Use Your Conscience to Encourage

Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I speak as a sensible people, judge for yourselves what

I say. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?

The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

Consider the people of Israel are not those who eat the sacrifices, participants in the altar. What do

I imply then, that food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, I imply that what pagan sacrifice, they offer to demons and not to God.

I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the

Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. Shall we provoke the

Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than he? All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful.

All things are lawful, but not all things build up. Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor.

Eat whatever is sold in the meat market, without raising any question on the ground of conscience. For the earth is the

Lord's, and the fullness thereof. If one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner, and you are disposed to go, eat whatever is set before you, without raising any question on the ground of conscience.

But if someone says to you, this has been offered in sacrifice, then do not eat it, for the sake of the one who informed you, and for the sake of conscience.

I do not mean your conscience, but his. For why should my liberty be determined by someone else's conscience?

If I partake with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of that for which I give thanks? So whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

Give no offense to Jews, or to Greeks, or to the church of God. Just as I try to please everyone in everything

I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.

Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word.

Lord, we thank you for the conscience, our conscience, Lord, that you give each one of us. Lord, thank you for the

Holy Spirit, Lord, help us to be patient with one another, help us to love one another, help us to be encouragers,

Lord. Lord, we need you. Lord, humble us, keep us humble, let us not be proud,

Lord. Lord, I pray for the preaching of your word this morning, Lord, may it be a blessing to you.

Lord, help us to be good listeners, Lord, we love you and we praise you, amen.

In last week's passage, we were admonished to remember. And this week has a therefore, right at the beginning of our scripture, and our argument this morning, and the section that we are dealing with, is talking about the central command of fleeing idolatry.

We have to run away from idolatry. Now, back in the time of Corinth, the idols would have been pretty easy to recognize.

You would go into a pagan temple, there would be a statue, there would be a bunch of smells and bells and incense and smoke, and there would be feasting, and there would be chanting, and there would be priests of this pagan god, and that sort of thing.

So pretty easy to determine, how do you stay away from that? And yet, the Corinthians did not stay away from that.

And that's why we have this in the letter. For us today, it's a little bit more difficult, because most people in our culture, although America is undoubtedly a deeply idolatrous nation, we do not go into obvious temples with statues and eat meat, sacrifice, and have priests.

Our idols today, as Satan grows in cunning, and as he has largely won the battle of making

Western Christendom into a liberal, autonomous, secular hellscape, what's happened is that the idols have gone beneath the surface.

And there are spiritual powers, authorities, and principalities that push forward ideas and ideologies that ensnare people and try to find their way into the church.

There are three of them that I want to address and talk about as we go through and keep these in mind, because as this chapter goes, the first thing that we have to do is we have to define the idols so that we can flee from them, and the second thing we have to do is understand how we are to use our conscience correctly.

Everyone has a conscience. Some peoples work better than others, and some peoples don't work at all, and we'll talk about that.

There are three large heresies, I think, that invade the church in America today.

Two of them are extremely ancient, and one of them is an amalgamation of several old heresies.

One of them is the most ancient of the heresies that plagues the church, and that is the Judaizing heresy.

Now, to boil this down, the Judaizing heresy is an idea that Christian practice, that Christian standing largely depends on outside appearances and practices that add to the grace of God to make us right.

It doesn't really matter what the works are. In the first century church, it was about old works of ceremony and the law that would confuse

Christians into saying, maybe I need to be circumcised as well as saved by Christ. And so many of the

New Testament authors deal with this heresy, and today it is alive and well, because in many churches this is infiltrated, and we will find that even sometimes inadvertently, there will be teaching that is about the treadmill of religious activity and hopelessness.

The idea is this, that we will work in order to please

God even more, and that you must look a certain way, and you must say certain things, and you must have certain trappings to really be in the kingdom of God.

This is the Judaizer heresy. It runs amok today, but I think it is the least of the three, although I will warn you, it's growing rapidly right now, and it's really growing in its old form.

It's much more about Passover meals, seders, observing actual ancient ceremonies of the

Old Testament, and this is taking root and growing. So we've learned nothing in 2 ,000 years, or as Solomon says, there is nothing new under the sun.

