Awaken to Righteousness and Do Not Sin - Christopher G. Brenyo

Ascension Presbyterian Church Longwood

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We'll begin reading in verse 21. For since Biman came death,

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Biman also came the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ all shall be made alive.

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But each one in his own order, Christ the firstfruits, afterward those who were

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Christ's at his coming. Then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom to God the

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Father, when he puts an end to all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign till he has put all enemies under his feet.

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The last enemy that will be destroyed is death, for he has put all things under his feet.

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But when he says all things are put under him, it is evident that he who put all things under him is accepted.

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Now when all things are made subject to him, then the Son himself will also be subject to him who put all things under him, that God may be all in all.

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Otherwise what will they do who are baptized for the dead if the dead do not rise at all?

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Why then are they baptized for the dead? Why do we stand in jeopardy every hour?

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I affirm by the boasting in you which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily.

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If in the manner of men I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is it to me?

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If the dead do not rise, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

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Do not be deceived, evil company corrupts good habits. Awake to righteousness and do not sin, for some do not have the knowledge of God.

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I speak this to your shame. This is

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God's holy and infallible word. Please pray with me.

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Lord Jesus, we come humbly submitting to your authority, to the authority, sufficiency, inerrancy, and infallibility of your word.

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Lord, I pray that we would be very much on guard against weakness and false doctrine.

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Lord, help us to see the danger of being slack in orthodoxy and how it spills over and corrupts our orthopraxy.

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Help us to see that the little sins that we tolerate, the little falsehoods in doctrine we tolerate, allow us to slip into a deep pit.

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Lord, I pray that you would preserve us individually, as families, and maybe most importantly, corporately, from these faults.

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We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Please be seated.

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Today, I'm going to be preaching a shorter message, hopefully, and no applause from some of you in the back.

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Verses 33 and 34. I still have much work to do, and hopefully next week we'll be tangling a little bit with verse 29, as promised.

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I still have some uncertainty in my own mind about what it is all about, so I pray for your patience on that.

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But today I want us to focus on 1 Corinthians 15, verses 33 and 34.

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I'm going to read that again, and I want to give a very basic lesson in biblical interpretation, because this would be a perfect time for us to see how often we really misuse the

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Scriptures. I want us to avoid that terrible danger. Verse 33.

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Do not be deceived. Even old company corrupts good habits.

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Awake to righteousness and do not sin. For some do not have the knowledge of God.

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I speak this to your shame. In understanding the

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Scripture, context is king. A lot of pastors would take this text, a lot of Sunday school teachers would say, and reduce it down to the bad apple spoiling the bunch illustration.

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And it's true. If I take 6 or 7 ripe apples, fresh, shiny, crisp, bright, beautiful apples, and I put them in a bag, and I put a rotten apple in that bag, you can be sure the corrupting influence will turn that bag of apples into apple soup in the passage of just a little bit of time.

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And the principle that's articulated there is very true in the Christian world, in the

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Christian life. However, what happens is when we take the text of Scripture and pluck it out of its context, we lose the first central reason that the text is given.

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And in our text today, Paul is warning against false teaching as it concerns the resurrection.

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And here's the argument. Paul says effectively, and my whole message is this,

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Paul says effectively this, that the denial of the resurrection that the false teachers are promoting and teaching is unbelief.

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It's disbelief in the gospel of Jesus Christ because of the central importance of the resurrection to the gospel.

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And as a result, they continue to act as unbelievers, and it spills out into all of their conduct.

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All of this immorality that we see in the Church of Corinth is built on a shaky foundation of bad doctrine.

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I want to explain this a little bit more. We like to think that theology is over here and practice is over here.

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God would say, well, their theology, they're not really precise in their theology, they're not careful with the Word of God, but their practice is good.

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I'm here today to tell you it's impossible. It's impossible to have right practice divorced from sound doctrine.

