A Healthy Dose of Intolerance

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Don Filcek; 1 Corinthians 4:18 - 5:8 A Healthy Dose of Intolerance

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsak preaches from his sermon series titled,
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First Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in. Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church.
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Wait, where are we? Recast Church. And I'm Don Filsak. I'm the lead pastor here. And I'm really glad to be back after a week of serving up at Camp Bearcowl.
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I was up there this past week serving kids, watching 144 high schoolers running around and running in circles and running every which way.
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And I got to work in the kitchen feeding them. It really is a privilege and it's really great to get an opportunity.
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Really almost every summer, Linda and I have been able to go up there and serve in some capacity. Linda was the nurse up there taking care of campers, pulling ticks off of them and all that fun stuff.
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But it's so cool to be a part of a camping program like that. And I don't know how many of you know this, but Recast is actually a member church, which actually
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Camp Bearcowl is run by its member churches in terms of we kind of have a part stake in the camp.
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It is technically on paper owned by its member churches. So we kind of own 116th of Camp Bearcowl and that's kind of cool to think about.
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And I'm on the board there and it's been a great privilege to get up there and serve. But I am so glad to be back this week to bring us all what
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I'm going to call a humdinger of a text. There is something about preaching through books of the
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Bible, section by section, paragraph by paragraph, verse by verse, that often will lead us from time to time into verses that I would not otherwise preach.
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Like if I was just picking out my favorites or my hobby horses or my issues, this might be down there near the end of the list.
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And I say that not to go like, oh great, now we've got one of these. Sometimes God brings forward hard things for us that we need to hear.
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It's beneficial for us to hear these things. The reason I'm setting it up that way is that this text this morning is full of counter cultural content.
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It's going to start with Paul's authority to rebuke the church in Corinth. Then it's going to move to that strong rebuke of the church for tolerating sexual immorality in their midst.
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It will include removing an unrepentant sinner from their midst. It's going to include then a twist at the end and the passage itself, like a cat, dropped from five feet.
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It's going to twist at the end and land on its feet at the foot of the cross. Just when we think
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Paul is seeking to take us all sideways into commands to fix ourselves, to maintain our own purity, to get our act together, he's going to bring us back to the
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Passover lamb. Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, who was sacrificed for us, the one who purifies us, the one who has dealt with our sin.
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But not before he takes us through the darkness of reviewing what is indeed and can indeed be broken within the church.
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So let's open our Bibles or your apps or your scripture journals to 1 Corinthians chapter 4.
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We're going to start at the very end and it's kind of a weird place because it's not a paragraph break. I'll explain to you why
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I'm starting there later. But we're going to start in verse 18 of chapter 4 and we're going to read all the way through verse 8 of chapter 5.
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So again, 1 Corinthians 4, 18, recasts God's holy word, a precious word, him seeking to communicate to us.
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There is no mystery to our presence here this morning. He desires for each and every one of us to take on this text, this word, and to be impacted by it.
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Now, some are arrogant, as though I were not coming to you.
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But I will come to you soon, if the Lord wills, and I will find out not the talk of these arrogant people, but their power.
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For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk, but in power. What do you wish?
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Shall I come to you with a rod or with love in a spirit of gentleness? It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among the pagans.
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For a man has his father's wife, and you are arrogant. Ought you not rather to mourn?
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Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body,
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I am present in spirit. And as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing.
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When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus, and my spirit is present with the power of our
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Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the
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Lord. Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?
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Cleanse out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened.
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For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
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Let's pray. Father, I want to just continue my prayer that I was praying to you earlier, just the awe and wonder of the way that you draw people together.
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The way that gathered here in this room are men and women, young and old, wise and foolish, strong and weak.
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Those that are broken and those that don't realize and aren't quite willing to admit how broken they are, the humble and the proud, the repentant and the brash and arrogant.
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Father, you have assembled together your church once again for your glory, for your honor.
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So Father, I pray that you would meet us here in our brokenness, meet us here in our frailty. Bring the arrogant down to recognize that we must all bow at the feet of Christ or be ultimately broken in the end, but that there is healing, there is hope, there is rescue in the name of Jesus Christ.
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And so may our hearts celebrate our Passover lamb, the one who died to deal with our sin.
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May we be honest and authentic with one another. May we deal with sin and expose it to the light that we might receive healing and hope.
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May we rejoice now in our Savior, who is our hope. And it's in the name of Jesus Christ that I pray these things.
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All right, yeah, you can go ahead and get comfortable, yep, you already found your seats, but if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donuts, use the restrooms, those are down the hallway on the left -hand side if you need those.
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You're not going to distract me at all if you've got to get up. So yep, that's that.
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I do ask that you do yourself a favor and reopen to 1 Corinthians chapter 4, starting in verse 18, so that you can see that the things that I'm talking about are coming from God's word.
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We're going to walk through that text together. And you may notice that I've done a strange thing and included verses 18 through 21 with the start of chapter 5.
