WWUTT 1413 Is Christ Divided? (1 Corinthians 1:13)

Christ is not divided, and so therefore we who are followers of Jesus Christ must not be divided either.

It is the scheme of Satan and the ways of this world to divide us when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ.

So we're back to our study of 1 Corinthians chapter 1, picking up where we left off yesterday, but I'm going to go ahead and begin reading in verse 10.

We'll go through verse 19. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth. Now, I exhort you, brothers, by the name of our

Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.

For I have been informed concerning you, my brothers, by Chloe's people, that there are quarrels among you.

Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ.

Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

I thank God that I baptized none of you except for Crispus and Gaius, so that no one would be able to say you were baptized in my name.

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

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel, not in wisdom of word, so that the cross of Christ will not be made empty.

For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever

I will set aside. This is the word of the Lord. And once again, I was reading today from the

Legacy Standard Bible. I've already received a few questions via email about this particular translation, and I will talk about those on the

Friday edition when I get together with Becky and we do our Q &A. So yesterday we left off in verse 12.

Now I mean this, that each one of you is saying, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ.

You had these divisions that were going on in the church, and Paul says specifically what's causing the quarrel and what's causing the division.

Now there's some other things that they're divided over that he's going to get to. So when he says in verse 12, now

I mean this, it may not be limited. When he says this, it may not be limited to just the example he gives there in that verse.

It may be, here's some other things that I have to confront in you as well. But this is the one that he begins with.

And we need to appreciate that about Paul's confrontation of this, that he says, I hear that there's some quarrels among you.

I hear that there's some divisions. And what I mean is this, some of you are saying this, and here's the problem with that.

Is Christ divided? You're breaking up the body and uniting people to certain teachers as though your faithfulness or devotion to that teacher makes you better than the other groups.

Is that Christ? Is he divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul?

So Paul puts before them exactly what the problem is. He states it and explains why this is a problem.

He says, first of all, to them that you need to be united in Christ. I've talked about how he says 10 times the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ in just the first 10 verses. And he says that I exhort you in the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ that you all agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be made complete.

And notice that word complete. It means that even now, though we are still being sanctified, we can be complete in Christ.

Remember what Paul said to the Philippians about being made perfect.

He says, not that I'm already perfect, but I seek to make it my own because Christ has made me his own.

So we're not yet perfect, but we seek perfection because Christ is perfect and we want to be as our

Savior. We are not yet complete in a certain sense because that work won't be completed until the day of Christ, Philippians 1 .6.

Yet there is a completeness that we have in the sense that we're Christ's now.

We're not trying to become Christ or God's children. We are God's children now.

That process, that spirit that is within us, that is most certainly complete.

We're not getting more Holy Spirit, but rather in this sanctification, we're getting more of ourselves out of the way, less of ourselves and more of Christ.

Amen. So Paul says of them that they need to be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment, pursuing those things that are

Christ, pursuing that perfection that is Christ Jesus, that we would be of the same mind and the same judgment.

So as I said yesterday, his desire for the Corinthians is that they would see these things exactly as Paul sees them, the problems that he needs to confront, that they would see the errors, the corrections that need to be made as Christ sees them.

That's something that happens for us when we come to faith is we see our sin as God sees it. Now, maybe not perfectly because once again, we aren't yet perfect, but we seek that perfection because we seek after Christ.

So we don't perfectly understand our sin in that way. I think as I've been growing in my sanctification,

I'm beginning to see more and more how much my sin truly has separated me from God and how much

I needed a savior and what Christ accomplished with his death on the cross. The more that I'm growing in the knowledge of God, according to his word, the more awesome that work is looking to me, the lower

I realize I am, that I have nothing of myself to exalt or boast in, but I desire to boast in Christ.

So we're certainly going to grow in the knowledge of those things as we go. But at least for the immediacy of the attention that these problems deserve,

Paul is calling them to recognize this as he sees it. You need to see the problem.

You need to recognize it so that you'll fix it. So be of the same mind and of the same judgment.

