Knowledge and Love

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Don Filcek; 1 Corinthians 8 Knowledge and Love

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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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I'm Don Filsak. I am the lead pastor here. And as Linda said, we enjoyed a couple of weeks out.
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Last week, we were up north. You know, you're from Michigan when you head north this time of the year.
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And beautiful, beautiful colors up there last week when we were on our way up there. But I'm really glad to be back.
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And I echo the same thing that Linda said. I miss you guys when I'm gone. And I mean that sincerely. Whenever we're gone on vacation, we do visit other churches.
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And we actually kind of like that. It's fun. Just to see how other people worship and to remind us that there are other people in other cities and in other places that worship
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God too. And it's really encouraging. And at the same time, we're always reminded when we visit other churches that the church we attend is not… it's not recast.
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Like when we go and we visit there, most of them are good. Most of them are doing their own thing. Most of them are… many of them,
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I should say, are teaching the Word. But none of them are our church home like you guys are. And so, we're glad to be back.
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This morning, we're going to be back in the book of 1 Corinthians. And we're in the middle of several chapters where the
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Apostle Paul is, in essence, managing a large Q &A. The church has responded to him in writing.
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It started back in chapter 7. If you were to glance there, chapter 7 verse 1, he said,
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Now concerning the matters about which you wrote… And that's a big heading shift in the book. And then he separates different issues that they wrote to him about, likely asking some questions and giving some commentary about the way that they're viewing things and asking for his correction or for his direction.
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And he divides those out with the phrase, Now concerning. Now concerning shows you that he's tackling a new subject.
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He's addressing something new. And our text happens to start this morning in chapter 8 with a now concerning.
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So, a new change of topic, new thing that we're going to be talking about here. It's been a lot over the course of chapter 5 through chapter 7 about sexuality and marriage and singleness and all kinds of things going on there.
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And the topic of hand now that's pressing on the minds of these ancient Corinthians is a topic that's far, far removed from our contemporary concerns.
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I don't think there's a person in this room over the course of your life that aside from reading God's word has ever thought the thoughts that we're going to be talking about here.
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This is the question, the kind of line of thinking that's being addressed in this text.
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What should a Christian's attitude be regarding food or meat that is sacrificed to idols?
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Ah, super devotional, isn't it? How many of you have just like, you spent most of your teen years just troubling over that, right?
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What do I do about meat sacrificed to idols? What do I do at the butcher shop? Where do I go to get food?
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Where do I go to get meat? Now, you don't really spend a lot of time thinking about that. And this topic seems further away from our contemporary concerns as a church until we begin to apply it.
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And once we begin to apply the principles of this passage, it comes to life. Once we begin to see the application of the main principle espoused in this passage, we will see that it ought to be a driving force, not a secondary, not a third degree, kind of like, oh, we ought to think about this from time to time.
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The principle that when applied should impact our daily decisions, the way we live our lives in community together.
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This passage identifies for us an ethic of unity within the body of Christ that is radical, it's vital, and it is often overlooked.
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It's radical, it's vital, and it is often overlooked. The reason I use such extreme words to define this is that we're a culture of knowledge.
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We're going to see knowledge and love put together in a way that is important that often isn't thought through.
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You see, we think the one who is right, the one with the right argument wins, right?
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I mean, raise your hand if you kind of basically think that's true. Like the person with the right argument, the person with truth on their side should win in all circumstances, right?
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And here in our text, we will see Paul emphasize that right knowledge is good. Landing on the truth is important, but only, only, only when applied with love.
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Only when applied with love. The backbone of our unity is only as strong as our understanding of the call to love one another.
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Certainly, we need to know right and wrong, but knowing right and wrong often leads the more knowledgeable, like us, right?
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We're all the more knowledgeable. We're all pretty much brighter than most people. That's the way we think.
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But it leads the more knowledgeable into an arrogant self -righteousness and pride. Knowledge, even of the truth, can puff us up with pompous privilege, while the one without knowledge can be run over or overlooked, or even led astray by those who model freedom in Christ without any care or concern, as this text is going to explain.
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So much conflict in our lives, church, comes through the conduit of arrogance, or a lack of love, or a pride of knowledge, that I would go so far as to say that if you've experienced conflict within the past week,
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I'm not going to ask for a show of hands, because I know all of you have, there's some level of conflict in your life, what be it internally, or with a spouse, or with a child, or with a parent, or with a co -worker, or with a boss, or with somebody.
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If you've experienced conflict this week, this passage will speak to it. This passage will speak to it.
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Because the vast majority of our arguments center either on a disagreement about what is true, or an unloving response on our part, or the part of the other.
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And often, unfortunately, it's a combination of the two. A disagreement about what is true, and an unloving response.
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This proves true in my life, it proves true in my family, in my marriage. When Lynn and I disagree, it is often over disagreement about what is true, or what is not true.
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Or one of us, usually me, has acted in an unloving way. And yet, before I read this, let me be clear that more is at stake in this passage than just merely getting along with each other.
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What is at stake in this passage is the peril of destruction. The peril of destroying one another.
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Going about living in the freedom of Christ without a concern for fellow brothers and sisters can result in some very dire consequences, according to the
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Apostle Paul in this passage. So, let's open our Bibles, or your scripture journals, or your devices, to 1 Corinthians chapter 8.
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We're going to read this in its entirety. A little bit of a shorter passage this week, or at least a shorter chapter.
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Maybe a longer passage than we are used to taking on, but it's an entire chapter. And again, recast
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God's holy word. Chapter 8 is what he wants to take on for us this morning.
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What he wants to impact us with, and what he wants to transform our lives with. So, please follow along 1
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Corinthians chapter 8. 1 Corinthians 8. Now, concerning food offered to idols, we know that all of us possess knowledge.