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Now there's a dude who sat down in the Middle Ages and divided up the chapters and divided up the verses and all of that stuff, and I think he did a pretty good job.
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I would, I mean, that would be a hard task, right? I'm going to be just kind of want to just kind of say kudos to that dude because he's helped us a lot.
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But occasionally I kind of agree with some scholars who say this section goes with that section, not with this section.
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And so this is kind of one of those things, I agree with those guys who see this, that they're already being an end in verse 17 to the previous large, large chunk of 1
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Corinthians that was talking about divisions and factions within the church of Corinth, a very affluent church and people were dividing over teachers,
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I like this guy, I like this guy, and there was all kinds of divisions. But I think the harsh nature, and what leads me to conclude that this opening harsh section of verses 18 through 21 goes with this next section in chapter 5,
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I believe it's introductory because it's a very hot topic that Paul wants to address. He starts with heat and fire to introduce the next topic because he's reasonably upset at the behavior of the
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Corinthian church. Now he's certainly upset about their divisions, and so that's where the debate comes in. Is this fire coming from the divisions or is the fire coming from the immorality that he's about to discuss?
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I lean towards the scholarship that guides towards it, tying in with chapter 5.
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So the outline of our text this morning, if you're a note taker, is the kingdom of God is shown in powerful life change, that's verses 18 through 21.
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So the kingdom of God is shown in powerful life change. The second movement in the text is verses 1 through 5. The kingdom of God is shown in purity, and then that last section is the kingdom of God is shown in truth and sincerity, verses 6, 7, and 8.
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So we're going to begin with Paul explaining that the kingdom of God is shown in a powerful life change and the
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Corinthians are not exhibiting that. So that's what these first four verses are all about. He starts with a basic statement.
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Some within the church, he says, are arrogant. That's not going a good direction right off the bat, right?
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Some of you are arrogant. If I were to stand up here and say that, it would be true, but it's also a bit harsh.
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And they can afford, what he's kind of getting at here in the opening is that they are affording this attitude, they can afford it as long as they assume that they will not need to stand against Paul face to face.
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But their arrogance is indeed in opposition to Paul, but more fundamentally to the things that he has taught them.
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They assume Paul's not going to return to them, so they feel comfortable in kind of going rogue and doing their own things, all kinds of things.
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What kind of things are they doing? Well, we're going to find out in this text. Things that are repugnant, things that are sinful, things that are harmful to fellowship, things that are divisive and are corrupting, things that not even the pagans do.
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That's the kind of things that are going on in Corinth, and it'll mine down and get quite specific here in a moment.
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But Paul will be actively seeking to return to them to set things straight, and he clarifies that here.
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He adds in verse 19, as he's talking about, I do plan to come, I do plan to come and visit you guys.
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And he adds the very biblical phrase, if the Lord wills, James told us to always assume in our, and even to speak within our planning, if the
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Lord wills, I'm going to go on vacation next week. If the Lord wills, I'm going to. You know, and I think, you don't have to make that a mantra, but what you need to make that an attitude, a heart of dependence upon God that acknowledges that if I'm going to breathe in the next five minutes, it's going to be if the
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Lord wills. How many of you know that? But it's good to have that heart and that attitude. Paul exhibits it here.
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He has a stern, intentional plan to go to Corinth. But he says, if the
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Lord wills, I will be there. But man, I'm making plans and I want to be there soon.
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Now I can only imagine that this announcement of his impending arrival would have made some in the gathering upset.
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I mean, you can imagine a church gathering where the very first time, oh, we got a letter, the courier comes in, we got a letter from Paul.
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Let's read it. And some are like, oh, Paul, whatever. They're sitting in the back just kind of grumbling and complaining.
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And he says, I'm coming soon. I imagine that some kind of were like, oh, oh, you know, the blood drains out of their face and they're like, uh -oh, uh -oh,
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Paul is going to come, Paul coming here? Uh -oh. The things that we've been saying about him, the things that have been reported to him, the things that we've been doing, the things that we've been dividing, the way that we have kind of put the wreck on the church that he planted, uh -oh.
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Can you imagine what that might have looked like in that gathering as they found out that they were indeed going to be seeing
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Paul face to face? The reason that they might feel frustrated at the notion of his arrival is their arrogance.
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They have been leading others astray. They've been going their own way. They've been leading lives of sin without any accountability and without living any lives of moderation, just kind of like, yep,
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God's grace covers us, we'll just do what we want. They've been teaching others or at least speaking up about the way that they think things should go within the church, even in contra to Paul.
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According to verse 19, they are teaching a lot of theory. There's a lot of words. There's a lot of speaking.
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There's a lot of talk that's going on. Look at verse 19. But I will come to you soon if the Lord wills, and I will find out not the talk of these arrogant people but of their power.
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According to verse 19, they are teaching theory, but they have not been teaching anything that's resulting in powerful life change.
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They are not living lives of power. They are just talking things. How many of you know that talk is cheap?
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You know that? And so Paul speaks an adage in verse 20 that we ought to take to heart. In essence, that's what he's saying.
