WWUTT 1416 Not With Words of Eloquent Wisdom (1 Corinthians 1:14-17)

The Apostle Paul was not trying to start his own cult. He was not out there preaching to a group of people, trying to unite folks to him, and saying, hey, this is the church of Paul. He did all things to the glory of Christ, and so the church must be when we understand the text.

You're listening to When We Understand the Text, an online Bible ministry so that we may know all the riches freely given to us by God. For questions and comments, send us an email to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com.

Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. We come back to our study in 1 Corinthians 1. I'm going to begin reading in verse 10, and we'll read through verse 19. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth.

Now I exhort you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.

For I have been informed concerning you, my brothers, by Chloe's people, that there are quarrels among you. Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ.

Has Christ been 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 would say that you were baptized in my name.

Now I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any other. For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel, not in wisdom of word, so that the cross of Christ will not be made empty.

Division in the Corinthian Church

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

So picking up where we left off last week, that would put me in verse 14 with Paul saying, I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one would say that you were baptized in my name.

Remember the argument that Paul is making here, or the issue that he is confronting. There's division that has come about in this church as a result of certain quarrels. And the first quarrel that he confronts is this.

He says, I mean this, that each one of you is saying, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ. So there's groups of people who are saying that they are better believers because they follow Paul.

Paul writes such weighty, heavy things in his letters. Or those that will say, we're a better group of Christians because I follow Apollos. Another saying, I follow Peter. Apollos is a better speaker.

Well, Peter was right there with Jesus. And then one who says, I follow Christ. So you see this kind of like this ascension going on. Paul calls himself the least of the apostles later on in chapter 15.

Apollos was favored among the Greeks because of his oration, his speaking ability. Cephas was actually an apostle who was with Jesus, and then you get to Christ himself. So there's some groups that are saying, well, we're better than all of you because we bypass all these other teachers and secondary sources, and we go straight to the source.

We are followers of Christ, but using that name in vain because they use it to puff themselves up or to win an argument, rather to give glory to that name and humbling themselves before Christ and before other believers.

So Paul says, has Christ been divided? And that response, that question there, goes right away to the ones who are puffing themselves up by saying, well, I follow Christ. Really? Are you sure about that?

It's not like Paul is saying to them, I'm not really even convinced that you're truly Christians, but he is saying to them, you claim to be a follower of Christ. Does your behavior reflect that? Why are you so divided from one another?

Paul was not in competition with Apollos. Apollos was not in competition with Peter. And Jesus himself is not divided. Have you ever considered the theological significance of the fact that Jesus' bones were not broken?

Though he died such a gruesome death by being beaten, by having to carry his cross, and then by being crucified, physically he went through more than you and I could even survive. It shows that Jesus fulfilled what he said to the Pharisees, that he had the authority to lay his own life down and to take it back up again.

He gave his life. He is the one who decided at what point he was going to breathe his last and commit his spirit to the Father. This was all in submission to the Father's will, but Jesus had authority to lay down his own life and take it back up again.

And yet, despite the severity, the violence by which he died, his bones were not broken. And this was in fulfillment of what is said in the Psalms. Psalm 3420, he keeps all his bones. Not one of them is broken.

You had the thieves on the crosses next to Jesus whose legs were broken to speed up their death. But Jesus had already yielded up his spirit to the Father, and so his legs were not broken. His body, when it was taken off the cross, when it was wrapped, when it was placed in a tomb, when he rose again, it was a whole body.

He was not missing any part of himself. No arms or legs, certainly no fingers or toes. Not even any of his bones were broken. He spilled his blood as a fulfillment of the giving of life that is talked about in the sacrificial system in the Old Testament.

There is life in the blood. So Jesus shed his blood to give his life for us, but there was no part of his body that was separated from him. So just as Christ's physical body is a whole body and is not divided, so his spiritual body, the church, is supposed to be that way.

We are a whole body. We are not to be divided from one another. By the way, this is another problem with the Catholic Mass. There are a number of problems with the Mass, namely because it is the re-sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

The Roman 6 .9 says that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. But when the Catholics partake in the Mass, they are re-sacrificing Jesus Christ, misunderstanding what's being said in John 6, where Jesus says, John 6 .53, Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. The Catholic Church has taken that statement, and has taken it very literally, that you literally have to eat Jesus' flesh and literally drink his blood in order to have eternal life.

So the Catholic Church claims to have the true communion, for it is the priest in the church that prays for the Eucharist, that it would be transformed into the literal flesh of Jesus Christ. This is the doctrine that we refer to as transubstantiation.

So it transforms into Jesus' actual flesh, and the cup transforms into his actual blood. Now this is mystic mumbo-jumbo. Of course, it's not real at all. And Jesus was not being that literal. He was being spiritual when he was talking about this in John 6.

