he always had that gracious touch that was sensitive to the person to whom he spoke and the need of that person's life and heart. "Speaking the truth in love" is the sign of wisdom.

Christ has come to teach us how to live this way. The mark of somebody who is growing in Christ is that he or she is becoming able to exercise that kind of wisdom. And it begins, as the apostle tells us here, with the gift of righteousness. Christ is made unto us righteousness. Righteousness is really what we mean when we use the words "self worth," a full and loving acceptance in the eyes of God. It is a position to which we are able to return whenever we are threatened, or guilty or afraid, a position from which we can handle pressure.

If you feel worthless you cannot handle life, you lose the ability to function. You must have a sense of worth. The world says you have to earn that, but God says you can have it as a gift; it is yours already. Now, on that basis, start to handle life.

Then, wisdom moves into the process that Paul, alls "sanctification." That is the daily manifestation of a Christ like character becoming more and more visible in our life--the outward product of the inward righteousness. We will find ourselves manifesting this character of Jesus more and more as we learn to handle life according to the way God teaches us. We will become more loving, more patient, more understanding, more insightful, more courageous. We are all in the process. No one has made it yet, but we are on the way.

And finally, it results in redemption. Redemption is the restoration to usefulness of something that has been rendered totally useless. Have you ever pawned anything? I have. Put something in hock and you get some money (never anywhere near what it is worth) from a pawnbroker. That object of value is useless while it is in pawn. It sits there, gathering dust on the shelf or in the shop window, until it is redeemed. But when you go back and pay the redemption price, you restore it to usefulness. That is what God is doing with us; he is restoring us to usefulness. We, who in the process of sin have been rendered useless, are gradually being restored. The day will come when restoration will be complete, body, soul and spirit, and God will open up to us an avenue of service such as we have never dreamed of, because at last we have been made useful once more.

That is the wisdom of God. The world cannot do that, can it? It uses people for a little while and then discards them as useless. But God's wisdom is such that through the processes of life he is gradually restoring us to usefulness (redeeming us), and he does it through this wonderful gift of righteousness and this process of sanctification. Thus, we ought to give thanks continually for what he is doing in our lives. How far superior is the wisdom of God to the wisdom of man! That is why Paul concludes this with these words, "Therefore, let him who boasts, boast of the Lord." It is the Lord who can change you, not you, yourself.

A Negative Note

Now, in chapter 2, the apostle is looking back to his first visit to Corinth"

When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom.

(Instead of "the testimony of God," some of the ancient manuscripts have the phrase, "the mystery of God," and I think, because of what follows, that is perhaps a better translation.)

For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

That represents a deliberate decision the apostle made when he came to Corinth. He would not talk to them along the lines of the wisdom of men. He would not use flowery phrases and lofty, high-sounding words; he would not attempt to impress them with the beauty and the glory of Christian living, but he would start on the negative note of the cross of Christ.

To us, as to the Corinthians, the wisdom of the world always sounds impressive. We are exposed to it all the time through the media of newspapers, magazines, television, and even our conversations with one another. If you watch television you are encouraged to seek after "the good life," to become "beautiful people," to "live life with gusto," and to find the "real thing." We all know, of course, that using a different deodorant is not going to change life that drastically, or that changing your brand of perfume is not really going to introduce you into a world of romance and exotic excitement. However, we are continually exposed to this idea: if you only develop all your hidden powers you will find life the way you want to find it--there are things in you, in your personality, that need to be brought out.

There is a germ of truth there that the Scriptures recognize also. God made man a potentially wonderful creature, and it is not wrong to say there are hidden possibilities in every human being that need to be developed. Where the wisdom of the world goes astray, however, is in how to do it. The world promotes the idea that if we just know the right things take the right course, get involved in the right program, use meditative processes and various other methods, we will achieve what we are after. It always sounds so beautiful. It is usually couched in colorful phrases and supported by clever arguments. It is confirmed cm television and in color advertisements in the magazines by very impressive people and facts, so that it all seems right.

Things were no different in Corinth When Paul arrived, the whole city was given over to exploring methods of fulfilling life by various Philosophical schools, by giving themselves to fleshly indulgences in the worship of sex, and in various commercial and business enterprises by seeking after beauty, art, music, and the aesthetic things of life. That is why Paul made a definite decision not to speak in lofty, flowing phrases, or to tell people that all they needed was a little knowledge in special subjects. "But," he said, "I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified."

They Are Afraid He Is Right

As we have seen, the cross of Christ is a judgment on the wisdom of man. What do the smart, powerful people of the world do with Jesus of Nazareth? They crucify him! They reject him; they deny him; they put him to death if they possibly can. That is what they did in the first century and they still do today. Why? Because they think he is crazy? No, even today, nobody thinks Jesus was crazy. They resist him because they are afraid he is right. He threatens people. As we have already seen, the cross is the result of confronting the world with the ways of God.

I want to share with you a quotation from Dorothy Sayers, a very insightful writer and popular theologian who has done a fine lob of defending Christian faith:

The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore--on the contrary: they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him "meek and mild," and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.

To those who knew Him, however, He in no way suggested a milk-and-water person; they objected to Him as a dangerous firebrand. True, He was tender to the unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers, and humble before Heaven; but He insulted respectable clergymen by calling them hypocrites; He referred to King Herod as "that fox"; He went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon as a "gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners"; He assaulted indignant tradesmen and threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; He drove a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary regulations. He cured diseases by any means that came handy, with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people's pigs and property; He showed no proper deference for wealth or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical traps, He displayed a paradoxical humour that affronted serious-minded people, and He retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb.

He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if He was God, there can be nothing dull about God either. But He had "a daily beauty in His life that made us ugly," and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without Him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness. [Affirmation of God and Man, New York: Association Press p36.]

So when Paul came to Corinth he did not start with the "power of positive thinking," or even "possibility thinking." There is only one answer to what is wrong with us, and that is to lay hold, by faith, of what God has done on our behalf, and that is where Paul started.

What are the results of that decision? First, he says (verses 3-5),

And I was with you in weakness and in much fear and trembling; and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

I think that ought to be one of the most encouraging passages to any of us who have tried to be a witness as a Christian. Speaking of the things of Christ and of God is easy in a church where you are gathered with Christian friends, brothers and sisters in the Lord. However, when you try to talk about these things with worldlings, people who have come from entirely different backgrounds, people who are committed to the philosophy of taking care of number one first, you find it difficult. You feel much personal weakness and fear and trembling. That is the way Paul felt, and that ought to be an encouragement to us.

Culture Shock

The reason he felt like this is that what he was saying to them was not in line with what they wanted to hear about themselves. It did not massage the ego of man. Paul deliberately rejected that approach (which is wrong because it does not help man), and began to talk about the judgment of God upon the thinking, the attitudes, and the wisdom of man. It left him feeling rejected, or more accurately, suffering from "culture shock."

When missionaries or business people go out into a different culture where the language and the whole system of purchasing things is different, where the way people relate to one another is different, it is common to experience what is referred to as "culture shock." (You can even suffer from this when you move from one part of this country to another where customs are different.) Now imagine what it is like if even the language is different. You have been used to communicating your value to people by the clever things you say, by the way you think, by showing compassion and friendliness and so on, and all of a sudden you cannot even conduct a conversation except on the simplest level of, "How much is this?" and, "I'd like so many of that," in the marketplace. All of the normally expected approval signs are missing. You begin to feel you are out of step; you feel rejected.

That is what Paul was suffering in Corinth. When he came, there was no great ego-pleasing reception for him, there were no dinners, there was no Academy Award, no sense of power or impact on this city. In Acts we are told that he came to Corinth from Athens. He had come alone to Athens after being driven out of Thessalonica and Philippi and Berea, and he tried to witness there in the Areopagus, the city council; and his witness, though it was true and based upon the cross of Christ, was not received. So he came away to Corinth, all alone, and moved into this great, bustling, beautiful, corrupt, powerful, commercial city, and tried to preach Christ.

He tells us that he felt fearful, weak, and ineffective. He felt his words were not outstanding; he felt he did not impress anybody. Have you ever felt that way? I have, many times. I have stood up to bear a public witness and I felt as if I had two tongues and they were stumbling over one another. I did not seem to have the right answers to things. I could only talk about how the gospel affected me; I felt as though I was doing nothing effective. Yet Paul was not discouraged, except at first. In the Book of Acts we are told that after he had been in Corinth for a few months the Lord Jesus appeared to him in a vision and strengthened him and said to him, "Do not be afraid, but speak and do not be silent…and no man shall attack you to harm you. That is a revelation of the basis of Paul's fears. He was afraid he was going to be beaten up as he had been in other cities. He was also afraid because of personal pride. He was afraid of being branded as a religious fanatic. He did not like those feelings; nevertheless, he faithfully began to talk about what God had said in Jesus Christ. Soon there was a second visible result. Paul calls it the "demonstration of the Spirit and (of) power." As Paul told the facts and the story out of the simple earnestness of his heart, God's Spirit began to work and people started coming to Christ. You can read the account in Acts 18. First, the rulers of the synagogue turned to Christ, and then hundreds of the common, ordinary people of Corinth began to become Christians. Soon there was a great spiritual awakening, and before the city of Corinth knew what had happened, a church had been planted in its midst and a ferment was running throughout the city.

Real Evangelism

I believe this is God's continuous and perennial way of evangelism. Frankly, though I support fully the ministry of evangelists like Billy Graham, Luis Palau and others in their mass rallies, I recognize that this is not the primary means of evangelism intended in the New Testament. It is only possible when there has been a foundation laid by the individual approach that Paul is speaking of here. The real evangelism occurs by simple people like you and me sharing what has happened in our lives.

I remember when we first started Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto. In those early days of the '50s we used to have Bible Classes where people would gather in homes in a relaxed setting to reach their non-Christian neighbors and friends. God greatly blessed that witness. We had meetings and classes that sometimes grew to tremendous sizes. Because it was so open and so free, these people would get into discussions about the principles of life and Scripture that were so interesting and intense they would go on until 12:30 or 1:00 in the morning. And do you know what the greatest problem was? Christians! Christians who were uneasy about talking to non-Christians, who loved the comfort of being with people who thought alike, and who felt uneasy when anybody proposed an idea that was not in line with Scripture. We had a terrible time trying to educate Christians to be gentle and gracious with people who had a different viewpoint, not to strike them down or brand them as heretic or send them out angry or upset because of something that was said. But as they began to bear witness in a gracious way and talk about their personal experience of life in Christ, hundreds began to come to Christ.

Never in all our history as a church have we had an evangelistic meeting in the church building at PBC. Many are absolutely appalled at the idea that there is any way to reach people without an evangelistic service in the church When I say to them that every year there are hundreds coming to Christ all throughout the whole Peninsula area at all levels and stages of life, and yet we never have had an evangelistic service, they shake their heads. Some have even walked away saying, "It won't work." But it has been working for many, many years.

That is the way Paul approached Corinth. There was nothing dramatic, there was no great awakening, but there was a quiet, resistless, surging movement of the Spirit of God touching and changing lives everywhere--a "demonstration of the Spirit and power." Paul was not holding great healing meetings or anything of that sort, but, as he tells us in the sixth chapter, some wonderful things were happening. He says, "Some of you were idolaters, some of you were adulterers, and some of you were homosexuals; some of you were drunkards; you were swindlers, thieves and robbers, and it has all changed. Such were some of you," he says, "but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus." Dramatic things had been happening in their lives by this simple witness of the Spirit by the apostle in the midst of his own personal sense of weakness, fear and trembling.

I want to quickly state here that although Paul was preaching the cross of Christ, I am sure that he was not coming on with heavy-handed, threatening, condemning language. He was not preaching what we would call "hell-fire and damnation." He did not have to. Later on in 2 Corinthians he says his approach was "by the open statement of the truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God." If you say to somebody, "You're a sinner. You're going to hell," you cannot expect them to say, "Oh! Am I? Help me! Save me!" They will get angry and turn their backs on you and walk off and say, "Forget it, fella." Paul was not doing that. Rather, he was saying, "Look, you folks, you only have to examine your own lives. How do you feel about what is happening to you? Are you happy?" They were not. They were empty, lonely, miserable, afflicted, falling apart and feeling it, and he just said, "This is why you are that way, and do you know that in the death of Jesus, God has wiped out all other approaches except through him, but in him you can have everything you want from God? Life can be filled with joy, peace, forgiveness, healing and wholesomeness." As Paul declared those words, a great desire was awakened in people's lives and they were coming to Christ by the hundreds. That is what happens every time people approach life with simple truth.

Some years ago I clipped these words from an article in Eternity magazine based upon the idea that truth is the best approach. The article was called "The Slickest Gimmick of All," and this is what it said:

There is potency and wholesomeness in living life transparently--rather than endlessly erecting poses and postures and fraudulent pieties. This modern world of ours is generously supplied with pitchmen, con artists and those who have axes to grind. These are enthusiastically and persistently using the big lie on us. Hence, it is an arresting and refreshing experience to meet a person or a group that is authentic and transparently open.

That is how Paul came to Corinth. He knew no church could flourish in Corinth that did not recognize the weakness of the wisdom of men and rest instead on the power of God.

The Missing Links

By contrast, he now describes the content of that wisdom and power of God. Verses 6-10:

Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written,

"What no eye has seen, nor ear heard,

nor the heart of man conceived,

what God has prepared for those who love him,"

God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

Paul says he did not come with lofty words of wisdom, but that does not mean there is not a wisdom in Christianity. In fact, he says, the greatest wisdom of all, the wisdom of God, is there. He refers now to a body of truth which ought to be the standard curriculum for Christian education in any church. But there are thousands of churches today where you would hardly ever hear anything about this being taught. Yet look how Paul describes it. He says it is the "mystery of God," in verse 1; he calls it the "secret and hidden wisdom of God," in verse 7; the "deep things of God," in verse 10; the "thoughts of God," in verse 11; the "gifts bestowed on us by God," in verse 12; and "spiritual truths" in verse 13. Finally, at the end of the chapter, he says it is "the mind of Christ."

Now what is this that Paul is talking about? A lot of people think this is some kind of religious truth that only churchgoers would be interested in, but it is not. What he is talking about is basically the missing links of human understanding without which we are unable to function as God intended us. These are truths that people all over the world are searching for. If you come to people with a simple declaration of these truths, you will find they are always eager to hear. This is why churches that really expound the Scriptures never have any trouble filling their pews. This is the most attractive truth the world knows anything about. There is no need for a lot of showmanship and hoopla to get people to come out. Once they understand that you are talking about the secrets of how to be a person, how to live, how to get rid of guilt and fear and hurt, how to interact with individuals, how to love God and be filled with the love and power of God, they will be there; they will be breaking down the doors to get in. These are not "religious" truths. They are vital and essential truths about man and God and the universe. They are what I would call "the lost secrets of our humanity."

Notice some of these statements that Paul makes. First, these are permanent truths; they are not passing (v. 6),

…it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.

In 1 John 2:17 we read,

The world passes away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides for ever.

This is not a passing fad that will change in the next decade: this is truth that remains eternal and unchangeable forever.

Second, it is intended, Paul says in verse 7, "for our glorification." Now glorification means the fulfillment of all the possibilities that are in you, discovering the "real you," to put it in modern terms. These truths will bring this about when you learn them.

Third, this truth is not discoverable by natural processes. The rulers of this age know nothing about it. When Paul speaks of "the rulers of this age," he means more than merely the officials of the day. He is talking about the leaders of thought, the mind benders, the shapers of public opinion, the philosophers, the sociologists, the politicians. They do not know these secrets. They do not understand this body of truth, and that is why nothing they propose ever works in the long run. You cannot find them out by listening to the speakers around today, Paul says. Neither are they observed, he says, by the eye, or the ear, or by the reason. You will not get them in school or in any secular training. You will not learn them by observation of life. You will not learn them by studying the history of the past, or by hearsay. You will not get them by deep and profound thinking on your own level about the mysteries of life. Paul says that God has revealed them to us by his Spirit. He then introduces the great section on how the spirit of God takes the Word of God and teaches the people of God, which we will come to in the next chapter.

This is what I consider the greatest truth ever set before men, this body of knowledge that Paul is talking about here. This is the value of coming to church and of Bible study, both personal and in groups. If you are involved in profound Bible study you are beginning to probe the greatest body of knowledge available to men anywhere; hidden secrets about life that will never be found out in the secular world around us, and yet, when understood, will lead you to fulfillment of joy and beauty, love and grace such as you never dreamed of.

1 Corinthians 2:10-16

4. God's Teacher

Everyone who heard Jesus teach must have been deeply impressed by the fact that he spoke with authority about things that other people knew nothing about. Remember that in the gospels he answers questions before they are even asked and accurately identifies people's motives. Even more than this, he speaks of unseen things with familiarity. He describes what God is like, and the nature of angels. He describes what happens after death. He predicts future events with pinpoint accuracy. At the close of his ministry, as he was about to leave his disciples, they were filled with foreboding and despair not only because of the loss of his presence but because of the loss of his wisdom and power. In the Upper Room discourse he said to them, "I will not leave you orphans: (I will not leave you alone). If I go away I will send another Comforter to you and he will guide you into all the truth. He will take of the things of mine and show them to you, and he will say to you the things that I have not been able to say." Remember that he said, "I have many things to say to you but you are not able to bear them yet. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth."

In this section of I Corinthians 2, the apostle Paul is clearly referring to that promise of our Lord about the coming of the Spirit and what the Spirit would teach us. Verse 10,

God has revealed to us (these things) through the Spirit; for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For what person knows a man's thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.

This passage introduces us to our mighty teacher come from God, the Holy Spirit himself, who is to instruct us by the Word of God. He will lead us into the truth of God that will change our lives and expose us to this "secret and hidden wisdom of God." When you discover that, I want to tell you something: life is going to be exciting and adventurous, for this line of truth is designed to set us free, to let us be the men and women God designed us to be.

Notice how the apostle underscores here the Spirit's knowledge first, using an analogy: "No one understands the things of man except the spirit of the man which is in him." Have you ever tried to talk to your plants? Many people do these days. We are told that plants can respond to our moods and reflect our attitudes. I know a woman who even prays over each plant. I don't know what it does for the plant, but it probably helps her a great deal! But it is clearly evident that plants do not talk back. (If they do, give me a call right away! I'll see if I can help you.) Life is constructed at various levels; the higher can take hold of the lower, but the lower cannot reach up to the higher. We have plant and animal life, then human life, then angelic life, and finally, divine life. The higher can reach down to encompass the lower, but the lower cannot reach up to the higher. That is Paul's argument here. Though no animal can reach into the realm of human relationship and converse with us, other human beings like ourselves can.

Do you ever try to tell your troubles to your dog? I know people who do. I've done it myself. A dog is man's best friend; he seems so sympathetic. If you talk to your dog, he'll whine, wag his tail, and lick you on the face. He knows you're trying to get something across; he is trying so hard to understand, but he cannot comprehend the things of a man. If you sit down and tell your troubles to your wife, however, she will understand. Or if you tell your troubles to your husband, or your friend, they will understand. Fortunate is the man whose wife is his friend, or the woman whose husband is her friend. They can understand because the spirit which is in man shares a common basis of knowledge.

God Must Disclose Himself

But here is this great Being in our universe, this fantastic Being of infinite wisdom and mighty power who is God. How can we know anything about him? Paul's answer is that we cannot unless he discloses himself to us. You cannot find out God by searching. Man by wisdom does not know God. Man by investigation of all the natural forces of life will never find his way to the heart of God. God must disclose himself, must open himself to us. That he has done by means of the Spirit of God--the Spirit has come to teach us about God. The Lord Jesus appeared as a man in order that we might have a visible demonstration of what God is like. The simplest answer to the question, "What is God like?" is to say he is like Jesus, under all circumstances. But it is the work of the Spirit to show us what Jesus is like. Jesus said, "He will take the things of mine and show them unto you." You can read the historical record of Jesus, but the living Lord does not stand out from the pages merely by reading them. It is as the Spirit illuminates those pages that you find yourself confronted with the living, breathing Christ. That is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Paul describes the method that the Spirit has taken to do this fantastic thing. Verse 12,

Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit.

Paul points out five steps here that the Spirit of God has followed to teach us this secret and hidden wisdom of God. The first step is that the Spirit begins with the apostles.

Now we (apostles) have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God…

The "spirit of the world" is that intelligent, strange, but sinister being behind the whole thinking of the world. He is described to us clearly and vividly in Ephesians 2, where Paul says, "You (believers) he made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience" (Ephesians 2:1, 2, italics mine). From this we learn that behind the strange, confused knowledge and wisdom of the world is a spiritual being the Bible calls the Devil. The world does not know that; worldlings are like so many dumb animals being led to slaughter without realizing where they are going. But Paul says that is not the spirit we have received. Remember how he put this to Timothy: "God did not give us a spirit of timidity but a spirit of power and love and self-control (or, a sane mind)" (2 Timothy 1:7). Jesus had told the disciples, "The Spirit is now with you; he shall be in you." And on the day of Pentecost the Spirit of God came in a new and fresh way. He had been present before in the world, but he entered into the disciples and from then on these apostles who were to give us the Scriptures were men and women filled with the Spirit.

A Totally Different Light

Then Paul tells us the second step--the Spirit of God taught them and illuminated their minds.

(We have received...the Spirit) which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.

He is not talking about spiritual gifts here; the context indicates that he is talking about the whole realm of knowledge and truth that God has given us, which these apostles had begun to understand.

Have you ever noticed in reading the gospels that the apostles did not understand Jesus when he taught? He baffled them; he puzzled them; he said things that left them scratching their heads. He angered them at times, upset them, and said things to people that sometimes embarrassed the apostles. On one occasion they turned to him and asked, "Lord, don't you realize you offended those Pharisees?" As if he did not realize that! But when the Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, suddenly all that Jesus had said began to make wonderful sense; thinking back over all they had heard from his lips, they began to see it in a totally different light.

