Stewards of the Mystery

1 Corinthians 4 and the Need for Faithful Stewards

This morning, we're going to be in 1 Corinthians 4, the first five verses. Let a man consider us in this manner, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. In this case, moreover, it is required of stewards that one be found faithful.

But to me, it is a very small thing that I may be examined by you or by any human court. In fact, I do not even examine myself, for I am conscious of nothing against myself. Yet I am not by this acquitted, but the one who examines me is the Lord.

Therefore, do not go on passing judgment before the time, but wait until the Lord comes who will bring both to light the things hidden in the darkness and make manifest the motives.

Of hearts.

And then each one's praise will come to him from God.

Let's pray.

Lord, you see all things, and you have made man in your own image, and in your image, we desire justice, Lord, as we reflect the glory that you've given to us, and Lord, we are impatient sometimes, and we judge wrongly, we judge rashly, and Lord, we don't wait.

And so I pray this morning that we would understand righteous judgment, that we would understand the way that you've instituted the church, and Lord, that there would be understanding of how we fit into this and how we can work faithfully.

Lord, give clarity to my words and help us to be hearers and doers of the word. It's in your name I pray, amen. So we're back in Corinthians. We took a little bit of a detour last week. This is a technical text this morning.

You probably gathered that as I read it. And with technical texts, as you come to them and you're asking, what is this about? What does it mean? Why is this here? It becomes even more important for us to remember and to examine the context that these verses come from.

So let's back up and look at 1 Corinthians with kind of a 10 ,000-mile view or 50 ,000-foot view, whichever it is. I can't remember. That'd be outer space, 10 ,000 miles, wouldn't it? A little too far.

We have to remember in this letter that Paul is delivering admonishment to the church. There are a lot of things going wrong in the church. They are judging wrongly. They are showboating. They are not loving one another.

The church service is out of order. There's false doctrine that's made its way in. There's just a lot of problems. And what happens is, and try to do this. As you read this through the week, as you read 1 Corinthians, especially what you're going to see next week and as we get into chapters 5 through 15, I want you to imagine the Apostle Paul coming in front of the congregation or sending this letter and having his man read this to the people where every person in that room knows that he is talking about them and he is delivering this kind of instruction.

So what would happen naturally is that as you are sitting next to a man who is having sexual relationship with his stepmother and you have all of these lawsuits flying around that you know who's suing who and Paul is bringing this to their attention, there is going to be opposition to him.

We know this. We know human nature and we know that when we get nailed to the wall on something, in our sin and in our hardness of heart, we will be defensive and we will attack the one who points it out.

And so Paul knows that his directions here are going to be questioned. He anticipates that. And that context is crucial to this morning. And we have to realize that Paul is going to have to answer the question, what gives you the right?

What allows him to be able to have this position to ask these questions? And then he foresees another avenue, Paul the apostle who always gives his credentials, I am the apostle of God, I am a messenger, I have been taught by Christ for three years in the desert.

But if Paul is questioned, how much more is the church going to question guys like Apollos or guys like Timothy? And today, guys like me. There's nothing special about me. There's a lot special about Paul.

And yet there is a gift that's entrusted and there is a position of elder and what people, what we have learned is that we have much of the debris that we have in the American church today because elders are afraid to do precisely the thing that Paul does for the church at Corinth.

And he does it, as we'll find out soon, because he loves them, because he sees them as his spiritual children. And he cares a great deal. And if you see your kid doing destructive things that are going to bring ruin and damage their life, you intervene and you stop them.

And so that's what he's doing. So in this text this morning, we have a lot of questions. And one of the things that should jump out right away is that this church is not judging rightly. In some cases, they're not judging at all.

That would be the case of the sexual deviant in their midst where they don't even want to deal with it. They defer judgment. They also defer judgment against each other to the civil magistrate, which brings embarrassment on the church.

But in some cases, they like to judge and they like to judge quickly. And they like to judge based on the motives of heart, and they do it without evidence. And I think that we'll see. We see this problem persist today in the church, sometimes not judging at all when we should, and sometimes judging without evidence and destroying people's lives without the benefit of having testimony.

