Destructive Knowledge

Our text today is 1 Corinthians chapter 8. Food will not bring us close to God.

We are not worse off if we don't eat, and we are not better off if we do eat. But be careful that this right of yours is no way becomes a stumbling block to the weak.

For if someone sees you, the one who has knowledge, dining in an idol's temple, won't his weak conscience be encouraged to eat food offered to idols?

So the weak person, the brother or sister for whom Christ died, is ruined by your knowledge.

Now, when you sin like this against brothers and sisters and wound their weak conscience, you are sinning against Christ.

Therefore, if food causes my brother or sister to fall, I will never again eat meat so that I won't cause my brother or sister to fall.

Let's pray. Lord God, we again are grateful for your word. We're grateful for the

Sunday gathering where we can come to the presence with your saints and hear your word preached. Lord, that your spirit would work in our hearts and minds, that we would be constantly, daily transformed by the power of your word and the movement of your

Holy Spirit. Lord, we know that knowledge puffs up. You've said it in the text. Lord, we also know that the beginning of wisdom is knowledge of you.

And so God, I pray that as your word is opened up to us today, that our knowledge of you would grow, that our wisdom and our love for you would grow.

Lord, it's impossible to know you more and love you less. And so God, as we submit ourselves into your hands, into the preaching of your word,

Lord, I pray that we would leave this place humble and joyful, that as we go out, as we encounter the world around us, that we would joyfully take up arms in the fight to point people to the

Lord Jesus Christ. It's in your name we pray. Amen. Amen. You may be seated.

We open a new section today, and this is going to run from chapters 8 all the way through chapter 10, and it's issues of conscience and Christian liberty.

We know that this section is written because the Corinthians had asked the question of Paul. We see in verse 1, concerning things, sacrifice to idols, this is the way

Paul introduces new questions. We will see another change in chapter 11, or maybe it's 12.

I believe it's 12 where he says, now concerning gifts. So we're going to be moving through issues in the church, and the idea and what's going on here

I think does require some context, okay? And that is this. There was a deeply idolatrous pagan culture that people in Corinth were being saved out of, and there were dueling forces within the city of Corinth.

There would be the new Christianity, which had struggles from two sides. There was the struggle of Judaizers from the temple who would try to make

Christians conform to the old system, the old covenants, and so there's things said about circumcision in other books.

There's things about eating of certain clean meats and that sort of thing. We also have the pressure of the pagans themselves, and these people had all of the power in Corinth.

This was a major Roman city. It was a center of trade, and the way this worked out was if you wanted to be in the top class, you had to,

A, have money, there's nothing new there, but B, you had to give your pinch to the gods of the day because the gods were very tightly combined in societally with the empire.

And so if you were to deny the gods blatantly and basically spit on them, then you would be barred out of the highest part of Roman society.

So there's a tension, and there's a tension all through the New Testament. We've not preached there, but we see it in James, that there is a tension and a temptation to treat people with partiality based on their money and based on their influence, or we can save them better seats.

You know, they can buy an engraved pew spot that say, this is where Johnny sits here, and we all know the reason why is because he's floating 60 % of the church budget.

You don't want to make him mad because he'll throw you overboard. This is the tale as old as time in the church.

And so this is wrapped up. There's a lot of things going on. There's true idolatry, there is temple worship, and there's also a societal social class thing going on here as we come into chapter eight.

And here's what we have to know. If we're looking at the big point, the big idea, the main theme that's going to drive this whole sermon this morning in chapter eight is this.

It is impossible, impossible to know God without loving the brothers.

If you know God, then you will treat others as more important than yourself.

You will honor them above yourselves. You will mutually submit. Submission requires disagreement.

As we've talked before, we are going to have disagreements in this body, and if we become partners with other churches, we're going to have sometimes serious disagreements with them.

The question is going to be, are we going to hold on to our rights to the expense of Christians whose faith will be rattled by the syncretism that we will always be tempted to?

So defining terms. Syncretism is bringing in portions of other religions and co -opting them and making them part of Christianity.

That's the idea. Syncretism is on full display in the chapter this morning as what's going on is there's

Christian arguments that are being made for certain men in Corinth and women in Corinth to do what they wanted to do anyway.

It's basically an end in search of a means is what's going on. And so very sophisticated arguments are being made to do things that are wrong.

