Who Do You Think You Are?

Scripture today is 1 Corinthians 4, 6 through 13. I have applied all these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brothers, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up in favor of one against another, for who sees anything different in you?

What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?

Already you have all you want, already you have become rich. Without us, you have become kings, and with that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you.

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 poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor working with our own hands.

When reviled, we bless. When persecuted, we endure. When slandered, we entreat.

We have become and are still like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.

By way of an intro, I really have this to say, is I've looked high and low this week to make some encouragement out of here.

It's a bleak piece of scripture to a church that needed a pretty strong rebuke, and so the challenge is to make right application to our day, but in order to understand what

Paul is doing here, we do have to understand what's going on in the Corinthian church, and we are about to make a pivot.

Chapter four really ends with the pinnacle and the connection between the argument that Paul is making in chapters one through three and what he's about to do in chapters five through really 14, okay?

So what is happening is that Paul is setting the stage for the judgments that he is going to levy against the church of Corinth.

He is going to be specific. He is going to be using God's law. He is going to be making them try to be ashamed of their sin and their inattentiveness to matters, but before he does this and he makes this transition, he has told us last week in our passage how we're to judge, that we are not to judge as God judges, looking at the motivations and assuming the intent of people's hearts, but instead we have to judge like righteous men, and righteous men have to use evidence and have to use the law.

That's where he left us last week, and as we pick up today, we are going to get into a breathtakingly sarcastic piece of scripture, and really the meat of the scripture and the focal point is three rhetorical questions that he traps the church of Corinth in because the answer to the question is obvious, but the implications of answering the questions wrongly are disastrous, and the

Corinthians, much like us today, I think will have to answer the questions wrongly because of their actions, but he has put them in a rhetorical trap because they do know the pious answers to the questions.

So first we have a part that has given scholars fits in verse six.

It's really the only part of this passage this morning that's very difficult to understand, and it revolves around one word, so I'm going to read it and we're going to talk about this word again.

Now these things, brothers, I have, and our word is applied to myself and Apollos for your sakes.

Okay, so what are these things? These things are probably what Paul has written in the book up to this point.

So we're talking about judgment, we're talking about the foolishness of God, the supposed wisdom of the scholar of the age, the stumbling block of Jesus Christ, and the wrongful judgment that's going on in the church.

These are the things that Paul has applied, but this word applied does not mean what we think it means.

It's really lost in translation. It's a very difficult word to translate because this word is used only by Paul in the

New Testament, and at that, it's only used five times. It's used three times in 2

Corinthians, it's used once in Philemon, and it's used once here. Now all three times this word is used in 2

Corinthians, it is talking about disguising. So if we were to read it the way it is in 2

Corinthians, he would say something like this. Now these things, brothers, I have disguised myself in Apollos for your sakes.

So what I will tell you, in making something that's extremely complex a little bit short, is Paul starts the sarcasm off right away, okay?

So if you wanna look at this word, what it is is this same word that he uses in 2

Corinthians, he says that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. He says that false teachers disguise themselves as the righteous, and here what he is saying is that Paul and Apollos have transferred the substance of something good to themselves, and that should be applied to all good teachers.

So here's the idea. It's tough, all right? I don't wanna tell you how long I thought about this this week, okay?

And how many different people I read about it. Here's where I've landed, and I think it makes a lot of good sense.

What Paul is doing is he's saying, to your shame, you have a lot of teachers in your midst that are disturbing you.

You have listened to them, and we see, as 1 Corinthians opened up, and it was especially seen in 2 Corinthians, that there are a lot of teachers who have come into the church that are disturbing them, that are messing with their doctrine, and Corinth is on shaky ground because they don't really know what to believe.

There are people that speak with a lot of authority, and we learn in 2 Corinthians, there's even people who have religious paperwork and credentials.

These are MDiv grads from the top seminaries of the day, and they have come into the church, and they are disturbing the church with conflicting doctrines, and so what

Paul is saying here is he says, hey, look, there is good doctrine, and what

I'm gonna do is I'm gonna come in as if I have this good doctrine, and I want you to judge every teacher like this.