If they're not of the same mind, you'll have those who are of the same mind with Paul, and they'll want to correct those who are in error.

Those who are in error won't want to be corrected because they're not of the same mind, right?

This is going back to what we've been studying in Proverbs on Thursday, that the fool hates correction.

The fool doesn't want to be instructed, but the wise man loves rebuke, and he loves to be trained by it.

So if they're of the same mind, then even those who are walking in error will love the correction. We all need that.

We need to humble ourselves that we may receive the correction where we need it so that we can be grown in righteousness.

And so again, Paul being informed by Chloe's people that there's quarrels among them, and he says specifically what the quarrel is.

And once again, I think we need to appreciate this, that Paul directly doesn't even go into dancing around some other words before he eventually gets into the problem.

He says exactly, here's the problem. Here's a quarrel. I'm going to give you an example of a quarrel right now that I've heard about among you.

And then when he says it, the Corinthians are going to realize this is not just merely gossip. This is not just Chloe's people coming to Paul and saying, hey, you need to hear about what's going on in the

Corinthian church. And then Paul making some sort of general correction, like, here's there's some quarrels among you.

You need to stop that. You know, even when Paul confronted this with the Philippians, in Philippians chapter four, he says, there's a couple of women among you that aren't agreeing.

Yodia and Syntyche. He calls them out by name in front of the whole congregation as this letter would have been read in front of the church.

They're squabbling with one another. And then he says to the rest of the church, you need to help them agree.

These are two women that have helped me in the missionary work that I've been doing for the gospel.

So you need to help them that they would agree in the Lord. Paul doesn't beat around the bush about these things.

He specifically names the problem will even call it out in front of the congregation and say to the church, you need to help them in this.

So it's not like he's singling these two out and saying these two are problems. You need to ostracize them until they shape up.

You know, he says to the whole church, it's your responsibility to make sure that they come into agreement with one another.

So he's directly confronting these issues. He's not just making ambiguous statements and then leaving it up to them to figure out, well, what's he talking about?

Quarrels like, well, what kind of quarrel is he saying that we're engaging in here? So he says, here's what

I mean. I mean, this each one of you is saying, I am of Paul. I am of Apollos and I have

Cephas and I of Christ. You'll hear a lot of evangelical leaders that will make very general, broad statements, condemnations of certain churches or Christians or things like that.

But they won't even say who they are. They will make the statements as if you need to know who I'm talking about.

So you will feel guilty about it and you will correct your behavior. But I'm not going to go as far to say exactly who these people are and exactly what they're doing wrong.

It's just very broad, very general. It's more virtue signaling than it is trying to correct an actual problem.

When you can say, I'm above all of this, I'm not bad like you are, but you're doing this and so you need to correct this.

That's not the way that Paul approaches this. He says exactly what the issue is. And he's coming at this as a pastor who really, really loves his church with all of the thanksgiving that he had expressed about them in the beginning of this particular letter.

So he's not going to be heaping up general condemnations just to make them feel guilty about something. And the rest of the church is left wondering, well, who is he talking about when he's naming specifically the quarrel that is causing division that's going on?

This is so specific, an example that there is a lot of Corinthians squirming in their seats now as they're hearing this letter read to the congregation.

I mean, this, Paul says, each one of you, each one of you, this is happening through the whole church.

Each one of you is saying, I'm of Paul, you're picking your clicks. I have Apollos, I have

Cephas, I have Christ. We have a lot of divisions that are occurring in the church today because of things like this.

And it may not be yesterday. I use the example of different doctrines or different teachers, even when it comes down to Calvinism or Arminianism, or you even have denominations that are named after particular teachers.

You have the Lutherans, right? Named after Martin Luther. You have the Wesleyans named after John Wesley.

You even have the Church of Christ. That's the denomination where they're wearing this argument on their sign.

They're going, I am of Christ. We're the true church because we're the Church of Christ.