Why are they wrong? How are they wrong? That's what Paul is going to bring us through.

The problem is division. So what's going on is there are people in the church who are looking at another and say,

I saw you eating in this temple to Jupiter. Not only were you there, you were eating the meat and the feast that was there to celebrate the worship of this

God afterwards, and now you're here and you're like the most influential person in this church.

You're like, we'll learn later. You're the one that's first in line at communion. So maybe

I have to worship idols to worship Jesus, and this is how faith crashes out.

Because no matter what happens is we follow humans. We are tempted to do it. We are tempted to join up in factions and people who are more influential carry more weight and they can disturb people's consciences more.

What would be a mistake to do in the text this morning is to transport it immediately into the conscience issues that always get talked about.

The two of our day are drinking alcohol and rated R movies. That's not what chapter eight is about.

Understand those things, look, somebody seeing you drinking at a bar is not going to crash out their faith.

That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about something that's far more serious, and the idea is if you see a

Christian brother seemingly worshiping at a temple to a false God, what's that going to do to your faith?

And then to make it worse, they make Christian arguments that happen to be true to defend their activity.

That's what's going on in chapter eight. So let's look at it. Is it possible? Is it possible to have any edifying knowledge outside of the law of God?

And that's really what comes into play this morning. Who can know whether it's right or wrong to eat meat in the temple in a festival to the

God of Jupiter or Mars or whatever? That's the question. So concerning things sacrificed to idols, we know that we all have knowledge.

Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. Do you see the difference there? Puffs up.

Puffs up like a balloon, right? How long does a balloon last? And we have this theme going through Corinthians, I'm constantly astounded by the way

Paul writes arguments, the way he breadcrumbs through the whole thing, and we see this idea that goes back to several weeks ago where it matters what you build things out of.

So if you build things out of knowledge or arrogance, you're building a hot air balloon.

And it may fly for a little while, but it's not going to last. But love builds up.

Love is the material that we should be building out of. Now love is not disconnected. Contrary to popular belief, love is not love.

That is a statement that doesn't mean anything. Love we know from Romans 13 is to follow

God's law as it regards God himself and our neighbor. If we perfectly follow the law, then we perfectly love.

It doesn't matter what your feelings are. It doesn't matter what your propositions are in your mind.

What matters is when we love someone, we follow God's law. That's how it's defined. So if anyone thinks that he has known anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know.

But if anyone loves God, he has been known by him. There's Paul's pesky doctrines of grace coming back.

What does it mean to actually know God? What does it mean to actually love God? To love

God means that you have been known by God. Now isn't that a statement that doesn't mean anything? Doesn't God know everything and everyone?

No, the answer here would be Paul is saying that you have been known by God in the sense that you are brought into his family.

You are one of his children. And when you are one of his children, we know from a salvation sense that you have been given a new heart.

This new heart is regenerate. This new heart is soft to the things of God. It was a heart of stone that looked at God's law in rebellion and did not like what it said because we want to do what we want to do.

This new heart loves God's law, meditates on it day and night, rejoices in the goodness of its statutes.

And that kind of heart is one that can only be created by God. And that heart loves

God. But the reason why is because he first loved you. You did not decide one day to love

God. God loved you. And he regenerated your heart.

And then you love him. And when you love him, you will have knowledge that's not destructive knowledge.

You'll have knowledge of him. And knowledge of him makes you look at yourself and everyone else a little bit differently.

So the Corinthians, we know they have a wealth of knowledge. If you go back to chapter one, verse five, it says that they know everything, all word and all knowledge.

They were enriched in God. They have a massive amount of knowledge and we see it over and over again.

Paul includes himself in saying in this passage, we have knowledge. We have knowledge.

And we can almost hear our reformed brothers and our reformed people ourselves saying, we have knowledge.

We may not have a lot of stuff we built, but we have knowledge. We know things. And oftentimes we think we're fairly special because we know things.

But that is a hobby horse that I don't want to go down. I've said much about the reformed stuff.

So I don't want to go there. I will tell you this, Christians are known by their love for one another, period.

They're not known by how many doctrinal propositions they can tell you. They're not known by how much systematic theology they can quote back.

We're not known by even being able to quote every one of the catechisms. Those are all very good things.

Very good things. But the reason they're good is because they train the Christian to love.