Every teacher that comes into your midst should have these things applied to them like I'm about to apply it.

Now, what's the joke? What's the allusion? What's the sarcasm here? Well, Paul has written much of this doctrine, and so the sarcasm is he's saying, hey, pretend like I'm me, and that everybody else needs to speak like the apostles did, and as you see as it closes, you heard

Cooper read it, there is a truce on who exactly the apostles are and what their credentials are, and their credentials are that they follow

Christ in death, that they are scum of the earth so that they would sit on thrones in heaven.

That's the allusion and the sarcasm that Paul is going to do, and so what he is saying is, hey, pretend like I planted this church, and pretend like I taught all the people here who are teaching you good doctrine, and you really shouldn't have to pretend that hard, you idiots, because I am the one who did it.

That's essentially what he's saying, and it's a verbal thing, it's difficult, people have fits with it, and so what he is about to do is he is about to give flesh and put meat on the bones of this idea that we have to judge by scripture, not by motivations and not in haste, which is something that we often do, and then he's going to bring in an idea that he's going to really get later in the book, in the letter, when he talks about conscience, because how is it that people would go beyond the scripture?

What Paul wants to teach the people of Corinth is how to judge without going beyond what is written.

See, when we judge as righteous men, we cannot go beyond what is written.

Now, can we judge ourselves beyond what is written? Yes, and that's called a conscience, right, and the conscience should align with the word of God, but we are weak human beings who have sinful hearts, we have a flesh that we war against, and sometimes our conscience is not exactly in a line with the word of God, and what happens is it goes further than what is written, oftentimes, and this gets difficult because we feel very strongly about our own conscience, but in reference to that,

I don't want to tread on that, we'll go into conscience later and we'll do a lot of detail on that. For today, what you have to understand is that your conscience can never be at odds with the word of God.

Like, so if your conscience says, hey, it's okay to commit adultery, your conscience does not matter, okay, because what is written is what matters, but if your conscience says, hey,

I can't even watch TV because this commercial is on and it might inspire me to adultery, then you should listen to your conscience and you should not watch

TV, but what you should also understand is that your conscience ends at your nose, and if you put your conscience beyond what is written onto other people, then you sin against your brother, and that's something the church desperately needs to hear.

So what I'm telling you this morning is that we have to learn how to judge this way. We are not better than the church at Corinth.

In many ways, we have less excuses than them. In many ways, they show us righteousness with their seriousness, in their display of spiritual gifts, in their faithfulness to Christ in the midst of a very dark and persecuting culture.

We have much to learn from them, but most of all, we need to learn this morning from this text how we judge the right way, and the

Scriptures give us the rules of engagement. This is how we must judge, and this is difficult, you're gonna hear it, and I wanna tell you this this morning.

This is the difficulty in talking about conscience and judging. Here's the deal, and I'm gonna say this clearly.

I am talking to you. I'm not talking to the person next to you.

Does that make sense? What we wanna do in our hasty judgment and thinking about assumption is we wanna think, oh boy, he's,

I hope they're hearing this. I really hope, I hope she's getting it.

I hope he's hearing this, because it's about time they come and make it right with me. This is what we do, okay?

This is what the people in Corinth are doing, is they are looking around, and they're going beyond the

Scripture, and they're saying things like, can you believe that they're doing that? That guy's eating meat offered to idols.

I'm a Christian. What's that guy doing? Get him, Paul! And then when

Paul would preach it, or read it, he would say, see, he's getting it. How can you not get it? Fools.

Fools. The Word of God is for you, and so what Paul is going to do in this section this morning is the encouragement that you can get from Scripture this morning is

Paul, through the Holy Spirit, holding up a huge mirror for you to look at yourself in.

And let's see if we like what we see this morning. Let's see if we do. We are not God. Who do you think you are?

You're not God. You do not have the discernment of all motivations and thoughts of anyone else.

You don't even really know your own thoughts, if you get right down to it, but you're the only person on earth who can know your own thoughts.

