A Family Feud

Sovereign Grace Family Church iconSovereign Grace Family Church

2 views

0 comments

00:00
And turn in your Bibles with me to the first chapter of 1 Corinthians.
00:16
We're going to read verses 10-17.
00:19
The title of today's message is, A Family Feud.
00:24
Verse 10 says, I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.
00:45
For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers.
00:52
What I mean is that each one of you says, I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I follow Cephas, or I follow Christ.
01:02
Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul? I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name.
01:20
I did baptize also the household of Stephanas.
01:23
Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.
01:27
For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel.
01:32
And not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
01:42
Father, I thank you for your word.
01:44
I pray that now as I have the opportunity to preach it, I pray that you would keep me from error.
01:50
I pray that you would also, Lord, fill me with your Holy Spirit.
01:53
For without the Spirit, my preaching would be in vain.
02:00
Lord, preach through me the power of the Spirit.
02:03
Speak.
02:06
And Lord, open the hearts of your people to understand your word.
02:11
Open their eyes to see, their ears to hear, their minds to understand, and their hearts to receive the truth that you have in your word.
02:20
And when we discuss the subject of division, a hard subject, Father, may we have, Lord, a willingness to apply what we learned.
02:34
In Christ's name we pray.
02:36
Amen.
02:43
Last week I began our new series on the subject of 1 Corinthians, and I have to say I've been really just excited.
02:53
I've been reading through this book and making outlines and notes, and I'm just really excited about what God is going to do in the study of this text.
03:04
If you weren't here last week, I want to just reiterate a little bit of the introduction.
03:09
We've decided, or I've decided to preach in 2018 through the book of 1 Corinthians.
03:14
Now my goal is to preach the whole book in this year, and that's something that's sort of a large goal to try to achieve, to try to get through the whole thing.
03:24
But I think that it's possible.
03:26
We're not going to rush, but we're also not going to belabor.
03:30
We're going to move forward in the text.
03:33
And so again, I want to remind you, if you're unfamiliar with the background of the Corinthian church, Paul established, he planted this church in Acts 18.
03:43
And if you want to read more about the history of how this church came to be and where it was and what all happened in the establishment of the church, you can go back and look at Acts chapter 18 and learn about that.
03:54
Corinth was one of the largest cities in the Roman Empire at this time.
04:00
So Corinth had an important place in the commerce and the economy of the ancient world.
04:08
Corinth was sitting between what would be known then as Macedonia and the Peloponnesus.
04:14
And there was a small strip of land that connected those two larger bodies of land together.
04:19
And that's called an isthmus.
04:20
I don't know if you remember that from learning geography, that small strip of land that connects two places together, almost like a bridge of land.
04:28
And it's got water on either side.
04:30
And that water on either side made it a trading port, a place where ships would come to one side.
04:36
They would drop off their cargo.
04:37
That cargo would then be carted across what was about a four-mile stretch of land from one side of the sea to the other.
04:44
It would cart the stuff across, and then it would be loaded onto another ship, and it would save the travel time of having to go all the way around.
04:50
Sort of like when, if you think about a more modern example, might be when the Panama Canal was dug.
04:55
It kept ships from having to go all the way around.
04:57
It allowed them to go straight through.
04:59
There's a canal there now, but it wasn't built until, I believe, the 1860s.
05:04
So before that, there was just a road that things were carted across.
05:08
Sometimes even smaller ships were lifted up out of the sea, put onto rollers, rolled across that small strip of land, put back into the water, and they made it to go their own way.
05:18
So Corinth was a place where there was a lot of commerce.
05:20
There was a lot going on.
05:23
One commentary writer said that it was sort of like the San Francisco during the gold rush.
05:27
It was a place where a lot of people came with money, and a lot of things were happening.
05:31
So there was a lot going on commercially.
05:33
There was a large banking center there in Corinth.
05:36
There was just a lot of economy there, and a lot of economic growth.
05:43
And it was also a place where there was a lot of worship.
05:46
In the ancient world, the worship of multiple deities was rampant throughout the known world.
05:52
Poseidon, if you've ever heard that name, Poseidon is the god of the sea in ancient mythology.