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It's impossible. It's impossible for people to say, I believe in Christ, I believe in the gospel, but to deny the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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These are mutually exclusive ideas. They are incompatible with one another. So Paul forcefully says, if you acquaint yourself with those false teachers, if you embrace their doctrine, you're finding yourself to be like unbelievers, to be outside the camp.

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And you will be in danger of all of these immoral things.

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I'd like us to go and remind you of something very important. I'd like us to go to Exodus chapter 20, please.

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Turn to Exodus 20. This may seem overly simplistic and basic, but I hope,

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I think it's needful to remind us what is the foundation of all righteousness on the one hand, and what is the foundation of all evil on the other.

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Exodus chapter 20. My argument today, and I believe my thesis is supported by the whole of the

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Old Testament record, is that idolatry is the leading cause of wickedness.

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That wickedness doesn't produce idolatry, but idolatry produces wickedness.

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We have to love and worship the one true God in the manner

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He has prescribed. That is the first, that is of tantamount importance.

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We have to worship Him in spirit and in truth. Everything else will be lost if we don't.

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There is no morality, there are no ethics, apart from the right worship of God in accordance with His word.

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Let's see if this idea is supported by Scripture. Exodus 20.

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Begin reading verse 25 of 19. And so Moses went down to the people and spoke to them.

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And God spoke all these words saying, I am the Lord, your

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God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

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I want to stop here. The prologue to the giving of the law at Sinai is this incredible declaration that He was their

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God. He was the God who delivered them. They were His people. And He says from that point, therefore obey my commands.

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I am your God. Look what I've done for you. You are my people, therefore obey me.

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So what's the connection to Christ and the resurrection and the denial of that?

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Christ says to the church at Corinth, I am your Savior. I'm the one who died on the cross.

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I'm the one who was buried. I'm the one who bore your guilt on the cross.

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I'm the one who tasted death for you. I'm the one who lay in the grave for three days.

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I am the one who was risen on high and even now sit at the right hand of God after the ascension.

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You see, to deny the resurrection is to deny Christ, who

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He is and all that He's done. So to deny the resurrection isn't merely just a little theological disagreement.

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It's undercutting the very gospel itself at Corinth. And for us, the gospel is everything.

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If we don't have the gospel, we have nothing. Without the gospel, we have nothing.

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So a lot is at stake here. Let's continue on. How does the law begin?

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You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image, any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.

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You shall not bow down to them nor serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous

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God. Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love me and keep my commandments.

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You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

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Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the

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Sabbath of the Lord your God, and in it you shall do no work, neither you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male servant, nor your female servant, nor your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates.

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For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day.

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Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. The first table of the law, and particularly the first three commandments, have to do with our relationship to God.

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The whole of morality and ethics hinges on man's relationship with God.

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And so if you take this idea and you connect it to 1 Corinthians, you realize that Paul is saying the

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Corinthian church is tolerating false teaching about the resurrection, and in the resurrection of Christ is the key and essential element of the biblical gospel and the means of man's salvation.

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He's saying, effectively, to deny the resurrection of Christ is to deny

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Christ and to deny his gospel. There is no salvation. We can't obey the 5th commandment, or the 6th commandment, or the 8th commandment, or the 10th commandment.

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We cannot do that apart from honoring God, loving God with all of our hearts, all of our mind, all of our soul, and our strength.

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That is the foundation of our ethics and our morals and our law -keeping in Christ.

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In Corinth, they're trying to undercut the mechanism, the way in which men are saved.

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I'd like us to go back to 1 Corinthians 15. So the starting point, and I was thinking and meditating, reflecting, as I woke up a couple times last evening, as often happens on Saturday night, and I was asking myself the question, what are the errors that are coming in to the church?

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How is the gospel under assault today? One of the thoughts

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I have is in relation to the things related to this gender insanity.

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They're saying, effectively, that God did not create men, male and female. Direct contradiction to the creator and his work.