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This knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know.
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But if anyone loves, he is known by God. Therefore, as to the eating of food offered to idols, we know that an idol has no real existence, and that there is no
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God but one. For although there may be so -called gods in heaven or on earth, as indeed there are many gods and many lords, yet for us there is one
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God, the Father, from whom are all things, and for whom we exist.
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And one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and through whom we exist.
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However, not all possess this knowledge. But some, through former association with idols, eat food as really offered to an idol, and their conscience, being weak, is defiled.
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Food will not commend us to God. We are no worse off if we do not eat, and no better off if we do.
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But take care that this right of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak. For if anyone sees you who have knowledge eating in an idol's temple, will he not be encouraged, if his conscience is weak, to eat food offered to idols?
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And so, by your knowledge, this weak person is destroyed, the brother for whom Christ died.
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Thus sinning against your brothers and wounding their conscience when it is weak, you sin against Christ.
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Therefore, if food makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, lest I make my brother stumble.
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Let's pray. Father, we rejoice in the opportunity that we have to gather together.
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It's a privilege. And I pray that we would not take it for granted. We can kind of see church as a show that we take in on Sunday morning.
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We gather together. There's an audience. There's a stage. There's things going on. Take in the program and leave.
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That's not church. Church is the united people under our
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Lord and Savior Jesus Christ who love one another, who bear with one another, who are in relationship with one another.
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Not, God, I pray that you would remove our blinders and the way that we become so myopic to our own lives, the way that we think only about ourselves, the way that we think even in terms of our personal relationship with Jesus, as if we can walk this road alone.
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Father, I thank you that you've brought us together. I thank you that you're uniting people. I thank you for rumors that I hear over the course of this last 14 years of people loving one another, of caring for one another, meals given to one another, prayers offered to you on behalf of one another, of tears shed with one another, and laughter and joy with one another, sorrow over defeats and rejoicing over victories.
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Father, I pray that you would be cementing us together to weather the storms. The world out there is raging.
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I can't hardly read a headline without thinking about Psalm 2 and the nation's rage.
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Church stands. Father, make us a people who love you, love one another well in the face of this storm.
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In Jesus' name. Thank you to the band for leading us in worship. Encourage you to get comfortable just like every week, but keep your
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Bibles open to 1 Corinthians chapter 8 so we can kind of walk through that together. So if you have your
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Bibles open in front of you, that's just going to help you. Again, I'm going to keep referencing back to that passage.
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So get back there. And that if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donut holes, you can take advantage of those back there.
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You're not going to disrupt me if you need to get up at all. Use the bathrooms that are out the barn doors down the hallway on the left -hand side if you need those.
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But the topic at hand is like I mentioned in my introduction, a topic that we don't think about very often, food sacrifice to idols.
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It shows up right away in verse 1. And our outline begins with Paul framing his answer to what
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I can only assume was a question that was something like, and I think it's framed this way.
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It's okay for us to keep eating the meat from the marketplace, right? Even though it was all offered to Demeter or Diana or Zeus, right?
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Like the idea is that it was a pro, like I think the Corinthians were already doing this. The implications throughout this passage all the way through chapter 10 is that they're likely already doing it and they're looking for confirmation.
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They're saying, we're okay with this, right? Now, there were some within Corinth that were not, but the majority were, and we're looking for some kind of, you know,
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Paul's approval kind of thing. And so that's where we're at and that's what we're looking at here.
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We don't have the questions throughout this passage. It's not like a Q &A where we get to see what the questions are and then see the answers.
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But it doesn't matter that much that we don't have them because what we do have is the active, proactive teaching of Paul in the answers throughout 1
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Corinthians. And the answers are what God desires to communicate to us. So it doesn't matter, but it doesn't keep our minds from wandering.
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Often, scholars spend pages and pages and pages and commentaries discussing what was the likely question, but we ought to spend our time on what the answers are, right?
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Here's the answer. So let's dig into that. Our outline this morning is the core of our actions, verses 1 through 3, the core of our actions, then verses 4 through 6, the core of our knowledge, verses 7 through 10, the core of our love, and verses 11 through 13, the core of our concern.
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So we're going to be looking at actions, knowledge, love, and concern, all swirling around and Paul utilizing the topic of meat sacrifice to idols to get down to the core of these things.
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So we'll start with the core of our actions here in verses 1 through 3. Paul introduces the topic and then seems to wander off into an unrelated topic right away.
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Like, how many of you have ever just like asked? Remember when you were a kid, you asked your parents a question and then they answered and it had nothing to do with the question you asked?
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Like, why are we talking about this? I was just asking if I can go to the dance and now you're talking about like modesty or something?
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Like, why are we talking about this? I don't know. So here he says, they are concerned about food offered to idols.
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And so concerning food offered to idols, Paul says, let's talk about knowledge and love. Let's go there.
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Let's talk about knowledge and love. And so that's the topic for these first three verses. He will definitively get back to the specifics of food sacrifice to idols throughout this passage, but barely.
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What he wants to take us on is a quick lesson regarding ethics in the Christian life. The way that we roll with one another, the life that we are meant to live together.
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And he starts off with a presupposition. We all have knowledge. All of us have knowledge of some sort.
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And I fear that many in the American church have misapplied Paul's concerns throughout all of 1 Corinthians. He's talked about knowledge early on and we misapplied it.
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Evangelicalism has been an increasingly skeptical movement. It was kind of founded in a bit of skepticism towards education and therefore an increasingly uneducated movement has developed.
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And we may be tempted to think that we find our justification for being against formal education in 1 Corinthians.