05:59
And Poseidon had a cult in Corinth.
06:01
And you can imagine why, with so many seafarers being there in Corinth, there would be a desire to satisfy the god of the sea because they're going out on the sea so much.
06:13
Last week I misspoke.
06:16
You ever make a mistake? Happened to me.
06:19
I said that they worshiped Diana, the goddess of love, but I was actually misspoke.
06:26
Diana worship, also known as Artemis, was more in Ephesus, and that's where Paul's writing from.
06:34
In Corinth, it was Aphrodite.
06:37
There was actually a temple at the Acrocorinth, which was a very tall, monolithic stone that sort of rose up above the city and looked down on the city, and there was a temple that was built on top of that, and it was a temple to the goddess Aphrodite, who was also a goddess of lust and love and fertility, much like the goddess Istar, the goddess of fertility in the ancient world.
07:02
And so there was a lot that involved promiscuity in Corinth.
07:10
In fact, one ancient writer said that at one time in Corinth, there were upwards of a thousand temple prostitutes who worked the ministry of pleasure in the temple.
07:25
Now, modern scholars have said that's an inflated number, that the size of the temple and the size of the area probably didn't have a thousand.
07:35
It would have been more like a hundred.
07:37
But even still, to know that there was even one that was their job to satisfy the lusts of the worshippers is a powerful thought as to how worship was looked at in Corinth and how that activity was addressed in that area.
07:55
And as I noted, because of that, Corinthian became synonymous in the ancient world with ill repute or sexual misbehavior.
08:06
A Corinthian woman was another way to describe a woman who was a harlot.
08:13
So you can get an idea of sort of the context of where this church is, what it's dealing with, and the context of the community that surrounds it.
08:28
And I mention all this only because when you read 1 Corinthians, you're reading about a church with problems.
08:35
That's the title of the series, by the way.
08:38
This entire book is about a church with problems, and yet God placed a church in a city that is filled with lust and greed, and yet there's a church there, and God is working in that church.
08:54
God is active in this church.
08:58
It's easy to think that God would just throw up His hands and move on, but He doesn't.
09:03
He's working in this church.
09:07
Paul had planted the church, and then once he planted the church, and he was there for a long time, but once he left, God sent them another man.
09:15
And I don't know if you remember this man.
09:16
His name was Apollos.
09:19
Apollos was introduced to the truth by Priscilla and Aquila.
09:23
Apollos was preaching, but he didn't understand the full gospel, and when he was in Ephesus preaching the gospel, and Priscilla and Aquila heard him preaching, and they pulled him off to the side, and they said, listen, you need to understand this better.
09:34
So the Bible says they taught him the way of the truth more clearly.
09:39
And after that, he went off to Corinth and started preaching there.
09:44
And as a result, the church began to grow.
09:46
You remember that passage in 1 Corinthians where it says, Paul says, I planted, and who watered? Apollos.
09:55
But God brought the increase in that, so that's what's happened here.
09:59
You've got Paul has planted a church, and he worked that church, and then he left to work at Ephesus, and then here comes Apollos in a very, the Bible says he was mighty in the scriptures.
10:12
I don't know much about Apollos, but I imagine he was very charismatic and very powerful in his preaching.
10:20
And his preaching was used by God to persuade hearts, and to open minds, and to move people forward in their faith.
10:33
And so that little bit of history gives us a foundation for where we are today.
10:38
And understanding the background of Apollos will help us in a little while, because we're going to see that one of the problems that was going on in Corinth was the problem of disunity.
10:51
There was a feud that was going on within the body, and what was happening in that feud was some people were saying, hey, I am of Paul.
11:00
And other people were saying, but I am of Apollos.
11:05
Other people were saying, well, I am of Cephas.
11:09
And of course, you have the super spiritual people.
11:11
Well, I am of Jesus.
11:16
And this disunity is the focus of this seven verses.
11:21
And actually, to be honest with you, it's the focus of the next four chapters.
11:26
It's not just these few verses.
11:29
From chapter one all the way to chapter four, he's going to be dealing with disunity in the church.
11:33
So this is going to be our focus for the next several months as we go through these texts.
11:39
But today I want to deal with just the initial reference that he gives here in verse 10.