That's where we are. So what we have to do is we have to learn to judge this way. Here's some rules of engagement.

The Scripture binds us to the rules of judgment. We have to wait for evidence. We cannot ever act as God, judging based on intentions, no matter how much we think we know what their intentions are.

We cannot judge others in self -righteousness because when we judge as though we are

God, what it does is it increases our own blindness and is setting us up to be puffed up because we are judge and jury with our own black robes and our own position of hierarchy.

So what we have to do is we have to go to our brother as Jesus prescribed in Matthew 18, and it's reiterated over and over in Scripture the way witnesses work.

We have to go to our brother or eat it. And sometimes eating it is good.

We do not have to go to our brother about every perceived sin that we might see them do.

That is exhausting. I've done some content lately on friendships, and I'm just gonna tell you right now, we are natural people.

We live on the earth. We have to have fun with each other. Not everything has to be a grind all the time, and if you are relentlessly bringing up offenses or sins to your brother, they are going to stop hanging around you.

It's exhausting. So sometimes you have to eat it, and everybody knows this. In your marriage, do you have to eat it sometimes?

Yeah, sometimes you grind your teeth at sinfully eating it, but eat it you will because you understand that you cannot bring every single thing up because they're not gonna agree with you.

It's gonna be a fight. That doesn't mean that you do it passive aggressively. It means that you forgive.

Do not exact cost for it. Now, if this sin is severe or it's habitual, and you can't prove it, gather evidence.

So how is Paul going to teach this? Well, he's going to ask three questions. This is in verse seven, and verse seven is the focal point of this piece of text.

These are three questions that are full of irony. Let me read them for you. Look in verse seven. He says, for who regards you as superior?

Let me read it this way. Who regards you as superior? What do you have that you did not receive?

And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it?

Question number one, who regards you as superior? Let me ask you this.

Who defines you? Who has elevated you to a place of rightful boasting?

Rightful boasting. What can you boast in? Your athletic ability, your intellect, your good looks, your children?

What can you rightfully boast in? Well, see, Paul asks a question that he's already answered.

See, pretend like Paul is a good teacher here, and let's listen to what he said just a few paragraphs earlier.

In chapter one, he says, and the base things of the world and the despised God has chosen, the things that are not, so that he may abolish the things that are, so that no flesh may boast before God.

Do you think that any human being ever is going to go before the throne of God and boast?

Who do you think you are? Who regards you as superior?

He might even ask it this way. Do you do well to be so arrogant in judging others and puffing yourself up?

Do you do well? I know in our marriages with the person that we trust the most, it's very easy to look out at other

Christians and to focus on their flaws and to assume motives that aren't there, to take offense at things that could be explained charitably, to look down on the way others are raising their children, to look down on the doctrinal knowledge of someone else.

And when this starts in our marriage, it bleeds into our friendships. And what we do is we blindly begin to regard ourselves as being superior.

Because the answer to Paul's question is this, who regards you as superior? The answer is, I do.

I regard me as superior. Look how much more spiritual

I am than you. Look at what I don't do that you do and look at the things that I do that you don't do.

How much are you praying, Christian? How much scripture do you know?

Can you describe the articles of our confession? Can you answer questions about covenant theology?

Can you explain your eschatological system? Can you talk about Protestant resistance theory?

If not, what are you even doing? Are you listening to sports ball being a worldly pagan? And I can sit here and I can go,

I'm the best Christian in this church, it's not even close. And if somebody argues with me, they can be like, what a fool.

Do you know who I am? Do you see how easy it is? And I make a caricature much like Paul does because what

I wanna do is like Paul was doing is to shine a light on the absurdity of this behavior.

It's absurd. You are gonna stand before the throne and you're gonna know that the

Lord knows your sins and the Lord Jesus Christ is going to say,

I have paid for his sins. What did you do? Do you do well to boast?

And should you judge others and be blind to your own sin because when we look out and we judge others, it's doubly terrible.

Not only are we sinning against our brothers, but we are building up our own blindness to our own sin that crouches at our door and wants to destroy us.