He's talking about being filled with Christ, not literally eating his flesh. To eat his flesh would be to divide the body of Christ. So there's another reason, theologically, that the Catholic Mass is an error.

Because Paul is saying here in 1 Corinthians 1, Christ is not divided, so the church is not to be divided. But what you have in the Catholic Mass, the practice of that is a divided body of Christ. We're continuing to break up his flesh and eat it and consume it, as though Christ has to continually be sacrificed for our sins.

He does not. The Scripture says he does not. He is sacrificed once for all. That's straight out of Hebrews 10. We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. There is not this continual sacrifice.

That is dividing the body of Christ. Literally, according to the doctrine of the Catholics, according to the doctrine of transubstantiation, it's literally dividing the body of Christ. And so it will spiritually divide the body of Christ as well.

Roman Catholicism is not the true church. So we are not to be divided. We are to be united in Christ. When we know the Christ of the Bible, when we know his true word and his true doctrine, as stated in the pages of Scripture, then we are united to one another.

But if we leave that doctrine, if we pursue our own doctrines, our own teachings, or anything that's contrary to the doctrine of Christ, then we're divided. Consider 1 Timothy 6, verse 3. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing.

He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth.

That's going on right now with the whole race-baiting arguments that are being made in the church. Critical race theory and intersectionality, these cultural Marxist theories, philosophies that churches are adopting and attempting to implement.

And as I mentioned to you last week, it doesn't mean that there's pastors out there reading on critical race theory and saying, oh, this is great, I'm going to do this in the church. They're listening to other people who have been influenced by these philosophies and fully embrace the spirit of these philosophies, the central tenet of these philosophies.

And again, it's not like these guys are going and grabbing textbooks and saying, hey, this is critical race theory, it's great, we're going to start doing that here. It's the influence of the spirit of the age.

And these men and women are lacking discernment and they're grabbing onto these worldly things that are going on, convinced that they're right. I mean, they think they're doing a good thing. I'm not saying these people's hearts are full of maliciousness and so they're coming in the church, ha-ha, we're going to divide everybody up now.

They just lack the discernment, the understanding to recognize that these things are demonic, they are not of God. Anything that is contrary to the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness.

Anybody who comes in with that kind of teaching is puffed up with conceit. They may think that they're doing it for the benefit of somebody else, but it's not, for it's not to the glory of God, it is to the glory of man.

And therefore it divides, it breaks up, it causes divisions. We're seeing divisions as a result of critical race theory into churches literally being divided up into like blacks over here, Hispanics over here, whites over here, Asians over here, Native Americans over here.

And by the way, the whites, they need to apologize to everybody. All of you are wrong. Everybody who's white is wrong. You need to feel guilty and ashamed for the fact that you're white. Oh, and by the way, only white people are racist, nobody else is racist.

That's part of this whole thing too. Which, by the way, that's racist. If this group of people is evil just based on their skin color, but nobody else of any other color can be guilty of that sin, that's racist.

That's a racist attribution. That you're saying only this group of people can be evil, but these other groups of people cannot be. And I just want to know, you know, at what point does your skin enter a certain shade of melanin that you would no longer be guilty of this sin?

You know, if I just go out and tan, am I not a racist anymore? Of course, I understand how all this works. I'm just being facetious, trying to show how ridiculous the argument is. But this is the racism that is coming into our churches, and it is infecting evangelicalism by storm.

I've never seen a movement move as fast as the stuff that critical race theory and intersectionality is doing in our churches right now. There is a prayer book that you can go and buy at Walmart and at Target.

I don't know for sure that it's at Walmart, but I know you can pick it up at Target. This book is entitled A Rhythm of Prayer. It was written by Sarah Bessie. Now, Sarah Bessie is a heretic. I've had run-ins with her in the past.

She does not like me very much. But anyway, she wrote this book that features prayer contributions from various other authors. One of those authors is Chaniqua Walker-Barnes, who is a professor at Mercer University in Georgia.

And this is the prayer that Walker-Barnes contributed for this book. She says, Dear God, please help me to hate white people, or at least want to hate them. At least I want to stop caring about them individually and collectively.

I want to stop caring about their misguided racist souls, to stop believing that they can be better, that they can stop being racist. This is a popular, best-selling book on prayer. And one of the prayers in this book is, Dear God, please help me to hate fellow image-bearers of God.

Even my own brothers and sisters in the Lord, or who should be my brothers and sisters in the Lord. Do you see how these worldly philosophies, these worldly concepts, break up and divide people? Paul is going to be confronting some other sources, some other things that divide the church later on in this letter.

But in the meantime, here's how he starts. So that we may understand that Christ is not divided, therefore we should not be divided from one another. Was Paul crucified for you, he says? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius. And we've seen these names come up before. I believe I've mentioned these, even when we were closing out our study in Romans. Crispus was the leader of the synagogue in Corinth.