Servants of Christ and Stewards of the Household

So let's dive into it. We see first, we have to define a word. We have to understand what Paul is talking about, and that word is the servant or steward. We see in verse 1 that Paul says that he and his compadres are to be considered as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.

This opens up a couple of questions. What is this servant of Christ and this steward, and what are the mysteries of God? He's been telling us a lot about the mysteries of God, and we'll look into that.

But let's first consider the word servant. It's a very interesting word. I don't do this often, so you'll see the importance of unlocking it, right? This word servant, this is the only time that Paul uses this word in Greek in any of his writing.

It is used often in the Gospels, and it is a generic word that basically means employee. It's an employee. He's an employee of Christ. But then I think that what he is doing is showing on dual hands. He uses grandiose language with the steward of this mystery, which implies an oikonomos, which is the butler.

This would be like the household manager. So the idea would be that the owner is Jesus, and the owner entrusts all of this valuable information and the goods of the house and the resources of the house to the steward, who then dispenses it out wisely to the people to carry out the business of the house.

That's the idea that Paul is trying to come across. So on the one hand, he uses this word for servant that would be like a run-of-the-mill employee. So in one sense, an elder like Apollos or like Timothy, in one sense, they're an ordinary employee of Jesus Christ, just like everybody is who's in the faith.

But in another sense, they have been given stewardship of this highly valuable mystery, and they are to manage the use of it, manage how the resources are given out, and manage how the work of the church or the work of the household is going to be accomplished.

I don't think these words are at odds. I think they are synonyms, and they start to build the picture of both how a steward or an elder is an ordinary man, but he is an ordinary man who has been called to do a very important job, and that job requires having some authority.

So the idea here is we have to wrap this in. We have to say, well, is Paul only talking about himself? Is he only talking about himself and Apollos? No, I don't think so, because when we harmonize with verses that we read this morning in Hebrews, when we look at how Titus is commissioned to go raise up elders in Crete, we will see this idea that there has been a passing of the torch, because in 1 Peter, he also describes himself as an apostle, but also as an elder or an overseer.

So the idea is that this faith has been given to the apostles to teach and to clarify and to make a deposit, and the deposit goes to overseers, and then the overseers manage the household and steward these things, these mysteries.

There is a picture that Paul gave us in the previous chapter in verses 5 through 7 of chapter 3, where he talks about farmers and builders, and he gives this idea. He says, what then is Apollos, and what is Paul?

This would be that servant language, right? They are employees of Christ, servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth.

So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth. There is a real friction that we have to deal with this morning. We live in a liberal, egalitarian culture, probably the most egalitarian culture that's.

Existed.

We have perfected flattened hierarchies in democracy, where everyone's the exact same. We're a big old blob of humanity. Don't tell me I can't do what you can do. And here's the simple, all you have to do, this idea, it's like a bubble, and all it takes is just a little thing to pop it.

And we know these things inherently. No matter how bad I wanted to be, no matter how hard I worked my entire life, could I have ever been an NBA player? And the answer is definitively, no. Why not? I don't have the ability.

We're not all the same, right? And so this idea that we have to fight with is that there has been a pervasive thing in the church that's come in, just like in the family, where there is no hierarchy between husband and wife.

We're all the same. And it goes into the church. There's no difference between us. We're all the same. And elders, I can hear myself saying, I'm just a man. And it's true in one sense. But then there is another sense where there is a holy job that's been given to an overseer, and he has to labor it and build, while understanding that if the Lord doesn't build the house, all of his work is in vain.

He doesn't accomplish anything. And I ask myself often the question, and I'll say it rhetorically, but I believe it, who's building this thing anyway?

Who's doing it?

And the answer is this. When we sit here, and I look back at June of 2023, two years ago, and it jumps out at me that you guys sitting in here this morning, and the work that's been done in this place, it is so far beyond me, and it's so far beyond any imagination that I could have had, that what I have to do is I have to understand, and I have to go back and say, you know, Josh may have watered, but I didn't grow anything.

I have no ability. No more than I can, with my willpower, make a corn seed sprout into a plant, can I make a church grow? I can't do it. And so we look at this. There is a steward. There is an importance.