Make no mistake, Christian, your pet sin is not a pet and it will grow.

And as you feed it and nourish it, it will get bigger and stronger. And what started as an idle thought, what started as a little bit of thought in the back of your mind, if you feed it, if you leave it alone, it will eventually become a ravenous monster that will destroy everything that you hold dear.

We have an enemy, so let's move on. He's asked, who regards you as superior?

They know the answer, you know the answer, don't you? No one, but that's not the real answer.

That's not how they're acting. And listen, guys, how you act is how you believe. God is not mocked.

Whatever you reap is what you sow, right? From the heart flows the words.

From what you believe flows your actions. If I say that I love you and I try to destroy you,

I don't love you. If I say that I love you and I don't wanna talk to you, I don't love you.

I am lying and I'm increasing my own condemnation in it. Second question, I had to backtrack.

What do you have that you did not receive? Let me ask a simple question. What were you born into the world with?

What did you have? Does anybody look at infants and go superior, powerful, amazing?

No, they go, oh, they're so cute. And then we know that an infant is absolutely, utterly dependent on parents.

Do you know that God has made us this way, right? Many other species do not have that level of dependency as young creatures, right?

They are away from their mother quickly. But humans, when does a human actually become independent?

It takes years, doesn't it? We mature slowly in relation to others.

I mean, you say a dog is like full grown at six months old, right? Six months to a year. What is a human like at six months?

They're terrible, all right? Let's be real, you've had them. They don't sleep anymore at six months.

They regress. It's all happening. This is all happening. What did you have that you did not receive?

The answer that we know, as pious churchgoers, we know the answer. Do we not, Calvinists? We know the answer.

Nothing. We had nothing. And we say it all the time. And I say it in our prayers.

We say it to each other, oh, I had nothing. Do you believe it though? Do you really believe it?

Do you act like that? And Paul has taken them on a path and he has been so subtle about it.

So let me lay the trap that Paul has laid on them with this question. Here's what he said. He starts in chapter one and he says, what are they believing?

I belong to Paul or Cephas or Apollos. What they're doing is they have broken into factions contrary to what

Jesus has told them to do. And they've said, I'm a great man because I'm a Paul. Well, I'm a greater man because I'm of Cephas.

And I think Apollos must have been an astounding orator. And so some of them would say, well,

I'm of Apollos and have you heard his sermons? Oh man, he preached the paint off the wall, okay?

And then some of them in their wisdom said, well, yeah, that's great. You know who I'm of? I'm of Jesus.

Trump card, the proto -Jesus Duke put on in the church of Corinth. And what

Paul is doing is he is rubbing their shame in this. They believe that they're great because they say this, I'm a

Paul, I'm of Apollos. I gave mocking voice, I have to break it out, much to my wife's dismay, okay?

Paul is writing to them and they're going, I'm of Paul, I'm of Apollos. That's what

Paul is doing to them and they know. They understand. Listen, when this is being read to them, they know what he's doing.

He is making fun of them because it's ridiculous. Because what they have forgotten is what chapter 15 is going to tell us.

That God came to earth and he died and he rose again. And if he did not rise again, then we are fools beyond all men to be pitied.

But Christ did come. And so where they start is they have pride in their faction.

They have collected like trading cards their influential teachers. Sound familiar?

And then he moves them along. A couple of chapters later, Paul starts to get warmer on the humility that he desires for them and he says, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or things present or things to come, all things belong to you.

Hmm. So from the factions to everything that's created and everything out there belongs to you, that is kingly inheritance talk.

And he's telling them, you guys are acting like you're in these divisive factions, but you don't realize what

Christ has given you. You've forgotten it. You are puffing yourself up in pride and you're acting abominably because you've forgotten who you are.

That's the sermon, right? Who do you think you are? Guys, we have to know who we are and we have to remember it every single day.

And then he lands the blow the very next verse and he tells them this. This is the true hierarchy and this is the source of humility.

You belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. What do you have that you did not receive?