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I've heard people say, you know, I wouldn't trust somebody who went to seminary or something to that effect. Or, you know, it's kind of like that's the place you go to ruin your faith.
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You go get formally educated about these things and that's going to destroy you. And I reject that idea.
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I recognize that making it too academic and not from the heart matters. And that's what he's going to say here.
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Paul is not against knowledge. We all possess it if we are in with Christ. It's a given.
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It's a given. If you belong to Jesus, a given is that you have knowledge about him.
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You didn't come to faith in Christ through feelings. You came through some understanding, through some knowledge about him.
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Christianity is a reading, writing, communicating with words kind of faith. God is a speaking, writing, revealing kind of God.
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And he's put it down in writing for us to study, to know, so that we can keep coming back to it time and time again. The fact that knowledge puffs up doesn't remove us from the necessity of studying to grow in our faith.
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But rather, we must have something added to our knowledge to put us in the right place. And what is it that the text is going to tell us we need added to our knowledge to be in the right place regarding knowledge?
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Love. Love must be added. Our knowledge comes from love.
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If I'm putting it into practice, we all have knowledge, each and every one of us. But knowledge without love puffs up, but love itself builds up.
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Knowledge puffs us up. Knowledge without love is going to make us an arrogant people. It's going to make us proud and prideful.
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But love, love is what builds up community. Love is what, specifically a love based on knowledge.
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Now, I don't need to get too deep into this because I think all of us have plenty of personal experience with those arrogant people out there who, you know, nothing like us, right?
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No, they act just like us, really, if you think about it. I mean, outside of the four walls, are there arrogant people?
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Inside the four walls, are there arrogant people? Yeah, we're here. But there is a better way to live, says
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Paul. Knowledge undergirded with love that desires the best for each other, that is in each other's campus, is ready to help, is ready to help the hurting, is willing to even go so far as rebuking those that are wrong.
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That kind of love, a love that enters into it. You talk about a healthy church, you talk about a healthy people, show me a church or show me a people that has deep knowledge coupled to an equally depth love.
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That's going to be an amazingly attractive community, right? One where there is truth held high and love held equally as high.
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That's an amazing community. That's what the church is meant to be. But Paul attacks any arrogance at the point of fiction.
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Fiction, you know, kind of untruth. In verse 2, he addresses anyone who thinks he knows something.
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Oh, this is getting close to home because I think all of us live in a day and an age where we can be experts about something with just a couple clicks on Google.
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We think we read Wikipedia and now we're an expert, right? And then we can weigh in on chat groups about topics that we've never studied.
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You know what I'm talking about? So we live in a day and a culture where we think we know something and we will speak into it with more confidence than we ought.
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Raise your hand if you acknowledge that about yourself. Am I alone? You're not going to leave me alone on that. About 10 of us do that regularly.
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I think more of us probably have that feeling in us where we know a lot about things that we don't know much about.
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And we can know the truth, but we can know the truth of God's Word to a
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T but have incomplete knowledge without love. We can memorize huge chunks of Scripture, be able to quote the
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Ten Commandments verbatim. We can go through the entire Bible in a year every year. Our Bibles could be marked up and highlighted and underlined and circled, but without love, our knowledge cannot be complete.
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And he concludes this caveat with a wonderfully pithy and deep observation in verse 3.
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It drives us in the right direction, a direction that knowledge alone will not take us. If anyone loves
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God, he says, he is known by God. If anybody loves
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God, he is known by God. That's where knowledge matters. What knowledge matters about you?
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What you possess, what you filled and crammed in your mind, is that the knowledge that's most important to you? Or is it that you are known by the
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Almighty? Which knowledge is valuable to you? He says, if anyone loves
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God, then he is known by God. What can humble us and bring our eyes down when we've been puffed up with religious pride?
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What can put our feet back on the ground when we think we pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps in our knowledge and our understanding and our academic pursuits and our reading of the
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Scriptures and our pursuing commentaries and our research online and all of that? What can bring us back down to earth that nothing that we have come to grasp, nothing that we can intellectually arrive at by study can bring us to the love of God?
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Rather, here in verse 3, we see notes of the gospel in this, that we love because He first loved us.
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We love because He first loved us. And the good news is that we are known by Him. Not that we know stuff about Him.
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Not that we can spit out right theology about Him, but that we are known by Him. Oh, one of the most terrifying passages of Scripture.
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Some will say on that day that they did many good things in His name. Their trust will be placed in what they did.
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Did we not cast out demons? Did we not do all these miracles? Did we not do amazing things? Things that I haven't done, things that I'm guessing you haven't done, and their resume is going to look better than yours.
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Their resume is going to look better than mine. And they're going to say, we did all these things in your name. Let us in.
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And what is His answer going to be to them? Depart from me, for I never, what?
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I never knew you. What knowledge matters most to you? What you can cram in your head?
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Or that you are known and loved and cared for by the Almighty. That is a recentering thing for us in this text.
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Knowledge about God is not bad in itself, obviously. But I believe that it always,
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I'm just making a radical statement here. I believe that knowledge about God always puffs up when it is not growing in the soil of love for God that springs first from being known by Him and loved by Him.
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A heart that has not been grasped by the gospel is a heart in a dangerous position.
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Knowledge without a relationship of love with God through His great grace poured out on us through the cross of Jesus Christ, His Son, is a religiously dangerous person.
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It's a religiously dangerous heart, a proud heart that is filling itself with knowledge without the gospel, without Christ.
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That is a dangerous thing. Knowledge without love will always lead to pride and arrogance.
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And in the end, without being corrected, will lead to hell. That's how important these things are.
