1 Corinthians 1 03-22-10

No Compromise Radio Thanks for tuning in to No Compromise Radio with pastor and author,

Dr. Mike Ebendroff. Today on No Compromise Radio, we'll be hearing Pastor Mike open the

Word of God in a recent message he preached at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

Now let's join Pastor Mike in progress as he preaches through the scriptures, verse by verse with no compromise.

If you have your Bibles, please turn to 1 Corinthians. We're going verse by verse through 1

Corinthians. I think this is week 8 or 9 or something like that. Some introductory comments. I have good news this morning and bad news as you're turning to 1

Corinthians. The church, Bethlehem Bible Church, this church is 97 % unified.

That's the bad news. Because the Lord wants this church to be unified as much as His bride is unified, and that is 100%, true?

The bad news is we're not completely unified. The good news is God isn't finished with Bethlehem Bible Church yet.

Did you know that? And what God does is He takes His Word, this inerrant, infallible, authoritative, sufficient

Word, and as it's preached through a frail, a feeble preacher,

He begins to conform our minds, our ambitions, our thoughts, our ideas, our ideologies, so that we become people who think less naturally and more supernaturally.

That is to say, God uses preaching not only to save people, and you probably can remember back to the day where you first heard the gospel or the day that God the

Spirit opened your mind through preaching. Supernatural event. God opens people's hearts through preaching.

Yet preaching does something else. It sanctifies Christians. It makes them think more like God. It makes them to have their minds renewed as Romans chapter 12 verse 2 would talk about.

So we come to the passage today and chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4, Paul deals with a church that's not close to 95 % unified, not 97 % unified.

They are fractured, they are divisive, and they are literally falling apart at the seams.

And this is a church where Paul had been. Basically it was Pastor Paul. He was the apostle, yes, and he began to preach to them.

He loved on them, as we would say, for 18 months. And Paul can teach a lot of doctrine.

Paul can teach a lot of Bible in 18 months. And he certainly poured out his heart and taught them.

People got saved under his ministry, sanctified, and now he gets a note, he gets a report, and there's all kinds of trouble.

So how do we look at the big picture of 1 Corinthians? How many chapters are there? 16. And the first four chapters deal with, excuse me, the first six chapters deal with four problems.

They've got a problem of disunity. That's where we're camped now. They've got problems. The church is not disciplining itself.

There's no purity in the church. Matter of fact, the third problem is people are suing each other, suing other

Christians in pagan law courts. And there's also sexual immorality running rampant.

And Paul hears about this and he deals with those. And then in the rest of the book, chapter 7 all the way through chapter 16,

Paul asks and answers a variety of questions. I've heard you've got a question regarding this topic.

Let me answer you the question. And so I find this book fast -paced.

I find this book exciting. This book is more exciting than one of my most exciting things to do in my life.

There are other things, but for sake of argument, I love it when I'm on my bicycle, my pedal bicycle, my road bike, and I'm going down a hill, have my helmet on and all the accoutrements, and I'm going down the hill, and about the fastest

I like to go is about 45 miles an hour. And it seems like it's a video game. And there's nothing between you and the pavement except Lycra.

And it's just moving fast. And you can just see things come up, one thing after another, and you're trying to listen, you're trying to see.

First Corinthians is almost like that, where it's one topic and the next and the next, no room for, oh, this kind of doesn't pertain to me, this isn't very practical,

I don't get it, what's the big deal, it is fast paced, it is energetic, it is driven by the spirit of God, and if you're a

Christian, it will change your life. I think we'll have a completely different church in three years when we finish.

Okay, five, whenever. When we finish, we will think differently. And isn't that true for Christians?

We come with all this baggage of the way we think, we think like the world thinks, we think like unbelievers think, and the more we progress in Christianity, the more we think like Christ.

And so Christ -like thinking in chapters one, two, three, and four is this, don't think like the pagans do, so you have some kind of party atmosphere in the church, where I like Ike, and I like Truman, and I like Pastor Dave, and I like all these different people, no we have to be unified because Christ is unified.

So let's look at chapter one, verses 10 through 16 today, I think we can get through that, and we will deal with this issue.

What does Paul do when he hears there's a problem in Corinth when it comes to a divisive factious church?

I'll say again that I don't think you're divisive and factious, maybe some of you are, but as a whole we are not, and so I'm not preaching this to you because I'm here to scold you or because I'm here to lecture you,

I'm here to preach this to you because it's in the word and God will use this to make us more unified.

And when we see this going on in Corinth, we don't want this to happen at Bethlehem Bible Church, so it's a challenge to preach because this doesn't necessarily all apply to us, although it is all relevant for us and good for us to understand the mind of God and just how important unity is.

