Spiritual Gifts - Barriers To A Healthy Church

God Centered Theology

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I trust that you will be blessed, all of you will be blessed this morning as we look into God's Word. And last week we started an introduction to a new series on spiritual gifts, and today we pressed forward with that.

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And within the series, this week and next week is actually a mini two -parter in the overarching series.

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This week we'll be presenting sort of the problem with next week being the solution. So this week we're looking at barriers to a healthy church, and then next week we'll be looking primarily at what the solution to that and how to pursue a healthy church and all those things.

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And also, last week I outlined the eleven spiritual gifts, everything from prophecy to teaching to serving to giving, faith, discernment, so on and so forth.

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Starting this Wednesday night, I don't know how many of them we'll get through each Wednesday night, but I imagine we'll get through at least two, maybe three.

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I'm going to start going through each one of those, describing what they are, describing what they would look like in the church, and maybe even hopefully having a discussion about whether or not you think this might be one of your gifts or not.

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You can take an assessment, you can take tests and things like that, that will tell you based on your results, these are your spiritual gifts, but really what it all comes down to is your heart and soul and how you feel the

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Holy Spirit has uniquely gifted you to serve in His church. And you, for the most part, my experience has been that Christians pretty much know what your gifts are.

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You may have a couple, once you get through the first two that are obvious, as you get down the ladder, sort of those supplemental gifts that help your primary, maybe a little division in your mind over which ones are stronger than the other, but there's always going to be one, two, possibly even three that are just very clear in your mind.

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You know what you were put on this earth to do, you know the ways in which you were put on this earth to serve, no question about it.

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So we're going to start into these on Wednesdays, and I hope and pray that it will be a blessing for you. What I want to start out this morning with is notating what we started with last week, and sort of set the context as we move forward.

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We noted that a healthy church is one that is actively promoting and pursuing the discovery, development, and faithful use of the spiritual gifts of all members of the body of Christ in the church.

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Now this takes on a specific context when you start looking at an individual local assembly of believers.

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There's the universal church, there is all those that have repented of their sin, placed their faith and trust in Jesus Christ, are all part of Christ's church, but we exercise and worship in local congregations.

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So a healthy church is one that actively promotes and pursues not only the discovery, but the development and faithful use of these gifts.

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Now notice with me, if you will, this statement says nothing about numbers, does it?

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This statement says nothing about congregational size, does it?

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If you study the book of Acts, nothing that the apostles did, nothing that the early disciples did, nothing that anybody that was involved in, whether they were in church leadership or simply a member of the church, nothing they did had numbers in mind.

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But you find in the book of Acts, it says the Lord added such and such a number to the church.

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The Lord added 3 ,000 souls in one day. The Lord added such and such a number to this congregation.

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The Lord will determine how many people is in this church, and He largely does that based on how healthy a church is.

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The Lord's not going to send people that are His people under the spiritual watch care of a dying or a church that is not healthy.

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Now, at the same time, you can be one of the healthiest churches that's ever walked the face of the planet, and you may never grow past 30.

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So this doesn't make sense. You would think, in America, we're trained to think, success follows.

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You do certain things, success follows, and we always think in terms of numbers or think in terms of financial gain or something along those lines.

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And there are elements of that to the equation. It's very obvious and very logical in my mind that if you do certain things certain ways, and if you attempt and push and attempt to try to reach and all these things, there's a certain amount of expectation you could have that there will be people that will want to come into your church.

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But the point is that our primary perspective, our primary goal, and our primary purpose for being here is not to fill this place up with 600 people.

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It is to actively promote, pursue the discovery, development, and faithful use of the spiritual gifts of the members of the body of Christ while also worshiping

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God, glorifying Him, reaching the lost. All these things are involved.

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And I believe that God blesses churches in one way that He blesses churches is numerically.

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I do not think that God wants to just leave a church with five people and never grow them past that.

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I do believe that one way He does grow us is numerically. The Lord is much more concerned with the spiritual health of a church.

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It's one of those things where we focus on what we're told to focus on and we let

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God handle the rest. Now this

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Corinthian church had a lot of issues. Everything from marital issues,

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Christians were suing each other all the time, dragging each other to court, had massive issues with taking sort of pagan practices, repackaging them as Christian, heavily influenced by the world.

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In fact, it could be very well said that instead of doing what they're supposed to be doing and that's impacting the culture and the community and the world around them, instead the world around them was impacting and changing them.