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Talk is cheap, but real ministry in God's kingdom results in life change.
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Where the Word of God is spoken in truth and in power, people's lives change.
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Where it's believed and trusted and applied and lived out in community, there is real life change.
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Real churches empower others through the Spirit for godly living. It would be easy to misunderstand what
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Paul is getting at here, especially with the interplay of talk and words and power. His words are indeed really direct and harsh, and we might be tempted to think that he's inviting the guilty parties into the octagon, right?
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Let's throw down, okay? Get the octagon ready. I'm coming to town. We're going to have a little MMA Corinth style, or at least some kind of power test.
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Like we might in our minds think of maybe more biblical, less octagon, maybe a power test like Elijah.
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He's planning on coming to Corinth and having a miracle off. Like, you do your miracles,
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I'll do mine, and we'll see whose staff eats whose, turn it to a snake, whatever.
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Is that what he means here? I don't believe so. What he's trying to convey is not some miracle showdown of power where he expects to walk into Corinth and show off some
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Holy Spirit power. What he's seeking to communicate is that the Christian life is not one of mere theory, never has been, never will be.
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But the Christian life is a life of powerful and radical transformation of real people, and Corinth isn't showing it.
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There hasn't been life change. As a matter of fact, there's been denigration. There's been some gross things going on there, and he's going to have to point it out.
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If life change, if radical life change, if powerful life change isn't happening, then correction is needed, and that's where Paul's at here at this introduction.
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And in this case, Paul is setting them up for a super stern rebuke. Let me say that again, super stern rebuke.
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Verse 21 might ring extremely harsh to our ears, and yet we might not even get the full force of it.
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It's harsh to us, and we might want to kind of slink off into the corner and go, oh no, Paul can't talk like that.
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And we are not even getting the insult that the Corinthians would have gotten out of it.
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They would have gotten the harshness. What I'm trying to say, look at verse 21 with me. What do you wish? Shall I come to you with a rod or with love and a spirit of gentleness?
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We might think it sounds violent and threatening, but it isn't merely threatening. It's also insulting.
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Because not only does he threaten them with a rod of correction, and I believe it's metaphorical. I'll explain that in a second.
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He's not planning on bringing an actual club and an actual stick and wrapping their knuckles or something or smacking them upside the head with a 2x4 or anything like that.
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But the terminology he uses would have also indicated that he was calling them little children.
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The rod of correction is a metaphor in this text, a Greek word that is used for the paddle of a Roman educator.
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Roman educators carried a stick, a bundle of sticks to, yeah, to hit students with.
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Or parents would have this bundle as well. I don't know if you can relate to this. Some of you older, my age and older can relate to this, but everybody could paddle me when
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I was a kid. Right? Like, I mean, my principal, Carrie, my principal, the principal of my elementary school had a paddle.
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Anybody, go ahead and raise your hand if you know what I'm talking about, the rest of you. Raise your hand if you're like, no, thank goodness,
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I never knew, that's the most bizarre thing I've ever heard of. No. And I did get paddled one time in elementary school.
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I was throwing rocks. I thought I was throwing rocks on the roof. They were going over the roof into the playground on the other side, and I hit a girl with a rock.
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Throwing rocks, bad idea. I had learned my lesson, got paddled by the principal. And it probably was only a couple of years after I got out of elementary school that they stopped doing that.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? Like, I mean, it was kind of like right around that era that it was like, oh, no, probably don't paddle people's kids.
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Probably not. Not a good idea. Oh, by the way, you know, just to clarify, my mom had a paddle too, so if you got it at school and then at home, yay.
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But the opposite response, the opposite response given in this text that leads me to conclude that it's metaphorical, it's not bringing a literal paddle, it's the contrast.
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What's contrasted against the real, the rod in this case? He's saying, pick how you want it to be.
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Pick how you want it to be when I come to see you. Pick the spirit in which you'd like me to arrive, a spirit of gentleness or a spirit of judgment.
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I'm coming soon to see you all. Many of you are arrogant, pretending that the kingdom of God is one of fancy teaching and high -flying rhetorical theories and ideas, while the kingdom of God calls his people into line and calls us to war against sin in and among us.
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This first section highlighting the nature of the kingdom of God is one of, it's highlighting that it's a life of powerful life change, and this is all one massive setup to what he's going to say next in verse 1 of chapter 5, a shocking statement.
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But I don't think that shocking statement is the introduction. I think the introduction is, oh, you guys need life change and it's not happening, and here's evidence.
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The second section of the text highlights that the kingdom of God is shown in purity in verses 1 through 5.
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Paul has received a report of sexual immorality being tolerated among the church of Corinth, being tolerated in the church.
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Sexual immorality is a catch -all category. It covers, it is a word in Greek that covers like an umbrella that catches all kinds of darkness and sin within it.
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So it's one word. We translate it with two, sexual immorality, porneia is the Greek word, and it is a common
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Greek word in documents outside of the Bible as well as within the Bible, and so we have all kinds of evidence for what kinds of things they would have categorized as porneia.