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What are we talking about here? We're talking about the very core, the very core of our actions, the very core of why we live a
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Christian life. And so the core of our actions is a knowledge supported by love for God and love for others that comes out of the gospel.
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The two greatest commands are love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.
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He is deeply concerned here for the way we roll in our community as a church recast.
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And maybe an application point this morning is to check your attitude to determine where you're at. Are you puffed up and full of knowledge but really low on love?
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That could be quite possible for many of us coming off of a few tough years here.
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Let this passage pop your balloon with the truth. The only thing that matters about you is that God loved you and rescued you from yourself.
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He rescued you from your lies. He rescued you from your darkness. He rescued you from your brokenness.
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Amen? And now He is building you back up, giving you knowledge in order to live out a life of His love toward others.
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Humble yourself this morning. Confess any arrogance and pride that you find within you and ask Him to use you in the practical ways that are yet to come in this passage.
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Now that He's established the core of our actions as knowledge with love, we move on to the more specifics, the specific detailed and technical section of the text, getting more and more technical about meat sacrifice to idols.
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We haven't even really talked about that yet. But He told us that He was going to be talking about food sacrifice to idols, and this is where we see the core of our knowledge come out in verses 4 through 6, the core of our knowledge.
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The beginning of verse 4 lets us know that what He says in this section connects to the previous section as an outcropping of that importance.
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He's been talking about knowledge and love in the context of meat sacrifice to idols, and this section is going to be more focused on the knowledge aspect of things.
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Paul right away says, we know in verse 4, that's how he starts, we know. Whoever he's writing this for, he assumes that they have some knowledge about idolatry, they have some knowledge about God that is shared in common, and yet in verse 7, he will speak about others in the church that do not possess this knowledge.
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We know, but some don't, all within the context of the church, all within the context of brothers and sisters in Christ.
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And I believe that he expects the average Christian to know some things. He expects that we have a very generic but common understanding about what
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Christ has done in the cross and the sacrifice that He made for us. He expects us to have some things in common, but he is so totally leaving room for some people in the church on the periphery to not have come into this full understanding, particularly regarding the nature of idolatry, particularly in regard to this meat sacrifice to idols thing that's going on here.
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I point this out here at the beginning of this because it shows that Paul understood that there's a variety of people that the church will interact with, a variety of people here in this room.
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Not all have and share the same knowledge. Not all of us have the same points in which we need to grow.
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Some of us are really strong in Trinitarian theology, some of us are very weak in that, and we need to bolster that.
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We've got some study to do. We've got some work ahead of us. Not all have the same knowledge, but all of us need to grow.
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And we define maturity here at Recast as growing in faith, growing in community, and growing in service.
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Maturity is not a line that we cross and one day we wake up and we go, got it, I'm now mature.
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Now I'm in. Now I got it all figured out. No, maturity is a commitment to a lifelong process of growing in faith, a faith that's built on knowledge about God and love for Him and love for others that flows out of His love for us at the cross.
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But Paul expects those who will read this letter in Corinth to know something quite specific about idolatry, something that we ought to all be brought into.
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And he spends three verses here explaining that idols are not real. That's what we ought to share in common.
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We ought to know that. Idols are not real. There is no other real
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God. Yahweh is not the head of a pantheon. And he roots this knowledge in Scriptures.
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He paraphrases a string of thought from Isaiah in the phrase, an idol has no real existence. He's not quoting a particular passage, but a line of thought from Isaiah.
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And then he does quote directly from Deuteronomy with a common Jewish phrase, there is no
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God but one. And so we see all throughout Scripture an appeal back to God's revealed word as the source of the understanding.
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What do we know, church? What do we know? How do we know anything about God?
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How do we know what is true about the nature of idols? How do we know there isn't a pantheon of gods up there, angry that we haven't given them their food in a while?
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It's been a while since we made a sacrifice here. Maybe they're all angry at us. How do we know that that's not the reality behind the scenes?
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How do we know that's not the fabric of the universe? How do we know?
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Scripture, Scripture, we trust this or we don't. If we don't trust this, how many of you know that anything goes?
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It might be the spaghetti monster in the sky. Like if we don't trust this, if this is not our foundation, then really we're opening the door to all kinds of things.
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That's why I love that he's revealed it in a written word that we can keep going back to, that we can study how it even came to us and we can see the supernatural nature.
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How many of you have been impacted by this word personally? It's changed your life. I've seen it time and time again when
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I dig in, it nourishes me, it gives me strength, it defines terms for me, it breaks down barriers, it reveals truth about me that's ugly, that I don't even want to believe, but it's true, that I'm broken, that there's a
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Savior that came to rescue me. I'm so much here. Scripture is how we know, and Paul appeals to it many times.
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And so we know that there are many self -proclaimed gods and lords, he says, and he puts it in quotes, so many gods and lords,
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Thor, Zeus, Nero, Tiberius, Herod the Great, all the way from myth and fiction to real live dudes who said,
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I am God, worship me and bow right now or I'm going to cut your head off. Real people who claim deity and lofty titles for themselves.
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And they are, in Paul's words, so -called gods. Now, Paul will clarify that he sees more power behind these idols than merely nothing.
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He's going to save that revelation for chapter 10. Here he doesn't dive in and give us everything at once, but rather he does indeed see deceptive, demonic forces behind idolatry, behind many of the things in our culture, behind the things in our culture, certainly behind many of the things in their culture as well.
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But that's, again, we're going to save that for 1 Corinthians chapter 10, but for now he wants to be sure we're all on the same page.
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Zeus, Hera, Artemis, Perseus, and the Roman emperors claiming deity are not really gods.