That is the reason why, when non-Christians read their Bibles it seems to be a totally different book to them than it is to a Christian. Perhaps you have had that experience. Before you became a Christian you read the Bible and it was such a dull book; there was nothing exciting in it. Then you became a Christian; you received the Spirit, and the result was that the book came alive. Things that you once had puzzled over became clear, and you found yourself fascinated. A man said to me recently that he had just become a Christian and for four and a half hours straight he could not lay the Bible down because the Spirit was teaching him from its pages. This is what Paul is talking about here. The Spirit began with the apostles and they were illuminated by him.

Words That God Approved

The third step is the phenomenon mentioned in verse 13,

And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but words (implied here) taught by the Spirit.

One of the major arguments of our day is over the question of the inerrancy of Scripture. People are asking afresh today, "is everything in the Bible true? Does the Bible speak with authority in every realm of life? Is it true in what it says about scientific, geographic, and astronomic matters, and the like? Or is it true only when it tells you how to get to heaven?" That question is answered by Paul's statement here. He says that when the apostles began to speak and to write the Scriptures, they did so by words "taught by the Holy Spirit."

I do not think he meant that the Spirit of God dictated the Bible to them. What he is really talking about is a process by which the Spirit of God awakened the minds of the apostles to understand truth, and they chose their own words to express it so that every apostle's personality comes through in the words he uses. And yet, in a strange and wonderful way, those words which the apostles chose are words that God himself approved. Therefore, they come from him not directly, but indirectly. Paul says to Timothy, "All Scripture is breathed out from God" (2 Timothy 3:16). If that is true, then it comes from a God who cannot lie, a God who makes no mistakes, a God who sees the end from the beginning, so every word in Scripture is true. As the apostles wrote these things down, therefore, we can trust what they had to say.

A young man was telling me how he has discovered that he does not always have to understand the Bible to benefit from its wisdom. He said, "I've learned that I don't always understand everything it tells me. But I know this: if I obey it, I will benefit from what it says." That is the truth, because it is the Word of God, the living Word, the Word of truth from the Spirit of truth.

Then there is a fourth step; Paul says,

And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit.

The whole last phrase, "interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the Spirit," is a translation of three words in Greek, and it is a difficult phrase to translate. If you have a Revised Standard Version, there are two other possible translations given in the margin. One is "interpreting spiritual truths in spiritual language," and the other is, "comparing spiritual things with spiritual." The verb that is translated "interpreting" here is really a word that means, "to fit things together." What I think Paul is describing here is the process of taking the wisdom of God--these great facts about our personalities, our makeup, and about God himself revealed in this secret and hidden wisdom of God-and fitting them to the circumstances and the personalities of each individual. In other words, making the Word living to us. That is the work of the Spirit of God. We have all had that experience, if we are believers.

Now, finally, (step 5) to do this, we must be indwelt by the Spirit as well. Paul uses a word here that indicates that. He calls us "spiritual people"; pneumatikoi is the word. It comes from the Greek word for spirit, which is pneuma. Who are the pneumatikoi the spiritual people? Well, they are those who have received the Spirit.

One of the arguments of today is over the matter of how we receive the Spirit. Some tell us it must be a dramatic demonstration that results in speaking in tongues. I was talking with a girl not long ago who said, "You know, the evidence of receiving the Spirit is speaking in tongues." I said, "Do you mean that everybody who has not spoken in tongues does not have the Spirit?" "Well, no," she said, "I didn't mean that." "But you said that the evidence for receiving the Spirit is speaking in tongues," I replied. "Well," she said, "maybe there's something else there that I don't understand." I assured her that there was!

According to the Scriptures you receive the Spirit when you believe in Jesus. That is what he himself said. On the great day of the feast of the Tabernacles recorded in John 7, he said, "If anyone thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, 'Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.' " John adds, "Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive" (John 7:37-39). And in the first chapter of his Gospel John says, "To all who received him (Jesus), who believed in his name, he gave power (power is the work of the Spirit) to become children of God" (John 1:12). Everywhere in the Scripture you find that the moment you believe the word about Jesus--who he is, what he did, and what he can do for you as Lord of your life--in that moment you receive the Spirit.

Scripture draws a beautiful analogy for us, comparing the new birth in Christ to a physical human birth. If you are a mother, you know that though the moment of birth was an unforgettable time, the moment of conception occurred without your even realizing it. In an experience of love, two tiny seeds joined together and a new life began by that union. It began to develop and grow, and soon it became evident to you and to everyone else that a new life was there. This is the way the Holy Spirit is born into our hearts. Nobody knows when it happens, but when the ovum of faith meets the sperm of the truth of God about Jesus, a new birth occurs; the Holy Spirit enters a life. Those who receive the Spirit then, are born again into a new creation, as Paul terms it; they are then "spiritual" people.

The apostle goes on in the next passage to contrast this with carnal Christians. Carnality is a state of temporarily not relating to the Spirit. But spiritual-minded Christians are those who not only have received the Spirit but, as Paul describes in Romans 8, "they have set their minds on the things of the Spirit." They listen to the Spirit; they hear the word of the Spirit; they believe the word; and they act upon the word of the Spirit. This whole body of truth then becomes active in their lives and they are changed.

There is the process. It begins for the apostles with the Spirit's indwelling and illuminating of their minds, so as to preach in words chosen by the Spirit, followed by the indwelling of every believer by belief in the word that the apostles preached, and the illuminating of the mind of each believer to understand truth as it fits his or her life directly. That is the process by which this great body of fascinating truth, the secret and hidden wisdom of God which is intended for our glorification, will begin to change our lives, our homes, our families, our community, our nation, and ultimately, the whole of the world.

The Natural Man

Now, in verses 14-16, we will learn why the world can never solve its problems, why it is locked into the same pattern of failure, generation after generation. The only breakthrough that can ever occur is to someone who opens his mind and heart to the word of the Spirit.

The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. "For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.

In verse 14 the translation, "the unspiritual man," is not a very accurate rendering. The margin says "the natural man." That is a much better translation because what Paul is talking about here is man as he is born, as he is by nature. We were all of us, without exception, born natural men and women. Paul uses a descriptive and helpful word to understand what that is. The word translated "unspiritual" here is really the word psychikos, which derives from the root psyche, which means, of course, the soul. What Paul means is that the one who enters this world according to nature is operating from the basis of his soul and not his spirit. As God made man in the beginning, he was intended to be a threefold being--body, soul, and spirit--with the spirit as the highest center of the operations of his life, directly open to the revelation of God himself. In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were both spiritual men and women, operating by the human spirit's contact with the living God who walked with them and talked with them. As someone has described it, when the Fall came, that spirit, that upper room, fell down into the basement, and man has been operating at the level of the second floor ever since. He is a second-story man, in every sense of the word, and that is the highest center of human functioning today.

The soul has three primary functions. The first and most notable quality about it is that it has the power to choose. It has a will, and we all recognize that. Even babies have their own will, which they exercise sometimes at the most inopportune moments. They will already do things that their parents do not want them to do, simply because they have the power of choice--one of the highest dignities accorded to mankind.

But that choice, that exercise of will, is made on the basis of two other functions of the soul. One is the ability to feel, the emotional capacity to have moods, urges, and desires, and this governs many of the choices of the natural man. We have all seen the bumper sticker that says, "If it feels good, do it!" That is a reflection of this natural philosophy which urges you to make your choice on the basis of your mood, your desire, your feeling of how you are at the moment.

There is another capacity of the soul, however, and that is the reason.

Some people pride themselves on not making decisions on the basis of feelings. They think of themselves as logical, coldly reasonable people who decide on the basis of the facts. They sometimes feel very superior to all those poor people who simply "emote" as they go through life, making decisions on that basis. But again, the Word of God tells us that they need not feel so proud of themselves, because their reasoning power is limited. It functions only between two clearly marked dividers, birth and death--only in the realm that exists between those two poles. Therefore, everything the reasoning man sees is related to this life. His logical choices are made on the basis of goals centering around this life, goals such as personal success, fame, wealth, power, personal pleasure, and so forth. People who live like this are what we call men and women of the world. Their viewpoint is natural; it is instinctive with them; it is from birth. As someone has well put it:

Into this world to eat and to sleep

And to know no reason why he was born,

Save to consume the corn,

devour the cattle, flock and fish,

And leave behind an empty dish.

Shut Away from the Things of God

But according to this passage, the natural man has some severe limitations. Verse 14:

The natural man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

Three things limit the natural mind: first, it is shut away from all the things of God, the whole realm of the secret and hidden wisdom of God that Paul has been describing. The natural man does not even know this realm exists. He thinks that all the bases on which he must make his choices are present before him now, such as his reasoning power, his emotions, and his ability to assess and evaluate life as he sees it. He is ignorant of a vast realm of information about us, about God, about the world and the way it functions, about the purpose of life, and about the end toward which all things are heading. For this reason, as we have already seen, he misunderstands much about life.

It is evident that he misunderstands marriage. He does not see it as a union designed to take two very different types of people and blend them together through a long process, sometimes involving much struggle and heartache, until a whole new being is formed to the glory and honor of God. To the worldly man, the natural view of marriage is that it is for his personal pleasure, so that another person might satisfy his needs. When that no longer happens, there is no reason to maintain the marriage. Many Christians are falling heir to this kind of thinking and even breaking up their marriages because they have allowed themselves to be seduced by the natural view of marriage.

The natural man misunderstands the power and purpose of sex. These days, many churches are debating whether they should ordain a man or a woman who has been and is an avowed, practicing homosexual. The only reason they are debating this thing is that they have forsaken to some considerable degree the revelation of the secret and hidden wisdom of God. Otherwise, it would not even be subject to debate, for the wisdom of God makes very clear that homosexuality is a violation of God's intent for mankind and a destructive force let loose in our society that tears down the very fabric of society by which we exist.

I read an article in the paper recently by a prominent woman pediatrician advocating openly and without shame that children ought to indulge in sex at an age as early as four or five years. And further, that incest between a father and a daughter is a good thing. Now where do those kinds of abominable ideas come from? Well, they arise from a failure to understand the secret and hidden wisdom of God, and a failure on the part of the church to adequately teach this so that it infiltrates society and affects the secular world around. Such abominations take root in our culture only when the people of God begin to drift away from their moorings in the Scriptures.

This is why the world misunderstands adversity. It does not see it as God's training ground. Trouble is regarded as an invasion of rights, as an alien invader that has no right to be there. The natural man's attitude toward God when trouble strikes is that of anger, hostility and resentment. Too often, it is also part of the Christian's attitude, because we have failed to hang on to those wonderful revelations of God by the Spirit in his Word.

Furthermore, not only is the natural man shut away from this, but going a step further, Paul says the natural man is unable to understand these things--they do not make sense to him. It is only as these principles permeate society as Christians live on this basis that he is able to see or accept them at all. Otherwise, he sees no reason whatsoever for these things. He cannot understand the things of God.

To the natural mind, such a thing as euthanasia-putting older people to death when they are no longer able to function quite as well as they once did--is regarded as the logical thing, the sensible thing to do. "Get them out of the way, they only clutter up the landscape." This is why abortion is so widely practiced and accepted in our day, because it is no longer seen to be what the Word of God clearly declares it to be--a taking of human life, a form of murder. But the natural mind does not see that. To the natural mind it seems to he logical and reasonable. This is ultimately what produces the macabre activity of Nazism in which a whole race of people is committed to the gas chambers. That kind of thinking arises because the natural mind does not understand the things of God.

The reason, Paul says, is very clear. These things are spiritually discerned; it is necessary to have the Spirit of God indwelling you in order to see and understand fully that these things are true. The natural man does not yet have the Spirit, so the only point of release for the natural mind at this point is to confront it with the person of Jesus. "What we preach is not ourselves," Paul says, "but Jesus Christ as Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake" (2 Corinthians 4:5). That is where the world can be helped, for it is only by faith in Jesus that the Spirit of God enters the human heart. If there is no faith in Jesus, if there is no acceptance of him as Lord, the mind remains darkened. Although it may accept, because of popular pressure, the standards of Christian life, it is never fully convinced that they are right until the heart is open to the Spirit of God by faith in Jesus. Without this equipment of the Spirit the mind is unable to grasp what God wants to say to us.

If we stopped to think about it, we would realize that though we may be sitting quietly in our room, the air around us is charged with pictures and music and people's voices. The reason we do not see or hear them is that we lack for the moment the necessary equipment, but if we had a radio or a television set we could immediately pick up these sound and picture waves right out of the air as they pass through the room. So it is with the men and women of the world. Without the presence of the Spirit they lack the equipment to understand many of the things that Christianity says.

Open to the Spirit

Now in contrast, Paul returns to the spiritual man. Verse 15:

The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" But we have the mind of Christ.

Here the apostle uses still another word, not psychikos, "soulish," but pneumatikos, "spiritual." In the widest sense, Paul is talking about all Christians--anyone who possesses the Spirit of God. In the Book of Romans the apostle says that if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ he is none of his--he is not a Christian, and yet, if we are led by the Spirit of God, we are the sons of God. Therefore, the presence of the Spirit of God in the individual life is what marks the difference between a true Christian and one who is not; and those who have the Spirit are spiritual men and women in the widest sense.

However, as Paul will go on to show in chapter 3, it is possible to have the Spirit of God but not always to obey him. Such a person is called a "carnal Christian," one who has the Spirit but does not walk by the Spirit. In a narrower sense, this is what Paul is speaking of here. To all who are open to the Spirit, who obey the Spirit, who are led by the Spirit, these three great possibilities are true.

First, they are able to judge all things on a moral basis. That is a remarkable statement, because when Paul says all things, he means all things. Christians who thoroughly understand the revelation of God in the Scriptures by the Spirit are rendered able to pronounce a moral or ethical judgment in any area of life. That does not mean at all that a Christian knows everything. Christians do not automatically understand all scientific knowledge, all physical or musical knowledge. If you think that by being a Christian you are able to know everything, someone will quickly disabuse you of that. What it means is that since everything has an ethical or moral dimension, it is the task of the Christian, indeed the privilege of the Christian, to point out to himself and to the world around what is the right and the wrong way to use things. Thus, he is the judge of all things in that realm. He must, therefore, pronounce the final ethical judgment in these areas.

Now, this is not something automatically yours because you are a Christian. There are probably millions of Christians who are not fit to judge ethics or morals because they do not obey the Spirit, or even know all that the Spirit has said. They do not study nor understand their Bibles. Therefore, they are not able to judge in this area. Nor does it mean that you need to quote only one or two verses of Scripture to prove that something is right or wrong. That is called "proof-texting," and it is one of the most abominable practices in the world today. If you merely take a verse here or there to support some particular cause, you can prove almost anything by the Bible. But that is a terrible abuse of Scripture.

The spiritual man is the man who has thoroughly studied the mind of the Spirit as he has spoken in the Old and the New Testaments. He is, furthermore, willing to be taught by the Spirit. He prays, he searches diligently and waits before God for an understanding, an illumination of his mind; he tries to understand the problem before him, and only then makes a pronouncement that could be called the judgment of the Lord.

It is this ability to judge all things in an ethical dimension that makes it possible for Christians, when the whole world is saying abortion is right, to stand up and say it is wrong. It is this ability that makes a Christian able to declare that homosexuality is wrong, no matter how many laws are passed favoring it. You can pass laws that make it legal, but you will never pass any that will make it moral. It is this ability to judge all things in an ethical dimension also that makes it possible, in fact, necessary for a Christian to say that heavy-handed materialistic greed is wrong, that conniving and wheeling and dealing in business to manipulate people to do what you want is wrong, and that social oppression is wrong, and that bigotry of every type is wrong. It is the Christian who is to say that, based not upon the wisdom and thinking of the world, but on the secret and hidden wisdom of God.

The second thing Paul says about the spiritual man is that he is not subject to judgment himself. This means, of course, that there are times and occasions when he will be beyond and above the law. Now if you think that means all law, and you go out and try to live on that basis, you soon will have plenty of time to think it over and no one will bother you during the process! But there will come times when even the Christian must act against the law. This raises the whole civil disobedience question, and that is discussed in the Scriptures in various places. There are times when the laws of the land become oppressive, anti-Christian. Then there is a Christian way of response. It is not demonstration, it is not violent protest of any sort, but it is quiet insistence that says his conscience must be taught and instructed by the Word of God or nothing will move it. You see it in Martin Luther as he stood before the Diet of Worms at the great cathedral on the Rhine with the authorities of Europe assembled there, including the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Luther declared, "Unless my conscience be taught and corrected by the Word of God, I will not change or recant anything that I have written. Here I stand: I can do no other, God help me." Now that is the Christian who is no longer subject to the judgment of the world, for he acts on the basis of the wisdom and knowledge of God. And Paul supports this; he says, "For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?" Wisdom from this source is beyond challenge, for it comes from God himself who is the ultimate realist, who sees life exactly as it really is.

The Mind of Christ

Then the apostle concludes by saying probably the most daring thing that has been said in the Bible: "But we have the mind of Christ." We have the very way of thinking about life that Jesus himself had, with that keen ability to observe what was going on around him, that ability to evaluate the changing standards of men and to come right through to the very heart of the thing. That is the mind of Christ, the ability to know what was in man. He needed no one to tell him because he understood men. That is the mind of Christ.

The mark of it, of course, is that we will behave as Jesus did. In the midst of this present world we will be compassionate when others are severe; we will be severe when others are tolerant; we will be kind to the ugly, the poor, the obscure, the people of no ability or power, but we will be frank with the rich and the powerful and the mighty. That is the mind of Christ. I submit to you there never was a more radical proposal to change the world than that brief statement--to act according to the mind of Christ. Here is the true way to radically affect the world of our day. That is what God sends us out to do.

I freely admit to you that there are few of us who in any degree manifest this consistently. We are all in the process of learning, and nobody can hold himself up and say that he always operates this way. But to the degree that we are learning to fashion our lives according to the revelation of the secret and hidden wisdom of God, we are letting loose in this world the mind of Christ. What a powerful effect it will have upon society! This is the privilege of the spiritual man, who is able to operate in the midst of the confusion of life today in such a way as to call men back to reality, away from the confusion and the illusion and the delusions by which the world lives, to the realities of life as it is in Christ. What a privilege!

I Corinthians 3:1-15

5. Carnal and Spiritual Christians

What is the trouble with the church at Corinth? Well, as the apostle has told us, by now they should have been governed by spiritual thinking; they should have understood what God had revealed to them in the Scriptures in such a profound way that their outlook would be controlled by this kind of thinking in everything they did. But instead, they are still operating on the natural philosophy of the world around, and they have brought that thinking into the church.

Of the Flesh

Paul says in plain language in chapter 3 that this is all wrong:

But I, brethren, could not address you as spiritual men, but as men of the flesh, as babes in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it; and even yet you are not ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving like ordinary men? For when one says, "I belong to Paul," and another, "I belong to Apollos," are you not merely men? (vv. 1-4)

Notice that Paul uses the phrase "of the flesh" three times. That phrase represents the problem here at Corinth. The apostle actually uses two different Greek words translated "flesh" here, and though they are closely related, there is a difference between them. The first one is the word sarkinos, which comes from the Greek word for flesh, sarx. We could translate sarkinos into English by the word fleshy. Paul is not putting them down when he uses this word, he is merely recognizing their nature--they are fleshy people; they are of the flesh. All Paul says is, "I could not speak to you as spiritual men because you are fleshy men." In other words, he began where they were, and he preached Christ to them. Even after they came to Christ, he recognizes they still had not advanced very far beyond the normal, natural outlook of flesh and blood.

He is careful, however, to indicate they were not unregenerate after he had brought them to Christ. He calls them "brethren," and he says they are "babes in Christ." They are in Christ, but they are babies. That is the problem. Paul was preaching and teaching in Corinth for a year and a half, but in all that time they never advanced far beyond babyhood. They were still governed by the thinking of the flesh. So in the second part of this section where he refers to the flesh again twice, he uses a slightly different word. It is not sarkinos here, but sarkikos, which comes from the same root but means "dominated by the flesh." The Latin word for flesh is came and that is why in some versions this is called "carnal." It should be translated "fleshly,"

…for you are still fleshly. While there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not fleshly, and behaving like ordinary men?

Someone who is still fleshly or carnal after he has become possessed by the Spirit is one who is still thinking like a natural man. We see the same divisions in Romans S where Paul speaks of those who are no longer of the flesh, i.e., they are regenerate but they walk "according to the flesh" instead of "according to the Spirit." Paul is using the same terminology in each case.

What is this like, this condition of carnality or fleshliness? Well, Paul describes it first as "spiritual babyhood." Now there is nothing wrong with babies; everyone starts out that way. Babies are delightful little creatures, up to a point, but they require a lot of care. They are messy; they burp, and they spill over in various ways. Someone has described a baby as a digestive apparatus with a loud noise at one end and no responsibility at the other! No one minds that when babies are little; we all must have that kind of care, and even a young father will learn to change diapers. But when that condition goes on and on and on and the baby becomes 5, 10, 15, 20 years of age and it still requires the same amount of care (you are still changing diapers!) it is a different situation altogether. That is what Paul is talking about here-spiritual babyhood that continues too long and that requires milk instead of meat. That is a very important distinction.

The Elementary Doctrines

In chapters 5 and 6 of the letter to the Hebrews, you also have a helpful explanation of what these terms mean. This was the problem with the Hebrews, too. They were spiritual babies; they had a case of arrested development. That passage also says, "You need milk." Well, what is milk? Hebrews 6 tells us that it is "the elementary doctrines of Christ," and it goes on to list them for us. The first one consists of evangelistic preaching, i.e., telling people how to become Christians.

One of the most dangerous and, I think, deadly things in the Church is the habit that thousands of churches have of preaching the gospel over and over every Sunday morning. For this reason Christians never grow up; they never get out of spiritual babyhood because all they hear is how to become a Christian. Now that is all right for babies; that is what leads them to Christ and establishes them, but evangelistic preaching is only milk. Hebrews goes on to say that teaching concerning rituals like baptism and laying on of hands (probably for healing), and all such emphasis on rituals and ceremonies are part of the milk that babies need. It is not yet meat, the strong food that is required for maturity. Hebrews 6 tells us also that truth about the resurrection and the last judgments (about prophecy and eschatology), is all milk. It is designed to get believers started in the Christian life, but it is no way to build maturity as a Christian. Yet, across America there are thousands and thousands of churches that spend their whole teaching period, year after year, in investigating more about rituals, ceremonies, baptisms, prophecy and prophetic matters, and evangelizing. That is milk.