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It's idolatrous to conform to the culture's idea about this new gender role craziness.

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It's idolatrous. And today, the church is now dabbling her toe in the idea of accepting homosexuality as being reconcilable to the

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Christian message and the teaching of Scripture. It can never be reconciled.

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He created us male and female. Sexuality was intended to happen in the context of marriage, between one man and one woman.

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That is it. There's no other allowable form. It's 2018, after all.

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The church has to keep up with the times. Which, what we don't understand is, we're chipping away at the essential elements, essential foundations of who

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God is and what his word says. And that little slip, that little slide, that little step, takes us away from the gospel into apostasy.

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You say, well, can someone believe in the gospel and not believe in the resurrection?

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Paul says, no. We want to be a big tent in our gospel. Well, can't they believe this and believe all these things?

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Paul says, no. There is some things that can't be debated or tinkered with.

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There's something else when thinking about this. And today, we highly esteem doubt.

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Doubt is very highly prized in the Christian world. I don't think doubt is virtuous.

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When we come to God and we legitimately have questions about the faith and sincere and honest desires to know him better, to know his word better,

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I do believe that's pleasing in his sight. To ask those questions of ourselves in the scripture, that we might have further and more clear understanding of God and his word,

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I think that's pleasing in his sight. But now, it's very fashionable to say, does the resurrection really matter that much?

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If you watch anything that's produced by the History Channel around Easter, Resurrection Sunday, so -called, watch all of the doubt that's thrown about the historicity of the resurrection of Christ.

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Can't we have the Christian message without all of this precise doctrine?

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Can't we have a Christianity that's kind of malleable to our times and the answer is emphatically no.

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The orthodox, fundamental Christian faith is shaped and formed only by the words of scripture.

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And they can never move with the times. Let's look at our text again, 1

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Corinthians 15. So what is this about?

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Paul says, don't be deceived. Evil company corrupts good habits.

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And this evil company is not a bad apple in the bunch, but false teaching that's come into the church.

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Paul says, you're corrupting the church.

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You say, this sounds familiar. This sounds like something else that's happened.

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Let's turn back to 1 Corinthians 5 really quickly. If you were to sit down this

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Sabbath afternoon and read through 1 Corinthians from cover to cover, it wouldn't take you as long as you might think.

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But you would see a greater level of continuity and cohesion in the message if you read it all together consecutively.

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One of the dangers of chapter and verse is this isolationist use of the text that I warned against in the beginning.

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I want you to listen to this. There is a great cause. We're very familiar with the most familiar section in 1

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Corinthians. We're very familiar that there's immorality that's being tolerated at the church of Corinth.

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In chapter 15, we're seeing a little bit how this could be tolerated. They've allowed false teaching in.

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They're denying the resurrection. Why would they uphold standards about sexual morality? How could they do it?

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Because they've given away the truth. They've compromised the truth of the gospel, which is everything.

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Without it, we have nothing. 1 Corinthians 5. I asked the question, how could this be?

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Let's listen to this account. Children pay close attention. Listen. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the

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Gentiles that a man has his father's wife. Remember correctly from the study, it was illegal to have such an incestuous relationship.

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The pagans thought it was illegal. The pagans, the

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God -hating, reprobate pagans thought this was evil. So we have this guy in the church that is married, taken up with his stepmother, most likely.

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Verse 2. And you are puffed up and have not rather mourned that he who has taken this deed might be taken away from among you.

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Now, what's happening here at Corinth is Corinth had many problems. We've been studying this for a long time now.

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Many problems. They had some virtuous things, it would appear, on the surface. It appears in some ways they were very accepting of people.

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Does this sound like the modern church today? But what happens in their acceptance of people is they tolerate wretched, egregious sin.

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That's in conflict with the plain teaching of the Word. They're puffed up.

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They're arrogant. They thought this was a good thing that they accepted this man and his immorality.