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It includes sex before marriage, which is fornication in our language, adultery, sex outside of marriage with somebody that's not your spouse, homosexual activity, pornography, incest, and a whole lot of other behaviors that I need not go on to name and do not want to go on to name.
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And rather than trying to attempt to explain all behavior that falls under the banner of that Greek word porneia, it would be helpful to define, define that word by one thing that it is not.
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To define it by its opposite, to define it by its contrast so that we have an understanding of what in the world are we talking about here.
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Sexual immorality is not loving sexual intimacy between a husband and wife within the protective confines of a marriage relationship.
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That's the one thing it's not. Let me read that again. The one thing that sexual immorality is not is loving sexual intimacy between a husband and wife within the protective covenant of a marriage relationship.
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Where does God reserve sexual activity among humans? In his moral, in his moral being, in his holiness?
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For the protective covenant of marriage. I'm going to borrow an illustration from a guy named
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Matt Chandler. I thought it was really powerful, a powerful illustration, but he says the protective, like sexuality and sexual expression is kind of like an explosion.
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Like it's this powerful, powerful force in a human heart, this powerful, powerful force within us, right?
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And you see it in our culture. You see the way that we make it God, we deify it, it's the glorious end all of all existence.
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And it's dangerous when something powerful like a bomb, like a nuclear bomb goes off uncontained.
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Do you know what I'm talking about? It's devastating, right? When a nuclear bomb falls on a city, it's devastation.
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But what about that same nuclear reaction within the protective confines of a nuclear reactor?
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It produces energy that lights up the world. You see, same thing is happening.
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The same thing is happening on the molecular level. The same power is being expressed. The same things are happening, but it's not protected.
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What is that nuclear reactor for sexual expression? What is the cement walls that protect it?
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It's the committed, loving, covenant relationship between husband and wife, and it's a beautiful, glorious thing.
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But outside of that, it's devastating. Many of us here are victims of our own vices.
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Some of us here are victims of our own expressions of sexuality outside of those confines that we could testify.
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We're not going to because that would be really embarrassing for us, but if I opened up the mic and we just got up and just shared, like,
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I've been devastated by my own not following God's rules, I think that'd be powerful for the next generation.
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It has a devastating impact and a devastating effect. A lot of this wasn't even in my notes, so we're going to jump back in here for a second.
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It's kind of dangerous when you talk about sexuality in a pulpit without your notes, but hopefully that was for somebody here and the spirit was in it.
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Paul quickly brings us back to define what brand of sexual immorality he's talking about.
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What has he received a report of in Corinth? It's an issue of incest.
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It's an issue in which a man has an enduring sexual relationship with his stepmom. Now I say enduring because the
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Greek phrase, has his father's wife, is quite specifically oriented around the ongoing nature of that relationship.
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It's not a one -night stand, and further, it's not his mom, it is his stepmom because of the technical term father's wife is a very technical
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Greek word that means stepmom. Now this behavior is clearly and directly prohibited by the
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Old Testament in Leviticus 18, let's just say
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Leviticus instead, Leviticus 18 verses 7 through 8. I felt like there needed to be a little levity in the moment there, so I don't know, trying to lighten it up a bit, but Leviticus 18, 7 through 8 says a man is, 7 talks about incest with a mom, verse 8 talks about incest with a stepmom.
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But even if this man is unaware of the law of God, which he likely was unaware, and the reason I say that is that there were very few, there weren't as many
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Jews who gave their lives to Christ in Corinth as there were Gentiles. So people who didn't know the law, people who were coming from worshiping
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Zeus and Hera and all the Greek gods and all of that stuff, and so, and I don't even know who the
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Greek gods are, so I might have just said a couple wrong ones, maybe it's, I don't know, you guys can clarify that later with me, but it doesn't matter that much.
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But he, this man was likely unaware of the law of God, and so Paul appeals, even in this text to the pagan culture in which they live, he says, you know, he doesn't appeal to Leviticus, rather he appeals, even in this text, to even the pagans don't tolerate this behavior.
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I think it's interesting, if you were to study this, where cultures choose to draw the line when it comes to sexual taboos.
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Our culture, how many of you noticed, our culture is shifting its cultural mores, morals, values when it comes to sexuality.
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Raise your hand if you knew that. There's a lot shifting, isn't there? Our culture is shifting on sexual taboos, but the
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Roman culture, surprisingly, because they were a pretty wild culture, but the Roman culture saw this type of relationship between a young man and his stepmom as a relationship abridged too far.
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Two particular Roman historians have actually gone on the book, Cicero and Tacitus, they were
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Roman historians that lived during this time, not Christians, they were just out there in Roman culture writing and documenting the types of things that they saw and writing about their culture and society.
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They both express, they're the two primary, by the way, of this era of Roman history, they're the two primary historians, and they both express, in writing, outrage over the sin of incest or over the behavior of incest.
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So, let me take a brief moment to inventory a secondary help for us that I see in this text that might land for some of us.