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And further, there is one true God and one true Lord. Many will gladly take those titles, but only one
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God deserves them. Only one God it really lands with. And that one God has revealed himself in three persons,
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And here we see either Paul being utterly inconsistent in this text or utterly
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Trinitarian because he sees no inconsistency in declaring that there is one God and Father from whom all things came and for whom we exist.
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And there is one Lord, think King and Master, through whom all things exist and through whom we exist, running parallel lines with God and Jesus.
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The reason Paul goes here is to highlight that in the Father and Son, we have all of our existences and purposes.
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We are created by him and we are created for him. And this core knowledge ought to be brought to bear on everything, church.
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It ought to come to bear on everything. As far as application, it's good to remind ourselves at the start of the day, throughout each day, and at the end of every day, that God is the maker, sustainer, and purpose of all things.
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It's a good place to start the day. This core knowledge should drive the way we live moment by moment, minute by minute, hour by hour.
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It should put us in our place, but it also should heighten our anticipation for his purposes for us in each day.
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He is our purpose. He is the one. Every day that our feet hit the floor, we're alive for one reason, church.
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Every single morning we get up and we breathe his air and our feet hit that floor is that he isn't done.
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He's not done with us, so we live. How many of you know, when he's done, we won't.
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But we will live every moment that he has for us to live. Amen? I find comfort in that.
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I find encouragement in that. I find strength to age. You know what I'm talking about.
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Like, as you age, it's like some days it's like, oh, wow, I'm here again. Depends on what you're going through, right?
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He has more. We wake up in the morning because he has more works for us to walk in, more good for us to do, more prayers to offer, more love to give, more service to render, more gospel conversations, more shining light and more salting the earth with his goodness, more growth in knowledge and love.
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That's why you're here. That's why we're alive. But this truth that God alone is
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God comes to bear on the topic of meat sacrifice to idols in a very specific way. Those gods are nothing.
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They're really nothing. There's really not anything behind them. It's not that important, neither here nor there.
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And that gets to the core of our love in verses 7 through 10. Because those that are in the know about these things can then have flippancy towards them.
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But Paul encourages us to pause here. And here's the core of our love. Tells us to pause and think about others.
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Not your personal relationship with God. We're in community. What we do matters.
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What we do impacts each other. And so the core of our love is verses 7 through 10, the third point.
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And most of us have little to no concern for the places. Just kind of set the stage. We have very little concern for where our meat comes from.
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Where do you buy your meat? Some of you have a butcher. Some of you go to Walmart. Some of you get it at Meijer.
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Some of you get it at Whole Foods Place or wherever. I've recently discovered that we have three different people here at the church that raise and sell beef.
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They raise and sell beef cattle. And Lynn and I just picked up a quarter of a cow recently and our freezer is full.
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As a matter of fact, that was just within the last week or two. And some of us are coming back into the knowledge a little bit more of where our food comes from.
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Some of us are starting to homestead a little. And some of you are doing chickens and turkeys and goats and all kinds of things.
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And how many of you know what I'm talking about? Some of you? No? There's a little bit more movement towards that. More people are going in together and buying a quarter of a cow or whatever and are actually starting to get a little bit more connected with their food supply.
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And that can be a good thing. I'm not preaching on that, but I think there's, you know, we're doing that.
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But honestly, we are really still far removed compared to Roman times of the knowledge of where our food comes from.
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You know what I'm talking about? We are disconnected a lot. I've never seen a Dorito tree.
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Sure, they're grown somewhere and they are delicious, but they are barely food, right?
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I mean, is that really food? If you were to show that to somebody from like, say the 1700s, they'd be like, do you eat it?
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What do you do with this? And then they would eat it and then they'd be addicted right away. So there's been, here's what's interesting.
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I do a little research and I try to figure out what to include for you and what not. But I've always studied a lot more than what
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I stand up here and share. But this was one nugget that I kind of thought was helpful because there were a lot of people for centuries, this passage was taught in pulpits and in churches and up front and in scholarly debates.
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It went back and forth that there was no place to buy meat in Corinth other than the temple. You had to go to a pagan temple to buy meat.
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And it's actually only been within the last 50 years that we've uncovered definitive, clear information that there was a public meat market in Corinth.
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We keep finding, we've got scraps of documents and paper and parchment that are filling up these warehouses where scholars are just looking to get their hands on them and some are not even cataloged yet.
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And there's this place called Oxyrhynchus. Oxyrhynchus is that old dump that they found from Greek times and actually they found like the routine things of life like receipts from purchases and that kind of stuff.
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And what they found in one of these digs is they actually found a register giving credit to a wealthy dude who was the patron that funded the building of the meat market in Corinth.
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Like definitively, like this dude deserves accolades. Everybody give him applause.
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He funded the building of the meat market, the public meat market in Corinth. Okay, guess what guys?
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There was a meat market in Corinth. We know that. So there was a common place for people to go buy meat.
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And yet the majority of meat sold in Rome came through the sacrificial system.
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Where were they slaughtered? They weren't paying butchers. They were being slaughtered and offered to these
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Roman gods and goddesses. They came through that sacrificial system. Proceeds often went back into the temples of the pagan gods and goddesses.
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So the purchase of that meat was often directly funding the pagan priests and priestesses and all that stuff.
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And I hope this clarifies for you the controversy that was happening in Corinth. Some had a weak conscience and didn't think
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Christians should participate in any way, shape or form with meat sacrifice to idols. While those with a stronger knowledge and a stronger understanding that they were okay in the gospel, they were okay with it.
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They were like, yeah, it's just meat. The logic is quite simple. Those with a stronger grasp of the freedom we have in Christ and a stronger sense of trust that these idols are actually really nothing, we're fine eating meat sacrificed to idols.