The second idol and false doctrine that we need to deal with is one that changes shapes all the time, and that is the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, which is the other heresy that many of the

New Testament books are about. Now, what Gnosticism as its form, and this may be one of those, we'll call them doctrinal things on Wednesdays, we may have to get into Gnosticism, Gnosticism is this idea of this strange feminine divine mystique up in the air that has basically intervened in front of the big, bad, mean

God who did all these mean things in the Old Testament. But what it devolves into,

Gnosticism always devolves into autonomous libertine antinomianism. Autonomous meaning every man for himself, libertine meaning you can do whatever you want, antinomianism meaning the law has no power.

The law has been obliterated by grace. That's the idea. And so how

Gnosticism plays itself out is that people will say that the body doesn't matter at all, it's only what you think and what you believe that matters.

And what comes from that is libertine antinomianism. All kinds of sexual immorality practiced and adopted,

Christians don't have any standard to hold one another to, we see this rampantly. How can you say this person's not a

Christian? Well, they're saying the most crazy things that are unorthodox possible, and you will get, you can't judge them.

That is Gnosticism taking root, because Gnosticism always leads to a seeking of knowledge that puffs up and values spiritual insight above action.

Orthodoxy over orthopraxy. In fact, in full -blown Gnosticism, orthopraxy is what you actually do with your knowledge, it doesn't matter at all.

The only thing that matters is what you believe, because that's the only thing that's going to be eternal. We see it everywhere.

Now we have this Frankenstein, this Prometheus of false doctrine that has just run rampant in the church today, and I'm calling that the modern heresy of liberalism.

I'm not talking about Democrats when I say liberalism, what I mean is the liberal idea that is founded on the idea of egalitarianism, that there is this mythical, secular, neutral public square, and every voice can just come in there, and we're all just going to agree with each other at some point, or we can agree to disagree, and I'll go home and live peacefully, and we'll all get rich.

See, the modern heresy of liberalism, it has pieces of Gnosticism and pieces of Judaizer heresy that pulls and tears, and they show inconsistency over time, because egalitarianism destroys hierarchy, it destroys marriages, it destroys ecclesial and civic authority, and it devolves into a presentism because it must.

Understand this. In order for liberalism to thrive, you have to believe that we're the smartest people who ever lived, and everyone before us just didn't know what we know today, otherwise they would have had the exact same government as us.

You will hear tenets of liberalism as like, we must preserve our democracy, and then no one asks the question, why, why?

If this is what this has delivered us, then of what good is the system? But that is a blasphemy against the religion of liberalism.

So understand that that is the one today that has most infected the church. It makes people very uncomfortable to poke democracy in the eye, right?

You will get angry comments. And the reason why is because democracy has functionally become a god.

We trust in democracy. We depend on democracy. We are ruled by democracy.

So that's where we are. And then what do we do with this? The apostle tells the church, he says, remember everything that you did, and remember what the

Israelites did. The lesson that we are supposed to remember is that they went out into the desert, and they did not see their

Lord, because Moses was up on Sinai with the thunder and the clouds, and they were afraid to go up there.

So what they did was they said, hey Aaron, make us an idol, make us a calf that will represent the one true

Lord, so that we can pray and worship and offer sacrifices to him, because we want to worship

God, but that God scares us. And so what they did was they fashioned a calf.

Understand, they were not making an idol to Baal or to Molech. They were making a calf that was representing their

God. And that is idolatry. And what has happened in the church is that it synchronizes.

And that's the lesson that Paul wants the Corinthians to understand, is that the way idolatry works in the church is that people who are within God's people don't usually just start blatantly worshiping

Baal. What they will do is they will ascribe Baal's ideas and practices to Christianity.

And they will rub Christianity on the top of it, and they'll say, well this is what

Christians do. No, it's actually what demons do. And so it infiltrates the church, and it starts causing problems, because Paul's central point in writing this chapter, remember

I told you last week, he is getting at something. And it's going to become more clear, hopefully, next week.

What he's getting at is the church must have unity. The church must have unity.

And if everybody is bothered in each other's conscience about the practices of their brothers, then there's not going to be unity.