What is meat? Meat is preaching that unfolds the full riches and magnificence of the gospel so that people grow up. They stop being children, as Paul says in Ephesians 4, "…no longer (to be) children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine" (Ephesians 4:14). That requires the meat of the Word.

Christ died for my sins; that is milk. We died with Christ to sin; that is meat. That is what will free me from habits and attitudes that are irritating to others and that make me difficult to live with. The knowledge of the gifts of the Spirit--that is milk. These Corinthians had that knowledge. Paul says right at the very beginning that they had all the gifts present among them so that "you are not lacking in any spiritual gift." What they did not understand was how to produce the fruit of the Spirit, which is love. That is meat. Later on Paul will discuss the gifts of the Spirit, and then he will say, "And I will show you a still more excellent way." That way is love. When you rejoice in hope of sharing the glory of God, that is milk, that is looking forward to the glory coming at the end of life. But when you learn to rejoice in your sufferings because you know God is working out something in your life which nothing else could do, that is meat. That is growing up as a Christian.

Now the mark of spiritual babyhood, Paul says, is jealousy and strife. Where you have baby Christians who are all too long in that condition, you will always have divisions, factions, strife, and breaking into little cliques and groups in the church. This arises out of a sense of competition. That is what Paul says here.

For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving like ordinary men (still unchanged in your thinking)? For when one says, "I belong to Paul," and another "I belong to Apollos" (there you get the competitive spirit), are you not merely men?

The whole world functions on the basis of competition. Out there in your job you are up against the sharp, "dog-eat-dog" type of aggression, competition that exists for jobs and the in-fighting that goes on in the office to see who is going to get the next promotion and how to cut one another out (we have all become skilled at that)--but that is not to be carried over into the church. Nor is it, by Christians, to be indulged in even in the world. The whole purpose of the Spirit of God is to change our way of thinking so that we are no longer operating out of competition, but of cooperation.

In this next passage Paul brings out beautifully the spiritual view of relationships. I know pastors who live in fear some layman will have a ministry that will outshine theirs so they are afraid to let people meet in homes or discover their spiritual gifts and go to work for the Lord. There is a sense of rivalry and competition in the church. I know of Christians who are unwilling to use their spiritual gifts unless they can do so in large meetings or somehow be the center of attention. They are not interested in small, obscure places.

Some time ago I ran across this little poem. I thought it expressed this very well:

Father, Where shall I work today?

And my love flowed warm and free.

Then He pointed me out a tiny spot and said,

"Tend that for me?'

I answered quickly, "Oh, no, not that.

Why, no one would ever see,

No matter how well my work was done.

Not that little place for me."

And the word He spoke, it was not stern.

He answered me tenderly,

"Ah, little one, search that heart of thine.

Are thou working for them or me?

Nazareth was a little place, and so was Galilee!" [Author Unknown]

The spirit of carnality has invaded the church and made us rivals one of another, but how truly the spiritual-minded person lays that all aside and begins to operate, no longer in competition with anybody, knowing he or she is unique, with uniquely chosen gifts that no one else has exactly in the same combination. We do not need to be in competition with anybody at all. Each has something unique to do that only he can do.

That is what Paul goes on to describe,

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor. For we are fellow workers for God; you are God's field, God's building (vv. 5-9).

Paul is looking now on the true view of ministry and ministers. He does not mean by ministers only the apostles or only a select group called the clergy, the pastors. This devilish idea that has possessed the church sees the clergy as people with a special pipeline to God. That idea is never found in Scripture. No, in Scripture all Christians are in the ministry, everyone without exception. All are given gifts by the Spirit. All are expected to have a function, a service that God uses. It does not have to be in the meeting of the church. It is out in the world, anywhere you are.

The Highest Rank

So how are we to view one another? As big shots striving to see who can get the most recognition; as dignitaries with special dress to indicate our rank and style of life? Are we to be the "heavies," the bosses, the brass? No. Paul says we are servants. That is all. Everyone, servants of Christ. That is the highest rank possible in the church, and everybody has it to start with. Therefore, there is no need for competition or rivalry. We are all servants of Christ. Jesus himself told us what our attitude is to be: "The Son of Man," he said, "came not to be ministered unto but to minister, and give himself a ransom for many." And again, "One is your Master, and all of you are brethren."

What is your reason for going to church? Is it that you might have a blessing, or is it that you might be a blessing? The attitude of a servant is always, "What can I do for another?" In the process you find yourself abundantly ministered unto. We hear so much today of this attitude that insists that "everything has to meet my needs." But the apostle is telling us that this will bring nothing but trouble in the church; it creates divisions and factions. We must come to see each other as servants of Christ, mutually living and ministering to one another as God gives us opportunity. This is what the Lord himself demonstrated for us. Are we in competition? "No," says Paul, "we're in cooperation. I planted; Apollos watered; but God gave the growth. We are doing different things, but we need each of them."

It is one of the glories of the church that nobody does the exact same thing. Churches that try to turn out people who all look alike, dress alike, carry the same kind of notebook, speak the same kind of language, use the same version of the Bible, are missing what God has in mind because we are all to be different, yet working together and needing one another. Paul will develop this much further in chapter 12.

The evangelist plants, the Bible teacher waters. Well, which is more important, Bible teaching or evangelizing? Paul's answer is, neither. God can do away with both of those. The important thing is not what either can do, but what God alone can do, which is to take truth and change lives with it. Evangelists cannot do that; Bible teachers cannot do that; only God gives increase, opens the mind, changes the heart and makes people different.

It is evident that God can dispense with both the planter and the waterer in nature. Out in the wilderness, he plants, he waters, and he gives the increase. God can do it all. So Paul is putting us in our proper place as regards people. When we ask who is more important, Paul or Apollos, Bill Gothard or Billy Graham, it is like asking which blade of a pair of scissors is more important, or which of my pant legs is more important? I need both. So it is not the people who are important, it is God who works through the people. Therefore, to give glory to men as though they were all-in-all (honor is right to give to those to whom honor is due), to exalt one as more important than another, is wrong. Paul says we are equal. "He who plants and he who waters are equal, and each shall receive his wages according to his labor," i.e., they are equally in need of the grace and the power of God, and shall receive the same according to their need.

Finally, his view is that all of us share the same high privilege. "We are God's fellow workers." Isn't that amazing? Nothing is more important in all of life than that. Think of the privilege of being a fellow-worker with God in this day and age! When at last it is all over and we stand before the King, the greatest honor ever accorded us will have been the honor that we have had of bearing his name and being an instrument of his grace here on earth, where we live, where we work, in our family.

Two Views of the Church

"You are God's field," Paul says. "You are God's building." Here are two equally valid views of the church. In the field, Paul is thinking of evangelism, of the increase. As a farmer plants his crop year after year it increases as he plants, so each year he is able to plant more because of the increased seed he gets. So the church spreads and increases numerically as we work within it, building one another up and teaching the truth of God. That, in turn, is imparted to others who are reached by neighbors and friends and thus the church increases. You are God's field. But you are also God's building, which, Paul says in Ephesians, "…grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built into it for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit" (Ephesians 2:21, 22).

As we minister according to our gifts, where we are, we are learning something. We are being changed. We are being shaped and fashioned and chiseled off a little here and put in the right spot there, until the whole temple grows to be a manifestation of the wholeness of God. That is why, as the church functions in the way the Bible outlines, we become more and more like Christ. We manifest his qualities; we become a wholesome, healed people, a community that has learned to live together in forgiveness, friendship, compassion, love and mercy toward one another. As that becomes visibly manifest, the whole world begins to prick up its ears and watch and listen, for it discovers that is where God is. God is dwelling among his people and we are built up into God's building.

When our Lord said, "I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it," he meant the church is people. The remarkable thing about the church is that it is a growing building, growing through the centuries, made up of people whom Peter calls "living stones" who are built into this mighty temple of God. Our Lord is still building his church, which he started back in the first century when the foundations were laid. That building has been going on, stretching through the centuries ever since, and now, perhaps, we are finishing off the roof. The building is almost complete it seems to me, but it is one building, one church.

An Invisible Union

Paul describes this now, in verses 10 and 11:

According to the commission of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it. For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

What a strange building the church is! It is not made of wood, or of stone, least of all of glass. It is made of people, and it consists of an invisible union among visible people, so in some sense the church is both visible and invisible. You can see the church because the people of God gather in one place, and yet you cannot see the church because it is made up of only that spiritually wrought tie that binds us together in sharing the life of Christ. That truly constitutes the church.

That union is manifested in three distinctive ways. First, we can refer to the church as the total union of all believers of all time, both on earth and in heaven. Paul speaks of the church in that regard in Ephesians where we have a picture of the whole temple of God in which God dwells.

Then, of course, there is the manifestation of that church as an individual congregation. In this sense the church consists of any two or three Christians gathered in the name of the Lord. Jesus said, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them." Christians meeting in a home deserve the name of a church because they are a manifestation of this strange living union that our Lord is talking about. Every congregation is that kind of a church.

Still further, as this letter makes clear, every individual believer among us is a picture of that church. Paul will say in the sixth chapter of this letter, "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit…? You are not your own; you were bought with a price."

In that sense every one of us is a church, a dwelling place of God by the Spirit, and when Scripture speaks of the church it has all three of these in mind.

Now in all or any of these manifestations the matter of first importance is the foundation. The apostle clearly emphasizes what that foundation is. He does not leave it to debate; it is stated as plainly as it can be (v. 11):

For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.

His person, his life, his doctrines, his teachings, his resurrection, his ascension, his return by means of the Holy Spirit to make himself universally available among us, his coming return in person from heaven--all that is included as part of the foundation. The teachings concerning Jesus were given to us by the apostles, but they focus on the person of the Lord. Every church that departs from teaching about Christ and his work, his person and his resurrection, begins to slide away from the foundation and soon becomes tottery and wobbly, and finally collapses and crumbles into nothing. Every individual who is not built upon that foundation will find his life crumbling and failing ultimately. So our Lord is to remain always present as the foundation of the church, the God and Lord of the universal church, the head of the local body, manifesting his presence, his power, and his guidance throughout that body, and the Master and Savior of every individual heart which has come to know him. That is the foundation.

That foundation, of course, basically consists of Jesus as revealed in the Scriptures. They are the only witness to the true foundation of the church. They were given to us by the apostles and as such they constitute an unshakeable foundation. That is why every church, either local or universal, or any individual who does not base his life upon the Jesus of the Scriptures, soon begins to waver. Today we hear the words "Jesus" and "Christ" used in many ways not reflected in the Scriptures, but the only foundation God ever recognizes is the apostolic Christ. "No other foundation can any one lay," Paul says. That is the foundation, and this is why we must keep Jesus central in all things.

Master Contractor

Paul calls himself here "the wise master builder," and the word for master builder, architectron is the word from which we get our word architect But he really uses this word in a different sense than we use the word architect today. To us an architect is the man who thinks up the building. He conceptualizes it; he plans it and draws the designs for it. In that sense, of course, God is the true architect of the church. The Lord Jesus said, "I will build my church." He has conceived it; he has designed it, has planned its structure, programmed its activities, and he continues to do so, thus he is really the architect.

The term I think we would use here for Paul is "contractor." Paul is a master contractor. He is skilled; he knows his business; he is filled with grace; he is helped by the power and the Spirit of God. He comes equipped to go to work and lay the foundation as he did in Corinth and everywhere else he went, preaching and teaching the doctrines of Christ. Many people think of a preacher as an individual with a dark suit on, who has an unclear mind, and always speaks with a holy groan. But we ought to think of a preacher as a man who wears a hard hat and a carpenter's apron and carries a saw and a hammer. He is building something. That was what Paul was doing. By preaching and teaching the doctrines of Christ and enabling people to practice these, he, together with the other apostles, laid the foundation of the church.

Now the purpose of a foundation, as Paul makes clear, is to build something on. You do not lay foundations and then walk off and leave them. If you do, it is a sign you have run out of money; you are not able to finish what you have started, and God does not do that. The apostles laid the foundations in giving us the Scriptures during the first century in order that they might be built upon, and the church rises upon that foundation. As believers are added to it, and as they become mature and strong in Christ, love and compassion, mercy, truth and grace begin to flow out of their lives instead of confusion, weakness, hostility and anger and all the things that were once there. So the church rises and takes shape as the building of God.

But who builds upon the foundation? Paul says, "I laid the foundation, and another man is building upon it. Let each man take care how he builds upon it." Obviously he has in mind Apollos and Cephas and some of the other teachers in the church at Corinth. There probably were many in Corinth who were teaching and preaching the doctrines of Christ and thus building on the foundation of personal faith in Jesus Christ which the apostle had laid. But this would also apply to almost any Christian, because we are all working with each other. There is a sense in which we disciple one another. Nobody is solely the "discipler" and somebody else the "disciplee." I have learned when I take on a young man to train or disciple that it is not very long before he will start discipling me as well. He will have insights and understanding of the Scripture that I need, and so we begin to build into one another's life. The great question that Paul raises here is, "What are you doing to one another as you build into one another's lives? They have an effect on you; you have an impact upon them." Everyone is faced with this great question here, "What is my impact? What am I building with? What kind of material am I putting into another person's life?"

Building for Eternity

Paul gives us the choices, in verses 12 and 13:

Now if any one builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble--each man's work will become manifest; for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.

Each one of us has an influence on someone else in the body of Christ. It may be on our children, parents, friends, companions, wives, or husbands. We are building upon the foundation which has been laid in their lives. "What are you building with?" That is the great question. There are two types of material. One is permanent--gold, silver, precious stones, By "precious stones," I do not think Paul means jewels, like rubies, diamonds, and emeralds. The word really refers to those large building stones carved out of granite or marble that are put upon a foundation to raise the walls and complete the edifice. They were costly stones because they required a great deal of work in quarrying and shaping and fitting them into the place where they ought to be. That is what Paul has in mind. The thing characteristic about gold, silver, and costly stones is that they withstand the fire. Such materials are permanent; they never fail or slip off the foundation; they are in line with the nature of the foundation.

The other three, of course, are exactly the opposite. They are highly combustible material--wood and hay and straw ("stubble," the King James Version calls it)--all very temporary.

These are symbols of course, but what do they refer to? What is the permanent material with which we can build into each other's lives, as opposed to the perishable? I do not think we have to debate that. It is what Paul has been talking about all through this whole section. The permanent is that secret and hidden wisdom of God which he said was, "…decreed before the ages for our glorification" and is revealed only by the Spirit through the Scriptures. If we build into each other's lives on the basis of that philosophy, what we build will endure the test of the fire.

On the other hand, the perishable is the "wisdom of the world," as Paul calls it, the wisdom of speculations and traditions, the changing philosophies of men. Every person sooner or later comes up with the same question, "Who am I? Why am I made this way, with this name and this color skin and why have I appeared in history at this point?" As people ask these questions, they begin to come up with answers, all of which conflict with one another. These reflect the shifting, impermanent philosophies of men. If you try to build your life on them, they will all disappear in the fire of testing.

But on the other hand, listen to the wisdom of God, Paul says. God is saying in effect, "Look, if you will just shut up for a minute I'll tell you who you are. I made you. I know what you're for. I know what you can do and how you fit and if you'll listen I'll tell you. You'll not only find out who you are, you'll find out who I am, and you'll discover that you can't find out who you are until you know who I am. I'm behind all things. I've brought all things into being and all things function within my will and purpose. All things will end in the objectives that I have set up. You can find yourself when you find me." That is what Paul is talking about.

One of the most devastating problems in our world today is the number of marriages which are threatened. Why are they threatened? Well, because they have all partaken to one degree or another of the current changing ideas reflecting the spirit of the age, which say that marriage is a way of enjoying yourself with another person. It is designed for sexual satisfaction. It is having somebody to meet your needs. Marriage is being in love and being happy together and if you are not happy or you are not in love any more, then forget it and marry someone else. That is why marriages are crumbling. They reveal what this very passage is telling us--that such ideas are impermanent, they do not last, they crumble and fall. It is improper material with which to build upon the foundation.

What lasts? God's insights into marriage, God's understanding of what is required for two people to become one flesh! God alone can show you how to lay hold of power and resources that make you able to do even things you do not want to do. That is "the secret and hidden wisdom of God." Without it marriages break up and churches fall apart, split and divide. Individual lives grow cold, lonely, despairing, unhappy and miserable. How appropriate is Paul's description of God's wisdom as "gold, silver and precious stones." These remain permanent, solid and sure!

Reflecting the Secrets of God

What Paul is asking us is, "You who preach and teach in the church (including me), what is the source of your teaching? Are you understanding these great secrets of God revealed through the Spirit, and do you reflect them in your teaching of the doctrines of Christ? Are you understanding that man is not to be exalted and/or to concern himself about status and titles, degrees and traditions? Has the word of the cross come to you, the word that cuts beneath all human attainment and sets it totally aside?" That word causes us, in fear and trembling, to declare what God is ready to do in our midst, not how much we can impress others by what we are going to do for God. That is the "word of wisdom," the "gold, silver and precious stones." This is what will endure and build up the church to last from age to age.

But do you know what we often want? What I frequently want is to find a way to indulge in all the love and pleasure of the flesh, to give way to my temper and to my desires to acquire comfortable things, to enjoy life with all its pleasures and at the same time, have a compassionate heart and the loving, joyful, peaceful, serene spirit of a Christian who is walking in the power of God. Isn't that what you want? Sure you do. But do you see what the apostle is saying? It is one or the other. If you are not building with gold, silver and precious stones into your own or another person's life, you are building with wood, hay and stubble. There are no other choices. That is why Paul says you must "take care" how you build the church.

Exam Time Is Coming

Now, why? Well, Paul says our motivation for true work is that examination day is coming.

If the work which any man has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire (vv. 14, 15)

What do these words mean? Remember that Paul says in 2 Corinthians, "We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ" (5:10). In John's Book of Revelation he describes the Lord before whom we appear: "His eyes are like a flame of fire" (1:14). Those flaming, searching eyes are going to examine all our Christian lives, what they have been made of, what we have been building with. Paul says in 2 Corinthians, "Then we shall receive the things done in the body whether they be good or bad"--the same two categories--whether they be built on the basis of the revelation of the mind and Spirit of God (gold, silver and precious stones), or whether they reflect the current philosophies of the spirit of the age around us. If it is good it will endure; it will stand the test, and we will be given a reward.

What is the reward? Do you know what I think it is? The Scriptures do not tell us flat out, but I think there are hints that indicate what it is. When Paul wrote to the Thessalonians he said, "Are you not our crown of rejoicing?" I think the reward is simply joy, joy over having spent your life in a way that counts. Did you ever watch a winning team at the end of a game? Do you notice what they do? They go crazy. Grown men jump on each other's backs; they pound one another and hug one another and even kiss one another. They jump up and down like little kids in a candy store. Why? They are filled with joy because the efforts they put forth produced results: it was satisfying to them. That was their reward.

Did you ever watch the losing team? They slink off; there is no jumping around and slapping one another on the back. No. Sadness and gloom prevail; they are ashamed because all their efforts were to no avail. It was all wasted effort. Now each of us will have some of both in our lives. There is no Christian who will not have some degree of gold, silver and precious stones because God guarantees it by having come into our lives. But there can also be a lot of wood, hay and stubble, too, built upon the philosophy of the flesh instead of the Spirit. John says, "Let us so live that we shall not be ashamed before him at his coming."

What is your life going to count for? That is the question. Every one of us is investing his life in something. You cannot live without making an investment. Will it be permanent? Will it abide? Will it stand the test? In the great day when all the universe sees things the way they are, will you be filled with joy that your life was invested in what stood the test and contributed to the glory of the Lord himself? Or will you be ashamed that you wasted much of those years making an impression on men and teaching and influencing others to do so, and it was all burned up in the fire? You are saved, but as though you had to run through the flames and lost everything besides? Martha Snell Nicholson has put it this way:

When I stand at the judgment seat of Christ

And He shows me His plan for me,

The plan of my life as it might have been

Had He had His way, and I see

How I blocked Him here, and I checked Him there,

And I would not yield my will

Will there be grief in my Saviour's eyes,

Grief, though He loves me still?

He would have me rich, and I stand there poor,

Stripped of all but His grace,

While memory runs like a hunted thing

Down the paths I cannot retrace.

Then my desolate heart will well-nigh break

With the tears that I cannot shed;

I shall cover my face with my empty hands,

I shall bow my uncrowned head...

Lord of the years that are left to me,

I give them to Thy hand; Take me and break me, mould me to

The pattern Thou has planned!

1 Corinthians 3:16-23

6. How to Destroy a Church

Through the centuries many have been building on the foundation that Paul and the other apostles laid. The great leaders, teachers and theologians, some of the great churchmen of the past--Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, George Whitfield--a great host have built upon it so the church has risen through the centuries. But always, as the apostle now tells us, there is a danger involved to anyone who would come against the church that God is building.

Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? If any one destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy, and that temple you are (vv. 16, 17).

There is no doubt that Paul has the congregation at Corinth in mind when he says this. "You as a people," he says, "functioning out in the world, at your work, wherever you are-you are the temple of God." In a sense this also applies to every individual, as Paul says plainly in chapter 6, "Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God?" (v. 19). Some time ago I attended a conference of the Fellowship of Christian Airline Personnel and a number of the pilots and flight attendants were sharing some of their experiences as Christians in the airlines. One beautiful stewardess told us that one day she was serving coffee and as she came down the aisle a man looked up at her and got her attention. He then opened his hand and showed her an explicitly sexual object and she immediately got the implication. It shook her, and she did not know what to do for a moment.

She turned and went to the hack of the plane to recover herself and she prayed and asked God to show her what to do, because she had to go up to that man again. She went back and knelt beside his seat and looked him right in the eye and said, "Sir, I saw what you showed me and I understand what you mean, but there is something you need to know. I am a Christian and my body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and God says he is going to destroy anyone who damages his temple." The man began to stammer out an apology, and she said, "I understand. Don't say any more. I lust want you to know that." Later she gave grateful thanks that the Lord had laid that verse on her heart because it served to deliver her from both the embarrassment and the threat of that situation.