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And that's, note the phrase, tolerated among the pagans in this text. This little phrase shows that there has always been much that is tolerated by those outside of the church, and here,
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Paul is saying, you've picked one that's not even tolerated by them. Should it surprise us that the world tolerates sexual immorality?
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Way back in Paul's day and age, way back in his time, he's acknowledging that the unsaved world will major on tolerating sexual sin.
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They're going to always be more okay with things than we are. But clearly, within the church, where pride is being dealt with in our hearts and in our midst, and the power of God's kingdom is breaking into us as individuals and breaking into our community to deal with our sins, to put it to death within ourselves and within our fellowship, in this place, there's a need for a healthy dose of intolerance.
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That's why I titled this message, A Healthy Dose of Intolerance. We ought to be fostering an appetite for holiness, and we ought to be fostering an aversion to sin, a repugnance to sin, a reflex that recoils from sin.
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And of course, I'm not merely talking about the sins of others, but the sin within us as well.
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A life being lived in the power of the gospel is a life that is actively, in a participating way, warring against sin within us and within our fellowship.
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We don't make peace with it. We give it no quarter, and we can never, ever, ever adopt a no -big -deal attitude towards sin.
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We can never say NBD. We don't get much detail about the man in the text.
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His name isn't given. Circumstances aren't clear. Was his dad still in the picture? We don't know.
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Was she widowed? We don't know. Was she after the money from the estate? We don't know. Many posit that he was a wealthy benefactor of the church.
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Some have even posited that the church met in his home, or give all kinds of excuses to why maybe the church didn't deal with this head on.
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But all of this is way too much speculation. We just don't know. The text isn't concerned for why it's not being dealt with.
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A man is having an ongoing sexual relationship with his stepmom. Many in the church are generally aware of the situation, and it appears that little to no action has been formally taken.
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And I say little to no action, because I actually believe that it's quite likely that some action did take place.
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That someone has likely confronted him. I'll explain that in a moment. But Paul uses this as an opportunity to bring the church down a notch.
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He says, you're arrogant. I don't think they were arrogant about this sin. I don't think they were out there boasting, ha -ha, you know, man and his stepmom, and yeah, look at us.
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No, it was a shameful thing in their culture. Just generally in the culture, it was a shameful thing. They were not boasting about this, but they are arrogant.
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And he's established that well in the first four chapters of this book. They're a relatively arrogant church. And he says,
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I mean, what he's talking about when he talks about their boasting, when he talks about their arrogance in this context, he's saying, how can you be arrogant when this is going on in your fellowship, when this is allowed and permitted to go on in your midst?
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You should be grieved, he says. You should be mourning. And instead, you boast and talk yourselves up like you're the elite flagship church of the
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Roman Empire. Everybody ought to do it like Corinth. No, don't. Whatever you do, don't do it like Corinth. And at the end of verse two,
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Paul prescribes a course of action for the church in Corinth. They should let him who has done this be removed from among them, jettisoned like an among us person that has been voted out and out the airlock.
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Some of you know what I'm talking about, and the majority of you have no clue. Removed. I have an important view that presupposes some things about this passage.
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I personally have a strong conviction that all of God's word holds together, that there's no contradiction, there's no conflict in it.
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In Matthew 18, Jesus speaks about the pathway of discipline within the church, and it is to be done in private first.
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Then if the offending party refuses to repent, then the circle is widened to only two or three. You don't go spread rumors.
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You don't go say, did you hear what that dude did? Did you hear what that dude did? And how many of you can imagine that happening in a church? That kind of like gossip and slander and things, even about what's true, but all of a sudden everybody knows, and it seems like, well, it's likely that maybe has happened to some degree in Corinth because people are going and reporting it to Paul, but the circle widens to two or three.
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Go and confront the sin again. If there's no repentance, then it's told to the church publicly. Then the church becomes aware.
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And if there's still no repentance after the church calls that person to repent, then the person is to be removed from membership and treated as an unbeliever.
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That's all found in Matthew 18. It's a passage I would love for every one of us to be familiar with and apply regularly within this fellowship, and I think for the most part people do.
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If we go confront others who have sinned against us in private, it would stave off a ton of gossip, a ton of slander and backbiting and a lot of the backchannel things that happen at churches.
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And more often than not, reconciliation is a result of following the model Jesus gives us. So go familiarize yourself with Matthew 18, those few verses near the beginning.
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But I don't think that our passage today is in conflict with the instructions of Jesus, and therefore I can only assume that there must have been some within Corinth, if not
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Paul himself, who has confronted this man with his sin and he has refused to repent. The ongoing nature of the sexually immoral relationship shows that he was not willing to repent of it and to end it and cut off this relationship.
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And I just want to point out what's true about that, and often it's sexual sin that gets disciplined in the church primarily because it's the one that clings to us the most.
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It's the one that we have the hardest time giving up when it's engaged in. Sexual sin has a way of getting into our souls.
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Despite what the world tells us, we are knit together with sexual partners. There is no such thing as just flippant sex.