Paul would have walked right into that denomination and well, he would rebuke them for a lot of things, but most especially that they would be thumping their chest and saying,

I am of Christ. This isn't pious. It isn't more humble. You're not showing yourself to be more right than others.

You're actually causing and fostering this division, the quarrels and the division that exist among you.

So, as I said yesterday, I named particular doctrines or particular denominations, and we might even separate based on secondary issues and things like that.

But there are even worldly philosophies that come into the church that people grab a hold of and say,

I'm united to this, and that especially will cause quarrels and cause divisions.

The big one right now is critical race theory and intersectionality. Now, I know that one's difficult to define.

You hear it thrown around a lot, and there are people that are going, but what is this really? What are we talking about when we hear this term critical race theory?

Well, critical race theory is when you take a bunch of people and you divide them up based on race or class or gender, and they're divided into what are essentially constituencies or voting blocks.

So, just like you would see the statistics after we have a major election, this group of people, white evangelicals, they voted this way, and black

Catholics and black Protestants, they voted this way, or you have the charismatics that went this way.

You have the nones who have no religious affiliation. They went this way. Asians voted like this.

Hispanics voted like this. So, this is the kind of statistics that we see following an election. And now we're trying to infuse that very same kind of breakdown among a group of people where we're taking that same mentality and we're applying it to the church.

Statistics are coming out from church congregations that look like that, where this percentage white, where this percentage

Hispanic. And I'm telling you, if that's the way you're measuring diversity in your church, you're already fostering division.

You're already breaking up people in your church. And it's the mentality or the philosophy of critical race theory you're imposing on your church.

It doesn't matter that you haven't read a book on critical race theory, and then you've liked the ideas and you're like, okay, well,

I'm going to implement this now in our teaching and in the way we structure our church and stuff like that. It's a culture that's being established.

And that culture is being brought into and infecting the church. And if you don't know what it is, if you don't know what the agenda is, what people are doing, how they've changed language and the definition of words.

The word racism is no longer defined as a person who actually hates another person because of the color of their skin.

That's racism. Racism is now some sort of systemic thing. And it's such a thing where only white people can be that way because they're the majority and every other person of color is not able to even be racist because it's something that exists only in the majority culture.

That's the way that racism has been redefined. This war over words, this changing of language so that certain people can try to elevate themselves into places of position.

And this is about power and control. It's about controlling people, elevating yourself, bringing these people down.

The whole system, the whole mentality, the whole approach is to divide people.

That is the objective. That's what critical race theory does. That's what intersectionality does.

It's to make myself more important because of a victimhood status. So you play this role of perpetual victim and you place upon other people an obligation that they have to pay for some sort of debt they're not even know they're guilty of doing.

But it's being imposed on them. You did do this, and therefore you have to repay it. You owe me. You owe me elevation.

You owe me status. You owe me money, whatever it might happen to be. But that is the deconstruction that's going on in our culture.

That's the breakdown of systems that's happening through this philosophy called critical race theory and intersectionality.

You know, in Psalm 69, verse four, it says, what I did not steal must I now restore?

And that's what's being placed on everybody through these particular philosophies. They are inherently meant to divide.

And we're grabbing on because of this mentality. We're grabbing on to that constituency or that grouping of people that we think we belong to.

This is my tribe. I'm black, so I need to do everything that blacks are supposed to do.

I'm white, so I'm supposed to do everything that whites are supposed to do. I'm Hispanic. So I got my own culture that I'm supposed to be a part of.

On and on it goes. Divided and more and more divided. Men against women. Women trying to elevate themselves.

Tearing down men. By the way, the target in this whole thing is white straight men. Those are the ones who are getting torn down the most by this system of critical race theory and intersectionality.

But it is fostering in our culture and in our churches division unlike I have never seen in my lifetime.

This results in nothing but division. And Paul would have been pulling his hair out to see some of the things that are going on in churches today with this very mentality of critical race theory, making it into our myths.

And once again, it doesn't take a pastor reading on these particular philosophies or even devoting himself to socialism and Marxism, because that's really where all this comes from.