It's more important than anything else in this book, by the way of numbers when it comes to chapters, chapter 1, 2, 3, and 4, all about unity, more important seemingly by the weight of passages, the number of passages than any other topic.

And so we come to this response of Paul, he hears about things and let's go to chapter 1, verse 10.

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

I've been informed concerning you, my brethren, 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, I am of Apollos, and I am of Cephas, and I am of Christ.

Has Christ been divided? Paul was not crucified for you, was he?

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 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.

Pray with me, bow with me, and we will pray and ask God's blessing on the message today. Father in heaven,

I pray that you would take the text, take your holy scriptures, and do a great work in our hearts.

Father, would you help our church to be strong, to be unified, to be able to do things outside of these walls so that we might see your blessings.

And Lord, we know that when we come to your word and your spirit applies it to our lives, things happen in wonderful ways.

I pray for unbelievers who are here today, that you would quicken their hearts and minds, they would see biblical truth, they'd believe in the risen

Savior Jesus Christ, they'd acknowledge their sinfulness. And Lord, for us as Christians, as we come to this passage, help us to block out all kinds of other issues and help us to see what you, the

God of the universe, thinks. And that we could just go behind the scenes to peer into your mind is an awesome thing.

So help the preacher, help the congregation, that we both might glorify you. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Now, as has been said the last two weeks, if I got a report that you were fractured and I was out of town,

I don't know if I would write the same kind of letter. I think I might want to scold, I might want to say, how could you?

How dare you? After all this work? But what does Paul do in this section? He appeals.

It's a brotherly kind of appeal. It's not of an iron fist, it's of a comforting friend.

And so do you see the tenor of the whole passage here when he says in verse 10, I exhort you or I appeal to you.

He is appealing to them like a friend, like a gentle mother, as he says in 1

Thessalonians chapter 2, gentle among you. He was affectionate, he was kind.

And so the whole sermon today is going to be wrapped around that idea. I'm going to give you five appeals for unity to be carried out here at Bethlehem Bible Church.

Five appeals to unity, not commands, not imperatives, but appeals. And you see how he connects this with the previous verse.

He says now, it's connected to the verse before that in verse 9, God is faithful through whom you were called into fellowship with his son,

Jesus Christ our Lord. And if we've all been put together with his son in a unique fellowship with Jesus the

Lord, then we shouldn't be fractured, we shouldn't be splintered. That's the idea. And so let me give you these five appeals to unity, some in review.

The first appeal to unity is that you ought to agree, since we're a family, unity is essential.

You see that in verse 10, now I exhort you, brethren. Now I exhort you, brethren.

You've been given the mind of Christ. You've been informed. You understand things biblically.

And as a parent would want to have the child, and the children, and the wife, and the dad all on the same page,

Paul says, we're brethren. He could say, I'm an apostle. The spirit demands it, but he appeals to them and says, we're family.

We are family. The second appeal to unity we saw two weeks ago is found also in verse 10.

I appeal for unity because we're all slaves of Christ Jesus the Lord. We serve another master.

Do you see that in the text? By the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the

Lord and he has accomplished salvation and we are under him. He is the Lord. We aren't lords. The pastor's not the

Lord. The elders aren't the Lord. Paul wasn't the Lord. And when you look at chapter 1, 1 through 10, Lord is found everywhere.

This is not a surname of Jesus. This is not necessarily a vacuous, empty title. Do you see it in verse 2,

Lord Jesus? Verse 3, Lord Jesus. Verse 7, Lord Jesus.

Verse 8, Lord Jesus. Verse 9, our Lord. I exhort you by the Lord, the master, the boss, the one who reigns over, and the risen savior.

We're all slaves of the Lord. We're all members of that Lord's church.

Appeal to unity, number 3, also found in verse 10. We all have the same doctrine, so why wouldn't we be unified?

They had it back then. We have it now. Take a look at verse 10. That you all agree, there be no divisions among you, but you may be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.

In other words, Paul said, I taught you for 18 months about doctrine, and you all believe that.

And if you all believe the same things about God, shouldn't that keep you together? Oh, if you believe different things, you'll be on different pages.

If we have 18 people here at the church, and they say, I don't believe that the scriptures are the word of God, and we have 300 people over here that say,

I do, there's going to be a problem. But we are united by statement of faith, elder board, deacon board, down to nursery workers.

We believe this is God's word, and we are under the word of God. It should unify us to speak the same thing.

Let me give you an example. When the elders get together, we don't always agree on every little detail.

And so we have four elders, and even when Lewis was there, we didn't agree on every little detail. We're different people, different backgrounds.