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Paul rebukes them. You should have mourned. You should have taken this guy and disciplined him.

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He should have been put out of the assembly because of his unrepentant sin. Verse 4.

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In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together along with my spirit, with the power of our

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Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the

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Lord Jesus. Now, here it is. Your glorying is not good.

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Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?

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Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you are truly unleavened.

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See, a little toleration of sin in your personal life will shipwreck your life.

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A little toleration of false doctrine in the life of the church will destroy our credible witness.

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We cannot compromise the essential truths of the Christian faith for any reason.

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Let our church be small. Let people make fun of us. We're going to preach the word of God here.

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With all of its culture chain challenging and unpolitically correct ideas, let us be the people who say we're going to preach it straight and tell the truth about our

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God and His word. It only takes a little bit of leaven to spoil the whole lump.

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I used this illustration, I think, when I preached through this the last time, when we were here many months ago now.

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But I know many of you are familiar with this. There was this Amish bread craze a while back, many years ago.

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And the first time it happened, my wife received something in a little bag from a lady.

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This is Amish friendship bread or something. And there's just some ingredients in a little

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Ziploc bag. I remember getting up for work early one morning and going in the kitchen, and this bag is basically about to explode because of the working of the yeast inside the bag.

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And that picture is what's happening in Corinth. They're tolerating grave errors.

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They're tolerating, they're denying essential truths of the

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Christian faith. That's how you get an incestuous son in the church. You tolerate stuff like the resurrection.

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If you deny the resurrection, all this other stuff has to be let in. So Paul's warning is very forceful here in our text.

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Let's go back to 1 Corinthians 15, and I think I'll probably remain here for the remainder of the time.

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1 Corinthians 15, 33. Do not be deceived.

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Brethren, you and I can be deceived. Do you remember that mention of doubt?

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Do you remember the garden incident and the serpent attempt at Eve? Just a little bit of doubt.

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Did God really say? And that is something that we are facing every day.

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Did God really say? Yes, he really did. Do not be deceived.

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There's something else. The enemies of the gospel are very good in being patient.

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I've told you this a number of times. If I see something that is evil the first time,

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I clearly discern it as evil. But if you drip water on my forehead a hundred times, if you subtly undermine the message, just a little bit here and a little bit there, over the course of time,

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I fail to see that evil is evil any longer. It's what's happening in the church.

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The church at Corinth, a broad application to all the faithful churches of the world, that a little leaven of false teaching comes in, and then a little bit more.

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And before you know it, the church is apostate, no longer holding to the gospel.

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You say, that would never happen to me. Paul speaks in the imperative. There's a double imperative, there's a double command, greater force of present reality for us.

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You can be deceived. I can be deceived. We must be on guard against the deception.

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And in this case, the evil company is false teaching about the resurrection of Christ. Evil company corrupts good habits.

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Apparently there's some evidence to support this is a common phrase by the

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Athenians, the people in Greece. Sometime about 200, 300

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BC, there was a poem written about this. It was an oft -quoted thing in the culture.

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And Paul uses this language that's very familiar to them. This is language that might be common to men.

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They might say, yes, evil company corrupts good habits. Yes, the apple, the spoiled apple can ruin the whole bunch.

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And he uses it to say, you better expel evil from your midst.

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You better not tolerate. So the question has to be asked today. In your life presently, what false doctrine are you accepting?

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What idolatrous practices have you adopted? What are you allowing to corrupt the purity of the biblical gospel of Jesus Christ?

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You better search that out. Remember the ladies in biblical redemptive history before the

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Passover, before the Feast of Unleavened Bread, scrambling to rid their house of yeast.

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That not one drop of yeast might have fallen out of some bag or some jar and landed.

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That it might have a corrupting influence. How fastidious are you about your life and your doctrine?

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Are you scrupulously caring for the jot and the tittle?