Because love comes out of this. Love is understanding that you are quite small indeed. Very small.

So in the grandeur of a big God who created everything with the word of his power means everything that wasn't there became there because the

Lord spoke it. He didn't fashion it. He spoke it. He thought about it, spoke it, it came into being.

And that kind of God lets you live. That kind of God has said that we are in his own image.

And when we understand that we have that kind of God, it makes our concerns and our petty desires and our lusts of the flesh seem very insignificant in comparison to what he's doing.

That's the idea. Knowledge puffs up because knowledge thinks that we have something to teach

God. He doesn't understand what I'm going through right now. He doesn't understand what

I need. He doesn't understand how mean this person has been to me. He doesn't understand how troubled

I am. See, that puts us in the position of God and that teaches us that we don't know anything and we have no love.

So here we go. What would you do? You're in a city.

You are a Christian, a new Christian. This has been going on for less than five years.

You're a new Christian. You're in this church. There are assaults from both sides, from the pious Jews who have the ancient religion of temple sacrifice that was inaugurated by God himself, and they are pressing on Christians to follow their ways.

And then we have apostles like Paul who say, you don't have to do that, and there's confusion. But then, even worse, you have the complete power structure of the society coming in and saying, hey, at the very least, just to be social, you've got to come into this place, especially if you're wealthy.

You need to come in here and show that you're part of Corinth. Show that you're a mover and a shaker.

How can you do anything for Christ if you're not a leader in the community? Look, I've said things like that before.

The question is the means, right? It's not wrong to be a leader in the community. It is wrong to syncretize, lose your faith, and shipwreck the faith of other people.

So you would walk in to these pagan temples, and they would sacrifice animals. And very explicitly, you would see blood and the organs of the animals being poured out on these idols' feet.

And then the meat that was left over, the priest would grab some, and then what was left over would be served out at a temple feast from the rich patrons.

The patrons would have their own meat that they brought to the sacrifice, and they would lay out a spread for their friends, okay?

And then anything that wasn't eaten there would be sold at the market. And that opens another can of worms for us that is not for today, okay?

So that is the situation. And you see your brother. And let's say that he is a very well -to -do person in the church.

This guy knows his theology. This is who we're talking about. You're asking him questions about systematic theology.

He can explain doctrine to you, and you see him on a Saturday night sitting there in the temple eating meat that had just been offered to idols.

What do you do? Does it mess with your head a little bit? That's what's going on. Because these people are people of influence, and it starts to mess with people's mind.

Is this really what's going on? And these people believe. These are real idols. So do we have to worship idols to make our way through this world?

And what happens here that's very difficult for us to suss out is that the argument that's being made and the knowledge that puffs up is a good argument.

Did you guys follow it in the text? The argument is basically this. There is only one

God, okay? These other idols, they're not gods. And even if they are gods, they didn't create anything, and they're not the one

God. That's premise number one. Does anyone have any disagreement with that premise? No, it's a good one.

It's true. The second part of the argument is that the meat offered to idols, the meat itself is nothing.

Meat is of no eternal significance. We've actually already seen this argument in chapter seven, haven't we?

This meat is nothing. It's neither here nor there. The food is going to be obliterated. It doesn't matter at all.

So what does it matter if you eat it? Premise two. Anybody disagree? That's true.

Is anybody going to heaven or hell based on what you ate for dinner last night? No. So premise one, true.

Premise two, true. Therefore, I can eat any of the meat I want anywhere I want.

So does the conclusion follow the premise? And is there something we're missing here? Because it sure seems so.

So you can understand the conscience issue is that if you believe that there is a God of Jupiter, which many of us today believe maybe not there's explicitly a

God called Jupiter, but we do believe that there was supernatural activity going on in these temples.

Because there are many gods, lowercase, and there are many lords, lowercase, and there are many demons who are supernatural, and there is all kinds of stuff going on.

And I can tell you that this demonic and supernatural activity is focused on these places of worship.

They're not worshiping these idols because they're a bunch of fools and idiots. They're worshiping these idols because these lowercase gods gave them stuff.

The Roman Empire was incredibly powerful. And many of the reasons it was powerful is because the rulers and principalities were running the

Roman Empire, and they have real power. Satan is the prince of the air. He has a lot of power.