11:46
Because he's going to address the fact that cliques and sects have formed.
11:50
Each one is claiming for itself a spiritual figurehead.
11:54
But it all stems from the root of disunity.
12:02
So let's look at verse 10.
12:04
He says, I appeal to you brothers by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
12:12
Now, before we go any further, I want to just point this out.
12:16
Because this jumped out at me like it was just jumping off the page.
12:20
If you read verse one through verse nine of 1 Corinthians, you will see that the name Jesus Christ or our Lord Jesus Christ is used seven times in nine verses.
12:34
And here in verse 10, it's used again.
12:37
So one of the sort of foundational stones of studying the Bible is if you see something once, it's important.
12:45
If you see something twice, it's very important.
12:47
And if you see something repetitiously in a small area, that means it's focusing a point.
12:55
So what is the point that we're getting out of verses one through ten? We're seeing the name of Jesus Christ eight times.
13:02
Over and over, he says, Paul, call by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus.
13:08
To the church of God that is in Corinth, sanctified in Christ Jesus.
13:13
Call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
13:15
Grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
13:18
He goes over and over and over.
13:20
Why? He's stressing the Lordship of Christ.
13:25
He's stressing the fact that the unity that he's about to talk about, the unity that he's about to give them the command to be unified is found in Christ.
13:40
I'm going to talk about somebody this morning.
13:41
I didn't tell him I was going to talk about him, so it's a little unfair to him, but I'm going to do it anyway.
13:44
Mike is here.
13:45
Mike Collier.
13:49
And he and I have talked about this.
13:52
Outside of Christ, we would have very little in common.
14:00
He likes cars, and he's very active.
14:05
I like movies, and I'm very inactive.
14:13
But we have a very sweet bond in the Lord.
14:18
And almost every time we have a conversation, it will come to Christ.
14:23
That will be the focus of the conversation.
14:25
And because of that, some of the most precious fellowship in the world happens in those conversations.
14:32
We're not talking about the Jaguars.
14:34
Not that there's anything wrong with the Jaguars.
14:36
Well, we're not going to go into that.
14:39
The thing that brings us together is Christ.
14:44
And it's nice to have fellowship with like-minded friends that we talk about things that are sort of superfluous and don't matter.
14:51
But the fellowship that we have in here is around the Word.
14:55
It's around our Savior.
14:59
I wouldn't know most of you if it weren't for the gospel.
15:04
I wouldn't know most of you if it weren't for the church.
15:09
And I think that the reason Paul is stressing the name of Jesus Christ is because that's where unity finds its foothold.
15:18
That's where unity finds its foundation.
15:22
Because let me tell you something.
15:23
If the only thing that brings us together is our mutual likes, our interests, our enjoyment of the same sports, appreciation for the same political positions, whatever, we homeschool, we don't homeschool, whatever.
15:31
If that's what brings us together, that will eventually fade.
15:35
But if what binds us together is Christ, that will hold us.
15:44
Paul calls them in the name of Jesus Christ to something that's really difficult.
15:47
I want you again to read it with me.
15:48
He said, I appeal to you brothers by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that all of you agree.
15:58
Just let that sit in your mind for a minute.
16:02
He said, I call you by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that all of you agree that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and of the same judgment.
16:16
Beloved, as I read this and I thought about it, I thought, what an impossible appeal.
16:23
He said, what do you mean? I said, you know, in a group of any size, there's going to be, there's going to be disagreements.
16:30
In a group of any size, there's going to be, I see it my way and you see it your way.
16:37
So I had to think about this and I had to really pray about this.
16:40
I said, what is Paul saying here? You know, is Paul saying that every single thing that we think has to be in lockstep, that we have to have this perfect unity of thought, that even the way we dress and the way we think about that has to be the same? I don't believe so.
17:04
I believe that the unity that Paul is stressing here is a unity of faith that relies on the Lordship of Jesus Christ and rests in the essentials of the gospel.
17:21
Saint Augustine said this and it's been used several times, so you've probably heard it in different contexts, but Saint Augustine said in essentials we must have unity and in non-essentials we must have liberty and in all things we must have charity.
17:35
Now that's the old way of saying love.