It's a dangerous situation. So here's what he says. Flee from idolatry.

He's already told them, flee sexual immorality. Flee idolatry.

In the Greek, this word, it means shun. Do not tamper. Do not draw close.

Do not entertain. Run away. That's the sense of the word. Don't get near it.

Don't touch it. Don't smell it. Don't let it into your house. Shun it entirely, and don't ever unshun.

You keep shunning it. You continue to hate it. If you're to hate anything in this life, it would be idolatry.

You should hate idolatry. Think about the Ten Commandments. Think about the first three. You should have no other gods before your

God. You should not make graven images, and you should not take the Lord's name in vain.

All three of those commands are dealing directly with idolatry. 30%.

And then when you consider that sexual immorality and breaking the

Sabbath always come into this idolatry, literally half of the Ten Commandments are directly related to this practice.

How often do we think about idolatry in the church? Well, here's what our helpful bettors have done to us in the last decade.

They have said that the greatest idol of the church is your family. Friends, that's ridiculous.

It's not true. I've never met anyone whose idol was their family. Okay? The idolatry that we have is to a system that makes us fat and comfortable.

It's much worse than you think. See, it's counterproductive and unnatural to think of your family as an idol, but it's very safe to never realize what the true idol is.

Because even the good kings of Israel, they would go, but they would not always tear out the high places, right?

Not all of the high places, because they stayed. But they didn't worship during their kingship, but the places were up there.

And so it is as the church, even if we don't worship here, we are not very active in tearing down the high places.

You have to flee from idolatry. And we know, remember, context. Remember what the fathers did.

What did the fathers do? They tore down the high places. What did Moses do? He told the leaders to grab a sword and to kill their friends and their brothers who had been involved in the golden calf incident.

See, there's a thing that we're not very afraid of. And it is the beginning of wisdom.

We're not afraid of God. Have you thought about that lately? We go through our lives.

We wake up, it's mundane. We get busy. We watch stuff on TV.

We mindlessly scroll on our phones. We use careless words. And we laugh at the stupid

Israelites in the desert who saw the sea parted and forgot their

God. How often on a daily basis do you start your day thinking about the terror, the terror of the

God of the universe? See, the historic tendency of every

Christian from the beginning until now is the tendency to syncretize.

It's to bring in a little bit of the world and to make it part of our practice.

And the reason we do that is because we want to be friendly with the people who are out there.

It's always what we want to do. Now, does that mean we're supposed to be jerks? No, it doesn't mean that. But we are never supposed to synchronize and adopt the worldliness.

And let me cheat on the conscience a little bit. The more worldly you are, the more susceptible you are to synchronizing or syncretizing and adopting idolatry.

That's what happened with the golden calf. They had seen the fun.

Remember, they partied. They made the golden calf and they partied because where did they learn that from?

They're looking out at all the people outside that looks like they're having so much fun. And Satan's constant game is to make you hate

God's law and think that God's law is keeping you from having fun. And I was telling an atheist this week, as I was explaining the law to this man,

I said, you do understand, right, that the more you accord with this law, the more naturally successful your life is going to be.

And he could not argue with that. He could not argue. But what's going on in Corinth is they are playing the same game.

They are worshiping Jesus with the Lord's gathering by name, but they are also wanting to dine in the pagan temple while also observing communion with the people of God.

See, what we want to do today is we want to teach the Bible while practicing the dogma of secular liberal democracy in every facet of life.

Understand, friends, that capitalism is divinely appointed. I think it was on the tablets, was it not?

Thou shalt be capitalist. GDP go up. What are you, some kind of leftist?

You don't want to maximize the profits of every business in America? This economy runs on cheap labor.

What are you, some kind of Marxist, if you don't believe that? Do you see how the dogma of liberalism invades the church?

See, a representative republic also was the type of government that God anointed from the beginning.

Thou shalt have a Senate and a Congress and division of powers. How dare you ask otherwise?

Women leaders and teachers, they're not a disgrace to the people, but they're a blessing of enlightenment.

The more women leaders we have, the more enlightened we are. Look at all those stupid idiots from the past who thought that women wouldn't be great leaders.