We're told in Jude that we should not tell him anything except the Lord rebuke you because we are not high enough to look at Satan and be like, oh, get out of my face,

Satan. We can't do that. That's blasphemous. There are powerful forces.

And so the idea, you can be excused, you're not a rube, and you're not stupid if you think that there's real demonic activity going on with these idols, and that you are syncretizing with demon worship whenever you eat the meat at these festivals.

It's a very difficult situation. And because of the goodness of the argument, it actually has an adverse effect of making people stumble even worse because they held these two things.

Think of the weaker brother who thinks, okay, so those two things are true, they're not really gods, but I think they're kind of gods.

And my brother here is worshiping in the temple with them. Is he even a Christian?

That's the situation. And so when you have people inside of a church, listen, if you haven't been in social media lately in the reformed ghetto, please don't go.

But I want to tell you something. This is very applicable today. Whenever Christians start to believe that other

Christians are not Christians, the glove comes off and it gets really nasty, really, really nasty.

We can have disagreements, but when you anathematize someone who's within the church, when you say, not my brother, then it's all out blood sport.

That's what's going on in Corinth. Because, see, the people who are eating meat offered to the idols, they think that it's a bunch of rubes that don't understand the eternal significance of meat.

But the people who are weaker and see this, they believe that their Christian brothers who are influential in the church are worshiping demons.

Can you be a Christian and worship demons? We know you can't. And so you can see, these divisions were not petty squabbles over post mill and on mill eschatology.

These were bare knuckled brawls over whether you're Christians or not.

That's why they're suing each other. That's why they're abstaining from marital relations, because they are afraid that their eternal souls are in danger.

It is ravaging the church. And Paul is hurt by it, because Paul put out blood and sweat to start this church.

And he is worried that they're tearing each other apart. That's what's going on. It's a big deal, and we see it today.

Division in the church of the worst kind is when we start to believe that those who are still in the church have not gone through any form of judicial disqualification, church discipline.

If we believe that they're not actually Christians, we are going to tear each other apart. When you hear things like, there's not any good churches around, what that is doing is anathematizing every other person that's going to church.

And that puts us at war with them. And we cloak it in our own arguments and say, what fellowship does light have with darkness?

Do you realize what you're doing? We have to be very, very careful about saying that people are outside of the kingdom.

Now, a tree is known by the fruit it bears, and we look at fruit, and fruit's developed over time.

But at the same time, it's very critical that we are careful and that we reason with one another before we start declaring people to be outside of the kingdom.

Really, really important. And the fact of the matter is, is that those who think others are not

Christians, and those who go to war with other brothers, are themselves displaying the most unchristian thing possible.

Because Jesus tells his disciples that they would be known, that the gospel of Jesus Christ itself would be known and garnished by the brothers' love for one another.

If you get down to the most fundamental thing of what is a Christian, what is a Christian? A Christian is someone who has been regenerated by the

Holy Spirit, and who bows the knee to Christ. Then the second part of that question that James would tell us, right?

Faith without works is dead. You say you have faith and you have no works, you're a liar.

So if we say we are Christians because we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, we do well.

The demons also believe and shudder. However, what's the next thing? What do Christians do? And the answer to this is very simply, we love one another.

Christians who do not love one another have very little standing to declare themselves Christians.

Your first thought when you see a brother or sister in Christ is that you should love them.

You should be willing to bear their burdens. You should honor them as being more important than yourself. If you don't do that, you should probably work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

Our first reaction to Christian brothers should not be anger and hatred. And if it is, there is a problem down deep.

We have to know this. Do you understand? He's telling the people in Corinth that they need to know what they don't know.

You have all these kinds of knowledge, but you don't know the one thing that you need to know, and that is that the

Lord God is one, and that makes you humble. That makes you patient with each other because God plays the long game.

Why does God play the long game? Because he's eternal. The time doesn't matter to him.

He has all the time because he invented the time, and if he wants, as we saw with Joshua, he can stop time.

This is a construct that does not limit God in any way whatsoever. It's very limiting on us, right?

But it's not limiting at all on God. So we have to understand that when we truly know

God, then we will love one another. And we understand also that the cardinal basics of the faith are quite simple, aren't they?

This question about the meats, it's complicated, and he uses it because we in our stupidity today try to act like things are very complicated that are not complicated, right?

Meat sacrificed to idols and being in that temple, that's a complicated issue. Your flesh and your mind would immediately side with the weaker brother, and you would say, you can't eat that meat, period.