17:41
And the only issue I've ever had with that quote, in essentials unity and non-essentials liberty and all things love, the only issue I've ever had with that quote is this, is what are the essentials? You know, we have to agree.
17:53
So when it comes to the essentials, there needs to be agreement.
17:57
Is it essential that we all believe in the Trinity? I would say yes.
18:00
Is it essential that we all affirm the full deity of Christ and the full humanity of Christ? Yes, I would say that's an essential part of being in fellowship with one another as Christians.
18:10
Is it essential that we believe in justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone? I would say yes, these are essentials.
18:17
This is what separates us from the Mormons or the Roman Catholics.
18:24
But I ask this question, is it essential that we all hold the same millennial position? I would say no.
18:34
Now I will say this, some churches think that that is essential.
18:38
Some churches believe that if you don't hold the right millennial position, you can't serve as an elder or a deacon.
18:47
And I don't believe that that's the extent that Paul has in his purview here.
18:51
Paul's concern for division and unity is based on one simple thing.
18:56
It is based on the people loving one another.
19:02
Loving one another and having a desire to build one another up, support one another and encourage one another, even in a difference.
19:16
Paul later in the book is going to talk about differences.
19:19
He's going to talk about the fact that some have differences that even led them to court.
19:23
And you know what he said? He said instead of going to court, you should have dealt with that in the church.
19:28
And he's going to talk about marriages and problems in marriages.
19:31
And he's going to talk about how God can bring solutions to those problems.
19:35
But what I'm saying is Paul is not giving some kind of pie in the sky idea of church life.
19:42
Oh, just everybody agree, never have a disagreement.
19:46
But what he is saying is that there are foundations upon which we have to build our unity.
19:53
The lordship of Jesus Christ and the essentials of the gospel is the foundation upon which we build our unity.
20:00
Some men thrive on disunity.
20:03
They thrive on finding ways to separate rather than come together.
20:07
And you know what the bible calls them? Factious men.
20:12
You can look it up in Titus chapter 3 and verse 10.
20:14
It says they stir up foolish controversies, dissensions and quarrels.
20:18
That's their whole life.
20:21
They desire division rather than unity.
20:24
They desire drama rather than peace.
20:26
They desire splits rather than coming together.
20:31
These factious men the bible says you are to put away.
20:40
And that's why Paul goes on in verse 11 to say that it's quarreling that is his real issue.
20:47
Look in verse 11 it says, For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarreling among you.
20:57
Now we don't know who Chloe is.
20:59
We assume based on context and what little bit we have here that she is a woman of some reputation.
21:08
Probably who lives in Corinth because she has people that are coming to Paul and telling him what's happening.
21:13
So she's probably a woman of wealth.
21:15
She probably has people that serve in her household.
21:18
And these people have come either as her servants or possibly as her family.
21:24
If it's just Chloe's people that can also refer to family.
21:26
And they've come to Paul and they've told him about this disagreement that's happening, this problem.
21:31
And here's the part that I love about this and I want to stress this.
21:38
Paul says, Chloe's people told me what's happening.
21:45
You say, well what does that matter? This is not idle gossip from somebody who told somebody who told somebody who told somebody in the church.
21:57
This is a person in the church who's willing to be named and willing to have the issue pinned to her name.
22:05
One of the worst things that happens in church is gossip.
22:08
And people come to me all the time and say, you know what I heard so and so said so and so.
22:18
You know my question always is, how do you know? Why didn't so and so come and tell me? What's the source of the information? You know I heard so and so was upset about X.
22:35
Well tell me who they are.
22:36
I can't tell you that.
22:37
That would offend them.
22:39
Well then I don't care.
22:41
If you don't tell me who it is, I don't care.
22:52
If we can't have a face to face conversation about what is bothering you.
22:57
If you're afraid of me, talk to Jack.
22:59
He's the sweetest man in the church.
23:02
Or Richard.
23:08
But honestly, I like the fact that Chloe's name is named here.
23:13
We don't know anything about her except this.
23:16
She was willing to put it out there.
23:18
You know who J.
23:19
Vernon McGee is? Walked through the Bible.
23:21
J.
23:22
Vernon McGee said this.