It's not like God said it or anything. Who cares what he said? We know better now. See, the ability to tolerate drag queen story hour by a

Christian author, drag queen story hour was described as a blessing of liberty.

That man is David French. He should be shunned and shamed out of Christianity unless he repents.

But we tolerate because we syncretize, because we don't want to be crazy, right?

Wives must submit when their husband gives reasonable suggestions. This is the fruit of egalitarianism, of liberalism.

Elders are just another church member who we can take or leave based on our own understanding.

Sola scriptura, baby. You can sum up liberalism in this brilliant quote from The Office.

Indulge me a second. Ryan from The Office, he's the temp. Here's what he says.

I got away with everything under the last boss, and it wasn't good for me at all.

So I want guidance. I want leadership. But don't just like boss me around, you know.

Like lead me. Lead me when I'm in the mood to be led. I mean, it's tremendous.

That is really the mantra of the God of this age, is it not?

We're divided and leaderless, and we want to be led. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Stop leading so much.

I don't feel like it right now. That's what we do. And so Paul starts to advance his rhetoric here.

And in verse 15, it's very crucial, church, that you start to recognize what Paul is doing with the Corinthians.

He is using rhetorical devices over and over. That's going to become extraordinarily crucial for us to understand the difficult passages from 11 through 14.

Very crucial. Here's what he says. I speak as to prudent people.

You judge what I say. What does Paul mean by that? He's going back to a trope that he's used over and over through the letter.

You are wise. You are learned. You are knowledgeable. So contend with what

I say in your sophistry. Weigh it out. Examine the argument, and see if you can come to any other conclusion.

So this is how Paul is going to support that they must flee from idolatry. Support number one, he comes out with the big guns first.

Communion. Because Paul's got something to say about communion, OK? And he's going to say it in chapter 11, and it is brutal.

What the Corinthians are doing is not good. It's not good at all. They are blaspheming

God. And so he lays out the argument, and here's what he says. It's not the cup of blessing which we bless a sharing in the blood of Christ.

It's not the bread which we break a sharing in the body of Christ. Since there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

What does this have to do with idolatry? See, the unity of the church is dependent on fleeing idolatry.

Idolatry is what brings division into the church. Syncretizing, having ideas that are contra

Scripture, and to have them tolerated will develop factions, and these factions are going to be developed along the lines of conscience.

I don't like what you're doing over there, and I can't abide it. I don't care that you don't like what

I'm doing, because my conscience allows it. And then we divide. It's a tale as old as time.

So what is the lesson of communion with idolatry? It's to understand who you are, what you're doing, and what you've been called to do.

Because look at what communion does. First, it's a cup of blessing. It's a cup of blessing, blessing from God.

To be blessed by God is to be righteous. There is no way to be blessed by God outside of having righteousness.

Righteousness is right standing according to the law, that you have been judged righteous. We know that the only way for that to have happened is by God's mercy, because there's not one of us that's righteous ever.

But he has imputed his righteousness, given it to us legally, that he sees

Christ when he sees us, and all of our lawless deeds have been covered by the blood of Christ never to be read again.

If the rap sheet of all of your impure thoughts, profane language, vulgarity, stealing, conniving, dishonoring your parents, having idols, if all of those things are on a rap sheet, written in ink, the blood of Christ soaked the page so that the ink can never be read again.

So when the prosecutor comes up before the throne to argue against you, and he opens his folder, there's nothing to read there.

There is no evidence. The only evidence is Christ's perfection and his innocence.

That is the cup you're drinking, that blood, that blood every week.

So Paul begins with the big guns. Remember what you're doing. You are partaking in the blood of Christ that is a cup of blessing.

You are sharing in the body of Christ. All of our hope is put in the person of Jesus Christ.

There is no other hope. And we declare that, we remember that, and we proclaim that every time when we gather and we take these elements.

That's why we're so serious about guarding this table. Because if you take that in an unworthy manner, which is going to happen at 11, bad things start to happen.

People die. Do I think that's been abrogated? No. I think people get sick and die today because they take a religious sacrament and partake in the blood and the body when they're not part of the body.