And so we work on things, we realize the mind of God is one, and so we want to move towards that.

And then after we work it all out, then what do we do? We all walk out of the elder room, and we speak the same thing.

There may be differences, we may come at things differently, but we speak the same things. And so the elder board speaks the same thing, we speak the same thing as a church.

You've all said, if you're a member of this church, in your membership application, there's a question. Do you agree?

Have you read, and do you agree with the doctrinal statement? Do you agree with it?

If not, do you agree to not make it an issue? We, on the fundamentals of Christianity, speak the same thing, about the same thing.

We have one voice. Number four, the fourth appeal to unity is, remember that divisions in Christ's bride are always sinful.

He says that in verse 10, that there be no divisions among you. No divisions among you.

Remember last week, I tried to create a scenario where you would all be saying this, uh -huh,

I agree, I agree, I agree, and then comes the wrecking ball. That was my thought process last week.

We talked about things that God hates. We all said, oh, God hates idolatry. God hates offering babies to Molech in the hot fire.

God hates homosexuality. God hates a variety of these things. And then we worked our way up to Proverbs chapter 6, and at the top of the list,

God says, out of all these things I hate in Proverbs 6, what do I hate the most? The text says, one who spreads strife among brothers.

Causing divisions isn't to be commended, it is to be condemned. God does not like that in his pure bride.

So one of the things I thought about this week was, we don't have a lot of people who run around and subtly try to craft words to get people to think wrongly about the church.

But we do have some on occasion, and we're all tempted to do things that we used to do. So let me just give you a quick little interlude here, and here's the interlude.

I'm talking to the 95 % of the people now who would say to themselves, I want to be strong,

I want to be unified. If God hates strife and disunity, what does God love? He loves unity.

I want to promote peace. I want to promote unity. I want to be a Roman 16 person, remember last week, who scopes out people who walk around and they're not saying openly, factiously, let's have a revolt down with Abendroth.

Let's get rid of the guy. At least I haven't heard it, but maybe... You know, when

I first got here, the church thought, we've seen pastors come and we've seen pastors go.

He'll be the next to go, right? If you like me, you wanted me to stay, but if you didn't like me, you think, you know, he's only got a few years to go.

And 13 years later, here I stand, much less hair, grayer, no correlation.

Maybe there is a correlation. But I want you to be on guard so when someone comes to you and they would say,

Jesus didn't die on the cross, you'd go, alert, right? That's not true. But people have a certain way to ask a question to put kind of a doubt in your mind.

And what they're trying to do is they're trying to have... They're probably not courageous enough to go to the leadership, to go to the elders, and they're trying to find a quorum.

They're trying to find a group. They're trying to get somebody else to think the way they do or maybe run with their ideas.

So I want to make sure you're aware of kind of a subtle thing that could creep into anyone's heart.

And if you hear this, you would maybe know, here's the way to go about dealing with it. Because divisiveness, friends, is not always overt.

So you, the unified ones, when you hear things like this, you may say to yourself, is this some kind of whispering messenger of Satan who's subtly trying to make me think ill about the church?

And the way you get someone to think ill about the church is to get them to think ill about the leadership.

And I want to just tell you some of those things that I've heard over the years that if you hear, here's what I'd like you to do,

I appeal to you. If the person says these things to you, why don't you just say,

I appeal to you and I'll hold you accountable to go to the leadership of the church, to talk to them, to ask them, why are you talking to me about this?

You want not to be talking about the leadership this way. You want to go to them. And so since you wanted to bring it up to me, certainly you're not trying to sin.

And so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. I'll give you one week to go talk to leadership. And if you don't talk to them, then

I'll tell them you've got a problem with them. Wouldn't that deal with so much? Wouldn't that deal with so many things?

I don't think we're like Corinth where there's this factious quarreling. I think we're like any other church who's learning and growing and we've got lots of folks and exciting things that happen.

But once in a while, there's somebody who kind of shoots in, they don't like something, and they say something I think you ought to say to those folks.

Well, then I want you to go talk to the leadership. I've heard people say to other people things like this, do you think the elders...do

you think the pastors should get raises this year? And what are they doing? Maybe they're innocent, but more likely they're saying things like this,

I don't agree that the pastors got raises. Do you disagree? Because if you disagree, now there's a couple of us.

And off we go. By the way, if the pastors get raises this year, should you be happy or bugged?

If you got a raise this year and you went home to your wife, what would you say? I'm so mad today I got a raise.

No, you'd be happy. It's hard, I know, because we think as congregants we're paying the pastor's salary.

And by the way, I would never talk this way 13 years ago, but now I've been the pastor 13 years and I love you. You guys pay me well.