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And it's very difficult to end a relationship that is centered on our own pleasure. And the entirety of Scripture, in balance, requires me to conclude that this man has been given opportunities to repent that are not recorded for us here, and he refused to take the off -ramps.
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But it really is in the instruction to remove the man from their midst that we finally see the second point about the purity of the church coming into focus.
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There will always be sin that we need to be dealing with. It's a routine thing. And this is why Jesus gave us the model of Matthew 18, so we have a pathway of restoration and repentance as sinners together in His community.
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But the end of the line of that accountability train is removal from the routine fellowship of the church.
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And in verses 3 through 4, Paul, in essence, is telling them, don't wait. Don't wait for me to show up.
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I said I'm coming soon, but don't wait. Deal with this situation. He gives his distant assessment of the situation, and even though he's not physically present with them, he goes over the top to say he is present with them in the truth of the
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Holy Spirit. Most commentaries I read this week made much of the need to capitalize the word spirit in verse 3, that that's talking about unity, togetherness, presence in the
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Holy Spirit. I am present with you in the Spirit. Paul is not making some kind of astral soul travel or Jedi force presence like Yoda or Obi -Wan or Anakin.
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You know, I will be present with you. My spirit will be there. And they're like, okay, that's weird.
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The presence of Paul with them in spirit is a way of saying we can all see the truth of this clearly from what the Spirit has revealed, and we ought to be unified in this clear pronouncement of judgment on the one who did such a thing and refuses to repent.
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And so when they're assembled in the name of Jesus in a church gathering and the presence of the Spirit is with them in the power of the
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Lord Jesus Christ who promised that where two or more are gathered in my name, there I will be in their midst, that's the end of that section about church discipline.
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That's not about your like little prayer huddle. That's literally in the context of church discipline that that passage occurs.
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And where two or three are gathered in my name and unified in saying this person, this is sin and wrong and needs to be corrected,
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I'm there stamping it with you. They are to formally deliver this man to the realm.
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When it says deliver him to Satan, it is to the realm of sin and Satan. Now, there's no formal like handing him over or anything like that.
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It's a metaphor, but it's a powerful and stark and ought to be shocking metaphor. They are to do this with two related outcomes in mind.
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He is delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, it says, so that his spirit might be saved in the day of the
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Lord. Flesh is often used by Paul as a word picture for our sinful nature, and I believe that that's what he's doing here.
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I think that's what he's got in mind. He is not hoping for the death of this man. Destruction of the flesh is not that his body might wither away or die, but rather the death of the grip of sin on this man.
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That's what he's looking for, that the sin nature might finally just get kind of like sick of itself. The process here is what we back in the 80s and 90s would have called tough love.
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How many of you are familiar with the phrase tough love? It still comes up from time to time, but I believe this passage shows that sometimes what's going on here is just playing into a reality.
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Sometimes Satan overplays his hand in people's lives to his own loss. There really is a potential for real people to hit rock bottom.
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There is a potential for people to just be given over to their sin and be given over to their sin nature to such a degree that they just get miserable.
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Have you seen it? How many of you have seen it? Maybe you've experienced it. You've seen it in other people's lives. You've seen it in your own life.
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You get to a place where it's like, okay, this isn't working. This is miserable.
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I feel terrible all the time. In this passage, Paul envisions giving a man over to the realm of Satan and his own sin so that he'll get tired and worn down by sin.
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And ultimately what that will result in is disillusionment with his sin, and he will repent and come back to Christ in the end.
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Hopeful aside, by the way, this is an interesting thought, and I think there's some truth or maybe validity to it at least.
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Many scholars believe that this same man is the subject of a section of the next letter to Corinth, and you can jot this down and look it up later.
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I'm not going to read it here, 2 Corinthians 2 verses 5 through 11, where he says, that man that you disciplined, that man that you set aside and cast out, restore him.
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I think this is a story arc. I think there's a story arc here, and you can read the remainder of it.
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Paul asked the Corinthians to forgive and restore the one that they corporately disciplined, and I think we have here a beautiful picture of church discipline working.
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The man being cast out to his own grief and brought to repentance and being restored.
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But note that the reason for the discipline and disfellowshipping of this man is not primarily fundamentally punitive. It's not to punish him, but it has two other things in mind.
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It has a hope that he will be saved in the end, but it also ties in with the last movement of our text. It's that purity, a purity of the church.
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That's the second point, but it's a truth and sincerity that makes up. The purity is made up of truth and sincerity.
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So, the third point is the kingdom of God is shown in truth and sincerity, verses 6 through 8. Verses 6 and 7 may seem to go better with the last point about purity of his kingdom.
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Boasting and talking up the church is not good when you have a serious cancer growing in the midst of the fellowship.
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And Paul was astonished that they seemed to be forgetting the reality, the adage that a little bit of yeast permeates the whole lump.
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We might say it in our day and age, a bad apple spoils the bunch, right? And we know that's true.
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But all this instruction towards purity requires a strong commitment to sincerity and truth.