That great truth lies at the base of all that Christians do. Their bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, and when Christians, with the Spirit indwelling them, gather, the whole congregation becomes a great temple of the Holy Spirit, the center of the presence of God. "Where two or three are gathered together, there am I in the midst of them," Jesus said.

But according to this verse it is possible to "destroy" the temple of God. (The word is not really "destroy," meaning "to eliminate or break apart." The word is everywhere else in the Scriptures translated "corrupt." It means to damage, to injure, to harm the temple of God.) Nothing can actually destroy that temple. Jesus said, "On this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." No matter what force is brought against the church, nor how powerful may be its adversaries, nothing can destroy the temple of God. But it can be damaged, it can be injured, and that is what Paul is talking about here. He says it is a dangerous thing to destroy or corrupt the temple (the church of God). God takes a dim view of anyone who does so and he will do something about it.

We have a dramatic example of that in the fifth chapter of Acts where Ananias and Sapphira indulged in a little hypocrisy. They pretended to a level of dedication and commitment which they really did not fulfill, and Peter, by the insight of the Holy Spirit, pronounced them guilty. Instantly, they both fell dead at Peter's feet. That was not intended to be the model of what the Spirit is going to do every time there is hypocrisy in the church, because he has never done it since. But it is intended to be a message from God as to what happens spiritually in a church when hypocrisy is allowed to pervade the thinking of the congregation. Something dies; something is damaged; some injury occurs, and God takes it very seriously.

Living by the World's Wisdom

How do you damage the church? How do you corrupt the congregation? I think the answer is clear from the context; corruption takes place when someone introduces the wisdom of the world into the life style and the practice of a congregation. If someone individually chooses to live according to the wisdom and the practice of the world, he begins to corrupt and damage the church. He is building with shoddy material, with wood, hay and stubble which will not stand the test of the fire and therefore he is marring the building of the church. When someone seeks to make the church impressive and powerful by the methods and the standards of the world, compromising with the spirit of the age, he is corrupting and damaging the church.

Let me give you some practical examples of this. What is happening in our own day is what was happening in that first-century world as well. For one thing the church is damaged when within the congregation people begin to treat each other in the same way that they treat one another out in the world--by recognizing distinctions between colors and classes and carrying these over into the life of the church.

Here in this country it has become evident that the churches, not only of the south but in many other parts of the country as well, do not believe the Word of God about those brothers and sisters in Christ who have a different color of skin. They have treated them in the same way the world around was treating them--making distinctions and putting them down at a lower level of life. This has damaged and injured the whole world because the church is at the very center of life and the world around reflects, to a great degree, the condition of the church. It produced an explosive situation in which our nation was torn apart because the church allowed a worldly philosophy to come in and govern the conduct and behavior of Christians.

This also happens when a church insists on having a hierarchy in the government of a congregation--someone at the top, someone in authority over everyone else. This is wrong, as our Lord said: "The kings of the Gentiles exercise lordship over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves" (Luke 22:25, 26). Yet how widely that has been ignored and how many churches still today have brought the hierarchical structure of the world's government into the church. As a result the church is severely damaged.

This happens too when a church permits the lax moral standards of the world to go unjudged within the congregation. (Paul is going to deal more extensively with this as he comes into the next chapters.) It is happening all around us today. Sexual practices widely tolerated in the world are admitted into the church and Christians allow themselves to practice these kinds of things. This damages the church and tears it apart; it destroys and mars what God is doing.

Corruption happens when you substitute secular insights and secular authority for guidance in the matter of counseling and discipline problems in a church. This is happening widely in our day. Much of secular counseling is designed to build up the flesh, to make people self-confident. The church forgets that the secular viewpoint is narrow and limited. It does not take into consideration all the factors of human life and make-up as God has designed it. Apart from that understanding, operating only on that very narrow, limited viewpoint, severe damage is done to people in counseling. Although there may be momentary or temporary help, they are trapped on a plateau from which they cannot escape and this has the effect of damaging the church.

Another common way of damaging the church today is to allow a congregation to drift into a "mechanical" worship. Perhaps nothing is more deadly than to permit people a kind of outward compliance with the matters of worship and service without any inward, heartfelt commitment to it. That will destroy a church.

Threatened in Their Worship

When Paul wrote to the church at Colossae he saw them severely threatened by three things in their worship together. One threat was formalism. They were going through ceremonies and rituals in a set way as though that was what God was after, and they were not manifesting the change of heart that these things represented. That formalistic pattern of worship is a destructive thing to the life of the church which God is seeking to build.

The second threat was emotionalism. Many of the Colossians were caught up in a kind of mystical experience and had forsaken a proper clinging to the Head of the body, who is Jesus himself. That was destroying the church, as it does in many places today. And the third threat was asceticism, a legalistic spirit that was taking pride in its dedication and its willingness to give up many things; to go in for fasting and beating the body, and not touching certain things. They were glorying in their self-denial. The apostle saw the church being choked and sabotaged by these kinds of practices.

Now according to Paul, God takes this seriously, and he does something about it. Paul says, "if any one destroys, or corrupts, God's temple, God will corrupt him." What does he mean? I think it is set forth back in verse 15: "If any man's work is burned up, he will suffer loss…"

A couple of years ago I was in Australia preaching in a downtown Melbourne church--a building that was rightly known all through the city for its beauty. I was staying in the home of one of the lay leaders of the congregation, a man who was known all through Australia as a leading churchman. He had given himself to many of the programs that the denomination had sponsored and he was leaned upon heavily as a leader in this field. He was also a very intelligent man, and, I think, a deeply devoted man.

That night I preached on Paul's experience of discovering how all his zealous effort on behalf of God was set aside in the early part of his ministry. How painfully he had to learn that all these things he counted upon from his past--his dedication, his ancestry, his morality, his background as a Hebrew of the Hebrews, etc.,--all were set aside. He had to come at last to learn that the only thing which counts is what Christ was ready to do through him, as he puts it in 2 Corinthians, "Nothing coming from me, everything coming from God."

As he was driving me home afterward this man turned to me and said, "You know, if what you said tonight is true, and I think it is, I have wasted my whole life." I do not think that was true because I knew his heart already, and I knew God had used him greatly in certain endeavors. But he caught, perhaps for the first time, a glimpse of the fact that effort put out to impress people as to what the church is like is wasted effort--it is wood, hay and stubble that comes to nothing in the measurements of God.

Paul now moves on to the logical answer to this in verse 18. What are you going to do? What is God's demand upon you if this is the danger under which we live? Paul says in verses 18-21:

Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly (foolishness) with God. For it is written, 'He catches the wise in their craftiness," and again, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile." So let no one boast of men.

There are two things Paul says to do if you catch yourself in this sort of thing--and we all do from time to time. We all think we are making an impression for God, doing great things for God. Yet, down in the heart, hidden from others around us, is an ambition, a desire for prominence. Paul says, "Stop kidding yourself. Don't let anyone deceive himself in this. You may be greatly impressing men, but God is totally unimpressed. You may think you are a great success but God is sadly shaking his head over what he sees. God cannot be fooled. He knows the heart. Others may give you tremendous applause and recognition, but if it is not coming from the sense of dependence on the wisdom and the power and the working of the Spirit of God; it is all wasted effort, coming to nothing."

Choose Foolishness

Secondly, Paul says, "Deliberately choose what the world says is foolish. If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, thinks he's got it made, thinks he understands the methods to move people and motivate them, let him become a fool that he may become wise, for the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God."

I was in the state of Washington a while back and a pastor I met there told me that another pastor in town asked him once, "What are you doing over there in the church?" So he told him, "We're trying to share one another's problems. We pray for one another and we're trying to meet each other's needs. We have a service where we try to talk openly and honestly about where we're struggling and where we're really messing up in our homes and our marriages." The other pastor said, "There's no other church in town that will act like that. Why do you do that?" And the first pastor said, "Because the New Testament tells us to." This other man said, "You won't get anywhere with that approach." But the first pastor said, "I determined that I was going to keep right on whether I got anywhere or not, because that is what God said to do."

Now that is "becoming a fool in order that you might become wise." That is choosing what the world and the worldly church says is foolish. Because the Lord says it is right, be willing to act upon it.

I think of that word in Hebrews about Moses growing up in Pharaoh's court. There came a day when, it says, "He counted the reproach of Christ greater riches than all the treasures of Egypt" (Hebrews 11:26). There was a moment when he renounced the allure of the world that he might suffer loss with the people of God for a season. How richly he won because of that.

I will never forget in my own life as a young Christian many years ago hearing George Beverly Shea sing the words for which he became famous. They spoke volumes to my own heart along this line.

I'd rather have Jesus than silver or gold.

I'd rather have him than have riches untold.

I'd rather have Jesus than houses or lands.

I'd rather be led by his nail pierced hands

Than to be a king of a vast domain

And be held in sin's dread sway.

I'd rather have Jesus than anything this world affords today.

That is what Paul is talking about. Never mind what the world thinks, never mind what the world says, for the wisdom of the world will prove to be foolish in the end.

Are they not remarkable, the foolish things worldly people and worldly Christians will do to keep up with the styles? Do you know what they have now to keep up with the fashion? Chest wigs! If you do not have hair on your chest you can buy a wig for it. The style today is open shirts with the hair visible and some men will not open their shirts because they do not have hair on their chests. Well, you can remedy that. You can buy a chest wig and nobody will know the difference. It will stay on even when you are swimming, they advertise. Nobody will laugh at you again. Isn't that wonderful?

How ridiculous, how foolish are the ways of the world. That is what Paul is saying. "The wisdom of this world is folly with God." Quoting from job he says, "God catches the wise in their craftiness," and then from Psalm 94, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile." The word futile is really, a breath, a puff of air. The words of the wise in the world are like a breath of air, a puff--it is gone, instantly; it changes to something else. Those who give way to that not only damage the church but they give way to that which in the end proves to be a wasted life.

Gain the Whole World

Now, in contrast, Paul moves on to show you what happens when you choose the wisdom of God and the ways of God.

For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future, all are yours; and you are Christ's; and Christ is God's (vv. 21-23).

You end up gaining the whole world. That is what Jesus said--"The meek shall inherit the earth." What a broad vista opens up to us in these words! All the world or the worldly church can offer you is fame, pleasure, honor, or wealth. If you want it badly enough, you will probably get it. But that is all you will get.

Jesus said that if you do your giving to be seen by men you have your reward. That is it. You will never get another one; nothing waiting for you beyond, no treasure laid up in heaven. If you do your praying to be heard by men so that you get a reputation for piety and godliness, well, you will get the reputation but that is all you get. It is the world that is narrow; it is the world that is crabbed and withered and limited in its whole approach, but, as Paul reveals here, those who choose God never lose.

This is right in line with Jesus' great principle, "If you save your life you will lose it, but if you give up your life for my sake you will save it." Paul looks all around and says, "He who lets God choose ends up with everything. Why do you divide between Paul and Apollos and Cephas and choose one among them? You can have them all," he says. "They are all yours. Paul, who planted, his whole ministry is yours. Apollos, the waterer, his ministry is yours; you can get the benefit of it. Cephas, the rock, whatever there is of value in his ministry is yours. In fact the whole world is open to you. Led of the Spirit of God you can go anywhere you want and God will give you things that money cannot buy."

I have had the experience many times of enjoying things that millionaires own but I get to use--they do not. The world is yours. Life with all its possibilities is open before you. God can lead you into where the real living is. Even death with its threat is already mastered; it is already yours. When you come to it, it will minister to you, not take from you. It will bring you into glory. The present, the future, all things are yours because you are Christ's, and Christ is God's and therefore everything he owns is yours. All things belong to you because you belong to the One to whom all things belong.

That is an incredible vista, isn't it, and yet those words are true. That is what God has in mind for his people. As we choose our life style, do we have the faith and the courage to set aside the life style of the world around us, and walk with God? When we do, all that God possesses becomes ours. We become children of a heavenly King who makes it all available to us.

I Corinthians 4:1-7

7. The True Minister

In the first seven verses of 1 Corinthians 4 we have a passage that gives us the true view of a minister of Christ. There are many stereotypes abroad today as to what a minister is. One stereotype is that he is a producer of hot air, a gas bag, saying things that have no real significance, "a holy groan in a black suit." I read another definition of a minister as "a mild-mannered man standing before mild-mannered people and exhorting them to be more mild-mannered." What an exciting concept of a Christian leader!

These Corinthians to whom the apostle Paul was writing thought of ministers of Christ as big shot traveling preachers who had their partisans in every church and who were known for their knowledge or their eloquence. At great length Paul has pointed out the danger, the weakness and the error of that position, and now in chapter 4 he corrects it by setting before them the true view:

This is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. Moreover it is required of stewards that they be found trustworthy [or faithful] (vv. 1, 2).

Here are the responsibilities of ministers. In verses 3 through 5 Paul gives us the proper evaluation of ministers, and in verses 6 and 7 the freedom which they will exercise when the congregation sees them in the proper light.

When I use the term "minister of Christ," I am not speaking of the traditional concept of a full-time employee of a church who is kept around to do the preaching, the teaching, the counseling and to run the mimeograph machine. Unfortunately that is a widespread concept of what the pastor ought to be and I run into it in many places.

This concept, of course, is totally unknown in the New Testament. The idea of having a single pastor, the pastor, is an unbiblical imposition that has come into the church only within the past 400 years. A minister of Christ in the New Testament churches was anyone, anyone, who by virtue of a gift of the Spirit was a preacher or a teacher of the Word of God. That is what Paul is talking about here.

In this sense we are all ministers of Christ. Every Christian is in the ministry--I have said that many times. But there is a special sense Paul is dealing with it here--wherein those who have the gift of teaching or preaching ("prophesying" as it is called in Scripture), have a special function within the body of Christ. There are dozens of ministers like that in every church.

How are we to look at such people and what are we to think about them? Paul deals with this first. Who are these people? Should we call them bishops? Are they wardens, as the Episcopalians might call them? Are they doctors, rabbis, popes or even senior pastors? You do not find those titles in the Scriptures. (Bishops are referred to, but not in the usual sense that we think of them today. Bishops were not in oversight over more than one church. They were the equivalent of elders and overseers.)

Under-rowers of Christ

The word the apostle uses here is a remarkable one. He says, "We want you to look at us as servants of Christ." The word for servant is the Greek word huperetes, which literally means "an under-rower." Now everyone in Corinth understood what the word meant. Corinth was where the war galleys of the Roman Empire crossed the isthmus that separated the Ionian Sea from the Aegean Sea, and the Corinthians knew that the lowest deck of a war galley was made of single rows of benches on both sides of the ship where the rowers sat. Then on a little deck raised up above them all so that each rower could see him was the captain of the ship. It was the rowers' task to row according to what he said. If he wanted the ship to move then they were to row; if he wanted them to stop they had to stop instantly. Their whole business was to obey his orders. Now that is the word that Paul chooses to describe those who are teachers, preachers and ministers of the Word of God within the congregation of the church. They are "under-rowers" of Christ.

This word is used in other places in Scripture also. When our Lord stood before Pontius Pilate and Pilate asked him if he were a king, Jesus said, "My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants (huperetes) would fight," i.e., "If my kingdom were an earthly kingdom and I told my servants to fight that is what they would do. They would obey what I said."

This word is used again in the account of Paul and Barnabas as they go out on the first missionary journey. Luke tells us that they took with them a young man named John Mark to be their "minister" (huperetes). Did that mean that he was to be in charge of the devotions every morning? No, it meant that he was the one who got the airline tickets, checked their baggage, and made hotel reservations, ran the errands and did what they told him. Paul says, "That is what we want you to think about us. We are not big shots, we are not among you as domineering leaders. We are servants of Christ, under-rowers with our eyes fixed on him. What he tells us to say, that is what we are to say, and what he tells us not to do, that is where our limits are. That is what we want you to think about us as you see us ministering among you."

From this flows what I think is the biblical independence which ministers of Christ have, using that term in its widest sense. They are not to be servants of the Board, for the members of the Board themselves, the elders, are joint ministers of Christ with them. Ministers are not to be servants of the congregation, and least of all the denomination. They are servants of Christ. In Galatians Paul says, "If I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ." There he draws a sharp contrast. They are not to be paying heed to what the congregation or any one group within the congregation wants to hear, but they are to say what the Lord tells them to say. That is what the servant of Christ, the under-rower of Christ, must do. I have never valued anything more in my whole life than the fact that I belong with that crowd. I see myself as an huperetes, an under-rower of Christ, and it is my responsibility to say and do what he tells me to do.

A young pastor at a pastors' conference once said to me, "What would you do if you were in my shoes? My Board called me in and said to me, 'Look, there are some things we want you to understand. One is that this is our church; it is not your church. We were here before you came and we are going to be here when you leave; therefore, we expect you to do what we want you to do and not what you think you ought to do.' What would you say to a church like that?" I told him that I would call together the elders of the church and I would say to them, "Brothers, I think you are suffering from two very serious theological errors. One, you think this is your church, but it is the Lord's church. All churches belong only to him; they do not belong to the people; they are not a democracy owned by the congregation. Jesus said, 'On this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it' So all of us are under the authority of the Lord of this church and it is his work to tell us what he wants the church to be and not our job to tell him what we think it ought to be.

"The second error is that you think you hired me to work in this church, but you have not. I did not come on that basis. I have joined you to share the ministry with you. I appreciate the fact that you have set me aside and given me support from the congregation so that I do not have to spend time earning a living but can devote my full time to the ministry of teaching and preaching. If you will not accept those terms then I will have to look elsewhere. I cannot work on any other terms because that is what the New Testament says."

He went back to his church and they fired him, but now he has another church and he made his stand clear from the beginning and things are working out very well with him.

So much for the status of the under-rowers. They are not unusual; they are not above anybody; they are not authorities within the church. They are under-rowers of Christ. Their accountability is to him.

Now what is the responsibility of a minister of Christ? Here Paul uses another term. He calls them "stewards of the mysteries of God." Isn't that an enchanting term? The word for steward is oikonomos, meaning "housekeeper." Today I think the nearest equivalent would be "administrator," but perhaps we get at the heart of this when we come right back to the old biblical word "steward" or "stewardess." We know what they are. When you are on an airplane you find a stewardess or a steward who serves coffee, tea, milk (and other beverages) and a tray of food at the proper time. They have been entrusted with certain valuable commodities which they are responsible to dispense. That is what a steward is and that is exactly in line with this New Testament picture.

A minister of Christ, whoever he or she may be within a congregation--and it does include women--is to be a steward entrusted with what Paul calls "the mysteries of God," that secret and hidden wisdom of God, these valuable truths which are only found in the revelation of the Word of God and nowhere else. They are responsible to dispense them continually to the congregation so that lives are changed and lived on the basis of these remarkable truths.

The Mysteries in Our Care

We have already seen what they are--truth about life, about our families, about God and ourselves. Let me remind you of some of them. There is the "mystery of the kingdom of God." How often that is mentioned in Scripture. What does it mean? Well, it means God at work in history, how he is working through the events of our day to carry out his purposes. It is the business of a minister of Christ to unfold that mystery to people and to help them to understand these events. The world interprets them on other grounds but God is intending to use them in a quite different way. That is the business of a minister of Christ, an under-rower of Christ, a steward of the mysteries of God.

There is the "mystery of iniquity," of lawlessness. This is the explanation we desperately need of the nature of evil. Why are we never able to make any progress when it comes to solving human dilemmas; why does every generation without exception repeat the struggle, problems and difficulties of the previous generation? We do not have instinct to guide us as the animals do, and we never seem to learn from the past. As the philosopher Hegel put it, "History teaches us that history teaches us nothing." We wrestle endlessly, over and over again, with the same basic struggles and problems. There is no advance. Why? Because of the mystery of lawlessness, that evil, invisible panoply of remarkable beings who are constantly twisting and distorting the thinking of men. They lead us down garden paths into error and illusion and cause us to see things out of proportion and out of relationship with reality. We assume that something is true when it is not and act on that basis. That is why we get mixed up all the time. You will never understand why if you do not understand the mystery of lawlessness.

Then there is the opposite of that--the "mystery of godliness." This is the remarkable secret that God has provided by which a Christian is enabled to live right in the midst of the pressures of the world (with all its illusion and danger), and yet not run away from it but refuse to conform to it and do so in a loving, gracious way. What is the secret? It is the secret of an imparted life--"Christ in you, the hope of glory." Christ in you, available to you--his life, his wisdom, his strength, his power to act available to you to enable you to do what you do not think you can do at the moment, but when you choose to do it you find you have the strength to perform. That is the mystery of godliness, the most life--transforming doctrine that has ever been set before man, radical in its effect.

Then there is the "mystery of the church," that strange new society that God is building which is to be a demonstration of a totally different life style before a watching world and which is to resist the impact of the world and instead be an impact upon the world around to change it. That is a great mystery. Those who are called to teach this and preach this in a church congregation are stewards of that mystery. They are entrusted to set it out and to help people to face the facts of life without fear so that all can experience both the ecstasy and the agony of Christian experience.

That brings us to the third part of the responsibility which is, "Moreover, it is required of stewards that they be found faithful." Faithful at what? Faithful at dispensing the mysteries so people understand them. You may fail at many things as a teacher, a preacher, a leader of a class. You may not make it in many areas but do not miss it in this one. Be sure that you are setting forth the mysteries of God. That is what you will be judged on. You are being "a good steward of the mysteries of God" if you set forth these truths.

Subtle Pressure

Paul now turns to a common problem, and that is the evaluation of the minister. Who is to do this? The remarkable thing is that we have hundreds of volunteers--everybody wants to get in on the act of how to judge the minister as to his or her faithfulness. The result is a kind of subtle but constant pressure upon everyone who is called to this kind of ministry.

But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you (Can you imagine how popular that verse was in Corinth? Can't you see them memorizing it and carrying it around with them on little cards?) or by any human court. I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me. Therefore, do not pronounce judgment before the time, before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then every man will receive his commendation from God (vv. 3-5).

The first pressure Paul mentions is congregational evaluation, and he puts it at the very bottom of the list. "It is a very small thing," he says, "what you think about me. I know you are thinking about me and I know what you think, but I want you to know I do not think it is very significant."