See, what has God given you? The answer is everything. Every single thing you have,

God gave it to you. Your ability to shoot a basketball, your ability to read a word, your ability to speak, your ability to breathe, your ability to draw, your ability to worship, your ability to understand any of these things,

God gave it to you. Who are you to bragging it? What do you have? And then he closes the rhetorical trap with the third question.

And this one is brutal. Why do you boast as though you had not received it?

Doesn't boasting imply your own effort? I don't think if somebody gives you a phenomenal gift, you don't boast about your ability to receive this gift.

Oh man, I'm so good that somebody gave me a car.

No, that's not how it works. What we do is we know intrinsically that that's detestable, don't we? And we know that what we should do is boast in the one who gave us the car.

That's how it works. And we would tell everybody, would we not? If you went home today and there was a, whatever your dream car is, and that's sitting there with a bow on it, and you know that thing costs 65K, oh crap, we're in 2025, that thing costs 75K, and it's sitting there and it says,

Merry Christmas from Josh Rice. The first thing you'd be going is, isn't he a teacher, what's going on here?

The second thing you might be doing is going, I'm kind of embarrassed, right? Wouldn't you think that?

Man, I'm embarrassed, what is going on? What does this guy think of me? But then the next thing you would do is you'd go tell everybody you knew, wouldn't you?

And who is made great in that transaction? Is it you or is it me?

The answer is me, right? The giver is the one who's greater in this scenario.

And so what Paul is telling them is your boasting diminishes Christ, and it also diminishes you, because praising your own effort is always going to result in sinful judgment.

And let me ask this question that he would ask them, do spiritual gifts originate from human effort? And too often, church, our answer is, well, yeah, absolutely, it's my natural talent.

Do spiritual gifts originate from human effort? To ask it is ridiculous. They are spiritual gifts, and the church is equipped with spiritual gifts.

Every member of the body has their own spiritual gifts that the body needs to have.

If you are not exhibiting and exerting your spiritual gifts, then the body is crippled.

The body is working at not maximum capacity, and you owe it to the body to exercise your spiritual gifts while understanding that your spiritual gifts do not derive from human effort, but are given.

And so let me ask this, who should we be boasting in, who should we be boasting in for our spiritual gifts?

The question's absurd, is it not? And to ask the question is insulting, and now you're getting there, right?

To ask the question is insulting. Why is there such confusion in this church?

They have spiritual gifts flowing in the church at Corinth. We would be afraid and uncomfortable if we walked into that church, because we would see things that we have never seen in our life going on in the church at Corinth.

There are prophecies being given, there are miracles being done.

As two leaders from the hostile synagogue across the street come into the church, there are amazing things happening in the church at Corinth, and yet underneath it all, what they have done is they have taken the outflow of the spiritual gifts of God, and they have claimed credit for them themselves so that they could judge one another wrongly and set themselves up as their own gods.

So do we lack gifts in the church today? I think we have to ask the question.

Why do we boast as though we had not received it? Let's point at the pulpit first.

Is this natural talent? Is it because I was born to be a good reader and kind of academic?

Maybe I can be persuasive. And it's easy for me, church, it's easy for me to start believing that.

And that is a deadly peril, because spiritual gifts are given by the Holy Spirit, and spiritual gifts are given by God.

Why do we boast as though we had not received it? We have received it.

You've received everything. So final point. What Paul doesn't do yet, he will next time.

And I don't want to blunt the knife by going into that. I'm not gonna tread ahead of the text, but this morning what we have to understand is

Paul asks these questions and they're feeling uncomfortable. I promise you they're feeling uncomfortable. And so what he does, does he get gentle?

No, he pours on the gas. Let me read this and let it flow over you. I can't put on the voice.

I don't know what his voice would have been like reading this. I know that people were very uncomfortable. You are already filled.

You have already become rich. You have ruled without us.

And how I wish that you had ruled indeed so that we also might have ruled with you.

For I think that God has exhibited us apostles last of all as men condemned to death because we have become a spectacle to the world and to angels and to men.

We are fools for the sake of Christ. But you are prudent in Christ.

We are weak, but you are strong. You are glorious, but we are without or honor.