Dangerous thing to do. Very dangerous thing to do. So the argument is this.

When we come to the table, we share in a feast that is after the sacrifice, just like in the demon temple.

Do you see what he's doing? He's talking about the fake thing versus the real thing. The feast is after the sacrifice, isn't it?

The sacrifice happened. And we remember it. We are bonded and bound up in Jesus.

We are in this together every Sunday. See, the Lord's Supper, we tell you to examine yourselves, but understand this, the supper is primarily corporate.

It's not your supper. It never was. It is a shadow of Christ inviting you to the table with him, with all of your brothers and sisters.

And so it is really about the corporate body, not about the individual. Forget the liberal nonsense.

The reason we think it's all individual is because of the liberal idolatry, the egalitarianism.

Just me and Jesus with my Bible. Church history has no view of that at all.

Do you understand that? You can't be disconnected from the body. The body is the whole thing.

Remember in Romans 11, you were grafted in. All the branches.

Nobody looks at individual branches on trees and goes, what a magnificent branch that is. They don't do that.

They look at the tree and they say, what a magnificent tree. And I've done that many times as you see magnificent centuries -old trees.

When you're fortunate enough to see one, they're a majestic thing to know that they saw the Civil War. Right?

Amazing. But we don't look at the branches. But in the church, we've been taught for our whole lives that you need to have a personal relationship with Christ and it's really all about you and him.

Friends, that is a pathway to the anemic, syncretistic, liberal Christianity that we have today.

It's not about you. Never was about you. It's about the people of God.

Always was. Always. Who is Moses? Federal head of a people. Who is Abraham?

The father of many nations. Who is David? The king of the nation. The epitome of a king.

Who is Christ? The one who has all authority over heaven and earth.

It's not about you. What are you to do when you go to communion?

You are to love your neighbor by not defiling the elements. Love your neighbor by being careful.

See, even when you examine yourself, think about how they think. Think how insidious the liberal mind virus is.

See, we even think, well, I don't want to die or get sick when I come to the table. That's not really what it's about.

It's about the dinner table. It's about coming up and messing up the whole thing for everybody else by yourself.

By blaspheming. Don't do that. That's why Paul says, no idolatry.

Remember what you're doing and who you are. Then he makes a second argument, a second support, and this is the historical support that it's always been this way.

What's going on in communion is not something new in as much as that it got invented out of whole cloth.

It was the fulfillment of what had always been happening before and it was always treated the same way.

Look at the nation Israel. Are not those who eat the sacrifices sharers in the altar? When you went in the temple and you participated in the sacrifices, you were the people of Israel.

And that said something about you. That said that you are God's people. Now, what if you weren't really

God's people? Not all Israel is true Israel.

Paul would say. Well, what does that mean? That means that we get the new covenant language in Hebrews where it says the

Lord was not pleased with them. There was a fault in the old covenant.

Not in conception, but in fulfillment. All of Israel was to care for the

Levites. They didn't have their own portion. They were scattered across the whole nation. They could not defend themselves.

They could not subsist. They depended on the charity of the other tribes. And as long as Israel remained pure to confine their worship to this setting and by these regulations, the kings were praised.

The people flourished and they were protected from their enemies. But when did Israel fall?

It was when they stopped worshiping only in the temple. When they brought their own ideas about sacrifices and they synchronized and the kings didn't stop it and the people were overrun and the kings oppressed the people.

You cannot commit spiritual adultery without destruction. And this is why sexual immorality and idolatry are so closely linked in Scripture.

And Paul has made this couplet. Flee sexual immorality. Flee idolatry. They are linked.

They've always been linked. Because if you will play the whore for your own God, what's going to stop you from playing the whore with your own husband?

Whether present or future. Nothing stops you. If you would cheat on the God of all creation, you will absolutely cheat on a fallible man or woman made in His image.

Because the image isn't the substance of the reality. In some ways we are like God, but God is not like us.

I hope that that was clear from last week. Can anyone describe you as a consuming fire?

No, I don't think so. I don't think so. So here's the argument.

You must flee from idols because you are all together. Because to partake in this is to say that you are a part of this.