Stuart Briscoe says there are three kinds of congregational pressure--there is adulation, which swells the head; there is manipulation, which ties the hands; and there is antagonism, which breaks the heart. I have experienced all three of those, as everyone has who seeks to teach and preach the Word of God.

There is adulation. There are always those people--they mean to be encouraging and within certain limits they are encouraging--but they will say nice things all the time, sometimes heaping it on until it begins to swell the head. Many a young pastor and many a teacher within the church has been ruined by too much adulation. It is so easy to start preaching to it, wanting to hear words of praise, and passing over truth that would be unpleasant. Evaluation by the congregation is a subtle pressure.

Then there is manipulation. Every congregation has its "power structure," people who seek to manipulate and to influence the teaching and the preaching. Sometimes they do it by personality, sometimes by a display of wealth, sometimes by perseverance, hounding you until you begin to give heed to what they say. There are many ways of putting pressure on a preacher or a teacher to stop being an huperetes of Christ. You begin to preach to accommodate; you pass over unpleasant doctrines, passages that deal with issues that would create controversy within the congregation, and this is deadly. It destroys the congregation and the life of a church.

Manipulation ties the hands. I have met young pastors across the continent who are ready to quit the ministry because they have run up against the power structure in their church. It has tied their hands and they are ready to quit. They have forgotten they are huperetes of Christ, and that he will see them through. But they give up and quit the ministry instead.

And then there is antagonism--outright, sharp, open-faced opposition. A young man once told me about his experience when he was on the staff of a church. He said one of the elders stopped him one day and said, "Where are you getting all these ideas? Have you been down to Stedman's church?" The young man answered truthfully, "No, I haven't." The elder grabbed him by the shirt front and said, "I want to tell you something: if I ever hear that you are going down to Stedman's church and coming back with some of those radical ideas, you're out!" Now that is antagonism; that is pressure upon the minister. This is what Paul is speaking of. It breaks the heart of a young pastor or teacher.

Next, Paul speaks of societal evaluation, "But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court"

Literally, it is "by man's day," the view that mankind in general has of a minister. Have you ever noticed the attitude displayed toward ministers in the movies or on television? Usually it is a kind of contemptuous, disdainful putdown. On the other hand, sometimes a church begins to make an impact upon its community and everybody in the world outside begins to patronize it, praise it, talk about it and flatter it. Again, you are tempted to speak so as to get these encouraging, helpful things said about you. Maybe you will get your name in the paper and perhaps some recognition by a denomination or by some other group across the country; you will build a reputation. This is a deadly, dangerous thing in a church. Paul says, "Don't pay any attention to it. I don't allow myself to. I'm not affected by any human court. It doesn't make any difference to me."

The Paul says, "I do not even judge myself." Now he does not mean he does not look at himself and evaluate what he is doing because he tells us that he does so in other places in Scripture. He also tells as to do it. He says, "Examine yourselves whether you be in the faith or not." What he means is that he does not take any final notice of this kind of judgment. He realizes it is incomplete. There is often a blindness about ourselves; we are blind to our faults and failures, and he knows it.

We are also sometimes unaware of our successes. There have been times when I thought I had totally failed in the preaching of a message, and yet I have seen many instances when that very occasion was the means of reaching people in a remarkable way. I have discovered, as Paul must have discovered, that you cannot accept your own judgment of yourself.

Paul says he is "not aware of anything against himself" at this moment. He has dealt with all the Lord has ever shown him about himself. He is not aware of anything, but he knows that he is not acquitted by that. He is not home free because he does not know there is anything wrong at the moment. He says the only evaluation that really counts is the Lord's--"The Lord is judging me." This is present tense; it is something that is going on all the time. In the privacy of his own heart and conscience he says that as he exposes himself to the Word of God and the Spirit of God speaks in his heart, he becomes aware of the Lord's evaluation.

The Motive That No One Knows

Then Paul extends that on to the great day coming when all will be made public. His advice to the congregation is, "Wait until then before you pronounce judgment on the ministers of Christ. Do not pronounce judgment before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness." That does not mean evil, necessarily. It means the motives that no one knows; even the man himself does not really know what is going on, or why he does things--"(The Lord) will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then every man will receive his commendation from God."

I often try to think of this. I live continually in the awareness that one of these days my whole life is going to be examined by my Lord. He is going to walk with me back through all the record of the years. There are some things that I would not want him to see, but I have already faced them so I am not afraid; he has already seen them. There are other things that I am anxious for him to see. I think he is going to praise me for them, but I may be wrong. He may come to them and instead of saying anything he may silently look at them. He does not condemn me, but he goes on, and I am disappointed. I think, "Oh! Lord, I thought I had it that time." Then he will come to some area that I think is unimportant and he will say, "Ah, that was the moment. You pleased me then. You were not looking for self-glory; you were not looking for a pat on the back; you did not want anything out of it for yourself. You did it for me and you did not feel very good about it afterward, but I did." "Then every man will receive his commendation from God." He does not condemn us; he commends us. His condemnation comes only in his silence about the wasted areas of our lives.

Now let us clear one thing up very plainly here. Paul is not saying that we are not to judge the actions of men when they do wrong. In the next chapter he scolds this church because they do not judge the actions of a man who has done something wrong in the church. So he is not saying that we are not to judge actions. What he says is, do not judge motives, do not assume that you know what has made somebody act the way they have. I find this is a common, constant temptation among us.

That brings us to verses 6 and 7 where the apostle sets forth the freedom that will be enjoyed by a minister when the congregation begins to think rightly about him as Paul has described:

I have applied all this to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brethren, that you may learn by us to live according to Scripture, that none of you may be puffed up in favor of one against another. For who sees anything different in you? What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? (vv. 6, 7)

A right attitude makes a difference as to what the congregation thinks and the way they treat the ministers in their midst. The first thing it will do is to eliminate rivalry among them. How many churches have been split right down the center by a rivalry developing between teachers and pastors? That is eliminated when the congregation refuses to be "puffed up in favor of one another," when they are bound by the word of Scripture how to think of men and they refuse to take sides and to choose favorites. If the congregation watches itself it can free the ministers in their midst so that there is no sense of competition and rivalry between them.

And then, second, it will have an effect upon the minister himself. It will destroy his tendency to personal conceit if he begins to think rightly about himself. Paul asks some searching questions here: "What have you that you did not receive, you people with gifts of teaching and preaching and prophesying? Where did you get those? You were not born with them. These are spiritual gifts imparted by the Holy Spirit. He could have given them to somebody else. He still could, perhaps; therefore, how foolish to boast because God has used you in a ministry of some sort. It is only the Lord himself who has done it. How foolish it is to make anything of that, to be proud over what God has given!"

I heard of a young preacher who preached a message to a congregation on a special occasion. God richly blessed the message and it hit with great impact. The young man enjoyed the obvious appearances of success, and afterward, going home with his wife, and evidently thinking over and enjoying the results of that powerful ministry in his own heart, he said to her, "I wonder how many great preachers there are in the world?" His wife replied, "One less than you think!"

What a foolish thing it is to view our gifts as though we were responsible for them. What a freedom can be found in a congregation concerning those who teach and preach among them if we will see them as people to whom God has given his gifts. If we take this view, the men and women themselves will refuse to take any credit for the ministry and for the gift that God has given them.

1 Corinthians 4:8-21

8. A Father in Action

In this section of 1 Corinthians the apostle is dealing with the problem of a complacent church, that is, a church filled with complacent Christians. This was also the problem of the church of Laodicea (Revelation 3), a church that was saying, "We are rich; we are filled; we have everything." But the Lord says, "You do not know what you are like. You are deceiving yourselves."

This is the ancient problem of spiritual lukewarmness, of being neither cold nor hot, but something in between, which is nauseating. I think the problem that most discourages people from turning to the gospel of Christ today is this very problem of half-warm Christians. They are not alive, alert, on fire for God, or ready to serve him, but they are not turned off either. They are in between, a kind of nauseating experience of spiritual life.

Paul now describes that condition and its cause in chapter 4:

Already you are filled! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you! (v. 8).

There are two marks of complacent Christians in this verse. The first one is that they have a sense of having arrived. You meet such people today, people who seem to feel they have it made; they have learned the whole truth; there is nothing you can tell them that they have not already learned; they think of themselves as rich.

Many things can give a Christian a sense of being rich. Sometimes it is pride in numbers or size. At Laodicea it was material possessions.

"We are increased with goods," they said. "We have a tremendous budget; we can do what we want; we do not need God anymore." Their pride in affluence gave them a sense of complacency so that the Lord had to say to them, "You have no idea what you are really like--you are poor and blind, pitiable and naked, and spiritually poverty-stricken." Affluence can do that to a church. It is always a problem.

Sometimes it is prominence that gives this sense of complacency. Peninsula Bible Church, where I have been a minister for many years, is known all over the world. We have a great reputation as an active church, a Bible-teaching church, and people in the congregation soon begin to think, "We have arrived; we have no further to go," and pride of complacency begins to appear.

At Corinth, however, the problem was none of these: at Corinth they were complacent over possessing all the gifts of the Spirit--they had them all. Can you imagine their advertisements in the "Corinthian Bugle"? "Come and Visit the Total Church--The Church That Has It All!"

We hear a great deal today about the gift of tongues. Corinth had tongues, and with it they had miracles and healings and prophesying plus many of what they regarded as lesser gifts--the gifts of helps and administrations, wisdom and knowledge, teaching, service, and giving. All the gifts were present, as the apostle Paul says in the very first chapter of this letter: "You are not lacking in any spiritual gift" (v. 7). I am sure their meetings were interesting, even exciting, but they were forgetting and already losing a sense of evangelism and of service. The church was in danger and Paul wrote to them to point this out. The first mark, then, of a complacent Christian is that he feels he has arrived.

The second mark, Paul says, is an "exclusive advance." "Without us," he says, "you have become kings!" They no longer needed Paul or any of the apostles, and there was no need for other Christians or any communication with the body of Christ around them because they were too far ahead of everybody else.

I think you will recognize this as a prominent tendency among many today. Christians who start out as alive and vital can become so in love with their own teaching that they begin to develop exclusive attitudes. They tell people they are the only "true" church. They have the only "apostolic" ministry, and there is no need of anyone else anymore. That is the danger of complacency, and as the apostle shows us here, it is always a sign of sinful human pride and a complacent spirit--and it is an offense to the Spirit of God.

A Father in Action

As victims of the world's illusions, these Corinthians loved to dream of getting some special ability that marked them out as different from others. They had developed a smugness and a sense of satisfaction. They were living in a dream world and acting as though the millennium had already arrived.

Paul brings them (and us) back to reality with a jolt, in verse S and following: "And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you!"

"I wish the millennium were here," he says. "We would love to enter into it with you, but it is clear it is not here yet. Would that it were." He continues in verses 9 through 13:

For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death; because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things.

What a stark contrast! "There is the real world," Paul says. "It is tough and ruthless. On the surface it can appear to be kind and responsive, but underneath the velvet glove is an iron fist that can smash and crush without compunction. You in your dream world are just kidding yourselves. Earth is a battleground and we apostles are fighting the battle. We are living in the real world, and it is not like yours at all." So Paul brings them back to reality.

Christians on Exhibit

Notice three things here that he teaches us about the apostles. First, "We apostles," he says, "are pattern Christians; in effect, God has put us on exhibit in order that we might demonstrate certain things. He has exhibited us last of all, like men sentenced to death…we have become a spectacle…" The word spectacle is the word from which we get our word theater. He is saying, "We have become the theater of the world, and when you look at us you will see what life is really like."

That is why the apostles are so important in the new Testament and to all the church ever since. They are "pattern" Christians. They are not, as we often imagine, super saints who live at a level that no one else can hope to attain. They were sent out to live, like our Lord, in the very teeth of the reality of life to show us how to handle it.

Notice that Paul calls the apostles, "men sentenced to death." Now men sentenced to death never deal with trivialities; they use their time to proper purpose. If you were sentenced to death you would not concern yourself with where your next ice cream cone was coming from. You would want to see that your relationships with others were right, and that your property was properly disposed of. You would be concerned with what was coming and what you could do about it, and what would happen after you were gone. Paul says that was the way the apostles lived--in the reality of life, not dealing with trivial things but using their time on the things that count.

I am sure he is thinking of the gladiatorial combats that were held in the great Coliseum when, as a final act, two gladiators, both of them condemned to death, would engage in mortal combat. They would stand before the great assemblage and salute the Emperor, crying, "Morituri te salutamus."("We who are about to die salute you.") Paul is thinking of that as he writes about himself, "We are set forth as men who have already died, in a sense, so we are not wasting our time; we are dealing with reality. We love not our life unto death; we want to make every moment count."

Notice that apostles, he says, are persecuted Christians (v. 10):

We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute.

By this he indicates that there is something about the gospel that will always make us unpopular. This is the problem, isn't it? Nobody likes to be unpopular. We all want to be accepted, but sooner or later we are going to be put in a spot where, if we are going to be true to what our faith says, to our Lord, to what we have learned in the Word of God, we are going to find people ridiculing us.

Sold Out to the World

Now nobody likes that, but it constitutes the great test of life: whether we are willing to bear reproach for Christ's sake. These Corinthians had sold out. They had so compromised with the world around that the world was not persecuting them anymore. The world did not laugh at them. They had adjusted their teaching so that worldly wisdom penetrated everything they said and did, and the world thought it was great. They had adjusted their actions so that nobody was offended by them, and they never had to tell anybody that something was wrong. As we will see in the succeeding passages, the Corinthians put up with anything in the church; they never told anybody they were doing wrong. So, Paul says, "The world calls us fools and treats us with dishonor, but you, you are treated as wise and as understanding; as strong, and we are weak."

A Christian lawyer friend who lives and works right in the midst of the world and who yet has a very deep commitment to the things of God and of Christ was discussing with me some of the ways that people--especially Christians who long for the favor of the world--look at other Christians. He said to me, "I get so tired of being treated like the village idiot every time I try to take the Bible seriously." Now that is the treatment you will get, but you have to be ready to be the village idiot and not mind it at all, because it is the other group that is wrong.

This is what lies behind many of the issues being debated in the church in our day, this unwillingness to be laughed at by the world. Behind the inerrancy issue that is raking the Church, behind the evangelical feminist issue, behind the homosexual issue and the issue of women elders, is this love of the world's approval, this desire to be like others, this unwillingness to bear reproach for the name of Christ. But Jesus himself told us that it would be there: "in the world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world" (John 16:33).

The third thing the apostle points out is that apostles are "peculiar" Christians--they do not act normally. Read this again:

To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are ill-clad and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become, and are now, as the refuse of the world (trash, rubbish) the offscouring (the scrapings of the plates after a meal, the garbage) of all things.

That does not sound like us, does it? I was thinking of this verse the other day while lying in my new hot tub. The temperature of the water was 103 degrees and the jet was massaging my body and I was thinking of Paul who was hungry, thirsty, ill-clad, buffeted, and homeless. Now my hot tub was a gift from some very loving and generous friends and I am enjoying it, but lying in it I was thinking, "Is the hot tub life style wrong?"

That is a question we are all going to have to face one of these days, is it not? We have so much: is it wrong to have so much when the rest of the world has so little? Some Christian periodicals today are telling us, "Yes, it is wrong. We have no right to this kind of affluence." They tell us that Christians ought to take a vow of poverty, in effect, and give away their riches and live at the lowest possible level of existence. And I must confess there are times when I wonder if they are right.

I agree that we need to rethink this issue and I think it will be consistently faced by the church in the days to come; it has to be faced. And yet I am not at all sure they are right. C. S. Lewis said that the devil always sends error into the world in pairs which are opposites. His strategy is that you will get all concerned about one and back right off into the other. That is the danger: that we will get so guilty over our affluence that we will back off into a kind of enforced poverty which is just as extreme and just as dangerous. But having said that, it still is true that we have to be very careful in this, as the Scripture warns us.

Despite this passage there are places where Paul says that at times he abounded. He had to learn how to handle it. He writes to Timothy and says, "God gives us richly all things to enjoy," and therefore to enjoy them is not wrong. So we must preserve a careful balance. I know that I must hold things loosely; I must not covet them or crave them if I do not have them. I must be willing to lose them without any complaint or sense of deep loss. They are just things; that is all.

But notice, the important thing here is not how we react to affluence: the important thing the apostle is underlining in this passage is how we respond to mistreatment. That is the indication of a true Christian life style. "When we are reviled, we bless," he says. "When we are persecuted, we endure. When we are slandered (lied about), we try to conciliate." That is the key; that is the heart of the issue. When you are treated like rubbish and garbage, do you try to get even? Do you try to reply in kind: "I'll give as good as I get; I'll let him know how it feels"? Or do you, as the apostle learned to do, try to work it out and try to heal the hurt? That is authentic Christianity; that is a true Christian life style.

Admonished As Children

So Paul has examined this complacent spirit here and shown us the cause. Now, as he calls us back to the real world, he shows us the cure.

I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you, then, he imitators 0f me. Therefore I sent to you Timothy, my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach them everywhere in every church. ("You are getting no special treatment here. I am not just zeroing in on you--this is the way I talk to all the churches.") Some are arrogant, as though I were not coming to you. But I will come to you soon, if the Lord wills, and I will find out not the talk of these arrogant people but their power. For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power. What do you wish? Shall I come to you with a rod, or with love in a spirit of gentleness? (vv. 14-21)

At a Pastors' Conference some time ago we were examining the principles by which you work out problems of personal relationships-how to handle people who are near you, especially within a family circle. Four principles emerged from various Scriptures. They are to be in evidence if you are approaching these sticky, difficult personal relationship problems as a Christian.

Now when I was looking through this passage in 1 Corinthians, I was struck by the fact that all four of those principles are present here. The key is in these words in verse 14, "I admonish you as my beloved children." He says, "I am your father and you do not have many fathers. I led you to Christ; you came to new life with me as your teacher. I did not give you the life (it came from God), but I led you to it." (Neither do a mother and father give life to their children; they are merely the channel through which it comes.) "But I am your father," he said. "You may have ten thousand instructors and teachers, but you will never have another father in Christ. That is my relationship to you, and that is why I talk to you the way I do. I am not trying to shame you; I am not trying to make you cringe and, feel awful and crawl away; I am simply trying to bring you to reality, and as a father to heal the thing that is destroying and damaging you and your life."

The first principle to come out at the conference mentioned above was that in dealing with another person you should try to convey some sense of confidence and love first. Never wipe somebody out: 'If you are going to act this way I don't want anything to do with you again. Get out of my sight." Paul never does that. Rather, he says, "You are my beloved children." At the point of sharpest censure you find this term of deepest endearment. Isn't that amazing?

The second principle was: present a model. Notice how Paul does that here: "Be imitators of me. I sent Timothy to you to remind you of my ways in Christ. I do not want you to follow what I say; I want you to follow what I do."

Now that statement troubles some of us. Many people think Paul is conceited when he says that. But he is not. He is recognizing the universal psychological principle that people will always follow what you do, not what you say. You can talk your head off to people but if your life does not reflect what you say, they will not follow you; they will pay no attention to it, because coming through all the time is that nonverbal communication that is saying, "Yes, I am saying all this to you, but it is not really very important because I do not bother to do it myself." You have no right to talk if you do not do what you say. Many parents have kidded themselves into thinking they were teaching their children what was right when they told them what to do, but never did it themselves. The child picked up all the vibes that were coming through and did just what the parents did. So the second principle is: present a model.

The third principle was to preserve liberty. That is, do not box someone in so they have no choice in the matter. Allow them to have a choice as to what they do or do not do. Notice how Paul does that here. "I admonish you," he says. "I do not command you. I admonish you; I urge you, but the choice is yours. What do you want? Shall I come to you with a rod or with love in a spirit of gentleness? You have the liberty to choose." What an important principle that is. Everybody resists being compelled to do things, but Paul does not threaten sanctions or punishment. He simply says, "You have the choice to make and it is up to you to choose."

And then the last principle was: confront realistically. That is, strip off all the illusions and bring things down to the way they are. That is what Paul says, "When I come I will find out not the talk of these arrogant people but their power. For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk but in power." What is the fruit of your life? Jesus said, "By their fruits you will know them." Do not listen to their words. Many a person has been deceived by the smooth talk of someone who leads him along with deceptive words that sound wonderful. But the thing to do is to ask, "What has happened as a result of all these good words?" Talk is cheap, but change requires power.

If we are unwilling to confront another with the reality of a situation we simply perpetuate his own self-illusions; he goes on thinking everything is fine when it is not. Sooner or later when the collapse comes be is shocked, startled, and shattered by the revelation of what has been going on all the time. This is why everywhere in the Word we are encouraged to admonish one another in love, to reprove and rebuke one another with all faithfulness in love. What a helpful ministry that is. Paul says, "When I come, that is what I am going to do with you."

This is the way he deals with the problem of complacency. The hunger of his heart is that these Christians will be really effective for Christ.

Chapters 5 and 6 introduce a new section of the letter to us. Prior to this the apostle has been dealing with pride and its consequences in the Corinthian assembly. Now he turns to a related theme, but one that is somewhat different: lust and its problems.

One of the growing problems the church is facing today is what to do about the frightening increase in sexual immorality among Christians. We hear of Christian leaders who have forsaken their wives, run off with a secretary, fallen into homosexuality, or are facing some kind of a moral crisis in their churches. Many are properly concerned about this and wondering why it should be.

In 1 Corinthians 5, we find the apostle Paul dealing with that very problem. These great Greek cities such as Corinth and others were given over to the casual acceptance of sex outside of the marriage relationship. As you know, there was in Corinth a temple devoted to the worship of sex, the temple of Aphrodite; therefore, it was a common thing for Christians to be tempted in this area. Many of them had indulged themselves in constant sexual liaisons before they became Christians and it was difficult for them to break these habits. If we think we have difficulty in these areas today, we are no different at all than these Corinthians.

The Christians in Corinth also were expected to meet the same demands for chastity and purity that we are called upon in the Scriptures to meet today. It was more difficult for them in some ways than it is for us, and yet the demands were the same. God has not changed; the world has not changed; and as we read this passage we can see that we are dealing with a very present and current problem. In the opening words of chapter 5 the apostle describes the specific nature of this problem in Corinth:

It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans, for a man is living with his father's wife (v. 1).