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They were falling into sinful patterns and practices that were characteristic of pagans. Notice with me in chapter 12 of 1

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Corinthians starting in verse 1. It says, Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren,

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I do not want you to be unaware or ignorant. You know that when you were pagans, you were led astray to the mute idols, however you were led.

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What Paul was saying here is that when you were lost, our natural nature, our sin nature that is natural to everyone that is born, when we are born, we are born with a sin nature.

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It is not that we just can't help it, we just, you know, it's just a mistake.

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No, we're naturally led to sin. It is in our nature to naturally desire and choose sin.

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When someone is saved, regenerated by the Holy Spirit, they now have a new nature. They have new desires, a new will.

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They have the capacity and the power through Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit to choose righteousness and overcome temptation to sin.

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However, what he's saying here is when you were pagans, when you were not

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Christian, when you were lost, when you were worldly, you were led astray to mute idols.

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Why? No surprise to Paul, that's what pagans do. It's what lost people do.

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He's saying this is not you. You shouldn't be doing these things. He's saying you should know better.

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I think in the year 2018, we should also know better.

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If you spend any time investigating and looking at American churches, I think you could say of a lot of them that they should know better.

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And you have to be careful too because there's a balance and there's a line you don't want to cross over into legalism.

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You don't want to get to the point where you're dissecting every little thing and saying, well, you know, that has some pagan roots.

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I hear it all the time from my extreme fundamentalist brethren, you know, that you shouldn't even celebrate

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Christmas, you shouldn't have a Christmas tree, you shouldn't do presents because it's all pagan. You know, after I'm like, for crying out loud, if we go that route, there'll be nothing left.

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We'll just walk around like this all day. Never say or do anything because we don't want to be pagan.

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It doesn't mean that you can't have convictions that you can't in your own home say, well, you know, I'm not, I'm going to do this, but not this.

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And as a church, we can collectively decide, you know, maybe we're going to do this, but not this. And you can have dividing lines.

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There's nothing wrong with that. But if it gets so bad where you literally can't do anything because it may or may not have a,

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I mean, it's like the six degrees of separation. It's not that the first thing's bad, but like six points down the road, there was that someone that knew someone that knew someone that knew someone that might've been pagan.

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Oh, well, I can't do it. That's crazy. But that's not what we're talking about here.

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These Corinthian believers knew it was pagan. They knew what it represented. There was no debate and they still were repackaging it and bringing it into their worship and using it.

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Notice verse three. It says, therefore, I make known to you that no one speaking by the spirit of God says

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Jesus is accursed. And this word translated accursed is anathema. It's a severe condemnation here.

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To render someone anathema to say that they are anathema or they are accursed. You are saying you're under condemnation of sin.

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You were destined for hell. It is the kind of thing you would say, you know, when you're drawing these dividing lines on the fundamentals of the faith, you know, deity of Christ, Trinity, authority of scripture, justification by faith.

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These are the things that I would say. If you don't believe in deity of Christ, you're in trouble. You're under the condemnation of sin.

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You're accursed. And they had people coming into their worship and their congregation and their intimate fellowship stating that Jesus was accursed.

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He wasn't really who he said he was. He really wasn't deity. He really wasn't the Messiah. Notice he says no one can say

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Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. Paul was saying, not only should you know as Christians that that is error, that that is heresy.

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But on the flip side, nobody can even say Jesus is Lord unless they've been saved by the power of the cross.

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There's a dividing line. There's distinctions. There are levels of separation. Now I don't believe in and I strongly preach against what would be termed a hyper separation.

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There's this idea of a hyper separation where, you know, you don't dare even step outside your door sometimes because you're afraid that someone might see you out in the world and think, oh, they're worldly.

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What this comes from is this overwhelming desire to be externally holy with no inward transformation.

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My friends, give me a Christian any day of the week that has a hunger and a desire for the word of God to have

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Christ in their life that wants inward transformation. You know what? If they don't quite stack up in the external as well as someone else,

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I don't care. Oh, here's a shock. We sin. We even fall short of the mark.

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Romans 3 23 continually fall short of God's glory. Why are we shocked when people sin?

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Why are we shocked even when Christians continue to sin? We're saved from the penalty of sin, not the ability to sin.

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This idea that you can somehow hold Christians or anybody to this unworldly external holiness standard is not scriptural.