23:23
He said, one must admire Chloe in Corinth.
23:25
Chloe told it as it was.
23:27
Brought it out in the open and said, there's trouble in our church.
23:29
Bad trouble.
23:29
And it needs to be dealt with.
23:34
And the word quarreling here, by the way.
23:36
Just to mention this.
23:37
It says, it's been reported to me by Chloe's people that there's quarreling among you.
23:40
That word quarreling actually comes from another one of those goddess names.
23:46
The goddess Eris.
23:47
Which is the goddess of strife and wrangling.
23:50
The word is Erides.
23:51
And it literally means to cause strife, to cause rivalry.
23:55
Out of selfishness to express differences of opinion.
23:58
And with at least some measure of antagonism and hostility.
24:03
Paul is calling the people away from hostile division.
24:07
Quarreling.
24:08
Fighting.
24:10
He's calling them to deal with one another in love.
24:13
You know the greatest expression of the definition of love is found in the book of 1 Corinthians.
24:19
1 Corinthians chapter 13.
24:22
Love is patient and kind.
24:24
It doesn't envy or boast.
24:26
It doesn't seek its own.
24:27
It keeps no record of wrongs.
24:31
Paul is explaining that to the church.
24:33
Because that's where they're having their failure.
24:37
They're having trouble loving one another.
24:40
All they can see is one another's faults.
24:44
All they can see is one another's failings.
24:46
All they can see is you're not doing it the way I would do it.
24:56
Instead of dealing with love and patience.
25:05
They're dealing with one another in self-righteous pride.
25:12
You say pastor how do you know it's self-righteous pride? The bible doesn't use the word self-righteous pride here.
25:16
Verse 12 is my argument.
25:20
You say how do you know it's self-righteous pride? Read verse 12.
25:23
Because he says what I mean when I talk about quarreling.
25:27
What I mean is that each one of you says I follow Paul.
25:30
I follow Apollos.
25:32
I follow Cephas.
25:33
I follow Christ.
25:35
Notice that each group has found for itself some positional head to say that's my man.
25:43
And that's why I'm right.
25:46
See a lot of people think that this is a hero worship issue.
25:50
And I've heard people use this to preach against denominations.
25:53
And I've heard people use it to preach against big name preachers.
25:58
And yeah you could stretch the context out to address those things.
26:02
But really the issue is this.
26:04
Paul didn't start this group.
26:07
Apollos didn't start these groups.
26:10
These groups are associating themselves with him because of pride.
26:14
You know who Paul is? Paul started this church.
26:18
And I'm of Paul.
26:19
I've been here since the first brick was laid.
26:22
You know who Apollos is? Apollos made this church what it is today.
26:26
It was five people when he got here and now it's 500.
26:29
I was here when it was growing and I asked my man.
26:35
You know who Peter is? Peter walked with Jesus Christ.
26:39
He is our tie to our ancient ancestors the Jews.
26:43
How dare you question me? I'm of Peter.
26:45
And what about those who are of Jesus? You know one would say well that's the only good group.
26:57
They're aligning themselves with who they're supposed to align themselves with.
26:59
They're aligning themselves with Jesus.
27:00
You know the issue with that group is this.
27:02
Not that they align themselves with Jesus.
27:04
But that they by doing that were saying the others were outside of Christ.
27:09
I am of Christ and as a result you're not.
27:21
And as I said all these claims are fallacious.
27:23
Because all of these claims.
27:27
Paul is not leading these people.
27:30
Paul didn't form this faction.
27:33
He didn't form this sect.
27:36
He didn't start this clique.
27:37
In fact in the next few verses he says that.
27:43
He asked the question to stab their pride in the heart.
27:48
He asked the question.
27:49
Is Christ divided? You who are following Paul.
27:52
You who are following Apollos.
27:53
You who are following Cephas.
27:54
You who say you're following Christ.
27:56
Is Christ divided among you? Or were you baptized in my name? Or were you crucified in the name? Or was Paul crucified for you? This is a nice way of saying what are you nuts? Why in the world would you go under the banner of my name? And why for a second would you think that Christ is only associated with your sect in the church? Your division is showing your heart is not where it should be.