This is what we would call "incest" today, and incest is increasing in frequency in our country to a frightening degree.

Beyond Shock

The woman mentioned in this letter, of course, was not the man's mother but his stepmother, his father's wife, and this was, therefore, a clear-cut case of adultery. But the additional element of the marriage relationship turned it into something even worse, incest. Paul is disturbed by this--I would not say he was shocked because I think at this stage of his career he was probably beyond shock. He had run into everything. When he says, "It is actually reported," he is not reflecting shock. It should more accurately be translated, "it is commonly reported among you"; this matter was notorious in Corinth.

As he points out, this was something that even that pagan environment would not look upon lightly. It is rather interesting that even in our own day the most degrading epithet anyone can apply to another is to suggest that he is sleeping with his own mother.

But the only ones in Corinth who were not shocked by this were the Christians in the church, and this is what bothers Paul the most. They were taking it lightly; they were even boasting in their attitude toward this and how they were handling this problem.

In verses 2 through 5 Paul describes what they were doing and what they should have been doing about this matter:

And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body I am present in spirit, and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment in the name of the Lord Jesus on the man who has done such a thing. When you are assembled, and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.

They were boasting in their tolerance of this condition, as many people do today. Many have a mistaken notion that rather than condemning such immorality, the church ought to express understanding of the pressures and the difficulties of living in our world. They feel we ought to say nothing about this; let the individual work it out on his own. This is what was happening in Corinth. They thought they were showing love and understanding by their casual attitude toward this sin.

I have met church boards like this. In one church where I was involved briefly, the young pastor had been caught up in immorality. The board of the church was very casual about it. I reminded them of this very passage, and the chairman of the board said to me, "Well, he's a young man and, after all, boys will be boys." That reflected something of the attitude here at Corinth.

Now I know that this attitude of tolerant acceptance is often a reaction to another wrong approach, which is self-righteous condemnation. Such a censorious reaction of horror, usually because of offended pride, cuts the individual off and has nothing to do with him anymore. That is wrong, too, and there is nothing of that in what Paul expects of this church in Corinth. I have met people who have been deeply hurt and terribly injured by the harsh, critical judgment of boards and leaders who have thrown them out without trying to understand the pressures they were facing. One is the antithesis of the other.

Paul now shows us what the true attitude of a church ought to be when immorality rears its head: it ought to be grief. "Ought you not rather to mourn?" he asks. There ought to be shock and hurt not only for the persons involved in this but also for the church and for the Lord himself that the cause of Christ is damaged in the eyes of the community by these deeds.

The reason this was so hurtful in Corinth was that the church was permitting it to happen. They were, therefore, participators in this evil thing. The church ought to mourn that such a thing can happen in its midst and that there is not more help and protection afforded for it. So Paul says there ought to have been sorrowful prayer about this.

This is surely what he means when he writes to the Galatians, referring to an individual involved in a case like this: "If a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted" (Galatians 6:1). That is facing the fact that you could be involved in something like this too. So the proper attitude in handling a situation like this is never one of, "Well, we would never do a thing like that," but rather one of, "Yes, we understand the pressures; we know what you have been up against. We are tempted ourselves; we could fall under the right circumstances. We do not trust ourselves any more than we trust the flesh in you, but nevertheless we cannot permit this to go on this way." There must be a right attitude.

A Right Basis for Discipline

There are four clear, practical steps to be taken when immorality is present. The first one is that there must be a right attitude. We must mourn and feel grief, instead of harsh, critical judgment or tolerant, casual love. Second, there must be a right basis for discipline. Notice what the apostle does not say. He does not say to these elders, "Now you elders get together and decide among yourselves what you ought to do about this. Whatever you feel is right, you carry it out. If you decide that he ought to be excommunicated, if you decide he ought to be fined a certain amount, well, that's fine. Whatever you decide to do is all right." No, it is never left up to individual judgment as to what to do. What Paul clearly indicates is that they have already been told what to do; they should just do it. He speaks "in the name of the Lord Jesus…by the power of our Lord Jesus…by my spirit present with you." In other words, apostolic and divine authority has already spoken in these areas; therefore, follow it through.

In Matthew 18 the Lord Jesus tells us what to do in cases like this. "If your brother sins against you," he says, "go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone." Do not spread it around; do not ask for prayer about it; do not talk about it; go to the one who is doing the wrong.

This wrong, by the way, is not a matter of personal injury, something that has offended you, or some way the person has acted that you think is inappropriate. Here Jesus is talking about things that the Word of God has already judged. You are to "go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone." If he hears you, "you have gained your brother." That is enough; it does not need to go any further; no one else needs to know about it. But if he does not hear you, Jesus says, take one or two others and go and tell him his fault again and discuss it among yourselves. (You need two or three to avoid what often develops when two people argue. One says, "I already said to you this and this." The other fellow says, "No, you did not say that at all, you said this and this.") But two or three are there as witnesses that what was said was exactly what was really said. This is an attempt to help a person see what he is doing and if he listens, that is the end of it.

Hundreds of cases of incipient immorality have been nipped in the bud, as it were, by Christians who faithfully go to somebody and tell him that what he is doing is wrong. That is the healthiest thing a church can do and Christians can do with one another. It saves scores of cases like this that would come to ultimate heartbreak if they were allowed to proceed.

But the Lord goes on. "If he refuses to listen to them (the small group that has come to him), then tell it to the church." Then it must become public; the individuals involved must sense the censure of the church, the feeling that this is not acceptable behavior to other Christians.

Now again, this is not to be done in a spirit of self-righteous complacency or critical judgment. It is to be done by lovingly stating that this is wrong; it is unacceptable behavior. It cannot be allowed to continue even though you understand the pressures and the problems involved in it. Therefore, it is to be told to the whole church. Everyone in the church, then, becomes responsible to try to help that individual to recover from this terrible situation.

Jesus then gives the final step: if he will not hear the church then "Change your attitude toward him" the Lord is saying, "let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector, as a sinner." In other words, let him be unto you as though he is not a Christian at all. He has declared himself not to be a Christian by his actions, even though he claims yet to be a Christian by his words. You are to treat him as one who is not yet a Christian, but that does not mean with scorn, or with judgment, or with any kind of retribution. Recognize that he has deceived himself, and he is not really born again. Understand that he does not yet know the basis for purity and needs to be born again.

This is what Matthew 18 is saying, and clearly it is a parallel passage to what we have here. Paul knows by now that this is a well-known matter. It has come now to the place where it ought to be dealt with by the church. Since the church has been involved in this whole process of accepting and tolerating this situation, it has now come to the final step Jesus has set forth. That is what Paul means when he says there is to be a proper basis for action. It is on the basis of what the Lord has said and not what the individuals themselves may feel.

I know many people have tried to apply Jesus' words, "Judge not that you he not judged" (Matthew 7:1) to a situation like this. But our Lord is clearly talking there about individual judgment of another on the basis of what offends you, whereas here he is talking about something he has already judged. The church is responsible to carry out that judgment, as Paul will make crystal clear throughout this passage.

Out into Satan's Dominion

So step number three in this passage is: there must be a right action. There must be a right attitude; there must be a basis for discipline; and there must be a right action taken. Here it is:

When you are assembled, and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus (vv. 4,5).

Three times in this passage the apostle says very clearly what action is to be taken. You have in verse 2, "Let him who has done this be removed from among you"; you have in verse 13 (the last verse of the chapter), "Drive out the wicked person from among you." Those two commands, which sound rather harsh and almost seem to describe a kind of physical exclusion, are softened and corrected and amplified by this central statement here in verse 5, "deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh." Now that helps us to understand what this action is to be, because, as we read in Matthew 18 and also here, the Scripture always regards the world as Satan's dominion.

There are two kingdoms at work in life: the kingdom of Satan and kingdom of God. They intermingle; they are working all the time, everywhere, and though you cannot separate them by sharp lines of demarcation from the standpoint of geography or personality, nevertheless they are sharply separated in their philosophy. What Paul is saying here is that the church is to put the man back, in its thinking, into the realm of Satan's control. He has never really left it; his persistence in evil has demonstrated that he has never really left Satan's world. Therefore, the church is to regard him as back under that control, and publicly the church is to recognize that he is not a Christian. He is, as Jesus says, like a Gentile, a tax collector, a sinner, unregenerate, and therefore he is not to be treated any longer as though he were a Christian.

Now I realize that there is always great pressure not to take a public action like this. People are offended by being made a public example. When our church has had to do this on several occasions we have been actually threatened with lawsuits if we took a public stand in this direction. This is why the apostle adds the words, "(take this action) with the power of our Lord Jesus!" You are not taking it as a group of people, an organization voting on one of its disobedient members. You are taking it as the church of the living God, among whom the Lord Jesus is present as he said he would be, with power to control the results and to guard and protect if you will be obedient to him. Therefore, the church is to act, regardless of what the threat may be, because the church acts by the power of the Lord Jesus.

This action does not mean physical ejection. The individual may continue to attend but he is to be treated and regarded in a different light. Usually, however, this almost invariably means that the individual, feeling the censure of the church, withdraws himself. If so, then he is allowed to go. There is no punishment ever assessed; there is no ceremony of excommunication to be carried out. That kind of a thing represents a misunderstanding of this passage.

Thus we have three of the steps: a right attitude; a right basis for action; and a right action to be taken. There is one more, and Paul indicates it in verse 5: it should be for a right purpose, "…that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus."

Why does the church take this action? Well, not just to get rid of a troublemaker or merely to show itself clean in this regard, but rather to reach the individuals involved and so deal with them that eventually they will see their wrongdoing and repent. All judgment ends at repentance; all discipline ceases when repentance occurs. The hope here is that when you put someone back into the world, as it were, under Satan's control, that he will learn what worldlings will learn if they live long enough: the philosophies they are following are delusive, empty, and vain, and when they find themselves drained, jaded, and empty of heart, they will turn back to the living Lord and their spirits will be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. When he comes or when they meet him in death, their spirits will be saved even though their lives have been wasted. This is the hope and that is the purpose for church discipline.

Reasons for Action

Now the apostle follows with an explanation for the severity of this kind of action. When a church is involved in this sort of thing many people raise the question of why the church should act so severely. Here Paul gives three excellent reasons why the church must take action:

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven ferments the whole lump of dough? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be fresh dough, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth (vv. 6-8).

The imagery is clearly borrowed from the Feast of the Passover when the Jews, remembering their deliverance from Egypt, would take the blood of a lamb and sprinkle it over their doorposts so the angel of death would "pass over." Then they would gather and eat the meat of the lamb that had been roasted. Before this they would go through the house with a candle and search out all the leaven that was in the house, for the Lord had said they must never eat the feast with leaven.

Leaven is yeast, and even today Jews will go through their houses and look for any form of leavened bread that may be present before they celebrate the Passover. Leaven is consistently used throughout the Scriptures as a symbol of evil. Paul says the problem is that "a little leaven leavens the whole lump." Therefore, the first reason action must be taken is to arrest the tendency to spread the infection throughout a whole congregation.

I have mentioned that we have had to take action like this on two or three occasions. Though it was painful and hurtful and there was great grief involved in it, the effect was an almost instantaneous cessation of the spread of evil throughout the congregation. People think twice before they begin to get involved in extramarital affairs or consider divorce or fall into homosexuality or other sexual sins. Sexual sins, of course, are not the only ones that call for judgment though they are probably the most common form today. This is the first reason the church must act, lest the infection begin to spread and "the little leaven leavens the whole lump."

The second reason is that judgment makes possible the demonstration of reality. As Paul says here, "Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are." The community was getting a wrong idea of the church. It did not see them as having solved the problem of how to handle sexual drives. It saw them as being as much a part of the problem as they themselves were and yet, as Paul will say in the next chapter, Christ had cleansed them, he had changed them: "And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ." But that is not evident while this tolerance of evil is going on. The world has no idea that there is any way to escape the power of sexual lust. "Therefore," he says, "the church must judge this kind of thing that it might be evident what you really are--that you have been given power to handle these drives and to be pure and chaste in the midst of immorality. For that is what you really are."

The third reason is that judgment permits the celebration of Christian deliverance and liberty. "Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth." "Celebrate!" he says. That is possible in a church when it begins to live on this basis in the eyes of the community and before the Lord. An element of joy comes into their midst, and they begin to celebrate that freedom.

I have noticed that congregations that refuse to act along these lines are usually grim. Their worship is dull and there is little joy. What brings joy into a congregation is not the sense of having achieved some degree of morality on its own, but of having been washed, cleansed, freed by the grace of God. All the ugliness of the past is washed away; it disappears from among you and that allows for a free spirit of celebration and of joy.

Now the concluding section of chapter 5 describes the limits of church discipline:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral men; not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But rather I wrote to you not to associate with any one who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber--not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside. Drive out the wicked person from among you (vv. 9-13).

In verse 9 Paul refers to a previous letter of his that is lost to us. No one knows what it said other than this reference to it. Yet in it Paul had evidently said something about not associating with immoral people and the Corinthians had taken it to mean (as many Christians seem to feel today) that they were not to have anything to do with worldlings who lived on a lower level of morality.

I am amazed at how the very attitude which Paul was attempting to correct here in this letter has pervaded the evangelical world. I meet people who refuse to have anyone come into their homes who is not a Christian. They want nothing to do with anyone who lives in a way offensive to the Lord. In my early pastorate I remember going to a couple and asking them to open their home for a Bible class. The lady looked horrified and said, "Oh! I could never do that." I asked, "Why not?" "Why," she said, "people who smoke would come in. My home is dedicated to God and I am not going to have any smoking going on there."

Well, that is a misunderstanding of the very thing Paul is talking about. We must not avoid the world-we were sent into it. The Lord Jesus said to his disciples, "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves." That is where we belong. Their habits may be offensive to us, but that is understandable. We do not have to pronounce judgment on them; God will do that, Paul says here. We are to love them and understand that they do not have any basis of knowledge so as to change. We are not to demand it of them before we begin to show friendship and love and reach out to them to help them to see their need, to see the One who can answer the hunger of their hearts. No, we are not to judge the world, but we are to judge the church. Paul says, and we are to do it on a clear-cut basis.

By the way, in referring to the world here, Paul mentions three characteristic sins that are very revealing:

…not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers (that is really one phrase taken together, the greedy and grasping), or idolaters.

There you have the world characterized for you: the sins of the body (immorality), the sins of the mind or heart (greedy and grasping attitudes), and the sins of the spirit (idolatry, another god). The offense against yourself, the offense against your neighbor, and the offense against God himself--those are the characteristics of the world.

What we will offer them is the gospel, not condemnation but the good news. But we are to judge the church for specific wrongdoings. Notice how Paul lists them. It is not because they are hard to live with or they are impatient people or they are obnoxious Christians--you are not to judge them on that basis. But if they are immoral, or greedy, or idolaters, or revilers (constant critics, running everybody down), or drunkards, or robbers, then they are to be judged by the action of the church in the way he has indicated, even to the point of social pressures. "Do not even eat with them," he says. If they will not listen, then withdraw from them. It comes at last to ultimate exclusion, as he has indicated in this passage.

What health would return to the world and to the church if the church would behave this way! The reason the world is going downhill rapidly is because the church does not maintain the standards God has given us here. The purpose of a passage like this is to call us back in all honesty to what God has given us, so that we recognize the unique position the church holds in the world today when it begins to walk in the beauty of holiness and enjoy the privileges God has given to us. When we live in victory over the forces that destroy others, then people see that there is meaning and purpose and reason for the salvation we profess to have.

1 Corinthians 5:1-13

9. Scandal in the Church

In the opening words of chapter 5 the apostle describes the specific nature of this problem in Corinth:

It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and of a kind that is not found even among pagans, for a man is living with his father's wife (v. 1).

This is what we would call "incest" today, and incest is increasing in frequency in our country to a frightening degree.

Beyond Shock

The woman mentioned in this letter, of course, was not the man's mother but his stepmother, his father's wife, and this was, therefore, a clear-cut case of adultery. But the additional element of the marriage relationship turned it into something even worse, incest. Paul is disturbed by this-I would not say he was shocked because I think at this stage of his career he was probably beyond shock. He had run into everything. When he says, "it is actually reported," he is not reflecting shock. It should more accurately be translated, "it is commonly reported among you"; this matter was notorious in Corinth.

In verses 2 through 5 Paul describes what they were doing and what they should have been doing about this matter:

This is surely what he means when he writes to the Galatians, referring to an individual involved in a case like this: "If a man is overtaken in any trespass, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Look to yourself, lest you too be tempted" (Gal. 6:1). That is facing the fact that you could be involved in something like this too. So the proper attitude in handling a situation like this is never one of, "Well, we would never do a thing like that," but rather one of, "Yes, we understand the pressures; we know what you have been up against. We are tempted ourselves; we could fall under the right circumstances. We do not trust ourselves any more than we trust the flesh in you, but nevertheless we cannot permit this to go on this way." There must be a right attitude.

A Right Basis for Discipline

There are four clear, practical steps to be taken when immorality is present. The first one is that there must be a right attitude. We must mourn and feel grief, instead of harsh, critical judgment or tolerant, casual love. Second, there must be a right basis for discipline. Notice what the apostle does not say. He does not say to these elders, "Now you elders get together and decide among yourselves what you ought to do about this. Whatever you feel is right, you carry it out. If you decide that he ought to be excommunicated, if you decide he ought to be fined a certain amount, well, that's fine. Whatever you decide to do is all right." No, it is never left up to individual judgment as to what to do. What Paul clearly indicates is that they have already been told what to do; they should just do it. He speaks "in the name of the Lord Jesus . . . by the power of our Lord Jesus . . . by my spirit present with you." In other words, apostolic and divine authority has already spoken in these areas; therefore, follow it through.

This wrong, by the way, is not a matter of personal injury, something that has offended you, or some way the person has acted that you think is inappropriate. Here Jesus is talking about things that the Word of Cod has already judged. You are to "go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone." If he hears you, "you have gained your brother." That is enough; it does not need to go any further; no one else needs to know about it. But if he does not hear you, Jesus says, take one or two others and go and tell him his fault again and discuss it among yourselves. (You need two or three to avoid what often develops when two people argue. One says, "I already said to you this and this." The other fellow says, "No, you did not say that at all, you said this and this.") But two or three are there as witnesses that what was said was exactly what was really said. This is an attempt to help a person see what he is doing and if he listens, that is the end of it.

I know many people have tried to apply Jesus' words, "Judge not that you be not judged" (Matt. 7:1) to a situation like this. But our Lord is clearly talking there about individual judgment of another on the basis of what offends you, whereas here he is talking about something he has already judged. The church is responsible to carry out that judgment, as Paul will make crystal clear throughout this passage.

Out into Satan Dominion

So step number three in this passage is: there must be a right action. There must be a right attitude; there must be a basis for discipline; and there must be a right action taken. Here it is:

Now I realize that there is always great pressure not to take a public action like this. People are offended by being made a public example. When our church has had to do this on several occasions we have been actually threatened with lawsuits if we took a public stand in this direction. This is why the apostle adds the words, "(take this action) with the power of our Lord Jesus!" You are not taking it as a group of people, an organization voting on one of its disobedient members. You are taking it as the church of the living Cod, among whom the Lord Jesus is present as he said he would be, with power to control the results and to guard and protect if you will be obedient to him. Therefore, the church is to act, regardless of what the threat may be, because the church acts by the power of the Lord Jesus.

Thus we have three of the steps: a right attitude; a right basis for action; and a right action to be taken. There is one more, and Paul indicates it in verse 5: it should be for a right purpose, ". . . that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus."

Reasons for Action

Now the apostle follows with an explanation for the severity of this kind of action. 'When a church is involved in this sort of thing many people raise the question of why the church should act so severely. Here Paul gives three excellent reasons why the church must take action:

The second reason is that judgment makes possible the demonstration of reality. As Paul says here, "Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are. "The community was getting a wrong idea of the church. It did not see them as having solved the problem of how to handle sexual drives. It saw them as being as much a part of the problem as they themselves were and yet, as Paul will say in the next chapter, Christ had cleansed them, he had changed them: "And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ," But that is not evident while this tolerance of evil is going on. The world has no idea that there is any way to escape the power of sexual lust. "Therefore," he says, "the church must judge this kind of thing that it might be evident what you really are-that you have been given power to handle these drives and to be pure and chaste in the midst of immorality. For that is what you really are."

Now the concluding section of chapter 5 describes the limits of church discipline:

I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with immoral men; not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers, or idolater; since then you would need to go out of the world. But rather I wrote to you not to associate with any one who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or robber--not even to eat with such a one. For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? Cod judges those outside. Drive out the wicked person from among you (vv. 9-13).

By the way, in referring to the world here, Paul mentions three characteristic sins that are very revealing:

…not at all meaning the immoral of this world, or the greedy and robbers (that is really one phrase taken together, the greedy and grasping), or idolaters.

'What we will offer them is the gospel, not condemnation but the good news. But we are to judge the church for specific wrongdoings. Notice how Paul lists them. It is not because they are hard to live with or they are impatient people or they are obnoxious Christians--you are not to judge them on that basis. But if they are immoral, or greedy, or idolaters, or revilers (constant critics, running everybody down), or drunkards, or robbers, then they are to be judged by the action of the church in the way he has indicated, even to the point of social pressures. "Do not even cat with them," he says. If they will not listen, then withdraw from them. It comes at last to ultimate exclusion, as he has indicated in this passage.

I Corinthians 6:1-20

10. Two Kinds of Lust

The apostle Paul deals with the problem of lawsuits among brethren in the passage we come to now. Recently two Christian organizations involved in smuggling Bibles behind the Iron Curtain were suing each other before the courts in libel actions for damages. I wondered if they had spent any time reading the Bibles they smuggle, for in this passage Paul clearly says that lawsuits between believers are definitely wrong.

The apostle seems to change his subject in this section. In chapter 5, he was talking about lust among Christians at Corinth. In the closing part of chapter 6 he returns to that subject and deals with prostitution in Corinth. But in between, the first eleven verses of chapter 6 are dealing with lawsuits among brethren.