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But it does say pursue and seek ye first the kingdom of God.

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We are to be seeking after Christ, seeking after inward transformation, desiring to be set apart, desiring to be more holy, desiring to be more righteous.

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But by God's standard, not man. But these

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Corinthian believers have become very fleshly, very self -centered. So I want to look at what

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I believe is probably, yeah, maybe somebody could make an argument, but I think it'd be very hard to make an argument that this is not the number one barrier in a church to being a healthy church.

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But I want to look at this barrier of self, self -centeredness, fleshly self, how it affects both spiritual gifts and the overall health of a church.

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Now to do that this morning, I want you to flip over with me to the first chapter of the book of first Corinthians.

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And that's where we're going to spend the remainder of our time this morning. First Corinthians chapter one, beginning in verse 10,

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Paul says, now I exhort you brethren by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree this where it's translated.

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You all agree. It's, it's literally say the same thing, agree, say the same thing. And then there be no divisions.

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This word translated divisions where we get our English word, schisms, schisms, divisions among you, but that you be made complete or unified in the same mind and in the same judgment.

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This Corinthian church had many, many, many divisions.

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They were divided over many things. None of them were because they were taking firm stands on sound doctrine.

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No, it was opinions. It was experiences. It was feelings. It was all kinds of things.

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This Corinthian church were plagued by various power groups, personality cults, as we're going to see that very, uh, clearly here in just a minute, personality cults, factions in their midst.

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Well, how could this happen? How could this happen in a church that names the name of Christ and claims to be pursuing righteousness, which is only found in Christ?

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Well, it all comes down to just one very basic decision. That's all. Everything in life boils down to one very simple thing, especially when you're talking about spiritual matters is the decision between self or Christ, self or Christ.

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Self is the biggest barrier, in my opinion, to unity and to health in a church.

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And it is also the biggest barrier to the slide I had for you at the beginning to actively promoting and pursuing the discovery, the development, and the faithful use of spiritual gifts in the church.

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So you have to ask the question then, which Paul undoubtedly many times asked these

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Corinthian believers, why do you come to church? Is it self or Christ?

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Do you come with self -serving agendas? Do you operate to either gain or preserve power in the church that isn't yours to begin with?

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Do you seek to have things your way? To me, one of the clearest signs of a promotion of self is how you react when things don't go your way.

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We learn that from the smallest among us, don't we? Sadly, we get to be adults, and I'm just as guilty as anybody else.

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I still want to act like a child sometimes. That can be playful and fun, and other times it can be just outright annoying.

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I'm told this in my home sometimes, especially when Hannah wants to play rough housing and run around the house, and all

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I hear is, y 'all are going to fall and break your necks. No, we ain't. I told you so.

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And that's just me. But if you think about it, and watch people, now you don't watch with judgmental attitudes and stuff.

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You still have to operate in agape love here. We're not looking to call people, oh yeah. Just watch.

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Be observant, and look at yourself. How do you react when things don't go your way?

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Here's the distinction. If what you're reacting to is sound doctrine, something that's fundamental to the way the church operates, probably a good thing to get angry every now and then and stand firm.

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If it's something that's trivial, agape love says that even if you don't get your way, even if it causes personal injury to you, you let it go and you support whatever it is because after all, it's not about you.

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It's not about me. It's about Christ. These Corinthian believers missed it badly.

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Boy, am I glad I didn't live then, because I'd hate to think that I was involved in inspired scripture and it's not good.

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But fortunately for us, we have it as an example. You know, self, when you really boil it down, and I'm one of them people that, you know, you talk about things in certain circles, but you never say publicly,

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I don't really have that problem. I just go ahead and say it. You ever heard the term church hopper? Let me tell you something about church hoppers.

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Self is ultimately the motivation and the motto of the church hopper. It's let's see what's in it for me.

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And the second you do something I don't like or approve on, I will threaten to leave. Now I feel like I spent half my sermons prefacing things.

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Let me preface this one too. It doesn't mean that you don't care about people and there aren't legitimate concerns and you want to hear people out and you want to try to work through things and I'm all for that.

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If anybody ever had a concern or feel like they've been ill treated or feel like something, like I said, door's always open.

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Come talk to me. People that have come and talked to me will tell you, I'll take all the time it takes.