28:26
And you're holding on to the name of Christ as if you're the only one to have Christ.
28:37
Paul never wanted the church devoted to him.
28:45
In fact in verses 14 to 17.
28:47
Which I think is somewhat of an aside.
28:49
But it's an important aside.
28:51
Because of course it's in the scripture.
28:52
But verses 14 to 17 is simply Paul's way of saying.
28:57
Why would anybody associate themselves with my name? He says I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius.
29:06
And by the way this is an interesting part of scripture.
29:08
Because even though scripture is inspired by God.
29:11
And it's 100% accurate.
29:12
The men who are writing it were not omniscient.
29:15
So this is Paul explaining something he didn't even remember.
29:18
He says I baptized Crispus and Gaius and I baptized Stephanus.
29:23
And if there's anybody else out there who may want to claim me as having baptized you.
29:27
Just know I forgot about you.
29:29
I don't even remember having done it.
29:33
Because it's not about me.
29:36
And it's not about my name.
29:38
It's about the Lord Jesus Christ.
29:41
Christ didn't send me to baptize.
29:42
He sent me to preach the gospel.
29:44
He sent me to focus on him.
29:46
I saw a preacher the other day wearing a shirt.
29:48
I loved it.
29:50
It said preach the gospel die and be forgotten.
29:54
Preach the gospel die and be forgotten.
29:56
It's not about you.
30:03
Paul said preach the gospel not with words of eloquent wisdom.
30:06
Lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
30:08
I didn't come in my power.
30:09
I didn't come in my eloquence.
30:11
I didn't come with anything but Christ.
30:13
And Christ is what we built on.
30:15
Christ is what we've grown on.
30:17
Christ is the one who's brought the increase.
30:19
It's all about him.
30:20
And if there is to be unity in the church, it's got to be founded on Christ.
30:30
Beloved, this problem, it goes so much further than you realize.
30:35
And I just want to show you this very quickly.
30:37
We're not going to study this, but just look over two chapters.
30:42
Look at chapter 3.
30:46
And, of course, we'll be here in a few months.
30:48
But just to point to something.
30:51
He's talking about this in chapter 1, verses 10 to 17.
30:54
He's talking about this division, about Apollos and Paul and Cephas.
30:57
And then you go over to chapter 3.
30:59
He says, Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.
31:03
I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it.
31:07
And even now you're not ready, for you're still of the flesh.
31:10
For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in human way? For when one says, I follow Paul, and another says, I follow Apollos, are you not merely being human? See, this issue is so pervasive, this division is so pervasive, that it's actually the focus of the first few chapters of the book.
31:34
Because this isn't a small rift.
31:38
This is a family feud.
31:42
The church is killing itself by its division.
31:47
It's killing itself by its cliques.
31:50
It's killing itself by its sects.
31:53
And every one of those groups feels the sense of self-righteous pride, and an unwillingness to recognize their own need to repent, and their own need to come together.
32:10
Beloved, whether most people admit it or not, division in the church is destructive.
32:21
And Paul is writing as an appeal for unity.
32:27
This doesn't mean that every issue is going to be seen by every person the same way.
32:33
In fact, I want to say this, Paul is not calling us to be mindless robots.
32:41
In fact, later in the book, he's going to address Christian liberty, and the eating of meat, and how we ought to be concerned with one another.
32:49
And loving one another, but that we do have liberty in what we eat.
32:55
Only in extreme cults do we see places where people are punished for having variation in opinion.
33:05
But on issues that matter, on issues that found us, that drive us together, that bring us together in the faith, issues of faith, issues of morals, issues of truth, there should be no division among us.
33:20
There should be a foundation on Christ, and unity in the essentials.
33:28
And when there are disagreements among us over secondary issues, they are to be handled with grace and with patience, rather than taking sides and building cliques.
33:43
We ought to be taking ourselves to prayer and building up one another.
33:50
Far too many churches divide over things that do not matter.
33:55
Entire churches, and you think this is an exaggeration, it's not.
33:59
Entire churches have been divided over things as small as the color of the carpet, the placement of the pulpit, the clothing choice of the pastor, and the song selections of the worship leader.
34:13
Whether or not the banners are to hang vertically or horizontally.