We might well ask, "What has that got to do with lust?" The answer is that the greed which prompts lawsuits is a form of lust. Lawsuits usually arise out of greed, or covetousness. A lawsuit is an attempt to force another person to yield to you what you regard as your right. The dictionary defines lust as "obsessive craving or desire," so it is apparent that someone who is greedy, especially regarding material matters, is guilty of a form of lust, of making things more important than people.

These first eleven verses divide naturally into three subdivisions. The first thing the apostle says is that lawsuits among brethren are stupid, foolish. Second, he says, lawsuits are shameful. Finally, Paul says, they even raise suspicions as to the spiritual state of the ones involved.

Notice how he brings in this subject:

When one of you has a grievance against a brother, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to he judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, matters pertaining to this life! (vv. 1-3)

The apostle does not use the word stupid here, but his implication is that these people are very foolish. They were obviously engaging in lawsuits, dragging each other before the Roman courts, washing all their dirty linen in public by going to secular courts to settle their problems. This, the apostle implies, is foolish, for two reasons.

First, it is an audacious act of boldness. "Dare any one of you, having a grievance against his brother, take it to a law court to settle?" This is an outrageous act, a bold, daring thing to do. Paul implies that one who does such a thing has reached the point of not caring what anyone thinks or feels; he is acting regardless of the injuries that may be done to others.

Paul then suggests in the two questions he asks that anybody who does such a thing is really an ignorant person: "Do you not know that the church is going to judge the world, and do not you know that the church is going to judge angels?"

In this chapter there are six occasions where the apostle asks the question, "Do you not know?" These questions imply a certain degree of knowledge that the Corinthians ought to have had. "Do you not know," he says, "that the saints will judge the world?" Surely he is referring to those passages, both in the gospels and in the epistles, where we are clearly told that when the Lord returns the saints are going to share the throne of judgment with him. We are to rule with Christ; we will, therefore, enter into judgment with him.

Learning How to judge

Exactly how we will do this we are never told. Whether we are to be assigned a literal throne to sit on or whether the throne is only a symbol is not made clear. What is clear is that we will enter into the mind and heart of God as he examines the thoughts and innermost desires of men. In chapter 4 Paul said that we are not to judge before the Lord comes who will examine the motives, the hidden things of the heart. But now we are learning how to do that, and that is the point Paul is raising here.

He does not mean to put down the systems of justice that were practiced in that day or any day. Paul admired and honored Roman law-he himself called upon it for defense on occasion--but he is saying that human law by its very nature has to deal with relatively trivial and superficial things. It deals with actions, not with urges and deep, hidden desires and motives. The law specifically prohibits the jury or the judges or the defense attorneys or anyone from probing too deeply into motives. Intent has to be established, but they cannot presume to judge why people act the way they do. The law is restricted to judging actions as to whether they are injurious to others or not. Therefore, human law operates at a rather shallow level of judgment.

Paul is saying, "if you are learning during the course of your life how to go deeper than actions, how to understand why individuals act the way they do, and what is wrong and right about feelings and desires, then surely you ought to be competent to judge these simple cases among yourselves that deal with actions."

Then the apostle goes even further and asks, "Do you not know that we are to judge angels?" Think of that! We do not know much about angels. They are beings of a higher order than we are. They are not only different from us in culture, they are different in their very nature, and yet the amazing statement of Scripture is that God is preparing a people who will be so capable of delving into the motives of all beings that some day they will participate with him in judging the angels that have fallen.

There are two references in the New Testament to the judgment of angels. We are reminded in 2 Peter that, "God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgment" (2:4). And in the little book of Jude we are also told of "…the angels that did not keep their own position…have been kept by him in eternal chains…until the judgment of the great day" (Jude 6). Therefore it is the duty of all believers to learn how to judge-that is one of the major reasons we are here on earth.

You can see Paul's argument then: "Is it not rather ridiculous that you people who are going to have to deal in such difficult matters as the judgment of the world and of angels cannot even settle these little squabbles among yourselves?" It is almost as if a mathematician who works with great computers were to call in a ninth-grader and ask him for help to balance his checkbook. Paul's argument is that it is stupid to have the world judge between brothers.

I do not think he means that Christians are never to go to law; sometimes that is impossible to avoid. Paul is not saying that it is wrong for Christians to settle claims with non-Christians before courts of law. It is between believers that it is wrong to go to law. Paul himself on one occasion stood on his rights as a Roman citizen and appealed to the court of Caesar for a final judgment.

Now Paul goes on to say further that lawsuits between brothers are shameful:

If then you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who are least esteemed by the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no man among you wise enough to decide between members of the brotherhood, but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? To have lawsuits at all with one another is defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud, and that even your own brethren (vv. 4-8).

You can almost hear Paul's shocked tone of voice; he cannot believe that these Corinthians will actually forsake the cause of Christ to this degree.

Paul points out four things here. The first is that lawsuits are shameful because they stoop to a lower level of judgment. What Paul means by "those who are least esteemed by the church" is the secular judges who are presiding over the courts of law in the world. He does not mean to dishonor them, as I have already said. He recognizes the limits of human law, but he is saying that a secular judge who does not understand the relationship of one Christian to another, who has no concept of the fatherhood of God and the family life of believers, who does not understand that we are members one of another, and who does not understand our relationship to Christ, is, therefore, not to be highly esteemed as a judge of matters concerning believers.

An Ignored Alternative

Second, he says these judgments and lawsuits between believers ignore a possible alternative that could be adopted. Suppose you have an agreement with a brother in Christ and he ends up owing you money. He has the money but he chooses to use it for other reasons. The world would say, "Take him to court; that is what the courts are for; you can get your rights that way."

But that is the very thing the apostle says is not right for Christians. In fact, he says, when you do this you are passing by an alternative, and he suggests it here: "Can it be there is no man among you wise enough to decide between members of the brotherhood? Why do you not select somebody in the congregation who understands the whole matter of relationships among Christians and ask him, or perhaps a group of people, to decide for you?"

I am amazed at how little this is practiced today. I have been asked to serve in this capacity a couple of times, but it is very rare. Yet I think it ought to be more common; elders ought to expect to be asked to serve in this capacity. Disagreements among Christians will come, and they do need to be adjudicated. The apostle's point is that you have people available far more competent to settle these than any secular law or court. Therefore, he suggests, why not do that?

The third thing Paul has to say about this (v. 7) is "To have lawsuits at all with one another is defeat for you." No matter who wins the lawsuit the gospel is still going to suffer. In the case of these two Christian organizations I mentioned, it really does not make any difference which one wins. The cause of Christ has already been degraded in the eyes of the watching world; no matter who wins the case there are people who have been turned off already by the fact that believers are fighting each other in this open, aggressive way.

What a lawsuit says to the watching world is, "Christians are no better than you are; they, too, have to have a judge settle matters between them. What have they to offer us?"

Consider the Damage

Finally, Paul says, there is still another alternative: "My not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud, and that even your own brethren." What he is suggesting here is that to accept personal loss is preferable to going to law when you consider the damage that would be done to the Christian cause by bringing them to secular courts to settle. After all, what is the loss of a few hundred dollars or a thousand dollars, or a hundred thousand dollars, if the whole cause of Christ and the gospel is going to be degraded in the eyes of those who need it in the world around?

Dr. H. A. Ironside, with whom I traveled once, told me of an incident in his own life. When he was only eight years old or so his mother took him to a meeting of the brethren, who were discussing some kind of difficulty among themselves. Young Harry Ironside did not know what the trouble was but it was clear they were deeply disturbed. He said that one man stood up and shook his fist and said, "I don't care what the rest of you do. I want my rights! That's all! I lust want my rights!"

There was an old half-deaf Scottish brother sitting in the front row, and he cupped his hand behind his ear and asked, "Aye, brother, what's that ye say?" And the fellow said, "Well, all I said was that I want my rights. That's all." The old man said, "Your rights, brother, is that what you want, your rights? Why the Lord Jesus didn't come to get his rights. He came to get his wrongs, and he got them." Harry Ironside said, "I'll always remember how that fellow stood transfixed for a little while. Then he dropped his head and said, 'You're right, brother, you're right. Settle it any way you like.'" And in a few moments the whole thing was settled.

What we should never forget is that as believers we are called to demonstrate a different life style before the world, one in which we are ready to surrender personal rights for the cause that we serve. Paul is going to develop this more and more later in his letter. There is nothing more characteristic of a believer than his willingness to surrender some personal right, even to his own hurt, so that the cause of the gospel may prevail.

A Christian businessman told me that whenever people accuse him of overcharging or of taking advantage of others in business, he says to them, "Well, how much is involved?" When he learns the amount he says, "Let's forget it. I don't want that money. I don't agree with you, but if you feel it is yours I would rather you had the money than fight with you." Often it shocks the individual involved and opens a door for a witness that had never opened up before. This is what Paul says is more important.

But he is still not through. He has a third area to discuss:

Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither the immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor robbers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God (vv. 9-11).

What ties this section with that which has gone before is found in verse 8, "But you yourselves wrong," and the word in verse 9, "Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?" Those are the same basic words. What Paul is really saying is, "Look, when you are so aggressive in defense of your own rights that you take another brother to law before a secular court, you are wronging that brother. Even though you may be right in your cause, you are wronging your brother. That unjust action gives rise to the question, 'Have you yourself ever been justified before God?'" To treat another unjustly makes one ask if you have ever been justified, and he says the unjustified, the unrighteous, the unregenerate cannot inherit the kingdom of God if they are committed, as a life style, to these things that he lists.

Discontinued Life Style

Now he surely does not mean that those who have been involved in these things cannot be saved, for he goes on to say, "such were some of you"; they have come out of it. But what he is saying very clearly is that these things cannot be continued as a life style for Christians. Conversion makes a visible difference, and if it does not, there is room to question whether there has ever been a conversion.

You recall the incident in Luke 19 when Jesus came into Jericho and he saw Zacchaeus, the tax collector, up in a tree. Jesus called him down and went to his home for lunch. Afterwards Zacchaeus came out and began to give away his money. He began to repay those from whom he had stolen, not only the amount he had stolen, but four times as much. No one has ever doubted that Zacchaeus was converted from that day on--it changed his whole life. His attitude changed so completely that his behavior began to alter almost immediately.

In 2 Timothy 2 Paul writes, "God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal: 'The Lord knows those who are his.'" (That is God's side of it. He reads the heart, but you and I cannot see that. But, Paul continues) "Let every one who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity." That is the way to tell if somebody is a believer in Christ. To go on living in a life style involving fornication, idolatry, adultery, homosexuality, thieving, greediness, alcoholism, reviling, stealing, robbing, is entirely incompatible and inconsistent with a Christian Profession. It is to give testimony that the person has never become a Christian.

Paul closes this on a rather practical and positive note: "Such were some of you." He says, "Because you are carrying personal quarrels so far as to get involved in lawsuits you are really giving testimony that you never were changed. But that is not true of most of you; 'such were some of you.'"

"Such ones," he says, "were washed, they were sanctified, they were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus. For this reason I can count on the fact that they will change their way of life."

He lists here the three things that produce the change, not in the order of their experience, but in reverse order. It all begins with justification, "You were justified," he says. "You came to the place where you quit trying to earn your salvation. You acknowledged the fact that Christ had paid your debt for you, and on the basis of your trust in what he had done for you, God made you righteous. God gave you the gift of full acceptance before him, and you were justified. Then that began the process of becoming sanctified. The Holy Spirit began to lead you to change your attitude and your behavior."

Finally, there is a washing. One actually changes his behavior; he starts acting differently. That was what was happening here in Corinth. These people were behaving quite differently. They had actually been cleansed by the change in their hearts made by the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of our God. That is what conversion and Christianity are all about.

Now Paul returns to the subject of sexual immorality. As a consequence of his teaching in Corinth, the church there had begun to challenge the sexual looseness of the city. But there were some in the church there who said that Paul had laid a groundwork for viewing some of the sexual practices of Corinth as being right and proper for Christians. Some of the people were actually quoting him to support what they believed. Beginning with verse 12, Paul refers to those quotations they were attributing to him:

"All things are lawful for me," but not all things are helpful. "All things are lawful for me," but I will not be enslaved by anything. "Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food"--and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power (vv. 12-14).

Notice the quotation marks around the words "all things are lawful for me." These reflect the editors' opinion that the Corinthians had heard these words from Paul, and were repeating them constantly within the church. It is very likely that they echoed something Paul had said because this was part of his teaching about the grace of God: "All things are lawful for us."

The difference between legalism and true Christianity is right at this point. The legalist looks at life and says, "Everything is wrong--unless you can prove from a verse of Scripture that it is right." It is a negative approach to life; it says everything that is fun is either illegal, immoral or fattening. But New Testament Christianity says, "Everything is right: God made the earth and everything in it and everything is right---except what the Word of God labels as wrong." That is an entirely different point of view, opening the whole world to exploration and discovery and enjoyment, except for a very limited part which Scripture clearly labels as wrong.

These people were saying, "Paul himself said 'All things are lawful for me.'" Their argument should sound very familiar to us today. They were saying that sexual freedom, i.e., sex outside of marriage, is theologically sound. Their argument probably went something like this: "The law of Moses tells us that it is wrong to commit adultery. (Adultery here is a broad word referring to any kind of sexual wrongness.) But Paul taught us that when Christ came into our life the law ended its reign. We are no longer under the law; we are no longer under this commandment not to commit adultery. Therefore, by Paul's own words, we are free to indulge in some of these sexual practices that are so widely accepted in Corinth."

In Paul's answer, notice first what he does not do. He does not say, "Now that you are a Christian we have a new rule for you. You must not do such and such." Paul never retreats into legalism. What he does say is, "Yes, you are right, but you need to understand that truth must always be balanced."

The Same Distance Down

When I was a boy I used to enjoy walking along the back fences in the city of Denver. I could go for blocks on the back alleys. I enjoyed doing it, but it was a very narrow path. Jesus said the Christian life would be like that. He called it "a straight and narrow way." The problem is to keep from falling off, and either is equally dangerous; it is the same distance down. Christians ought to remember that the pathway of liberty is always narrow. It is a freeing and exhilarating path to walk, but you can easily fall off into one error or the other.

Liberty is liberty only, the apostle insists, when it is balanced between two extremes. These people in Corinth were saying, "The law is an extreme; it makes a rigid demand on my life that I or nobody else can live up to." And that is true--the law is an extreme. When you understand the impact and import of the Law of Moses, the Ten Commandments, you find they are so easily and quickly broken that there is not an individual in the world who has ever lived up to them except the Lord Jesus himself. "You are right," Paul says, "the law is an extreme, but license is an extreme too." "All things are lawful," he quotes, "but they are not helpful." The moment your liberty begins to hurt you or someone else, you have fallen off into license, and you are in the same trouble you experienced under law.

"Further," Paul says, "the things that are not helpful are always enslaving. 'I will not be brought under the power of anything.' "Notice how beautifully he is balancing truth here. The things that hurt you have a tendency to be habit-forming. Have you noticed that? They hurt you, but they are fun. They give you a certain degree of pleasure, which is why you do not mind the hurt so much, but that degree of pleasure is habit-forming, either physically or emotionally. The apostle says, "But we are interested in true liberty. We must remember, therefore, that truth can be lost on either side of the fence."

There was another impressive-sounding argument there in Corinth about which they had written to Paul, "Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food." Notice the quotation marks around that; that is what they were quoting from Paul. It meant, the stomach was designed for food, and food is obviously designed for the stomach, so it is natural and right to satisfy your hunger need whenever it arises. We all run to the refrigerator when we get hungry. Nobody raises any objections or charges us with immorality when we do that. How many times have you heard the argument that sex is like that? Sex organs were made for sex; therefore, it is natural and right to satisfy them, and when you feel the urge it is okay to merge. That is what they say, isn't it?

A Permanent Plan for the Body

Now the apostle's answer to that is a profound revelation of the difference between our food appetites and our sexual appetites. Here we enter into an area of revelation where it is evident that the Word of God sees far more profoundly into the nature of our humanity than anything in the world around us. Here, by contrast, you can see the shallowness of the world's view of sex.

Paul's answer is very brief: "True," he says, "food is made for the stomach and the stomach is made for food, but God will destroy both one and the other." In other words, that is only a temporary arrangement. It is true that the stomach and food were made for one another and God obviously did that--but it is only true for this life. There is coming a day when God is going to destroy both the food and the stomach. God has no permanent plan for the belly, but he does have a permanent plan for the body. The body, quite apart from its digestive apparatus, has a reason and purpose in God's program.

But sexuality is much more profound and touches us at a much deeper level. Sexuality, according to the Scriptures, pervades our whole humanity. It touches us not only in terms of the body (physical), but also in terms of the soul (the psyche), i.e., our social relationships with one another. Even more profoundly, sex characterizes and touches us at the level of the spirit (the pneuma) as well.

Did you ever realize that the Bible teaches that worship is a form of sexual expression? The basic definition of sex could be stated as the urge to merge. You can see that going on in terms of friendship. If you sit down with friends you want to share; you want to hear what they have been doing and tell them what you have been doing. You want to hear their opinions about certain things, and you want them to listen to yours. Friendship consists of the interchange of one life with another at the level of the soul, expressing itself as mind, emotion and will. Now, what is worship? Worship is a hunger to be possessed by God and to possess all there is of God. The worshiping spirit cries out, "O Lord, come take me, use me, possess me." God, in turn, gives us the beautiful promise that he is available to us, to be experienced by us and to relate to us. Jesus put it in the most precise way when he said that the deepest relationship possible between a human being and his God is: "You in me and I in you."

We are taught by the world that sex is that which touches us only at the physical level. In the modem movements of today that call themselves "Sexual Freedom Movements," "Feminist Movements," "Woman's Rights," and other things, we are being told that sexual differences between the male and female are basically superficial. At heart, they say, we are all human beings. But the Word of God never tells us that. In the Scripture, from the very moment that man appears on the scene until we are carried into the reaches of eternity, man appears as two sexes: "Male and female created he them." That division is pervasive; it runs through our whole being. We are not only physically different, male and female in our physical bodies, but we are different in our attitudes, our emotions, our reactions. We are different in the way we worship God, and the way we enjoy him and respond in worship, as well. God likes it that way and God made it that way. Sex therefore represents a far deeper and more significant appetite than that for food and drink.

Made to be Possessed by God

Paul points out that God has a purpose for the body beyond this present life. He says, "The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body." Notice the parallel there. They were saying, "'Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.' They are obviously designed to be together." Paul says, "All right, now carry it further: the purpose of the human body is not sex expression; it is to be the possession of the Lord himself--that is what your bodies were made for." There is a dignity about humanity that is far greater than any animal can claim. Humanity is made to be indwelt by God. That is the most exciting, the most remarkable, the most revolutionary teaching in the Word of God.

As Paul brings out, God has a purpose for the body; he is going to raise it up. He raised up the body of the Lord, and he will raise us up also. Sexuality, which penetrates our whole being, will not be expressed on the physical level in the resurrected body, but it will have its expression at the soulish and the spiritual levels. God has a purpose for it in the life to come. That is why we are given physical sex. It is designed to teach us what we are like, who we are, what our role is, in the life to come.

Male organs are external in order to emphasize, as one of the marvelous visual aids that God is always employing, that the male role is one of visible leadership. He is designed to take the initiative, and yet to do so with tenderness and gentleness. Any physical sex within marriage that is conducted without both firmness and tenderness becomes destructive and creates difficulties within the marriage.

Female organs are internal, hidden, to indicate the role of women as being inwardly sensitive, far deeper emotionally than men, more subjective, contributing deeper insights than man ever does, having a greater sense of compassion, and responding to that which leads. All this is designed to teach us truth about our relationships with one another and with God himself. That is why, throughout the Scriptures, God appears in relationship to the Christian as the lover, the aggressor, the male. We are the bride, the responders, the followers, and that role is consistent all through the Scriptures.

Paul is thus underscoring in these brief words the tremendous mystery of sex; that it is the very secret of life itself. To misuse it is to miss the beauty of it. Its beauty is destroyed and defiled when it is indulged for self-satisfaction only, or without the full commitment that marriage represents. (Paul is going to have a lot more to say about this when he gets into chapter 7. He will take up, in detail, the mutual sex roles of husband and wife, which we will look at with the same frankness as the Scripture does.)

But now, Paul moves on to attack the problem of prostitution that was present there in Corinth. The glory of the Scriptures is that they never present a principle without bringing it right down to where the rubber meets the road and applying it to life itself. That is what Paul does now with the widespread problem of temple prostitution:

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who joins himself to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, "The two shall become one (flesh)." But he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him (vv. 15-17).

In this passage Paul describes fornication as a horrible sin which involves taking a body, which is the personal property of Jesus himself, and using it in a relationship with a godless woman. He suggests it is equivalent to involving the Lord of Glory in a dissolute and reprehensible act. That is what every act of prostitution and every act of fornication involving a believer is.

Dr. J. A. Schep, in the book The Nature of the Resurrection Body says,

Sexual intercourse always effects a complete union of the two persons involved, and thus is quite different from eating or drinking something. Becoming one flesh with a harlot means becoming one body with her, i.e., being united with her in every respect, in her shameful sinning as well.

This is the thing that raises Paul's expression of honor: "Never! Who would want to do a thing like that?" Notice that Paul goes clear back to Genesis here. He takes that governing word spoken to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, "The two shall become one flesh" (which describes marriage), and he applies it here to a passing liaison with a common street prostitute. Something goes on in the act of sex that creates a union far deeper than the merely passing pleasure of the moment. It is part of that whole mystery that God designed and set forth at the beginning in the Garden of Eden. Thus it has tremendous effect upon those who give themselves to such a practice.

This is a profound insight that we need to take very seriously these days. The apostle Paul is telling us that something happens when you indulge in sexual relationships that even callous worldlings can recognize. Men who live sexually promiscuous lives have told me that even the most casual sexual liaison results in a change that is evident when they meet the girl later. There is a deep sense of having shared a mystery together--an intimacy that can never be forgotten.

But the Christian's relationship with his Lord, in contrast with the sexual relationship, is one of spiritual identity. These are probably among the most revolutionary words ever written in the Word of God or anywhere in the whole world of books. Paul says,

The body is not meant for immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. And also in verse 17, he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.