To this present hour, we hunger and thirst and are poorly clothed and roughly treated and homeless. And we labor working with our own hands.

When we are reviled, we bless. When we are persecuted, we endure. When we are slandered, we try to plead.

We have become as the scum of the world, the grime of all things even until now. Pretend that I am a teacher and all teachers should be judged this way.

Pretend it. What are you doing Corinth? See, the church at Corinth has convinced themselves that they have everything because they're rich, because their church has grown, because they have manifestations of spiritual gifts the likes of which we would not believe.

We would have a whole channel on television broadcasting every service at Corinth today and we would marvel at what was going on.

And some in our midst today would look at that and say, scoffers, deceivers, Satan's at work in Corinth.

That's what they would say today. You know it and I know it. We do the sin of Corinth all the time.

But see, they have convinced themselves that they have everything and they've got everything backwards. They think, the church of Corinth thinks this, who rules if not the rich?

And why would I have spiritual, why would I not have spiritual insight like God if I have all these spiritual gifts flowing?

See, this is what they've done. They have confused the giver and the receiver and what they think is because I have all these spiritual gifts, now

I can judge like God and I can look at everybody out there and forget love, forget loving my neighbor.

Let's look at what people are doing. Let's do the output games. Who's the best Christian in this church? Let's line them up.

Let's rank them. This is functionally what's going on at the church of Corinth.

Have you spoken in many tongues? I sure have. When's the last time you gave a prophecy?

I gave one yesterday. What do you know?

I know everything. Do we see this today? Do we see that churches become successful because of numbers?

Do you get down when it's a little bit lighter one day and it's a little bit heavier the next? It's easy, right?

Who's building this thing anyway? We see today that the church can be puffed up because if there's 1 ,000 people here, how could we possibly be doing anything wrong?

If we got a $40 million budget, it's all obviously blessed by God, right? Our pastor is the smartest.

He's the best teacher. I'm a votey. I'm of John MacArthur.

I'm of R .C. I'm more pious than all of you. I'm of Spurgeon. I'm of Jesus.

See, we have to understand this. A healthy church, man, hear this so clearly.

A healthy church is not the church that is right. A healthy church is the church that is humble and unified.

See, if the healthy church is about being right, then that church is going to have factions and divisions in it because there is nothing that human beings in our own self -righteousness love more than being right.

Am I right or wrong? When you engage in an argument, what is the ultimate success of that argument?

Is it changing your mind or is it being right? We know why the voice raises.

I am more guilty of this than most. So guilty of it. When I get into the conflict in my immaturity and in my selfishness, the first thing

I wanna do is be right. This is what we do. We have to understand.

We have to understand. It is important to have sound doctrine. It is critical. It is fundamental to have sound doctrine.

But at the same time, what good is your doctrine if it does not result in us doing the commandment for us to one another?

We must love our neighbor. If we don't love our neighbor, we do not follow the law and we do not understand the simplest doctrine.

Does everybody know what the two commands are? Everybody knows, right? If I said raise your hand, do you know?

Love God, love your neighbor. You know this. So if you don't love your neighbor, what good is all of your knowledge?

You're just more condemned because you know what you're doing and you choose to rebel anyway.

See, unity in the love of neighbor is the marker of a great church. This only occurs, only occurs when we have humility and we live inside of what

Scripture teaches. We can't go outside. We can't and we cannot judge ourselves wrongly.

We have to judge with humility. When we go outside of Scripture to rush judgment or to attack, then what we are doing is we are dividing and breaking the body of Christ and that is primarily what's happening at Corinth.

In our realm of the world, we like to purity spiral and that is this, purity spiral is this, like I agree with you here, yeah, but do you agree here?

Well, yeah, I do. Well, do you agree here? And what we do is we make sound doctrine into a test of how far down the rabbit hole we go, okay?

And what we do is we forget, we forget Jesus Lord and the test of Christianity is very simple, friends.

Do you bow the knee to Christ? If you bow the knee to Christ, then we can continue the conversation as brothers.