34:21
The reason for the plethora of churches which are scattered around our city has very little to do with a desire for diversity.
34:27
It has much more to do with our inability to live together in unity without quarreling.
34:42
As a local body of Christ, there's very little we can do to heal the great divisions which exist in Christendom in a universal sense, but we can do what we can to heal the divisions that exist here.
34:55
The most important thing that we can do is settle in our mind that we want to listen to Paul's appeal for this unity and seek to be of one mind on the essentials.
35:04
For if we are of one mind on the essentials, we will learn to come together on the non-essentials.
35:14
But how are we to do this? I point you back to the Lordship of Christ.
35:17
If we are to have genuine unity, if we are truly to be of one mind, if we are truly to be unified in our judgments, if we are truly to be devoid of self-righteous pride, we must submit ourselves to the Lordship of Jesus Christ.
35:29
Anything which breaks down that unity that we have in Christ is not of God, and in self-righteous pride there is ultimately demonic foundations.
35:41
Things of which factious men enjoy, righteous men should stand.
35:55
In his commentary on this passage, I mentioned J.
35:57
Vernon McGee earlier, and I actually purchased his commentary for this series.
36:05
It's certainly not a technical commentary as you might find with some that deal with the Greek and things like that.
36:12
J.
36:13
Vernon McGee was very pastoral in his preaching, very practical.
36:22
But I read in his commentary a poem on this passage, and I want to read it to you.
36:28
Now, I admit from the outset, this is not fancy Greek poetry or anything like that.
36:42
This is an old Kentucky ditty, as it were.
36:50
How many of you have ever heard of the Martins and the Coys? Not the Hatfields and the McCoys.
36:55
I've been dealing with that all week, because every time I ask someone, they'll say, no, it's the Hatfields and the McCoys.
37:00
No, the Martins and the Coys.
37:03
Well, this is the ballad of the Martins and the Coys.
37:10
Oh, the Martins and the Coys, they was reckless mountain boys, and they took up family feuding when they'd meet.
37:16
They would shoot each other quicker than it took the eye to flicker.
37:19
They could knock a squirrel's eye out at 90 feet.
37:23
Oh, the Martins and the Coys, they was reckless mountain boys, but old Abel Martin was the next to go.
37:28
Though he saw the Coys a-coming, he had hardly started running, for a volley shook the hills and laid him low.
37:35
After that, they fought in earnest, and they scarred the mountains up with shot and shell.
37:42
There were uncles, brothers, cousins.
37:45
They say they bumped them off by the dozens.
37:49
Just how many bit the dust is hard to tell.
37:53
Oh, the Martins and the Coys, they was reckless mountain boys.
37:56
At the art of killing, they became quite deft.
38:00
They all know they shouldn't do it, but before they hardly knew it, on each side, they only had one person left.
38:11
Now, again, that may sound kind of corny and a little backwoods, but it unfortunately describes a lot of the feuding and fussing that goes on inside the local church.
38:21
It's what Corinth was dealing with and what a lot of churches deal with today, sometimes even our own.
38:30
My prayer is that we, as the body of Christ, would lay down our arms against one another, learn to love one another, and look to the unity that we share in the Lord Jesus Christ.
38:45
And when there comes a point of contention, which will at times happen, may we handle it in ways that build up rather than tear down.
38:57
Lay down our arms and then wrap our arms around one another for the sake of our Lord and his name.
39:11
Let's pray.
39:14
Father, I thank you for your word.
39:17
Thank you for what your word has to tell us.
39:20
Your word tells us that in Christ, we find our unity.
39:26
And I pray that that foundation of unity would stand.
39:31
And I pray, Lord, that when there is division among us, that we would seek to heal it with love and encouragement rather than the building up of cliques and the separation of factions.
39:49
Lord, may we find the precious unity which will draw us together to love one another.
39:57
Your word tells us, Father, that the way the world will know us is not by our fancy cathedrals, not by our great ability to work miracles or to do mighty things, but the world will know us by our love for one another.
40:18
Oh, to our shame, how much that has been untrue.
40:25
Lord, may we repent and love one another.
40:32
In Christ's name, Amen.
40:36
Let's stand together and sing.