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There are genuine believers. That's a reality. There are genuine believers. And there are genuine believers here in this room.
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And then there are people who just mimic everyone else around them. There are some who are not in with the faith and are just kind of, well, this looks like what
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Christians do. I brought my own Bible because I looked around and I saw other people bring their own Bible. I give to the church because I just saw other people give to the church.
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I've always been in the church. I was raised in the church. No relationship with Jesus Christ, no repentance, no asking for forgiveness, no walking with it, but just straight up like,
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I'm just doing what other people around me do and kind of blend in, bro. And it's just a matter of time until the one who is not sincere and bound to the truth is shown and revealed in a powerless, hypocritical life.
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That doesn't mean they crash and burn in sexual immorality or something like that. Often it's just, I mean, what is this spate of deconstruction that's going on in our culture right now?
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It's a lot of that. They weren't in to begin with. They weren't really in relationship with Christ.
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They were in with relationship with the church. And how many of you ever been let down by a church? They were in with the other people around them, watching them, following them, doing what they do.
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Oh, bring a Bible. I'll bring a bigger Bible. You know what I'm talking about? And in the end, there was no substance.
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We were the substance. They were just watching us and we let them down. They were like, yeah, you're not real.
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And I'm out. How many of you know that if I watched your life for a month,
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I would be disappointed with you at points and at places? Because you'd be disappointed with me. I can tell you that for sure.
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So where should our eyes be, church? The only connection that we have to anything that matters is in Christ.
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And he puts us together to work it out, show that he is working in us to love one another well, to deal with sin, to in our own hearts and in our midst.
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How can we ever cleanse a church full of sinners? Is it up to us? How in the world can
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Paul stand over Corinth when he called himself, he used this phrase for himself, the chief of sinners?
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He told us about his own personal internal battle subsequent to receiving Jesus Christ, subsequent to his encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus with a bright light and the life change and the going this way really hard against the church and now going this way towards the church.
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All of that has happened now. He's written some books of the Bible and then Romans 7, and he sits down with parchment and pen and writes, the very things that I should do,
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I don't do. And the things that I do, I shouldn't. How can he kick another guy out of the church?
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If that's true, how can he say, have him removed? Well, he's saying in summary, where the kingdom of God is broken into a heart or a church community, there's powerful life change.
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There is a commitment to fight sin, to seek accountability, to strive for purity, to drive for repentance, to fight sin within us.
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There's a desire to be a pure unleavened lump of dough here. And to be clear, leaven is used as a metaphor for sin in many places throughout the
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Old Testament. It's kind of epic in its visible impact over a short amount of time. Now, you got to remember that back in that day when we're talking about leaven,
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I mean, they would put yeast, they didn't know what yeast was, right? They just knew that if you put it in bread, went to sleep the next morning, what happened?
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The whole thing was leavened and it had grown. They didn't have microscopes, they didn't understand, you know, microbiology or any of the stuff that's going on at the cellular level.
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They didn't know any of that. They were just like, man, you do this and it has a visible dramatic impact. That's amazing.
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And they use it as a metaphor for sin. Where yeast is present, the dough expands and is leavened. Where sin is present, the community grows in sin.
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So, the church is called to cleanse out the old leaven to get a restart as a new lump. And by implication, this will need to happen as often as necessary.
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This is not a one and done thing. This is a routine of church life. This is a cadence of a personal life of confession before God and constantly dealing with our sin.
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That's why I pray that God keeps me on a short leash, that he convicts me quickly. He doesn't let me go too far down the road before he yanks the chain and goes,
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Don, you don't want to go over there. How many of you know what I'm talking about? Lord, please keep me on a short chain, right?
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Note where we come in for a landing here this morning regarding truth and sincerity here in this final point.
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We might have an increased sense that Paul is telling us that we are the masters of the purity of the church. We need to wage war against sinners.
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We need to be constantly in battle mode. But Paul says something that is so totally radical in the middle of 7 that it almost takes the complete fangs out of his bite.
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As you really are unleavened.
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Think about it. As you really are unleavened. He says that to Corinth.
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Cleanse out the leaven among you as you really are unleavened.
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Recast everyone in this room who has the Lord Jesus Christ as your king, as your master, and you have asked him to save you and he has sent his spirit to rescue you.
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You are unleavened. Before the eyes of the
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Father, you are sinless. Amen? All praise to him.
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Why? Because you figured out how to deal with leaven. You figured out how to get it out. You figured out how to live a better life and how to live a perfect, pleasing life before God.
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Absolutely not. Why? The text tells us because Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.
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He's done it for us. He has rescued us. The hope of the church is not found in a self -improvement project.
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Make sure we're constantly, you know, watching out and, you know, everyone's sauce and you got to just make sure and I'm just kind of watching you, seeing who to jettison next.
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No, it's certainly and quite fortunately not wrapped up in our ability to remain pure. It's only wrapped up in the sincere and true connection to our
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Passover lamb by faith. He was slaughtered in our place. And so verse 8 ends our text this morning with a strange place, celebration.