The Lord is a Spirit, and we are human spirits. When regeneration occurs there is a fusing of identity. This is what Peter refers to in his letter as having "become partakers of the divine nature." Think about that for a minute. What a fantastic statement it is! We have an ability, a capacity within us, to fuse with the very nature of God so that there is no distinction left between us and him as to identity. We are one spirit and from there on that becomes our true "I," our true identity.

This is what forms the basis for the New Covenant in the Word of God--the availability of the life of God to the believer so that he faces every situation and every circumstance with a new power and a new ability to act; a new ability to understand and see things he never saw before.

A fantastic inward change takes place that means our spirits have fused with his Spirit and from then on one can hardly tell the two apart--we are one spirit with him!

That truth serves to highlight the terrible effects of fornication which, at Corinth, took the form of prostitution. "Shun immorality." ("Flee fornication" is the actual term.) That is Paul's apostolic advice as to how to handle sexual desire when it is not able to be expressed within marriage. "Get out of there," Paul says. "Don't fool around with it; don't play with it." If you are in a parked car and you are beginning to get aroused, start the engine and drive home. If you are reading a magazine and you run across something obscene, get rid of the magazine. If you are watching television and it presents erotic material so that you find yourself aroused by desires, change the channel, or go read a good book!

"Flee immorality"--that is the advice everywhere in the Bible, Do not try to fight with it; do not try to overcome it; do not try to suppress it. Get away! These are subtle, powerful forces, and the widespread destruction we see in lives around us is ample testimony to the subtlety with which they can conquer us.

Not Like Other Sins

Then Paul goes on to say something very interesting:

Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body; but the immoral man sins against his own body (v. 18).

Many people have struggled with that verse because it seems to suggest that fornication (sexual promiscuity or sexual indulgence outside of marriage) is unique in its effect upon us. It is not like other sins, for it is against the body, and yet we know that other sins affect our bodies. Drunkenness, for instance, will destroy the human body. You only have to take a walk through skid row somewhere to see the awful effects of drunkenness upon the human body. And there are other sins that affect the body. Drug abuse can destroy the mind, twist the features and turn the individual into a twitching, nervous wreck. Why didn't Paul mention that? Drug abuse was known in his day. Even gluttony can destroy the body; even too much hard work will destroy the body. So what does Paul mean when he says other sins are "outside the body" but fornication is a sin against the body?

The answer is given in verse 19:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own; you were bought with a price.

That is why fornication is different from other sins. Here again Paul is reflecting on the fact that human nature is different than animal nature. It is unique in its marvelous capacity to hold God, to be intimately related to the greatness of the majesty and glory of God. It becomes a temple, for God dwelling in something transforms it into a temple. But fornication defiles that temple. It involves the body of a person who is the temple of God in a wrong union. Therefore, fornication is basically the sin of idolatry. That is why in Colossians and other places the apostle refers to "covetousness, which is idolatry." He means sexual covetousness, the desire for another person's body, which is a form of idolatry.

It is idolatry, the worship of another god, the substitution of a rival god, which defiles the temple. That is why fornication has an immediate and profound (but subtle) effect upon the human psyche. It dehumanizes us. It animalizes us. It brutalizes us. Those who indulge in it grow continually more coarse, less sensitive, are more self-centered, more desirous of having only their own needs met.

A beautiful young couple came to me not long ago. Both of them were Christians; they had formed a close friendship, and they were enjoying one another greatly. They were growing in the Lord and heading for marriage. But then something happened. They began to fight, and I did not know what it was all about. Finally they brought one of their quarrels to me and in the process of working it out I asked them, "Are you having sex together?" They admitted they were. I said, "Well, this is the result of it. It is destroying your relationship." They did not believe me and went on. Sure enough, soon their relationship ended with great hurt on both sides, and the woman in particular was damaged by this. That is what fornication does. It defiles the temple and destroys the person.

Paul closes with a beautiful summary,

You are not your own; you were bought with a price.

That is basic Christian truth. It is something every Christian ought to remember every day of his life. You have no final right to yourself. God has ordained that there are decisions that only we can make. He does not take away our right of choice. But, he says, we shall have to account for the decisions we make. Because he has bought us and we are his by right of creation and of purchase, God always reserves the right to send us where he wants us to go. He reserves the right to take away from our life whatever he sees is harmful or injurious to us, whether we like it or not, to give us both blessing and trouble alike as he sees what we need, and to guide us as a loving Father to the place where we recognize that he owns us, that we belong to him. God is glorified when any individual Christian lives on that basis: "Lord, you are the Lord of my life."

Therefore, in verse 20 Paul says:

…glorify God in your body.

That is what will make the world see that there is something different about Christians--Christians have discovered the lost secret of their humanity. God has come to dwell in his temple again. That temple should be maintained without defilement, not offering it to another except as God himself has ordained in the beautiful sacrament of marriage.

1 Corinthians 71-24

11. Answers on Sex and Divorce

In the seventh chapter of 1 Corinthians we plunge into an explicit and forthright passage dealing with sex in marriage, followed by answers to the Corinthians' questions on divorce. Some Christians are squeamish about hearing the subject of sex taught and preached, but the very fact that the Word of God, in all its purity and wholesomeness, treats this subject ought to correct that attitude. Besides, it is a passage of crucial significance for our day.

You will remember from the first part of this letter that three young men--Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus--had brought a letter from the church at Corinth asking the apostle certain questions. Paul has not yet touched upon these questions; he wants to build up to the subject with some very necessary and honest dealing with the problems they had not asked about, and some revelations of truth that they needed to know.

But at this time he turns to the letter and begins to answer their questions:

Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. It is well for a man not to touch a woman. But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband (7:1,2).

Question number one on their list seems to be something like this: "In view of the sexual temptations we face in Corinth, is it perhaps better to take a vow of celibacy, renounce marriage for life, and withdraw from all contact with the opposite sex?"

That question probably arose from the difficulty that some were having handling their sexual drives. They were facing temptation in these areas every time they turned around, just as we do today, so some of them were saying, "Rather than struggle all the time, why not just forget the whole thing; get away from the opposite sex, and live as a monk?"

This attitude is commonly held. It is what gave rise to monasticism in the Middle Ages and was a popular practice at that time. People withdrew from all contact in this area, viewing sex itself as defiling, dirty, and unworthy. They regarded the celibate state as a higher level of spirituality. They moved out of the world and built monasteries where men could live with men and women could live with women so as to remove them from all contact with the opposite sex and (they thought), all struggle in the area of sex. But it did not work, and it never will work. It is never God's intention for the sexes to live separately--he made them in the beginning to be together. Monasticism proved to be a disaster, for you cannot run away from drives that are within you, and Scripture clearly recognizes this.

Nothing Wrong with Celibacy

Paul's answer, given in the first verse, is that there is nothing wrong with celibacy. "It is well for a man not to touch a woman." He stresses that it is all right to be single. Nevertheless, he says, because of the temptations that abound, marriage is preferable in a place like Corinth. Some have taken that to mean that Paul had a very low view of marriage, that it was a kind of a second-best state of affairs, but they have missed the whole thrust of this passage; they have ignored the context.

It is true that the apostle, at least at this time, was unmarried himself. There is some evidence that he might have been married at one time in his life. It was a custom among the Jews for young men to marry. Furthermore, Paul had been a member of the Sanhedrin, because he tells us that he gave his vote against the Christians. To be a member of the Sanhedrin required marriage, so it is probable that he was married at one time. What happened to his wife is one of the great mysteries of all time. Tradition does not tell us. Scripture does not even mention it. Whether she died, or left him when he became a Christian, we have no way of knowing. (That is one of the first questions you can ask the apostle when you meet him in heaven.) But at this point, anyway, he was unmarried, and he glories in his singleness. Several times in this chapter he will tell us that he considered it an advantage to be single.

So he starts with this statement, "It is well for a man not to touch a woman." "Touch" is a euphemism for sexual intercourse. It does not mean that it is wrong for a male to lay his hand on a woman's shoulder or arm or whatever may be normal in friendship. Paul is saying here that to abstain from sex is not harmful and is not wrong, but if one abstains, a celibate life must be lived in chastity, as he has made clear in the previous section.

But, he says, marriage is proper too. Here in this passage he is not primarily talking about marriage; he is dealing with sex in marriage. The context makes it clear that sex is the subject he is discussing; therefore he takes up here the proper use of the body's sexual powers. He has covered sex outside of marriage in chapter 6, and now he discusses it within marriage. (If you want to know what Paul thought of marriage itself, read the fifth chapter of Ephesians. There is found an incomparable passage of tremendous beauty setting forth the glory of marriage as a picture of Christ's relationship with his church.)

The apostle now says three things about sex within marriage. The first one is suggested here in these opening two verses. Sex within marriage, the apostle implies, does permit relief from sexual pressures. Now he does not suggest that one should get married to be free from sex drives. That should never be the sole reason for marriage and no part of Scripture ever teaches such. What the apostle is saying is that being married does help one in this area. It helps to be married when you live in a sex-oriented society.

Several things are indicated by this. First, it answers the claims of some, notably the Roman Catholic church, that sex was given to us only for procreation purposes. Children do come from sex. Let us not hide it; the stork story has been blown! But that is not the only reason sex was given to us. It is clear from a passage like this in which married couples are urged, even commanded, to experience sex together and frequently-not lust once in a great while when a child is desired--that sex is given to us for more than merely carrying on the race. It serves another function within marriage: to provide pleasure to one another.

When I was a young Christian in my early twenties I was given a book to teach me how to handle sex drives and what sex was for. It was called The Way of a Man with a Maid. It had some helpful things to say, showing that sex is a gift of God. But it also taught that the best marriages are based upon having sex only when you want to have children. I did not recognize how wrong this was at the time because it was a highly respected book and it seemed to be in line with biblical teaching. I have since come to see that it represented a terrible distortion of the biblical position on sexuality. There is a wealth of literature available today that much more accurately reflects biblical teaching on this subject.

One thing is clear from this passage: sex in marriage is given to us for the mutual pleasure of those involved. It is the highest form of physical ecstasy, without a doubt. It rates as the number one recreation of the world; it always has and it always will. God likes it that way; he designed it so. He gave us our erogenous zones and permitted them, yea, intended them, to be aroused and excited. He designed human beings to experience the exquisite ecstasy of orgasm, but he intended it to be protected, and experienced only within the walls of security which marriage provides.

Within marriage bonds sex is an exquisite pleasure which a married couple are to experience frequently, as frequently as they mutually desire. This is what is meant in Hebrews 13:4, which says, "Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled" (KJV). Those who twist certain passages of Scripture to indicate that sex should be kept secret and not openly discussed even in marriage are mistaking and missing the whole purpose of Scripture's teaching on the subject.

A Freely Offered Gift

Having said that marriage is a way of relieving sexual pressures, Paul now says something else very significant. He says sex in marriage is designed of God to teach us something about ourselves as well as to fulfill a need in our partners:

The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights and likewise the wife to her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does. Do not refuse one another (or to put it more bluntly, as the Greek actually does, and as we read in the King James Version, "Defraud ye not one the other") except perhaps by agreement for a season, that you may devote yourselves to prayer; but then come together again, lest Satan tempt you through lack of self-control (vv. 3-5).

The major thrust of that paragraph is that sex in marriage is designed for the fulfillment of each partner. There are several important statements here. First, notice that Paul does not say to the husband or the wife, "Demand your sexual rights." As a marriage counselor I have been involved in scores of cases where one of the major problems of the marriage was that one partner, usually the man, demanded sexual rights from his wife. (Occasionally it has been the woman who was the aggressor.) Nothing, perhaps, is more destructive to marital happiness than for the male to demand that his wife submit to him in this area whenever he feels like it. This is to mistake the use of this passage. In describing the wife as not ruling over her own body, Paul is not giving license to the husband to demand sex whenever he wants it. That is to destroy the whole beauty of sex in marriage.

What the apostle says is that each has the right to give to his or her mate as a gift, the fulfillment of sexual desires--and one's responsibility is not to the mate but to the Lord to do so. It is the Lord who asks us to give this gift to our mates in marriage, and thus to make sex an experience of mutual fulfillment and satisfaction. Thus sex in marriage is a gift that you are to freely offer to each other. It is not a selfish, self-centered satisfying of your own desire.

Understanding this will make a big difference in many marriages, and if you reflect on it a moment you will see why. Sex is given to us to teach us how to relate to one another psychologically, and also how to relate to God spiritually. We have no real ability to fulfill ourselves sexually. We need another to minister to us, and that is how God teaches us to fulfill the basic law of life. Jesus said, "If you save your life you will lose it." If you try to meet your own need, and put that first in your life, the result will be that you lose the joy of life and lose everything you are trying to gain. Instead of finding fulfillment you will find emptiness, and you will end your years looking back upon a wasted life. That is not merely good advice--that is a law of life, as inviolable as the law of gravity. The only way to find your needs met and yourself fulfilled is to fulfill another's needs. That is what is meant by verse 4,

For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does.

This is not saying that you are slaves of one another. It is declaring that the power to give fulfillment to your mate lies with you. He or she cannot fulfill himself or herself in this area. It is impossible. That is why sex with yourself, solo sex, masturbation, is a drag. It does not go anywhere It is a dead-end street. It is a momentary, mechanical fulfillment that leaves one psychologically unfulfilled.

God made us to need someone else to fulfill us sexually. This is why unresponsiveness on the part of a partner in sex always creates a problem in marriage. Frigidity, of whatever type it may be or for whatever cause, creates deep-seated psychological problems in a marriage and a rift occurs. God has given us the ability to give the gift of love to another person and the joy of doing so is what creates the ecstasy of sexual love in marriage.

So important is this to marriage that the apostle goes on to say that it takes precedence over everything else except an occasional spiritual retreat for prayer.

Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement…

If you are going to cease sex, it has to be mutual. You must not deny your partner the right to this kind of enjoyment. To unilaterally refuse to involve yourself in sexual union in marriage is to violate this command of God, and to hurt the marriage very severely. So Paul says, "Don't do that"--with one possible exception. If you both agree to it and if you do so only for a brief season and for a spiritual reason, such as to have more time for working out a special problem in prayer, then it is all right. But frigidity can be such a destructive thing in marriage that Paul says, "Be careful. Don't continue it very long, and by all means come together again lest Satan be given an advantage over you." Those are very wise words for Paul is underscoring here much that is causing problems in marriages today.

Illustrations of God

Now he says a third thing about sex in marriage which is very important:

I say this by way of concession, not of command. I wish that all were as I myself am. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another (vv. 6, 7).

Paul is saying that sex in marriage manifests a special gift of God. Marriage itself is a gift from God, just as singleness is. Some have one gift and some another, but both express some unique quality about God himself that is intended to be manifested by that state. The word this in verse 6 looks not just to the immediate context but clear back to verse 2 where Paul talks about the gift of being married versus the gift of being single. What he is saying is, "Marriage is not for all." Paul himself glories in being single, but both states, singleness and marriage, are a gift from God, and sexuality in marriage reflects a special beauty of God; it illustrates something about God. I think it illustrates the unique relationship within the Trinity, and also, as we are told in Ephesians 5, between the Lord and his people. It illustrates a oneness of spirit and identity of person that can only be manifested when two human beings, weak and struggling and failing in many ways, nevertheless learn to live together and love one another despite the problems and the heartaches they experience.

On the other hand, singleness without sex reflects another beauty of God. It permits a quality of dedication to a single goal that is often highly admired by everyone around. We all know people like this who have never married, who have given themselves to achieve a certain goal in life. This too illustrates truth about God, his single-minded devotion to his determined ends. So both these states of life are gifts from God and we must view them as such.

This brings the apostle to a related matter which he takes up in verses 8 and 9. What about the sexual lives of people who once were married but now are no longer? (Later on in this chapter Paul is going to talk to the unmarried, those who have never married. He calls them "virgins." Here, obviously, he is talking about those who once were married, the divorced and widowed.)

To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do. But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.

The King James Version puts it, "It is better to marry than to burn." I remember hearing a sermon years ago from a country preacher in Texas on the text, "It's better to be married than to be burned." All the young people in his church went out and got marriage licenses right away! Nobody wanted to be burned. But that, of course, is not what Paul is talking about.

He is talking about "burning" with passion. Paul is saying here that if you have been married and now are no longer, he understands that your sexual lives have been fully awakened by marriage. You are used to finding sex drives and pressures met, and now suddenly, deprived of your mate either by divorce or by widowhood, you no longer have a way of satisfying these desires. What about such persons?

This can create quite a problem. Years ago I read Catherine Marshall's book written shortly after the death of her famous husband, Dr. Peter Marshall, and with all frankness she said that her awakened desires for sexual love from her husband was a real problem in her life. Many a widow struggles with this; many a divorcee has agonized over it.

The apostle's word is, "If it is possible, remain single. Having learned many great lessons from life, you can now give yourself more fully to the work of the Lord than you ever were able to do before. This is your opportunity." I should state here, however, that in the letter to Titus Paul commands young widows to remarry. He says that would be much better for them. But if you are older and have lost your mate, then his advice is to remain single. That is best. But if the physical struggle is severe, then marry again. There is nothing wrong in it. Thus he graciously, and with the wisdom of God himself, encourages and gives advice to people who have once been married.

It is clear as you look back at this passage that the essence of marital happiness, sexually, is made up of three ingredients. First, love to God. The body is made for the Lord; therefore, what the Lord wants you to do with your body should be all-compelling. It should govern your decisions.

The second ingredient in sexual happiness is a discipline of self--a willingness to put your own needs second to those of your mate in this area, and to give yourself, to give the gift of beauty and love and fulfillment to your mate as he or she desires.

In a good marriage, of course, a husband and wife are always giving gifts to one another, buying little trinkets here, bringing home something from a trip, seeing something in a market or a bargain store that you think your mate will enjoy. That is a way of saying to your mate, "I'm thinking of you. You are important to me. I love you."

The greatest gift along that line is sex if it is given with that same spirit of willingness to give pleasure. Nothing is more important than that, but it calls for a refusal to indulge in mere self-satisfaction. The third ingredient, therefore, is mutual respect.

Love to God, discipline of self, and a mutual respect for one another-these help two lives to learn to unite in the Lord. That is the most beautiful thing God produces on this earth. If you have ever seen an old married couple who have been in love for years and have learned how to relate in happiness, peace and joy to one another, you know something of the quiet beauty of that relationship. It blesses everyone who sees it, and that is what God desires for marriage. Examine your own marriage in the light of this, or if you are not yet married and you feel God is heading you that way, think these things through.

Now Paul leads us into confrontation with one of the major social problems of our day, and that is the breakup of marriages. The divorce statistics today are frightening. I saw a cartoon in the newspaper that showed a father speaking to his daughter just before her wedding. He said, "Try to make it last, dear, at least until I can pay for the wedding!" I think that summarizes the attitude of many today toward marriage.

Yet with this widespread and frightening increase in marriage breakup, we are really only repeating the conditions that existed in Corinth when this letter was written. Divorce was rather rare in Jewish communities then but in the Greek cities, like Athens and Corinth, divorce was frequent. Even women could divorce their husbands and did so very easily. The apostle addresses a condition very much like that which we have in America today. Paul understands, amid the world's easy acceptance of divorce, the temptation that Christians face to take what looks like an easy way out of an unhappy or difficult marriage.

The Fundamental Position

He begins in verse 10 of chapter 7 with a word about marriage in general:

To the married I give charge, not I but the Lord, that the wife should not separate from her husband (but if she does, let her remain single or else be reconciled to her husband)--and that the husband should not divorce his wife.

Here we have the fundamental position of Scripture on marriage: it is intended to be for life. God's desire in giving marriage to our race was that a man and a woman should live together, as the marriage vows put it, "for better or for worse" (either one), "until death do us part." Wives are not to leave their husbands, difficult as a marriage may become; husbands are not to divorce their wives even if they appear to be almost "irreconcilably incompatible," to use modern terms. This is not a passage that needs debate as to what the apostle means. He makes it crystal clear; it is not in doubt in the least degree. Furthermore, this statement rests upon the most solid foundation. Paul says, "I charge you this," and here he uses a term he seldom employs. The full weight of apostolic authority is brought to bear on this question. "As an apostle, an appointed spokesman of the Lord himself," he says, "this is his word to us." Then he goes even further back to the Lord's own recorded words and quotes the teaching of Jesus himself on divorce, when he was here in the flesh. These words are recorded for us in the fifth and nineteenth chapters of Matthew, and in the tenth chapter of Mark. Three different times in the gospel the account is given of our Lord's words.

Now some have misunderstood what Paul is saying here. They think because Paul says, in verse 10, "I give charge, not I but the Lord," that Paul's word is at a lower level of authority than the Lord's. But the word of an apostle and the direct word of the Lord are equally authoritative for all who are Christians. An apostle only gives what the Lord himself has already given him. Apostles do not invent doctrine, nor are they free to add to what the Lord has told them or take away from it. The contrast here is not between the inspired teaching of the Lord and the uninspired teaching of an apostle, but rather between what the Lord himself uttered directly and what he has uttered indirectly through his apostle. In either case the authority is the Lord.

God never leads anyone to leave his wife! He has made very clear in both the New and the Old Testament what he thinks of divorce. In the Book of Malachi God bluntly says, "I hate divorce." He never intended divorce to interrupt marriages. But having said this, it is also necessary to say, and it is also true, that God permits divorce. "Oh," you say, "you mean God permits what God hates?" Yes, of course he does. Much of life is made up of God permitting what God hates. God hates sin, but he allows it to continue in our race and he allows people to make wrong decisions even though he hates the decisions they make. Everywhere in Scripture we are faced with what is termed the permissive will of God. The Scripture states that God is not willing that any should perish. Yet many do perish. All those who do not come to believing faith in Jesus Christ will perish--they are already perishing. Though God is not willing that any should perish, he does allow it to happen. There is a place, therefore, for divorce.

It was not Moses who permitted divorce in Israel; it was God, speaking through Moses. When the Lord was teaching on marriage and divorce he said, "Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, permitted divorce." Many have read that as though Moses initiated the whole process, that it was Moses who thought up divorce. But Moses, a prophet, was like one of the apostles. He was a spokesman for God. Moses had no authority and no right to interpose his own desires or understanding or will over what God had said. Therefore, it was not Moses who decided to l