If you don't do that though, then we're not on the same team, we're not in the same family. We have many disagreements with many churches in the area but the test of Christianity is not about being right, it's about loving the bride of Christ, it's about following God's commandments.

Was that not the promise of the new covenant that we wouldn't have to be taught, that we would have a heart, that we would understand God's law?

It's a tremendous gift we've been given. So what did the apostles do? Pretend like they're real, right? Pretend like Paul is the one, he's disguised himself in good doctrine so that maybe you'll listen to him.

What did they do? And this is what we should do, right? Hierarchy. Are the apostles obviously in hierarchy over us?

Would everyone agree to that? Yeah, give me that. Is Peter higher than you? Yes.

So is Paul. These men are going to be throned in glory. They are gonna sit with the heads of the 12 tribes on 24 thrones and we will give homage to them, not as God but we will know that they were our fathers in the faith and we love them and we have been blessed by them.

What do we do, Jude said? We go by a faith that was once for all delivered by the apostles.

That is the foundation of our Christianity, is what the apostles wrote, what the men of God wrote.

So what did they do and we should act like them? What did they do? They acted like death row prisoners.

That's what Paul says. They were put on public display as death row prisoners and what for?

For nothing. For their love of Christ. They are a spectacle to the heavens and the earth.

The angels were amazed at what the apostles were doing and the worldly leaders couldn't understand it.

They would go from town to town turning the world upside down as they disrupted the idolatry trade and as people were leaving the temple to come into the

Christian church and people were amazed and people were angry and these men were spectacles unto

God. They were made a public display and we see them today and we have to ask ourselves, we have to ask ourselves, are we acting like they did?

Are we? We know that they were weak and they were fools but what did they carry?

Paul will say that he is like a clay vessel, nothing spectacular about him at all that hides inside of it a message of surpassing value.

Isn't that what we are? Were the Corinthians really strong and glorious? Not next to the apostles who were death row inmates.

The apostles were hungry. They were ragtag. He describes them as homeless.

That's because of him because Paul was going all over the known world, shipwrecked, left adrift in the ocean.

Can you imagine? Can you possibly imagine what his life was like? Left adrift at sea.

He had to think he was dead, right? Stoned and left on a pile to die and got up and went right back in the city.

Discouraged, reviled, homeless while the successful church at Corinth feasts and shows off their riches on a daily basis.

Cuts in line at the love feast to get more wine, getting drunk at communion. It's all about me but not with the apostles and then

I think he really gets to it. He says that they return reviling with blessing.

How are we doing with that, Christian? When someone reviles you, do you bless them?

Not like a bless your soul kind of thing. We all know what that means, right? But instead to return reviling with truth and with patience, taking persecution with endurance instead of screaming like bleeding lambs led to the slaughter.

Isn't that what we do? Persecution, persecution. Were the apostles persecuted?

Of course they were and they did it with endurance. Why? Because the endurance was showing the godly character that Christ had given them.

Count it a joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials. Too often, brothers, what do we do when we get these trials is we cry.

Right? Can you believe what's happening to me? Oh God, what did I do to deserve this?

This is what we do. We are warned by scripture. Be like the apostles.

Be like them. Take the persecution and trust in God. Endure.

The apostles have become the scum of the earth while their churches have petty infighting and grasp for the pleasures of this world.

Can you imagine how discouraging that had to be to the apostles? But do you know, we're gonna see it next week, I have to cheat, two weeks, where I'm gonna cheat a little bit.

Do you see what Paul is doing? He should be really discouraged by the people of Corinth, right? They have messed it all up.

But what is Paul's emotion in talking to Corinth? We'll see it. Read ahead at the end of the chapter. He doesn't do this to destroy them.

He loves them. No matter how bad they get. He sees them as his children and he loves them.

He cannot get away from them and he wants to come and to bless them but he might have to come and discipline them and they'll be afraid of that.

I can't imagine what Paul was like when he came to discipline but I imagine it was pretty scary. You probably didn't want much of that and he warns them.

So let me ask in ending today, is this us? How much persecution, reviling and slander can you take?