And if you are worshiping other things while you're a part of this, then you are starting to divide what

God has put together. Now, in marriage vows we are often here, we hear it in wedding ceremonies, right?

Let no man separate what God has put together. The marriage is a shadow of the bigger reality of what

Christ has done with His church. What happens when you try to divide Christ from His church?

Well, we know from Hebrews that there will be no salvation for you, that the blood of Christ will cry out for justice against you, and God will avenge

His Son. It's a serious thing to have other gods whenever you identify as being of the one true

God. That should frighten you. It is not the meat, it's the action, as we move into conscience here.

Let me read it to refresh you, because I've waxed long so far. I'm sorry. What do I mean, then, that a thing sacrificed to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything?

No, but I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God, and I do not want you to become sharers in demons.

You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.

Or do we provoke the Lord to jealousy? Are we stronger than He? Rhetorical questions.

Do you see the rhetoric? Do you see how He is playing with rhetorical questions and answers?

Understand this, and remember from chapter 8. There is a high -handed argument going on from chapter 8 that Paul is finally addressing to completion here.

And that is this. Remember what the Corinthians would say. There is only one God. Idols are nothing.

Food is unimportant in an eternal sense. Therefore, who cares if I dine with pagans, eating the food from the bounty of sacrificing to their gods?

That is the argument. All of the premises are true. Did you hear that? Every premise of that argument is true.

There is one God, the idols are nothing, and the meat is nothing. But the conclusion does not follow the premise, because even though we, by reason, can learn true things, there has been divine revelation that was given.

And remember the Council of Jerusalem had forbidden this already in order to build up and protect the

Gentile and Jew mix in the church. So these high -handed arguments were really proto -liberal arguments, where it's like, who are these guys, who's this

James and Peter to tell us that we can't have this meat? That's what they're really saying.

Who are you, Paul? Who are you, James? Who are you, Peter? We want the meat.

And the reason we want the meat is because that's what all the wealthy people do. And if you want to ascend through society and be the upper crust of Corinth, you can't be one of these hick, hayseed guys who's not going to eat the meat in the temple with all the other well -to -do people.

So I want to do it, and I'm going to craft an argument here that it's going to be okay for me to eat the meat because they're nothing.

Do you see what we do? We do this all the time. We ignore divine revelation.

We ignore the authority of the church and our fathers that went before us so that we can do what we want to do.

And so Paul takes it, and he says this, Do you think you are protected from Satan whenever you judge yourself to be so wise that you cannot fail?

I will never fall into Satan's schemes. I know too much doctrine for that.

My arguments are sound, and I've got this. Well, he had already warned them, didn't he? Verse 12,

Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed that he does not fall. When you deem yourself strong enough to contend with Satan in your knowledge, friend, your doom is coming.

It's not a question of if, it's a question of when. If you think that you have arrived at a level where you know

Scripture well enough, where you have prayed habitually enough, and you have surrounded yourself with enough friends that you are going to be able to contend with Satan and do something that even the archangel

Michael refused to do, your doom is at hand. Do you remember in Jude what

Michael said? He said, I don't rebuke Satan, I say the Lord rebuke you. That's Michael.

I think we would all bow down if we saw him, because every saint in the Scripture who saw an angel like that did bow down.

And he's not God. He's in the presence of God. Incredible stuff. In other words, let me ask you this,

Reformed brother. Can your knowledge protect you from a blindness and lack of care for your brothers?

Can you learn enough doctrine to the point that it doesn't really matter if you consider your brothers when you do stuff?

Take heed, lest you should fall. And here's the other part of this. When we start to synchronize, he says, remember what he says, do we provoke the

Lord to jealousy? Paul is doing something very specific when he says this. Friend, Christian, this should terrify us more than anything

I've said today. If you provoke the Lord to jealousy, here's what's going to happen. Deuteronomy 32.

I'm going to take snippets of verses 17 through 23. Here's what it says. They sacrificed to demons who were not

God. This is the people of Israel. To gods whom they have not known, new gods who came lately, whom your fathers did not dread.

You neglected the rock who begot you. You forgot the God who brought you forth.