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But if you are in a position where you're basically saying you're going to do what I want or else there's plenty of exits

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I'd like to show you. And I'm not saying that to y 'all this morning, I'm saying it to the church hopper. We all know who they are.

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They're in every community. If the church hopper comes into our congregation, they attempt to stir up strife division and then tell us we have to operate to their standards or else if I don't get to show up, would y 'all please kindly show them the door?

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They say, Andy, we don't want to tell people. Paul did, but he had a specific reason for doing so.

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We need to be very careful how we treat each other. Matthew 18,

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I believe it is, where it discusses church discipline and it discusses these types of things. They're not to be taken lightly, to be taken very seriously.

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They should be a last resort. We should not look to go hold things over people's heads. Oh, you messed up, see ya, there's the door, no.

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This is continual, ongoing. This is, you can tell there is a heart of deceiving nature.

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You can tell that there's a heart in this person, that they're very likely may even be lost.

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Paul speaks often of wolves in sheep's clothing, but he always makes the determination around doctrinal lines.

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But there are also those cases where someone's come in and they're attempting to stir up strife and division.

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But here's the thing, it isn't division over preferences, it's division over Christ. Anything that threatens the unity in Christ in this church is to be dealt with, corrected, and if it can't be corrected, if someone claims to be a

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Christian and we're going to them in Christian love and they can't be corrected, they need to be put out of our midst.

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It sounds harsh, but it's biblical, it's true, and it's healthy. You wouldn't let anybody into your home for any amount of time that was causing your home to be completely turned upside down.

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You would attempt to correct that behavior. You would attempt to see them choose healthy, make healthy choices.

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Picking back up in verse 11, Paul says, For I have been informed concerning you, my brethren, by Chloe's people.

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And I don't know who Chloe is, but apparently she was in the know, and she had a lot of people and sources. You know, like today in the news, hey, you know, my sources tell me, basically biblical brought up to modern day.

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I can imagine it'd be like a newscast, we're going live now to Emporia, and we've got Chloe on the scene.

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Emporia, what have you got for us? Well, you know, I've got, there are these sources that so -and -so's striving up strife, and then, you know, we've got

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Paulos over here, and Cephas over here, and Paul over here, I mean, it's basically how it would go.

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That's what's happening here. Chloe's telling them, there's quarrels among you. There's strife, there's division.

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He says, Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, and this is the part where you would drag in the witnesses, right?

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The bystanders. Will you, sir, please tell me, who are you of? Well, I'm of Apollos. Oh, okay, let's go over here.

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Who are you of? I'm of Paul. Oh, well, we've got this other guy over here. Who are you with, sir? Well, I'm of Cephas.

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And then you've got the, you know, the really nice spiritual one they finally interview. Who are you of? I'm of Christ. Oh, finally a good one.

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Verse 13, Has Christ been divided? Has Christ been divided?

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Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

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Paul didn't want them marking themselves out in this way. They were not to define themselves by who baptized them or who tickled their ears and made them happy by appealing to their pride.

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God does not want his church to be a power struggle or a political playground.

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There's no room for it. Christ wasn't good enough for the

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Corinthian believers. So they followed after Apollos or Cephas or whoever else, fueled their pride and gave them what they were ultimately after.

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They promoted self and had no use for agape love or spiritual gifts. And in fact, you'll find as you go through the book of 1

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Corinthians, especially when you get into 1 Corinthians 13 and 14, they abused their spiritual gifts.

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They used it for themselves. They weren't even using it for the right reasons. Self is not the determining factor.

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Self is not the final authority. What is the final authority in the church?

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Is it self or God's Word? Is it tradition?

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Which Catholics really have trouble with that one and a lot of even Protestant Christian denominations, even

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Baptists a lot of times can have trouble with tradition. Or is it God's Word? Is it

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Apollos or Cephas or whoever else they claim to follow? Or God's Word?

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Another thing you see in a lot of churches that have a lot of unhealthy characteristics or even on the road to dying is there's some program or it's nostalgia.

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It's the way things used to be. The 1950s aren't coming back for that matter.

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The 1990s aren't coming back or even the 2000s. Are we really in 2018 already? Great, day in the morning.

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And you'll see a lot of times there's some program. You know, we have to have this program or we won't be successful. No! All you need is

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Christ! Programs come and go. Things come and go. Change happens.