But if you say, well, we don't like these raise -giving things, do you? Friends, I don't know how you can say that's helping promote the unity of the local church.

I don't really like elder rule, do you? And you can see it's this kind of fishing thing.

I don't really like it when Kim spends all summer in California, do you? I don't really like it that Mike has five weeks off for vacation every summer, do you?

I don't really like it Pastor Dave seems to teach a little bit different eschatology than Pastor Mike.

What do you think of that? See how subtle it is? And I don't think this is some huge problem.

You know, I think Mike talks about the doctrines of grace a little too much. What do you think? You all laugh,

I guess you all think I do. I think you should say things like this when people ask questions.

And again, it might be immaturity or it could be outright divisiveness. Either way, it is your privilege.

It is your duty to say, I want to strive to take the what? The high road. God loves unity and God doesn't like it when we kind of fish and talk this way.

If you like to talk that way, then I don't want you to do that anymore. I don't appeal to you. I command you, you need to strive for the unity of the body.

I don't think I like it when pastors take sabbaticals, do you? And you see how that kind of works and you say,

Mike, that's self -serving. Well, I don't think it's that self -serving because I love you.

I'm your pastor and I want you to say things rightly. And when you say things, make sure you realize you're not going to try to gather people around you who somehow think in less than a biblical way.

Remember, friends, submission is going along with someone even when you disagree.

Yes? You don't have to agree with every minutia of the elder board. And matter of fact,

Kim and I, we don't agree on everything in life, but she has to submit and she goes along with even though she disagrees.

That's submission. Somebody comes to you and says, you know, as a matter of prayer, I need to tell you about brother so -and -so at the church and the elders aren't telling anybody about it, but you need to know so you can pray about it.

We just ought to say, well, certainly, you're not trying to sin. Give them a benefit of the doubt.

Maybe they are trying to sin. But I think I'm going to hold you accountable to go to the leadership of this church. Divisions are always sinful.

Well, again, I don't think this is a huge problem, but I think it's in all of our hearts to maybe do it. And when we hear, the 97 % of you that hear those things, you just need to say, oh, you must not be saying these things.

Let's go talk to the elder board and then we will deal with it. Number five, appeal number five.

Christians should never follow men ultimately. Christians should never follow men ultimately, and that we are going to see in verses 11 through 16.

You ought never to follow Mike, Dave, Paul, MacArthur, Piper, the list goes on and on.

Let's take a look at the text. Fascinating. Watch this. Verse 11, for I have been informed concerning you, my brethren.

See, there it is again. My brethren, my friends, my comrades, I've been informed.

This is not hearsay. This isn't gossip. This is an established fact. Paul's not saying why.

I've just kind of overheard through the grapevine, through the prayer line, through the gossip line. I haven't...not all prayer lines are gossip lines, but sometimes they turn into that.

I've heard this. I've been informed. I've received this report, my brethren, by Chloe's people.

There are quarrels among you. In the original language, this report is used for legal, official, documented things.

This is a...basically, I just got a legal document from Chloe's people, and you're fighting. Why are you fighting?

Why are you quarreling? Now, people kill thousands of trees trying to figure out who Chloe is, who's

Chloe's people. Most people think she was a wealthy slave who got saved and freed, and then she had slaves.

She had interests at Corinth and Ephesus. We don't necessarily know who Chloe is, but do you think the church at Corinth knew?

They knew. Only mention here, those of chlori...chlori,

that's where we get the Greek word chlorine. See how easy that is? He says,

I hear there are sinful, strife, quarreling, contentions among you. It's a documented fact.

This isn't hearsay. I know that they're there. I've heard about these wrangling, hot -tempered things.

When you think of that word strife or dissension or quarrel in the text there, in the New American Standard, it means something hot, heated.

Have you ever seen an argument that's gotten over the top, and you call it what? Man, they really got heated.

That's the kind of idea here. This isn't some kind of minor disagreement. This is emotional flames running high.

And by the way, this is the kind of quarrel that makes the church vulnerable to outside attacks.

I don't mind the outside attacks at Bethlehem Bible Church because we're bound to get them.

We're bound to get them when we stand up and say, the Bible's true, Jesus is the only way, the exclusivity of the cross.

You're born sinners, and you need a savior, and there's only one, the only one who's alive, and his name's Jesus, and you must be born again.

And those who follow other religions and all those who follow other religions will not inherit the kingdom of God.

And do you think the world's going to go, right on, way to go? We like that. No, the world is going to shoot at us.

I don't mind that, but when we're quarreling and when we're not unified, and when we're having these kind of problems, we become easier prey, don't we?

We don't want that. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Avendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff or management.