Then he said, I will hide my face from them. I will see what their end shall be, for they are a perverse generation, sons in whom is no faithfulness.

They have made me jealous with what is not God. They have provoked me to anger with their idols.

So I will make them jealous for those who are not a people. I will provoke them to anger with a wickedly foolish nation, for a fire is kindled in my anger, and it burns to the lowest part of hell, and it consumes the earth with its produce, and it sets on fire the foundations of the mountains.

I will heap calamities on them. I will exhaust my arrows on them.

Christians, I think we have to be real. Do we see signs today that God has made the church in our nation look at other foolish nations and search after what they have?

Do we have a perverse generation with sons who have no faithfulness, among those who call themselves

God's people? We've lost the Methodists.

We've lost the Anglicans in America. We've lost most of the Presbyterians.

We've lost so many Lutherans. What are the

Baptists doing? Whatever they want on their own, autonomously. His anger burns to the lowest part of Sheol.

This is what happens when God's people forget who their God is. The church today here is afraid, but not afraid of the only thing that we're supposed to be afraid of.

See, verses like that, they terrify me. And understand that that verse was corporate too.

But your individual decisions have something to do with the corporate, because if you bring your idolatry and it gets tolerated, then we have the situation in Corinth, and we're about to have the veil open.

We're about to look very intimately over the next several weeks over what's going on in the weekly gathering of the people at Corinth.

And it's a scary thing. Paul's warning them. The idolatry is at hand.

And then he gives them practical wisdom that we will end on here. Here's what he says. I want to stop.

I want to preface this text, because this is all about the conscience, and you guys are probably fairly familiar with this.

All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable. All things are lawful, but not all things edify or build up.

You've heard these passages. And here's what we do. In our syncretizing with liberalism, what we have done in the church for my whole life, and I, to my shame, have done this numerous times.

I go to this passage, and what I'm primarily trying to decide is, God, am I allowed to do this thing that I want to do?

That's because we've syncretized. Because the faith really is all about me. Because it really is all about my actions, and what

I'm going to get out of it. That's not what Paul's talking about.

He's not writing them this letter so that they will have a final invective to be able to decide whether they can eat meat or when.

See, he's got a bigger principle going on here. So let's go through it. Remember what he said. All things are lawful, but not all things are profitable or build up.

And then he says, don't go asking around at the store where the meat came from. Why?

For conscience sake. Because once you know, you're going to have to do something about it.

And remember the argument. The meat's nothing. If you go to somebody's house and they serve you meat, don't go, where'd you get that meat?

Because think about what's about to happen. This is what he says. If you go to somebody's house and they say, I got this meat from the temple over there.

Then what you say is, I can't eat that. And it's not for my conscience. It's for their conscience.

Because what they're about to see me do is worship the demons. It's not about the meat.

It's about where it came from and what you're doing. And once you know, you know. And once you know, you are a witness to the lost generation.

And what we've done is we have filtered out this divine stuff and we have historically asked the question, can a

Christian drink alcohol? That is so blindingly stupid that I can't even believe it.

Can a Christian watch rated R movies? Do you see how we strip the context by doing that?

This is really more like, how does a Christian avoid syncretizing with idolatry?

And the more you love the world, the more you're going to syncretize without your conscience even knowing it. Because you have made your conscience less sensitive to the idols.

So here's what we do. Everything is just stuff and it's lawful. But the question we must ask is, does it build up and encourage?

And friends, are we even asking that question? Is the thing I'm about to do, is it going to build people up?

Or is it just going to make me feel happy? Are we overly concerned about what's going to happen to other people?

Or is it all about our rights? Friends, we need to, in the information age, we need to calm down about asking the origins of everything.

We spend so much time on TikTok, going into the furthest corners of the web, where you're banking on the edges of the internet to learn where did this spinach come from?

What are we doing here? So we go to the neighbor's house, and we don't ask them where they got the meat.

Okay? Don't ask them. If they tell you, you have to walk away for their good. But here's the thing.

Understand this. This is the guiding principle. The Christian life is one of freedom and wisdom, not endless research and introspection.