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Are you looking for all the little ways in which the essential gospel, the essential truth about who

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Christ is and what he requires of us is being undermined? I think that's the duty of the Christian.

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The times we say it's not a big deal. This is not a significant issue.

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Every time we say that, we're allowing an entrance probably into our lives of unbelief.

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But what does he say in verse 34? Awake to righteousness.

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In that language of awake, it's a very unusual term in the scripture.

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It's essentially saying this. Imagine you are completely inebriated, drunk, intoxicated, in the deep kind of sleep that you would fall into, passing out in drunkenness.

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He says, effectively, if you tolerate this teaching, you have been passive in allowing this.

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You're like you've been drinking on a bender and you've fallen asleep for a few days when it comes to this doctrine.

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Paul says, wake up. Bad doctrine, bad practice has come into the life of the church.

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Awake to righteousness. Get out of the stupor. See clearly again.

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This is an assault on the truth about who Christ is and what the gospel is all about.

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He says, and do not sin. Calls to holiness are causes for people in the church today to roll their eyes.

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Oh, he's talking about that again. Do not sin. Didn't Christ deliver us from sin?

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He did. Therefore, we should be putting sin to death in our own lives in this journey of sanctification.

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The pursuit of Christlikeness. So we have a double command here.

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Two imperatives. You need to awake from your slumber. You may, when you're asleep in this passed out condition, your house can burn down.

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A lot of bad things can happen. You say, arouse yourself from the sleep. Wake up from the slumber.

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Be discerning about the truth. Be discerning about Christ and his gospel. Be discerning about the peace and purity and unity of the church.

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Awake to righteousness. And do not sin.

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Now, I don't know if you catch this. But he's saying, idolatrous views about God and who he is.

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In this case, about Christ and his resurrection. Leads to unrighteous living.

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Further supporting the slip into idolatry. What happens in Israel.

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They take foreign wives. And they're pretty foreign wives.

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And they do wonderful things to provide for their husbands. But before you know it, they're building things in high places.

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Because they've tolerated this error. And so, this cycle that Michael mentioned in his teaching this morning.

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There's this repeatable and predictable cycle. I talked about it a few weeks ago. We have to see the warning signs of leaven coming in.

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You have to see it in your life. And in the life of your children. And in your marriage. And in the workplace.

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You have to see it everywhere. That there are forces at work undermining the truth of the gospel.

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The church has to stand against it. And fight for the truth of the gospel.

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Wake up from your drunken stupor. Be aroused to righteousness.

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And do not sin. And notice the consequence in the next part of the phrase in this verse.

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For some do not have the knowledge of God. If you persist in your embrace of false teaching.

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You're going to reveal yourself to be an unbeliever. To be a reprobate.

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To be someone outside the mercy and grace of God. My friends, we don't want to be those kind of people.

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We don't want to associate with them. Because they're enemies of God. And he says that he offers these words to shame them.

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How unpolitically correct is that? Paul speaks these words to say, shame on you.

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You need to change. Do we ever say that to ourselves? I know we have to preserve our self -esteem.

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But do we ever say to a brother, shame on you for tolerating apostasy?

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Are you ever hard on yourself for the toleration of evil and wickedness in your life?

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Do you tolerate idolatry? If you do, you're on the path to really unspeakable horrors.

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Because all of morals, all of ethics, the whole of the

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Christian life starts with the right and proper worship of him. And secondarily to that, that right worship is only mediated through a person who's benefited from the work of Christ.

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So, the gospel, which is everything. Without it, we have nothing. To deny an essential element of the gospel means there's no salvation.

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And it means we could have no possibility of having any kind of moral or ethical. Because it all starts with the right worship.

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Paul has tied here in our little section today, the denial of the resurrection of the false teachers to unbelief and immorality.

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My friends, idolatry is the leading cause of wickedness.

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We need to flee idolatry. We need to not tolerate false teaching in our midst.

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The gospel is at stake. The gospel is everything. Without the gospel, we have nothing.