That's what you would say. That's what makes sense. However, it's not that simple. Because the law of God, the law of God is the standard by which our conscience should be judged.

And our understanding of it comes with maturity. See, what you'll find is a paradox in the

Christian faith, is that when you're younger and more immature in the faith, you're actually weaker to the law and more things are sent to you.

And when you mature in the faith, you understand the law better, and you understand that there is liberty in your conscience under the faith.

But the problem then is that we have this new thing out, where as mature believers, we look at the others, and we look at immaturity, and we are patient and honor it.

We don't try to shove our knowledge of the law down other people's throats. It's really important for us to hold this thing.

To be mature is to greatly love your brother, right? If that's what

Christians do, and you want to be a mature Christian, then the fruit of your mature Christian life is going to be how much you love your brothers.

How much are you willing to take for them? And I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

The goal of my Christian life is hopefully that I would leave nothing on the field here. This life here, it's a prelude.

It's very important. But our real life is an eternity with our Creator, and we should be storing up our treasures there.

And the way we do that materially is that we evangelize the lost, and we love the brothers, and bear their burdens.

So what is the source? We know this, right? The source of knowledge that we all need is that God is one.

Essentially, what Paul does here in verses 4 through 6 is he sums up the Shema from Deuteronomy 6.

Hear, O hear, Israel, the Lord your God is one. That means there is no other God like Him.

He is all -powerful. He created everything, and that is how we base all of our calculations.

So what he does is he tells the stronger brothers, hey, your arguments are correct. I grant them.

I grant them. But there's one little hole, one little problem, and that is if you don't esteem the other people in your church as more important than you, you don't know anything.

See, what they wanted to do, you can't divorce the desire from the action.

And what the Corinthians wanted to do here, these well -to -do ones, is that they wanted to ascend through the society.

And so what they wanted to do was eat the meat. Now look, in a vacuum, we would all want to eat the meat.

Meat's delicious, all right? And social gatherings with meat being the centerpiece are very fun, okay?

Love to eat huge steaks, love to bask in the expense of all that with friends and that sort of thing.

That's fun. The problem is, the problem is, is that when you're going to do it in a temple with a bunch of idols, like a false temple, and you're doing that, and people are watching, and they're asking you questions, and you say, no, here's my arguments, you're an idiot, man.

You think that I can't eat in this temple? The food's nothing, and there's only one God. So get along with it.

Big deal. What are you doing coming at me about this? And that person's going, I think you're worshiping demons.

And you see the problem? Should they eat in the temple? That's really the question, because at the end of the day,

Paul needs to provide an answer, and I think that he does. And there's some words that he uses that should draw our attention.

I'm going to read 7 through 13 as we finish here, and I want to talk about what's going on, what's the conclusion of this argument, and how does that apply to us today?

However, not all men have this knowledge, but some, being accustomed to the idol until now, eat food as if it were sacrificed to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.

That means completely ruined. But food will not commend us to God. We neither lack if we do not eat, nor abound if we do eat, but see to it that this authority of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.

For if someone sees you who have knowledge dining in an idol's temple, will not his conscience, if he is weak, be built up to eat things sacrificed to idols?

For through your knowledge, he who is weak is ruined, the brother for whose sake

Christ died. And in that way, by sinning against the brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.

Therefore, friends, this is not any therefore. This therefore is a Greek word that is used twice in the

New Testament, both by Paul. The second time he uses it is he's going to say, therefore flee sexual immorality.

It's a restatement that comes later, not in chapter six. Here it is an emphatic.

Paul is screaming. He is drawing attention and saying, therefore, for all of these reasons, if food causes my brother to stumble,

I will never eat meat again, ever, so that I will not cause my brother to stumble.

Friends, let me just ask right off the surface, what if we treated our brothers this way? Can you imagine?

The apostle Paul had a greater knowledge of the law than any one person in here will ever have.

I am confident of that. Very confident. The apostle Paul understood the argument better than the people who made the argument.

In fact, he wrote many of the arguments against the Judaizers that followed a very similar line.

He understands, and then he also says this thing, I will never eat meat again, ever.

Why? Because they're sinning by doing it. See, the use of disordered liberty destroys

Christians. This is destructive knowledge. Look at how he frames it. Their knowledge, their knowledge leads to this, right?