So we mentioned that and I kind of flash back to the story of Paul sharing the gospel there in Corinth in Acts chapter 18. So Crispus was the leader of the synagogue. He was converted through Paul's preaching.

Gaius is likely the same Gaius mentioned in Romans 16 .23. So remember that Paul was writing his letter to the Romans from Corinth at the time that he was writing to them. And it says Gaius who is host to me and to the whole church greets you.

So it could be that the church in Corinth was gathering there in Gaius' home. So regarding those names, Paul says that he baptized Crispus and Gaius. I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one would say you were baptized in my name.

Now I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any other. Now some have said Stephanas was the Philippian jailer because we do have that story in the book of Acts where Paul baptizes him and his household.

And so therefore, since this is a record of Paul having baptized someone and he says I do not know if I baptized any other, we can conclude that Stephanas was the Philippian jailer. I don't really think that's the point that Paul is making here.

I think Stephanas was somebody else that lived in Corinth because Paul is just naming those who in Corinth he baptized. He mentioned Crispus and Gaius and Stephanas, and we don't know the identity of Stephanas.

We don't know who that is. I find it highly unlikely that it was the Philippian jailer. I think Paul baptized many people, but in Corinth, he mentions only Crispus and Gaius and Stephanas. And he says beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any other.

So if he did baptize any other Corinthians, it would have been at another location. It certainly wasn't in Corinth. So where Paul says in verse 17, for Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel, not in wisdom of words, so that the cross of Christ will not be made empty.

Now, this is not Paul downplaying baptism, and it's not in any way him saying that you don't need to be baptized. You do need to be baptized. It's a command of Christ. So therefore, to show that you are buried with Christ and risen with him to new life, you should be baptized.

It is the command of our Lord to baptize and to be baptized. What Paul is saying here is that he was not trying to start a cult. He does not have some sort of faction of the church or some sort of group that he's trying to raise up for himself, baptized into his name.

Hence all of his references to this. I didn't baptize any of you, except Crispus or Gaius, so that no one could say you were baptized in my name. He's not starting his own group of people here. The baptism that John the Baptist was doing and his disciples were doing and the baptism that Jesus' disciples were doing, those weren't different baptisms.

No one was divided. Jesus, by the way, never baptized anybody, not with water, for he baptized with the Holy Spirit. That's mentioned in John chapter 4. Well, John the Baptist says, I baptize with water, he'll baptize you with fire and the Holy Spirit.

And then in John 4, it mentions Jesus did not baptize, but his disciples baptized. And they were not doing some different baptism than John the Baptist, for they were not divided from one another. You have that occasion in Mark chapter 9, verse 38, where John the apostle said to Jesus, Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him because he was not following us.

But Jesus said, Do not stop him. For no one who does a mighty work in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. For the one who is not against us is for us. For truly I say to you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you belong to Christ will by no means lose his reward.

So we're talking here about unity that we have in Christ. And just because one group would be over here and one would be over there does not mean that this is a divided body. Paul was not trying to start some sort of a cult.

He was not baptizing anyone into his name. He was baptizing in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit as the Great Commission commissions us, as Jesus instructed in Matthew chapter 28.

So Paul again saying, Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel, not in wisdom of word, not in eloquence, not so that you would be amazed at my speaking ability or my oratory skills, so that the cross of Christ would not be made empty.

It's not about being persuasive with my words. It's the power of the Holy Spirit in you that you would turn from worldliness, idolatry, sin, and turn to Jesus Christ and believe. This is the power of God for salvation to all who believe.

And then consider here where we will pick up tomorrow. 1 Corinthians 1 .18. I got through even more verses today than I've done so far, right? 1 Corinthians 1 .18 for the word of the cross. So again, Paul is saying this isn't about the power of my words.

It's about the power of the word of the cross. The word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, the word of the cross is the power of God. And we'll pick that up tomorrow in 1 Corinthians 1 .18.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for drawing us to yourself through faith in Jesus Christ. And may we be united. We know according to what Scripture says to us that unity has been purchased by Christ by his death on the cross.

So let us not think that we need to strive or labor for some unity that we've not yet been able to accomplish. Christ accomplished it. May we grow in this unity that we all have. Those who are in Christ are united to God and to one another.

May we grow in this more and more with our churches, with our families, with our friends, our brothers and sisters in the Lord. We're drawing closer to one another as we draw closer to Christ. And may we show the world that we are Christians by our love.

May it not be about the most persuasive arguments. May it not be about these worldly philosophies that we latch onto so that we might look good or impressive to the world. But may we be pleasing unto the Lord according to what your word says.

And it is by your word that we are sanctified, growing in Christ Jesus with one another in this faith in which we stand. It is by the name of Christ that we pray, in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thank you for listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website www .wutt .com and click on the Give tab in the top right corner of the page.

Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study when we understand the text.