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But let me stop us all for a moment and do an exercise that might be a bit convicting. When you think of somebody with a stronger conscience, if we were talking about some dude named
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Joe and I said, he's got a really strong conscience. What do you think of Joe? What comes into your mind?
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Does he like more rules or less rules? What do you think? How many of you would raise your hand and say more rules?
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He's got a strong conscience, more rules, right? But Paul flips the strong and the weak on its head in our passage and whenever he mentions it, wherever we find the juxtaposition of the weak conscience versus the strong conscience, it is flipped, which
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I believe reflects how unreasonably far off we are in our thinking about morality in the
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Christian life. We think a person with a strong conscience is going to have more rules. The one with a stronger conscience, according to Paul, has more freedom, understands the freedom, lives in the freedom, and understands how much
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Christ's sacrifice means for our daily walk in a fallen and broken world.
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Because a strong conscience is a biblical conscience. A strong conscience is a gospel conscience.
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A strong faith is a faith rooted in the knowledge that he has washed my sins away.
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Amen? A strong conscience doesn't yield a life of fear, but yields a life of joyful freedom.
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Not freedom to sin, but freedom to not worry. Freedom to walk in this life in joy and gladness without a terror about, like, what if God is against Halloween, right?
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Or whatever it might be. Fill in the blank with whatever it is for you. But a weak conscience struggles with the truth that we've been set free.
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A weak conscience is the one that's like, I think he might just be ready to smoke me if I get it wrong.
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I think he's probably just got the lightning bolt ready, and if I just step off one way or the other, man, he's going to get me.
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That's a weak conscience. And a weak conscience has a little growing to do in regard to the knowledge of what
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Christ has done for you. But in this passage, Paul doesn't tackle a solution to the weak conscience.
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That's not his concern here. A person who would demand, by the way, a person with a weak conscience,
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I've seen this happen in churches. Fortunately, it's not gotten that far here. But a person with a weak conscience often will demand that everyone do things their way.
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But that's not acceptable in the church either. You can't claim a weak conscience and then always get your way.
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Paul is not here setting up a pattern by which the first one to shout, I'm the weaker brother, gets their way. It's me,
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I'm the weak one, so now you have to do it my way. Paul here in verse 7 is saying that not all understand idolatry the same way.
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Some who were steeped in former pagan practices are going to have a hard time wrestling their consciences to the truth that eating meat sacrificed to idols is a gray area issue.
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For them, and the way that their upbringing was and their personal experience with idolatry, for them it feels very black and white and very clear.
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He's contending that there are going to be people in the church who are going to have a weak conscience. And when they get around, when these people, particularly in Corinth, they get around idolatry, when they get near the temples, when they hear the names of the old gods and goddesses that they once worshipped, they feel a gravity and a temptation to enter back into a lifestyle that could be rightly called comforting to them.
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We think it should be just a clear break for them, no problem. And what we can't conceive of is the idea that some people in their past were so utterly connected with particular forms of worship, particular forms of idolatry, that to even be around it is intoxicating.
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It draws them back into an old pattern of thought, into an old way of comfort.
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Do you realize how comforting pagan practices actually are? You got a problem and you're infertile and you're struggling to try to bear children, you go to the gods and you give a sacrifice.
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Your kids are wayward and struggling, so you go and you give a sacrifice.
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There's something to do for everything in paganism. Do you understand what I'm saying? There's very little gray area in paganism.
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You just go do the thing. There's stuff to do. How many of you would just admit, and I'm going to raise my hand, like there's some comfort.
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There would be potentially some comfort in that. That's not the way that the world works. That's what the scriptures say is true.
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But how many of you would raise your hand and say, like, there's something that's just mildly comforting about always having an answer to everything.
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That's the draw of paganism. And so that some would find that lifestyle very, very comforting.
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We had a Q &A when we were in Uganda and I had, this question came up at every place that we went.
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We had a panel of a couple of the elders right here from the church and we went and other all pastors from Africa in these conferences and we would sit on chairs and they would ask us these questions and it would come up.
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Okay, so like we know that Jesus Christ saves us. So now, but it's okay still to go to the witch doctor for the generational curses, right?
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Because when we've got these generational curses that are placed on our families, we still go to the witch doctor to pay them a sacrifice to cover for that.
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And these are pastors. And they didn't have a framework by which like, no, Christ is taking care of you.
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You're good. You can trust him for that. These are the pastors of churches that are encouraging their people.
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Yeah, but when it comes to these scary things, these demonic things, you really have to go to the practitioner for that.
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Now, there's a comfort that overcomes people when it comes to pagan practices. And so in verse eight,
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Paul offers another concession to the strong here. He's kind of bouncing back and forth kind of between the strong and the weak.
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He's not saying you're wrong to be strong and not at all. We know that what we eat is neither here nor there in relationship with God, he says in verse eight.
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And this in itself is a radical statement. Think about it. Paul coming from a Jewish background, raised in a Jewish context, studied under Gamaliel, a
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Jew among Jews, a Pharisee among Pharisees. All those kosher laws are out the window with a pretty brief and passing comment here.
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What you eat doesn't matter. What do you think? That's a pretty radical change for the apostle Paul. That demonstrates that there was a pretty big shift in the way that he viewed the world and viewed
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God. What we eat doesn't matter much, says Paul. Food will not make us more or less acceptable to God, he says.
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And now to be clear, your mind might wander like mine does, and gluttony is a sin regarding food, but it rests more in the heart attitude towards food than it does in the food itself.
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And so Paul's statement here is absolutely true. It's not about food. It really is about our hearts.
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So verse eight serves to remove this discussion away from the specifics of dietary law. He doesn't want to dive back into dietary law and what's kosher and what's not instead he's saying, that's gone.