Their knowledge, their asserting their own authority leads to a brother who was saved by Christ's conscience being ruined.

Do you know what people do who have ruined consciences? Everything.

There's no breaks. Whenever your conscience is defiled, whenever it doesn't work anymore, whenever you don't understand what's wise and what's good, then everything is wise and everything is good.

I'm around this sad state of affairs every day. All day, every day.

It's a sad, terrifying thing when the conscience doesn't work. Lie, cheat, steal, intoxicate, whatever.

That's what happens when the conscience doesn't work. So how is disordered liberty used?

So what the brothers were doing is they were asserting their argument, and their argument was we are completely allowed to do this.

You are being a tyrant by saying that we can't, so get out of my face. I'm going to eat the meat, and I'm going to ascend through the society because there's nothing wrong with it.

How does this happen today? I don't think that we're eating meat in festivals and Mormon temples or anything like that.

So we have to make a little bit of application, and I'm going to jump away. Here's some things.

Corey mentioned to me this week, he's like, this is like a playground for you. You can just run around in here. There's so many places to go.

So let me just give you a few, and I'm going to hem myself in because I don't want to go for an hour and a half. Here we go. Ecumenical worship with Muslims and Jews propped up as a beautiful thing.

We heard this just a couple weeks ago in an interview with Mike Huckabee, an ex -Southern Baptist pastor, by the way, who said that there is a temple in Israel where the

Jews and the Christians and the Muslims can all worship together. What a great thing. Does that burden your conscience?

Muslims worship a definitive demon. Jews deny the divinity of Jesus Christ.

They hate our Lord. We want to worship together? That's beautiful? No. That is a thing that defiles people's conscience.

It makes things that should not be touched be able to be touched. Have we accepted pagan practices such as Mormonism being grouped in as Christian?

What do Mormons call themselves? Christian. They are desperate to be called

Christian. The reason why is because they are a tool of Satan that's a subversive force.

They are a Christian heresy who wants to come in and defile people's conscience and ruin people.

They do it through the cloak of family values and being nice people, and they are nice people, and they worship a demon, actually thousands of demons.

They're one of the most polytheistic religions that there is. In many ways, they put the Hindus to shame, and those are demon worshipers too.

Does that mean we hate them? No, we hate their demons, right? We evangelize them.

We have Christian leaders who just seemingly cannot help going to Jerusalem and kissing the wall to show their solidarity with a false religion.

Let's call it what it is. Judaism is a false religion. There's more coming on this soon, but I will tell you.

Judaism is not Old Testament Jewish practice, not in any way, shape, or form.

There is no temple. There's no animal sacrifice. There is a bunch of rabbinical traditions passed on that are strictures and rules that bind people's conscience to the craziest stuff you can imagine.

And when we bring that in and we say, Christianity came from Judaism, it did not.

There is only one religion in Holy Scripture, and that religion is Christianity.

Was Adam a Christian, or was he a Judaism? Because he's the beginning, right?

And Adam wasn't even a Jew. They didn't even start till Abraham. So who's

Noah? He's a Christian. He was a man blameless. Have you ever thought about that?

It says that the Lord looked over the whole world and he saw one man who was perfect. Because Noah is a type of Christ, was

Noah actually perfect? No, but it gives a foretaste in the Old Testament to what it means to be a

Christian. And that is this, is that God regenerates the heart and he saves us with his propitiatory substitutionary sacrifice.

And we are perfect in his eyes because when he sees us, he sees the righteousness of Christ. And he saw it with Noah, and he sees it with you.

There's one religion, Christianity. Don't be sucked in by this stuff. It destroys people.

It destroys families. We have macro movements, big global scale movements like climate change, right?

Gotta pinch the incense, we're all gonna burn. If you don't scrub the carbon, and it fools

Christians, you'll see things like the Green Bible. You ever seen that? We gotta highlight in green all the places that Scripture speaks to our environmental responsibilities.

You'll hear this rampantly from Christian leaders. We are all God's children.

We are not. We are not. We are all made in God's image, but only his children are his children.

You have to be saved by the Holy Spirit through the blood of Christ to be God's children. We have woke theology.

Think about what happened. There was a lot of leaders, I can name a bunch of them. They disrupted churches, they still disrupt churches to this day.