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I've got a few words of application. First, what

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Paul said to young Timothy, beware of your life.

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Beware of your doctrine. Denying essential truths in the faith leads to destruction.

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The serpent just had to convince Eve about the goodness of God's plan and dropped in a little bit of doubt, facilitating

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Adam's fall into sin. Those people were without sin prior to that fall.

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You're not half as good as them. Beware of your life and your doctrine.

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1 Timothy 4 .16, of course, the first application would be to a minister of the gospel. Paul urging

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Timothy, these pastoral epistles, but I think there's a broader application to the life of believers.

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Take heed to yourself and to the doctrine. Continue in them, for in doing this you will save both yourself and those who hear you.

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Paul saying to Timothy, Timothy, you're a pretty gifted guy, but if you have abandoned the essential doctrine, you can't say you're part of the family of God.

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It's amazing, isn't it? Continue in that. Believe the gospel.

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Secondly, in our instance today,

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Paul says denying the resurrection is denying the gospel. Today I'm going to ask you, do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?

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This whole chapter is devoted to that subject. The only answer is yes.

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I believe in the biblical doctrine of the resurrection. That's the only legitimate answer. Doubting the resurrection is not virtuous.

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Don't be deceived. It's not virtuous to doubt essential truths. Third, the first rule of morality and ethics consists in the right worship of God.

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Idolatry is what leads us into sin. When you fall into sin, you think, Lord, help me with my sin.

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I want to turn from this sin. The first thing you must recognize is that you failed to worship

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Him. That's how you got into this sin. You failed to see

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Him and His glory and what He thought about the sin that you're committing. That's how you sin.

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You forget about God. You forget about His word. It's idolatrous. Finally, this is something that requires our hands to get dirty, and we don't like to get our hands dirty.

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We have to expose false teachers. If they fail to repent and persist in teaching false doctrine, they must be excommunicated.

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They must be publicly declared to be enemies of God and unbelievers.

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We all shrink back from that. We don't want to be those kind of people. We have to be those kind of people. Joel Osteen is a false teacher.

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He does not believe in the gospel. I'm sorry, he doesn't. Don't reconcile. You can't be reconciled.

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May the Lord be pleased to cause him to repent. That he might be numbered among the elect, but he's a false teacher.

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And he's assaulting the church with his bad teaching. So today, our text was a little bit more deep than just don't hang around bad people.

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This will mess your life up. There's a little lesson there for us interpreting scripture. There is application.

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Children, you should be very concerned about the company that you cable. But what

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Paul's talking about here is denying the gospel. That's a weightier matter. We can't forego the weightier matter for something less significant.

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Let's be careful and disciplined in our Bible reading to get the first application, the first meaning and essence of the text.

41:48

Let's emphasize that, prioritize that. So I, with Paul, say, awaken to righteousness and do not sin.

42:04

Please pray with me. O Lord, I pray that we would never deny the resurrection, nor would we deny any essential element of your character and attributes.

42:26

O Lord, convince us again of our desperate need of Christ and his gospel. Let us see again that we can never do anything to undermine the purity of this precious doctrine filled with rich promises for the people of God.

42:44

Help us to guard it, make it sacred in our eyes, consecrate it again to us, the peace, the purity of the gospel of Christ, that we would let nothing come and taint it or spoil it.

42:59

O Lord, we thank you for our acceptance.

43:06

When we read texts like this, we recognize that if it were up to us, we would be on the precipice of danger every moment, falling in unbelief.

43:17

We thank you that you are the covenant -keeping God who keeps us in covenant and never allows us, who are your children, who are your elect, to apostate in the final or full sense.

43:31

What kind of love is this that you would love us as your children, that you would take us to be your bride, that you would preserve and protect us to the end?

43:42

Lord, I pray that this would be very much the forefront of our thinking as we come to your table. We ask these things in Jesus' name.