Decently and In Order (1 Corinthians 14)

Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. Today we're going to be looking at 1st Corinthians chapter 14. Now 1st Corinthians chapter 14 is a passage which has a lot in it that is controversial.

It talks about the subject of speaking in tongues and prophecy and there's a lot of that that goes along with yesterday's lesson about cessationism and charismaticism and continuationism. So if you didn't watch yesterday I would encourage you to go back and listen to yesterday's podcast.

Decency and Order in the Church

So today I want to deal with another part of 1st Corinthians 14. I'm not going to deal so much with the tongues and prophecy issue. Rather today I'm going to look at the last verse which tells us that all things are to be done decently and in order.

This is the end of an argument that Paul has been making ever since chapter 11. And really the argument is how things ought to be managed within the assembly of believers. If you go back to chapter 11 you'll remember he talked about head coverings men and women and how they ought to look differently in the assembly.

He talked about the Lord's Supper and how some were treating each other well and some were or some were treating each other not well over the Lord's Supper and they were holding back and not sharing the food that they had and they were mistreating one another.

And then you get into chapter 12 and Paul talks about the fact that we're all one body in Christ and every body has different members and and the different members are there for a purpose and those purposes should not elevate one above the other but should help everyone understand that everybody has a place and everybody is purposeful within the assembly.

Everybody has a purpose within the body of Christ. Then we get to chapter 13 and he talks about love and how love is ultimately the greatest of all gifts and even if we have all the other gifts if we don't have love we don't have anything.

And then we get to chapter 14 and he begins to break down two specific gifts which seem to be gifts that were issues within the church. The gift of tongues and the gift of prophecies. Two gifts that it seemed like if you read the text that they were being used to exalt or lord over other believers.

If they had these particular gifts and others were not exercising these gifts they were using those gifts as in a sense to build up their own personal spiritual real estate. And so Paul was essentially explaining why that should not be the case.

And so again I encourage you to read 1 Corinthians 14 with the idea that all of this has to do with how the body is managing itself and how the body is working within itself. And then you get to the end of chapter 14 and he begins to talk about even the subject of women and how the women ought not to speak in the church.

And boy is that not a controversial subject there. But really the main thrust of the argument comes in the very last verse when he says ultimately all things are to be done decently and in order. When it comes to the ministry of the gospel, when it comes to the ministry of the church and the assembly, we need to understand that what we should be seeking is not chaos but order.

And some people have taken that to mean that that we should be extremely orderly to the point that we never have any spontaneity at all, and I don't think that that's what it means. I don't think that we should be known as the frozen chosen, and that's a little jab that's often pointed towards Calvinists because oftentimes they're not as excitable as those you might find in charismatic circles.

But at the same time, I've been in a lot of churches on the other end of the spectrum where it seemed like there was absolutely no order whatsoever. There was no order in how the music was was done. There was no order in how the the preaching was done.

I remember one specific instance where a man stood up to preach. He opened up his Bible. He looked down at his Bible. He looked back up and he says, you know, I had a passage to preach on today, but I don't think I want to preach on that passage.

The Lord is speaking to me and telling me that someone needs a touch from the Lord. And at just that moment, a woman stood up and yelled from the back and ran forward, and he and he ran down and met her and grabbed her and began to have a laying-on-of-hands situation.

And I just remember thinking, this is completely disorderly. There doesn't seem to be any order in this at all. And some people will say, well, that's just the Spirit's movement. And one thing that I learned years ago is the Spirit of God is just as work, is at work just as much in the planning as he is in the activity of the worship service.

We spend hours and days preparing for what we do on Sunday. I prepare my messages, and it takes hours to sit down and to read the text and to understand the text and to seek to give an application of the text.

And I believe the Spirit is just as much at work with me in my study as he is with me in the pulpit. Now, does that mean that there aren't times in the pulpit where the Spirit brings to things to mind that he didn't bring to mind when I was standing there or when I was in my study?

Absolutely. And there have been times, very few times, but there have been a few times where I walked up to the pulpit and realized at that moment God wanted me to preach a different message than the one that I had prepared, and I do believe that can happen.

And it has happened. But ultimately though, that does not mean that we need to be people of chaos. We need to be in the church people who do things decently and in order. And that doesn't mean that we have to be rigid.

It doesn't mean that we have to be the frozen chosen. But it does mean that we serve a God of order. We serve a God who does things orderly. Think about how when he prescribed his worship with the nation of Israel, he prescribed to them very specific ways that he would be worshiped.

And I would say that even within the New Testament there are prescriptions for worship. We go into the book of Acts. What were the main activities of the church that they would come together for the Apostles' doctrine and for the prayers and the fellowship and the breaking of bread, which is the participation in the Lord's Supper.

All of these things are orderly things and things that we ought to take seriously. So my encouragement to you today as you're reading this passage, read it with the idea of thinking that this is the Apostle Paul's admonition to the church that everything that we do should be in accordance with a God of order.

Not a God of chaos, but a God who would say that because I am orderly, so too should your worship be orderly. Again, thank you for watching. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. God bless you.

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