We had notable guys like Matt Chandler, there was Tim Keller, there was John Piper, there was

Mark Dever, there was Ligon Duncan, there was David Platt, tons and tons of people who had all the articles, who had all the ability to speak to this, and what they came in and said was, look,

God's sovereign over the church, but you guys don't have enough people of color in here. This binds people's conscience, and what it does is it packages in and it brings in another religion that disrupts people.

It causes quarrels, and what we saw back in 2018 through 2022, 23, was the church get completely ravaged by this.

It was just another thing of, hey, look, I can believe in white privilege and still believe that Christ is the Son of God, what are you to tell me anything differently?

And it made people angry, and it destroyed many churches, many, many churches. And then we had

COVID, right, where our priest said, if you love your neighbor, that's a good argument, right? Should you care about the health of your neighbor if you love them?

The answer is absolutely yes. Wear a mask, don't sing. It's the same thing.

It causes divisions, and it happens over and over again. It causes despair.

We have it today. We cause despair and unrest from the left by saying we didn't really even have any

Christians in America until the slave trade was abolished. John Edwards, dirty slave trader, not a Christian.

Dabney, slaver, not a Christian, so on and so forth, and it causes controversies.

We cloak unrighteousness constantly in biblical arguments. And then, you know what makes it worse, and it causes divisions in the church.

It's the same stuff. It's the syncretization. And I'm going to have to go after somebody here that it really pains me to go after.

He is dead, so it's not him, okay, but it is his disciples. And I will tell you this.

We were told after the tumultuous years in the church in 2018 through 2022,

John MacArthur wrote famously that social justice and that gospel was the greatest threat to the gospel and to the church in his lifetime.

He wrote that, and he wrote a series of articles about it, mostly expositing Ezekiel 18, doing it really well, by the way.

But you know what happened last week? Many of the leading insurgents of woke theology in the church were speakers and on a panel at John MacArthur's church.

They repented of nothing, and they did what bad guys do, they pivoted. When the winds of culture change, you don't repent, you just don't talk about that anymore.

You start talking about other things. We see it as Driscoll comes back in the news the last couple weeks, right?

Manliness is good, now female preachers are good, so we pivot. Friends don't be fooled.

We have to be really, really, really careful, okay? We have to be careful. I'm not here to put people on blast, that's not the point.

The point is this, is that there is nothing new under the sun, it's Solomon's Ed, right? Nothing new under the sun.

The church has been ravaged by people who are bad actors who come in subversively, and they don't get to come in by denying the trinity, right?

No one's doing that. What they do is they bring their lies and their stuff that has their biblical arguments.

You have to go after the weightier matters of the law, that's why you have to do these things, right?

You have to love your neighbor, that's why we do these things. You have to submit to all authorities all the time, that's why we do these things, okay?

Don't you know, like Israel is God's chosen people, you have to know these things, right? It depends, what is

Israel, right? We have to know these things, it all comes into play, and it's slithering and it's moving around time and time again, and we have to be very, very careful about when these things come in, and it harms people, defiles their conscience, and it wrecks the faith of Christians and it ruins churches.

See understand that chapter 8 is not a tyranny of the weaker brother situation, okay? It's not.

There is tyranny of the weaker brother. You can say, I have a real problem with alcohol, and if I see you do that, it might make me just get drunk.

So if I see you at the pizza place drinking a beer, like, you just defiled my conscience. That's not what's going on here.

That is not how the weaker brother loves the stronger brother, right? There are some things that biblically, explicitly, you're allowed to do.

Are you not? Are you allowed to drink alcohol? Yes, explicitly in scripture.

So that's not what we're talking about. What we are talking about is this, is here we go,

I've hidden this to the end, yay. Here's what happened. Here's what happened.

The question is, should you eat this meat, right? Is it okay? Let me give you what the council of Jerusalem said five years before these events.

And they sent Paul as an emissary to the churches to deliver their decree. They had a confession.

This is not floating around in the air. This was instructions to the churches. Acts 15. Pardon me,

I'm going to read the lengthy thing because I don't want you to hear the whole thing. Starting in verse 22, it seemed good to the apostles and the elders with the whole church to choose men from among them.

Judas called Barsabbas and Silas, leading men among the brothers to send to Antioch with Paul and Barnabas.