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That's gone in Christ. Instead, verses nine through 11 highlight Paul's deeper concern. Here is what all of us talk about.
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Meat sacrifice to idols really is about love for people. That's where he wants us to land on this.
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The strong have the right to eat meat sacrifice to idols if they want, but he squarely places the onus on the strong to care for those who are currently in a status of weakness.
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Those who are finding their freedom in Christ ought to take special caution to be sure that they do not somehow become a stumbling block for the weak.
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We ought to be creative in our thoughts about what could cause others to stumble. There's another answer to that and that's knowing each other better.
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We're going to get there in a minute. But we can wrongly think that a stumbling block is a pesky annoyance like Legos left in the hallway for our feet to find in the dark or a stone in the pathway to stub our toes on.
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Oh, that's inconvenient. The stumbling block metaphor in scripture, everywhere that it's used that I can find, it's always used in the context of destruction.
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The one who stumbles over a scandalon, that's the Greek word, scandalon, stumbling stone is one who plunges to destruction, one who plunges to doom, destructive in nature.
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And in verse 10, Paul gives a more specific scenario that is different than the discussion of merely eating food sacrifice to idols.
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He's going to land on that going, that doesn't matter that much. It's not really a big deal whether you eat meat sacrifice to idols, but he's going to into a way of eating food sacrifice to idols in verse 10 that he's going to eventually disagree with strongly by the end of chapter 10 and say, no,
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Christians ought not to do this at all. There's a part of this passage that he's going to pick up later and say, no, you shouldn't do this.
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He says, if those who are strong in their freedom are seen by a weaker brother eating meat sacrifice to an idol at a temple dinner, then the weaker brother will be enticed to reenter that context of their idolatry.
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And he's going to later in chapter 10 say, don't even go into the temples. You can buy this at the meat market, but don't go into the temples and participate in the feasts and the dinners and all of that stuff that we're being put on and the benefit of Diana or Artemis or these pagan gods and goddesses.
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By the knowledge of the stronger brother, the weaker brother may be brought back into idolatry and therefore plunged headlong into destruction.
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Paul calls this man, a brother for whom Christ died, meaning that he's a Christian. And that leads me to conclude from what
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I understand from all of scripture, that the strong word destruction here is, it is a strong word, but it doesn't have an eternal facet to it.
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This is not about condemnation. This is about destruction, about a destructed life. It is in the present tense, meaning that the one who goes back to idolatry because of your freedom is being destroyed, active place of being destroyed.
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Their life is going down a sinful path that leads to sin, depravity, and possibly even the end of their physical life.
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The core of our love is a radical view of community. Church, we need to take this on. We are saved into a life of loving our neighbor as ourselves.
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We are called into a relationship of being our brother's and sister's keeper. Are you your brother's keeper?
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Are you in connection in life with one another like that? We are not all out here on our own little journeys in isolation towards the celestial city.
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Sorry, John Bunyan. Sorry, Pilgrim's Progress. We're not alone in that. We are an army fierce and strong together, church.
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We are a body dependent on each other to live. Satan wants nothing more than for you to be alone.
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He wants you to be isolated. He wants you to be disconnected, and he wants you to not love the person sitting behind you or in front of you.
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He wants us to be disconnected. He wants us to be uncaring. He wants us to be unloving and just a bit aloof from one another.
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That's what he desires. What he really would love. He's not against this gathering as long as he can keep us isolated.
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As long as this can just be a show. As long as you can come in and get your fix and walk out and go,
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I'm good for this week. He's okay with that. Just don't lock arms together.
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Just don't get together and recognize that we are together something that he's terrified of, but alone he can manage us.
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He doesn't want us together, church, and God has put us together to be vitally, vitally impacting each other's lives for good, for love, for care, for concern.
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We need to be in accountability relationships together as a church.
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We are not on our own little journeys. We are an army fierce and strong. We're dependent on each other.
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We are a beautiful mess that God is redeeming in unity together. And that beautiful mess, I mean that sincerely because many of us have been hurt by the church.
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What do you expect from a church? I hope you expect some hardship. I hope you expect some sparks to fly.
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I hope you anticipate that there's going to be times where it's going to be uncomfortable together. I hope you expect and are open to somebody rebuking you.
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I say, that's off track, man. That's not right. Let's go back to God's word and talk about this.
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You shouldn't be treating your wife that way. You shouldn't be looking at that secretary that way. You shouldn't be doing this this way. You shouldn't be clicking on that.
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How many of you know that we need rebuke? Or I'm not going to talk about that because that sounds a lot like we're about to gossip.
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We're not going to talk about that here. Go to that person and talk with them. I'm not going to entertain that.
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We need this because we are indeed beautiful and a mess.
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And stop thinking only about yourself. Stop thinking only about your truth. Stop thinking about only your freedoms, your personal relationship with God.
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And start thinking about others. Serve one another, love one another, and even give up freedoms and rights for one another.
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But we're Americans. And that's a tough one. We all can put our foot down on our rights, right?
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And according to this passage, the last and brief point wraps it all up. The core of our concern.
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What ought to drive our concern? Verses 11 through 13. When it comes to community, we ought to care.
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We ought to care. That was the application. That's the application of point three. Care. Whatever that looks like.
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Get involved with others. Join a community group. Get together in each other's homes.
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Really figure out what makes each other tick. Share stories with one another. Share your burdens with one another.
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Pray with one another. Encourage one another. But we care because the well -being of our brothers and sisters are at stake in this.
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And so it's our own relationship with Jesus is at stake as well, according to verse 12. According to verse 11, theirs is.
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According to verse 12, ours is. When we wound a weaker Christian's conscience and encourage them to enter back into that which is sin for them, we are sinning against him.