And this language of the steward, the servant, and the mystery, it brings up a huge amount of questions for us. It gets technical, and the household hierarchy is being extended to the church, and that.

Is this.

Jesus is clearly the head and the chief cornerstone of the church. He is the direction. He is the stone that holds it all together. If he's gone, it falls apart, and if he's gone, it goes off in a crooked direction.

And if you've ever been in a crooked building, you'll understand, you feel weird when you even walk in the place. Even if it's an inch off, it feels strange. You're walking across the floor, the windows are cockeyed, don't look at that one back there too closely, okay, that sort of thing.

And when Jesus is the cornerstone, what that does is it sets a direction for builders to come in and work off of that cornerstone, or that foundation stone, and to set the wall in the right direction.

We don't get to decide the direction. Jesus has decided it. Jesus has laid it out, and what we do is we labor according to what he has given us and he has set out. So he is the head and the chief cornerstone.

And then overseers are the managers of the house. They have authority. They take care of the house, and they run the economy of the house. They can do that by empowering others, but they definitely do that by handling this mystery, the theology, the idea of revelation that God has given through his word.

And it brings to us earthly and physical obligations. The owner will hold his manager accountable. Just like if the house is in disarray, there's a story I love. It's dear to our family. It's called Poldark.

It's about a guy who, he goes off to war in America in the late 1700s. He's in Britain. He's on the wrong side. And his dad dies while he's over there. And when he comes back, he finds his home in complete disarray.

And the problem was there was a household manager. And so what the character does is he finds the household manager laying on the floor drunk with a bunch of animals in the building. And so he dumps water on him over and over again and runs him out of the house.

Things are going to have to change. And that is the danger of this position is that there are responsibilities and obligations on the overseer that we are going to be held accountable for. We have to administer the physical duties of the church to set all the things in order.

If there is disorganization, if there's disarray, ultimately the overseers are responsible for that. And God will hold us accountable. And so mainly there's the physical part is things have to be in order.

That is the service. That is communion. That is the songs. That is what we do ministry-wise. But there is also, much more importantly, a distribution of spiritual gifts to identify and empower in the household.

And Corinthians has much to say about this. And we will get there. And a church that is strong is a church where every member of the church understands that they provide something to the body that no one else can.

They've been given a duty and a spiritual gift. And the job of the overseer is to recognize, empower, and encourage so that they will go out and exercise those gifts to the good of the body and to the good of the kingdom.

And we are responsible for that. You for your part, but me for the greater part. See, it's a good thing we know this. It's a good thing to aspire to be an overseer. But understand that it brings tremendous potential for both blessings and cursings.

Because not only the works of the overseer, but also the motivation of the overseer is going to be judged. God knows in the inner man why I'm doing this. He knows. You don't. My wife doesn't. Sometimes in the sinfulness of sin, even I don't.

But God knows, and he's not fooled. So if it's for money, if it's for power, if it's for some kind of selfless prestige thing, if it's just to know a bunch of information about a people, God's going to know that, and I will be judged accordingly.

See, Paul says in chapter 9, he would say, if I do this voluntarily, I have a reward. But if against my will, I have a stewardship entrusted to me, and this is a thing I've tried. I can't say it as eloquently as Paul, but I can tell you this.

There was a calling on my life, and the reality is I could do this voluntarily and reap a reward, or I can do it like being dragged behind me, and even still, I'm going to be accountable for it. Because God has demanded that I do it.

And I'm responsible for the results, whether I want to do it or not. And friends, many times I don't want to do it. Because I'm given to laziness and given to wanting to just check out. And it's the truth.

So that's question number one. What is the hierarchy? We have a situation where a church that's out of order is going to have overseers who are not doing their job. It always works that way. Church out of order, overseer going to be held accountable by God.

They should be afraid. And if they're not, they're a fool. And we have many fools inhabiting the cloaks of overseers today. The second question out of this one verse is what are the mysteries of God that are going to be distributed?

What is that mystery that we're stewarding? Well, there's a few aspects of this. One of them we sang about. Think about it. The Son of God, begotten but not created. The Word of God made flesh. These are things the human mind can't really understand.