And they sent this letter by them, the apostles and the brothers who were elders to the brothers in Antioch and Syria and Cilicia who are from the

Gentiles, greetings, since we have heard that some of us to whom we gave no instruction have gone out and disturbed you with their words unsettling your souls.

It seemed good to us having come to one accord to select men to send to you with our beloved

Barnabas and Paul, men who have risked their lives for the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Therefore, we have sent Judas and Silas and they themselves will report the same things by word of mouth.

For it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these essentials, that you abstain from things sacrificed to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from sexual immorality, from which if you keep yourselves, you will do well.

Farewell. So they were sent away. They went down to Antioch and having gathered the congregation together, they delivered the letter.

And when they had read it, they rejoiced because of its encouragement. And both Judas and Silas, also being prophets themselves, encouraged and strengthened the brothers with a lengthy message.

Do you understand that what Paul is writing here is just his communication of what the council of Jerusalem had decided?

So these men who are disrupting families and disturbing Christians are doing so in direct opposition to what they've been instructed from the elders of the

Christian faith, apostles and prophets. So was it okay to eat the meat in the temple?

The answer is no, it was not okay. And the reason why is because at a time and place, a council had decided primarily about circumcision.

That's why the Gentiles were so encouraged, is because the council told them, you don't have to be circumcised and you don't have to hold to these

Jewish practices. You are free in Christ. And the Gentiles were ecstatic to hear that because their consciences were burdened.

They didn't know if they were really Christians or not. They didn't know if they had to chop chop or if they had to touch these meats or if they had to go to these festivals.

They didn't know. And they loved Christ and they wanted to follow Christ. And these apostles and these prophets write a letter of one accord and they send it to all the churches in the area and they say, you are free.

You are free. Don't eat the food offered to idols. Don't touch the blood and flee sexual immorality.

Is Paul not just doing the same thing here in chapter 6 through 11? I think he is. I think he's delivering the message and going into the details on it.

Friends, we are never, ever, ever going to regret taking care of our

Christian brothers by emphasizing their honor and our unity. Do you have to have the meat?

Do you have to have the cultural appeal? See, we are shot through in the reform culture is that we want to be accepted by those with the credentials because we love knowledge and we love to ascend.

What we would love to do is have the doctorates and the institutional credit so that we can write the articles so that people will go to our conferences and so that they will follow us.

See, that's what knowledge gets you. It puffs it up like a hot air balloon. You may have your conferences, but eventually your brother is going to be trying to kill you because you will disagree on some piece of doctrine.

And then when it was built up on knowledge to begin with, the fellowship is dead. And the people in the pews suffer.

And they wonder, what is going on out here? These men were supposed to be our examples.

These men knew the doctrine. They were supposed to be leading us and they fell. So what chance do

I have? That's the problem. Church, you have liberty.

So let us reason together. Church, we have the law, so let us obey it.

And church, most importantly of all, we have love. It's been given to us by the Holy Spirit. So we need to practice it and we need to show it.

Do you want your way or do you want to understand your brother and do you want to love them?

And that's what we are judged by. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, your church is the main weapon in your war against sin and Satan and death.

And your church draws the attention of your enemy and has since the very beginning. And Lord, we see that he sends his agents.

And Lord, we're bad enough ourselves in our selfishness, in our disdain for others, in our desire to have what we want, that we make a mess of things.

So Lord, it is our prayer this morning that you would tune our consciences to the knowledge of your law and that you would give us a love of our brothers, that we would honor each other more than ourselves, that we would abstain from the things that defile others' consciences so that we would not sin against you.

And Lord, help us have conviction to know that where we bind people's consciences wrongly, that we are sinning against you.

Lord, you died for that sin. And so it is not of your people to walk in it.

Or we walk in your forgiveness and we walk in repentance. So Lord, help us. Help us where we lead astray, where we cause division, where we cause quarrel.

Would you help us to repent of that and to walk with love for our brother? We know that we're not capable of it, but we know that through you we have all the tools for righteousness and the chief end of righteousness is to obey your law as it pertains to you and to our neighbor.

So help us in that way. Change our minds. Transform us, Lord, so that we would look more and more like your

Son, who first of all loved his people and showed it in perfection.

Lord, we pray these things knowing we can't accomplish them, but you have set out those works for us. And so we pray in faith and in hope that you will achieve that good work in us and that we will glorify you for it.