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And when we wound one member of his body, we're wounding him.
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And so Paul concludes in verse 13, saying that he would choose to forego meat to avoid making a brother stumble.
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Now, this all sounds pretty theoretical. While many of you might want me to get very specific, this is the passage where we talk about the freedom to drink alcohol while landing on, we're not going to drink alcohol, right?
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Isn't that kind of, how many of you heard this passage used that way? It has been in my history. But here's the principle of the passage that I want you to think through.
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Here's the principle of the passage. If there is anything we do that entices others to forsake
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Jesus, we must rethink that behavior and be willing for the sake of the weaker brother to give it up, whatever, whatever, whatever it is.
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I don't think that I've ever drank a beer in the context that it was going to cause somebody to go back to idolatry.
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I don't think that's happened, but it's something that we need to think about. I don't think that Paul would have us walking on eggshells.
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I don't think this is meant to be a fear message that we are all tiptoeing around one another, not really sharing our hearts, not really sharing what's going on for fear that we might call,
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Oh, maybe you're a weaker brother. Maybe you're a weaker sister. I'm going to cause you to stumble just by saying the wrong thing. So I'm not going to say anything.
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Obviously, that's not the intention. The intention is to do life together. We ought to walk in both knowledge and love, and this requires us to know each other much better than we do, much better than we do.
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Knowing past, knowing history, knowing struggles, knowing past idols, sharing with each other our struggles and praying for one another and bearing one another's burdens.
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Paul picks this theme up again in 1 Corinthians 10, and there he's going to speak about hospitality regarding meat sacrifice to idols.
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We're going to get there. The community ought to know about the touch points in our culture and be conversant about them.
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Alcohol does come close to this discussion. God forbid that any one of us would be guilty of offering a beer to a recovering alcoholic who is a guest in our home.
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We ought to think this way. You don't know where they stand regarding alcohol, don't offer it.
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Are you getting what I'm saying in that? I have an application to this. But also, shouldn't we be careful about other things too?
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Careful about the shows we promote? Should we be careful about the authors we recommend? Especially when so many are deconstructing in their faith right now.
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That's a pretty good application to this. You might be strong enough to handle some things that you hand to somebody else and it ruins their faith.
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Are you getting what I'm talking about? Being careful. There are some authors that lead away from faith despite sounding very spiritual.
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Other authors will feed an appetite for legalism. Some authors will feed a propensity towards the prosperity gospel.
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Some of us here are coming out of that. Some of us here have been rescued out of the thought that the only thing that God offers is health, wealth, and happiness.
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And don't tell Job that that was the center of the message, right? And so you're coming out of that.
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And should we be careful about what books we hand to somebody else? Some of us would just be drawn back into a weak, cliche
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Christianity. Some authors and some books are just so shallow. And what it does is it just brings people back into the kiddie pool of a shallow faith.
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That's what they grew up with. It's just kind of like the candy Christianity. Just give me the easy stuff.
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Again, we ought not to dwell together in fear, but rather an increase in knowledge for the weak, love for the weak in conscience.
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Increase in their knowledge ought to be the point. There ought to be an aim that the weak are growing stronger.
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But in the meantime, the strong remain committed to a loving sacrifice, giving space and time for the weak to grow up.
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And so all of the importance of this is brought to you by, sponsored by, verse 11. And so by your knowledge, this weak person is destroyed.
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The brother for whom Christ died. Look around you, church.
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I'm going to make it awkward and I'm not going to say anything more until you look around. I want you to look around.
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Still awkward, but some of you aren't looking around. I want you to see that there's other people in the room.
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And why do those other people that you see why do they matter? Why does that person sitting over there matter?
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And why do you matter? And why do you matter? Why do you matter? Eve, why do you matter?
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Why do you owe each other sacrifice? Why do you owe each other to give up your rights for one another?
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Why do you owe each other love? Because you and you and you and you are brothers and sisters for whom
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Christ died. What is the value of a human life? What do you think?
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That's a, that's a high value. There's a lot going on there. And so those who are here, who have asked
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Jesus Christ to save you, if you're here and you've asked Jesus Christ to call the shots and you are at peace with others in this church, as far as it's up to you,
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I invite you, I invite you like I invite you every week to come to the tables, to remember the center of our unity.
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Here's some knowledge. Here's some knowledge we ought to share. His body was broken for us because of our sin.
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His blood was shed for us because we couldn't save ourselves. And so we come to the tables to take that cup of juice and drink and remember for hope and redemption.
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And we take that cracker to remember his body broken in our place. And then
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I encourage you as you go to those tables, as you stand in those lines, as you move back to your chairs, as you drink and you eat at your own pace, but look up and look around.
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We are not eating this alone. We're not eating this alone. We're remembering our brokenness and his great love for us together.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for the unity that you have purchased for us here.
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I look around this room and many of us hardly know each other. Some of us, this is new and you're like, they're just kind of like, well,
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I don't really know anybody here and I don't know how to connect. But I do pray that you would be connecting us more and more in relationship with one another, more and more in vital community, more and more as we realize that the darkness is real out there.
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And that this would not become a huddle up together thing, but a strengthening together so that we can go out into the darkness and be salt and light.
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Other than not at all a fortress mentality of just hiding out in these four walls until the return of Jesus.
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But a strengthening of us together, a strengthening of our love together for you.
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It gives us the power and the force to go out and be the army that you desire for us to be.
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An army presenting love and care, unified together, that they would know you through our love for one another.
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Father, thank you for the cross that brings us all to a level place. Our brokenness, our crud, our messes, our abusive ways resolved in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.
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Pray that you would increase our unity together, increase our love for you and increase our love for others.