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We're not in here wearing diapers and going goo goo ga ga and making the wonderful noises as Hudson and the beautiful little girl back there are making.

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We grow up. We wear different clothes. We eat different things. Thank the

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Lord. I do not want to eat what comes out of that baby bottle.

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Resistance to change. Resistance to trying new things is one of the hallmarks of unhealthy and a dying church.

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What the Corinthian believers ultimately missed is that to the extent that we are united in Christ alone, we will be healthy and growing.

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And I do believe that includes numerically to bring that back at the forefront of what I spoke of earlier.

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When you promote self, you lack agape love. And when you promote self, spiritual gifts can't bring the unity and the health that they are designed to.

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Let's look at our last four verses for this morning. Pick it up in verse 14. After Paul gets through all this admonition, he says,

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I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius so that none of you would say you were baptized in my name.

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Now, I did baptize also the household of Stephanus. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any other.

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For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech, so that the cross of Christ would not be made void.

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Void means empty of power. Paul was not giving a dissertation on baptism here.

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One of the errors that I see is that you'll take these verses and they'll say, Well, you see, Paul didn't even think baptism was that important.

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He's not giving... One of the things that I hope if there's interest and we do this study, I'll be able to unpack this and teach you if we do this class.

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That's why this living by the book is so important. Shameless plug. But when you're interpreting scripture, you have to look at the literature.

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The book of Acts is largely descriptive, narrative, explaining what happened.

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In the epistles here, especially in this letter to Paul, sometimes he's describing things. Sometimes he's actually giving doctrinal instruction.

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And then sometimes in the case here, he's using something to make a point.

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He's using baptism to make a point here. He's not giving instructional teaching on what baptism is, how it's important, or what it should be used for.

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What Paul is saying here, because these Corinthian believers no doubt were separating and defining themselves by who would baptize them.

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Now, there's some part of that that's okay. A lot of you probably think back to your early years as a child and say, you know, growing up, my pastor was so -and -so, or, you know, my

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Sunday school teacher was so -and -so, and this is the person that baptized me. And you hold a special place in your heart for them.

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And there's a little bit of allegiance in a way. Nothing wrong with that. These people were not doing that though.

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They were completely earmarking themselves out and they were saying, I am a faction of this person because they were the one that baptized me.

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And Paul says, if baptism is going to be handled in church that way, then I'm glad I didn't baptize any of you.

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Because I would hate to think that any of you were following me just because I baptized you.

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Paul wasn't there in Corinth to gain a following. He wasn't there to grow a

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Paul following. He was there to point people to Christ. And he says, even if baptism is getting in the way,

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I'm just, I'm very glad I didn't baptize any of you. Except for those he could remember off the top of his head.

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Paul understood very well that we are not to promote self. We are here to preach Christ and Him crucified.

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We are not here, and Paul wasn't there to make disciples of Paul. I am not here to make disciples of Andy.

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If I was, y 'all would need to show me the door. Because as we discussed earlier, we should be well aware of where our exits are at, right?

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When we attempt to make disciples of ourselves or anyone for that matter, other than Christ, we are basically giving in to our own selfish sinful desires.

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We are here to make disciples of Christ and Christ alone. And then lastly, let's look at this last phrase once again in verse 17 as we wrap this up where it says, so that the cross of Christ would not be made void.

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The word void meaning empty of power. This does not mean that the cross lacks or does not have power.

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The cross always has its power because the literal Son of God died on it.

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Nothing any human could do could render the cross or the blood that was shed on it inoperative or not having the power to save.

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Paul's drawing and making another point here. He's saying that when you operate this way, when you promote self, when you divide, when your unity is lost, you're essentially rendering the cross ineffective and empty of power in your influence, in your church's influence, in the intimate fellowship that you possess as a local body.

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If we want to see the cross have power, if we want to see our preaching, not just mine, but the preaching that you do with your lives have power and effectiveness, we do it through the unity in Christ that we are to have.

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It is in dying to self that the cross finds its true power. That is the only way in which we can see the cross find its true power, not only in our individual

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Christian lives, but in the life and the healthiness of this church. So I repeat one more time, it is in dying to self that the cross finds its true power.

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Dying to self and promoting Christ. Dying to self and serving

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Christ, which is the true nature of spiritual gifts. But no matter what, no matter what we decide to do, no matter how we operate, one thing is essential.

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Self must die and Christ must be lifted up.