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A passage on church discipline, sexual immorality, and a lack of holiness in the church, particularly focused on Corinth, concludes with celebrating the sacrifice of Jesus.
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And we celebrate him best in a sincere obedience that flows from the truth.
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It requires some self -assessment, church. Is there sincerity in your faith before God?
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Is there an honest, when you're alone in your quiet moments, a relationship with him, a desire to commune with him, a desire to talk with him, a desire to hear from him, a desire to share him with others?
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Is there sincerity in that? Nobody's going to be saved through trying to mimic their way into his kingdom.
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But those who have asked Jesus Christ to save us by faith and trust and what he has done for us on the cross, we are unleavened in that Jesus has taken our sins on himself.
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And so in truth and in sincerity, we are being called to become what we already are in Christ.
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We have become unleavened, been made unleavened by him, so we must keep dealing with leaven when it's found in our hearts and when it's found in our midst.
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And consider this as we land on a couple of applications. We've wrapped things up. How involved are we to be in each other's lives?
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We were talking about this in our men's group yesterday morning. More than we are. I think that's the right answer, right?
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How involved are we supposed to be in each other's lives? More than this. More than we are, more than our culture has us.
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I mean, that's hard to do and I don't have like specific, but if you've got some ideas about how to do that, come and see me.
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We have community groups and we try to provide opportunities for that to actually rub shoulders with others and just see if there's some relationships that stick.
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That's the goal of community groups, by the way. We recognize that that's not the end all of the way that you fellowship with others.
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We recognize that you got friends outside of the church. You got all kinds of things, but man, we need to be together. We need to be involved in each other's lives.
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So let's open up our lives to one another in genuine community, in genuine accountability, in quick apologies, in soft hearts that are quick to acknowledge our own sins.
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And we only practice that when we're in relationship with one another. The second thing is that some may be tempted to stuff their sin down deeper after hearing this message.
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Like, oh man, this guy got kicked out. Why? I must be next. Well, what could be more insincere?
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Think about it. What could be more insincere than allowing Satan to produce fear within you from a passage that concludes with sincerity and truth?
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Letting it come out. If you're struggling with sin, be it sexual immorality, gossip, gluttony, theft, whatever, set up a meeting with me or one of the elders, and let's get to the work of seeing what is true and exposing these sins to the light for the glory of our
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Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Let's get some health and some healing and some hope in these places.
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You come to me and you expose that. I'm going to say, oh, no surprise.
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You're a sinner? Wow, didn't see that coming. Now, if you expose it, what you're saying is
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I want to deal with it. If you hide it, that's the danger. That's the scary place.
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I'm much more scared about those that are hiding it than those who are exposing it and working through it and dealing with it.
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Be honest and direct and expose our sins to the light. And the last thing is let's end our time together by way of application at the foot of the cross like we do every
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Sunday. Come to the tables with eyes fixed on the one who died for our sins.
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Sin is not tame. Hear me, don't check out for a second here. Sin is not tame. It's deadly.
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And it would have plunged each and every one of us into the eternal torments of hell. God is holy.
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Sin is not a plaything. The bloody gruesome cross shows us just how deadly sin is.
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Just how gruesome a punishment we deserved. And yet we end this morning in light of all of this with celebration.
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Why do we celebrate? Because He has removed the leaven from us in His sacrifice. He is eager and ready to give any and all a newness of life.
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And He is ready to give hope for forgiveness through His sacrifice. So as we come to take the cracker and juice this morning, consider what
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He paid to wash us clean. And then let's allow that glorious truth to propel us forward with sincerity and truth this next week.
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Here at Recast, we reserve communion for those who acknowledge Jesus as Lord and have asked Him for His salvation and are at peace with each other here in this fellowship.
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If that defines you, I encourage you to get up during this next song and take the cup of juice and the cracker to remember
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His sacrifice as our Passover lamb. You can take that back to your seat, but drink and eat at your own pace as you talk to God and celebrate and rejoice together.
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Let's pray. Father, our sins, they are many, but Your mercy is.
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God, time and time again, were it not for Your grace, I think any one of us can point to places and times and things.
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We ought to have been the bum kicked out, but only in Your grace have
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You held us. So Father, would You continue to keep us? Would You continue to hold us?
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In Christ, would You continue to give us strength, to confess, to expose sins to the light, that we might obtain help and hope and healing and forgiveness?
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And Father, if there's anyone here who doesn't belong to You, I ask that You would give them a boldness, maybe to just even come up and talk with me or Dave afterwards or Dan as the elder on duty and just say, hey,
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I need a start. I need a fresh start. I am leavened through and through and the sin is just pressing me down and I feel like I'm on my way, if not near rock bottom, and I need help.
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Father, today might be a day of rejoicing and celebration and salvation. But as we come to the communion tables, we thank
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You for the sacrifice of Jesus Christ that gives us hope, that unifies us together, that brings us under His sacrifice so that we are made unloved before You.