Do you see what Paul's doing? He's talking about your knowledge is not going to protect you from the idolatry. What's going to protect you is a well -tuned conscience that's following the

Holy Spirit. Where are you getting that Holy Spirit influence? From the table. You come together.

You declare these things. God works in your life, and he gives you a properly tuned conscience.

So how does it all fall apart? Well, Paul says that he does everything with thankfulness, a clean conscience.

And when you do that, you don't have to worry about the meat. Have a clean conscience.

Think about others. Be grateful to God, and then don't worry where the chips fall.

Listen to your friends. Listen to wise counsel. Surround yourself with it.

Do everything to build up others, and then bask in the joy of obedience. It is good to obey

God. It's very, very good. And we have to remember this, too.

In the mix of idolatry, look what Paul brilliantly does. He talks about the first table of the

Ten Commandments, about not having idols, and then he brings in the application of the first table of the

Ten Commandments, is to love your neighbor. That's the summary of the law. It's good to be in agreement with God.

We must not let the fear of man chart our course, but instead fear God. So here's what you do,

Christian. If you are taking in daily bread, remember the lesson last week. Take in the bread every day, because God is testing.

Do you really live on it? Or do you live on your own ingenuity? Take heed, lest you should fall.

If you are taking in daily bread, drinking the living water, joining with the saints in holy communion, fleeing idolatry and sexual immorality, then it is likely that your conscience is working well.

So follow it. We have the guiding principle of giving no offense. He says in Acts 24,

In view of this, I also do my best to maintain always a conscience without fault, both before God and before man.

The guiding principle of wisdom and conscience is to look out for the good of neighbor and to have no fault before God.

Confess your sins. This is what Paul said to Felix when he was being examined. See, we have to confess and repent when our conscience is burdened.

But otherwise, when our conscience is not burdened, we live for others in the sense that we obey

God's commands with respect to them. Everything that we do, and this is

Paul's point, everything about the offense of the gospel, that should be the only offense when we talk to our friends.

The gospel is the offense, not conscience issues. We give up our rights to proclaim the gospel.

And in the body, we give up our rights to bear with one another so that we do not cause divisions.

And we never, never, never treat things with pride and with condescension because that's what brings division into the body.

We end with the catch -all. Be imitators of me, just as I also am of Christ.

This could be a sermon by itself. I'm just going to ask you a few questions here. Are you imitating, and am

I imitating Paul as Paul imitates

Christ? Let me just pick a few areas where we should imitate Paul. Are we imitating

Paul in his gospel proclamation? Are we imitating Paul's piety?

Are we imitating Paul's freedom? Are we imitating Paul's love of the church and of his neighbors?

Are we imitating Paul's zeal for Christ? Are we imitating

God's gratitude for calling him into the kingdom and understanding his place in it?

Are we imitating Paul in hope to live as Christ, to die his great gain?

Let's pray. Lord, we have nothing to do here except to ask that you would, through your

Spirit, give us wisdom and discernment. Lord, help us to see where idols become deeply entrenched, where they change our patterns of thought, where we try to reconcile fellowship with light and darkness.

Lord, help to expose those lies in this church and in our families.

Lord, help us to be a people who, for conscience's sake, would give no offense and would not sin against our conscience.

But, Lord, also, at the same time, I pray that you would calibrate our consciences in accordance and agreement with your law, that we would understand your law, that we would love your law, that we would obey your law, and that through that, you would build great unity in this place as we celebrate and come together and proclaim remembrance of what you have done so that we would be unified, partakers of one cup of blessing and of one body as we break it, as we share in what you have done.

Lord, may we be a people that joyfully and gratefully fill up the measure of sufferings that you were the firstfruits of on the cross.

Lord, help us to be people of courage, to fear no man, to not cast a wandering eye at the fruits and the tables of spoil that the world lifts up, but instead,

Lord, that we would have a holy fear of you, that we would be afraid to make you jealous, Lord, that we would fear your judgment.

And so that would be a guidepost that would keep us on the way of holiness. Lord, protect our church here.

Protect us from all of these pitfalls and these sources of division, Lord, so that we would be one people, and you would be our one