They're cultural Marxist ideologies. Nobody has to read a book on Marx or decide that they're going to be a socialist to be taking these particular philosophies and then imposing them upon the church.

Again, it's a culture that's being developed. And those who are worldly minded are crafty because they're following in the schemes of Satan, and they're doing a good job at making sure this stuff does get in the church and it does break us up.

That's what Satan wants to see happen in the church of Jesus Christ. He wants to see us at each other's throats, not unified in Christ, but broken apart from one another.

Paul had warned the church in Rome. We read this in Romans chapter 16 at the very end of the letter when he's giving them some final instructions and closing things out.

He says, I appeal to you, brothers, to watch out for those who cause divisions and create obstacles contrary to the doctrine that you've been taught.

Avoid them. For such persons do not serve our Lord Christ, but their own appetites.

And by smooth talk and flattery, they deceive the hearts of the naive. For your obedience is known to all so that I rejoice over you.

But I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil. The God of peace will soon crush

Satan under your feet. And these things that divide, that cause quarrels among us, these are schemes of Satan.

We need to be wise to them. We need to be of the same mind and of the same judgment. And that requires looking at Christ, clinging to Christ.

What did we lack that we had to go away from the word of God and start pulling in philosophies from the world in order to fix us?

We started listening to the world and realizing, oh, yeah, we do have problems that the Bible doesn't address.

And so we need worldly philosophies in order to solve them. My friends, that is a worldly scheme. It is wrong.

It's error. It's heresy. We don't need anything but what the word of God says about us and about himself.

The gospel is enough to unite us. Christ's death on the cross is enough to reconcile us to God and to one another.

We don't need these worldly philosophies. Paul makes such a point to exalt

Christ before the Corinthians, before he starts confronting the issues that are going on in their midst.

But he gets real specific about them so that they of the same mind and of the same judgment can see the errors and come to correction.

Remembering, again, Christ has not been divided, so we cannot be divided. Paul was not the one who was crucified for us.

It's not people of particular colors in your midst, particular skin tones or melanin count that was crucified for you.

Understanding or recognizing the differences in our melanin is not going to unify the church.

It's never going to bring us together. These people have not been crucified for anyone.

We were not baptized in the color of our flesh. You're not baptized into whiteness.

You're not baptized into blackness or into being Asian or Hispanic. You're not baptized into a nation.

You're not baptized into a language. It's not I'm baptized into English or I'm baptized into Spanish or in Mandarin or Cantonese.

You are baptized into Christ and you have died and he lives.

Galatians 2 20. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer

I who live, but Christ who lives in me and the life

I now live in the flesh. I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.

If righteousness were through our skin color or righteousness were through our nationality or our ethnicity or any of these other kinds of things, if that was where righteousness came from, then

Christ died for no purpose. But my friends, you are to be dead to yourselves and alive in Christ.

It's about him, not about us. Christ is not divided. No one else has been crucified for you, and you've not been baptized in the name of anyone else or anything.

You're baptized into Christ to live is Christ to die is gain and only by his great name.

Amen. Let's finish with prayer. I know we're not trucking through first Corinthians very quickly, but I hope that you are truly edified by the attention and detail we're giving to these passages.

We'll pick up in this section next week when we resume our New Testament study Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for convicting our hearts of sin, of the ways of this world and help us not walk in them, but repent of these ways and turn to Christ that we die to ourselves and we be alive in Christ.

We want to be unified. I hope that's our desire, that that's the yearning in our heart. Not that we're continually squabbling against one another and looking for ways that we can be divided against one another.

But we're looking for Christ that we may be united to God and to each other.

So work out in our hearts this conviction that we would work out our salvation with fear and trembling for it is

God who works in us both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

We ask for this in Jesus name. Amen. You've been listening to When We Understand the

Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, Gabe will be going through a New Testament study.

Then on Thursday, we look at an Old Testament book. On Friday, we take questions from the listeners and viewers.