And friends, let me twist the knife a little bit deeper. How much persecution, reviling and slander comes from inside?

My experience is most of it. The world doesn't really care what you're doing because what we don't wanna do is press our morals on other people, right?

So we basically stay insular and don't involve ourselves with them and so what we do is we get in the

Nerf ball wars of fighting inside because we know we're not gonna kill each other except, except we often do.

We hurt each other with words. We revile one another and we slander and it must not be so.

It must not be. Do we bless God when we encounter trials?

Are you thanking God for your trials? It's not therapeutic self -help but I will tell you this, if you praise

God and thank him for the trials that you're encountering, you will look at them differently and he will give you endurance and you will see that you know that in years there will be an end to this.

It's a milestone that we look back on and the worst times of my life, the very worst times of my life,

Kelsey can vouch for this, that I go back to those often and I pull those out and I say,

I cannot believe what has happened because of that. Because of how it was hard in the time.

It was brutal in the time. I thought maybe I was gonna die. Sometimes I wanted to die, right?

And you look back and years later you can see I have everything because of that.

Bless those who persecute you? Why? Because they are accomplishing the will of God in your life.

They are helping you to become more godly. How can we bless those who revile us? Because they're sanctifying you.

They are growing you closer to Christ and is that not the prize that we have? And most of all, let me ask this, do we puff ourselves up in our doctrinal supremacy while aiming most of our ire and disdain at Christians who are deemed poorer than ourselves?

Please don't do that. I don't, I think that we're on the pathway to trying to fight this. We're fighting it with everything we got.

We have to have a simple, standard posture. We love Christians here at this church. We do.

If there is another church, if you have a coworker who has bowed the knee to King Jesus, you know what our posture should be towards that person?

We love them. And we are gonna be in heaven with them and we are on the same team. And sure, iron sharpens iron.

We want to have those discussions. We want to grow in our understanding of scripture. But at the same time, we have to understand when we're having a family meal versus when we're in the trenches fighting a war.

We're never fighting the war with the family. We're fighting the war against the orcs, the demonic powers and principalities and authorities.

We fight with them because they aim to kill us. But we have to stop trying to kill each other within. And that is, in a nutshell, the message to Corinth.

Paul uses explosive rhetoric to shine the light on saying, friends, you must stop doing this.

You must stop dividing the body and you must judge rightly. If you don't judge rightly, you're gonna be torn apart and the wolves will be able to feast on you.

Because when the sheep scatter, the wolves ravage. We should not scatter, we should herd up.

And the way we do that is by realizing we are sheep. And do you know what the preeminent thing about sheep is?

They're stupid. They are defenseless. The only defense that sheep have is a shepherd and the herd, the flock.

They have to stay together. If they get alone, they get destroyed. Who do you think you are?

Do you think that you can handle it alone? Me and my Bible on the lake? No, we don't have that.

I'm preaching to the choir, you're here. But you have to understand this. Socially, religiously, in your family, you cannot do it alone.

If you're alone, you are easy mark for the wolf and he is prowling. And that's just his emissaries.

The real threat is a lion. Is he more dangerous than a wolf? Yeah, he roams around like a ravenous lion.

He is fearsome. Be aware of what you're up against. And the safety is in the flock and the safety is in trusting in Christ and knowing who you are.

Let's pray. Jesus, we thank you for the many means of sanctification and grace that you've given us.

Lord, I pray that we would see our people, that we would see this as a manifestation of a blessing.

Lord, that you have given a people that we can help each other, that we can encourage one another, that we can rebuke one another.

And Lord, that we would take that with humility. I pray that you would soften our hearts, that we would see where we have sinned.

And Lord, that we would love one another. There are obstacles. We are blind, we are proud.

We judge motivations and we assume. Lord, help us to stop.

Help us to judge rightly. Lord, help us to know who we are and help us to know what we have been given and who gave it to us so that we boast not in ourselves, but that we would boast only in what you have done.

You are worthy of all of that praise. And you are worthy of the boasting and so much more that we can give for the gift that you've given and the gifts that you continue to lavish on your people.