What do you mean the Word made flesh? The Word, these are like things in the air that you hear. Sound waves, right?

Or ink.

How was that made flesh? But there's another aspect and that is what Paul is usually talking about when he talks about the mysteries of God is the things that the prophets searched out but were in the shadows.

Peter comes in to help him out and he says concerning this salvation, all of this, which is what Corinthians are out, remember the foolishness and weakness of God is the salvation and it's the power of God to those who are being saved by it.

Peter says concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied of the grace that would come to you made careful searches and inquiries, inquiring to know what time or what kind of time the Spirit of Christ within them was indicating as he was predicting the sufferings of Christ and the glories to follow.

I imagine Isaiah and I imagine Jeremiah and I imagine King David. I imagine Nathan, the prophet. I imagine Moses digging into what God had told them, thinking about it, praying, pleading with God, God help me to understand and the Spirit of God within them was driving them to write these things down, to speak to kings, to write songs, to have these words and yet it was a shadow and there was pieces of it that were coming into view and these men of God of old, these great patriarchs and these great prophets, they desired more than we can imagine to know what the plan of God was, but it was a shadow and they could have never understood begotten but not created.

They wrote these things not knowing what would happen until the light of God came at Advent and we started to see the gospel of Christ revealed. Paul writes in Romans 16, now to him who is able to strengthen you according to my gospel and the preachings of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long past ages.

See, the cross of Christ did something that the old prophets could not have really understood and that is this, it opened up the Holy of Holies where we have complete access to the King of Kings. Unimaginable to those men.

They would have thought that you were a blasphemer by even suggesting something like that and yet the veil was torn as we learned last week in Hebrews 8 that there is no going back because what would you go back to?

The crude tabernacle or the temple that's in heaven? See, the obsolete old system that Hebrews 8 talked about, it pointed to the grace of God but the substance was veiled in the shadow of priests, mediators and the law as a jail cell.

Galatians 3 tells us,. But before faith came, we were held in custody under the law, being shut up for the coming faith to be revealed. There was a system. Grace was demonstrated nationally and there was a fault in the old covenant because men of the same nationality, of the same race, they had to be in that country to be of God, right?

You had to be of the Hebrews to be of God. If you left out of one of the pagan nations, you had to go in there. That's the mystery and it blew people's minds in the New Testament if the doors popped wide open and all of these Gentiles started coming into the faith.

They were entering the holiest places without even being circumcised and this rattled the cage. You can't imagine what turbulence there would have been in the first century. It would have been confusing.

It would have been terrifying. The way God had dealt with man for thousands of years changed. But here's the thing. Whenever the son of God condescends to be a man and dies a death on a cross and raises from the dead and ascends into the sky, that's gonna change some things.

And it did. See, the shocking, this is the other aspect of the mystery, right? Is the shocking revelation that God's chosen people were always chosen by faith instead of by lineage. That's a thing we take for granted today as enlightenment liberals.

We hate talking about lineage and race. We love talking about your ideas. Our ideas make us equal. But here's the thing. This idea was perplexing in the first century. Romans 11, for I do not want you brothers to be uninformed of this mystery so that you will not be wise in your own estimation that a partial hardening has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.

The door was flung wide open. And these riches, these riches of this mystery were given to overseers to give to the people. And they were to bring these things to bear with the many issues that came up in the church.

And that's where we're about done with one. 20 minutes in, right? We got five points. We're doing good this morning. So let's ask a few rhetorical questions here. But I want you to think of them in your mind.

Number one, does having access daily to the son of God through his Holy Spirit affect your battle with sin?

Does it?

Does the removal of iniquity and your status as a child of God have any effect on your marriage and your family? Does having one with accountability to God being there to counsel you in spiritual matters change your view of living out the Christian faith?

Do you avail yourself to the resources that God has given you? Does it matter that you will be called to imitate the life of your overseer? Can you swallow that pill? Or do I sound arrogant when I say that you should imitate me spiritually and you should take the food that's given and you should take the distributions of the household that come from the owner that are delivered through his under shepherd and that you should live your life according to those things?

See, God can make you do it. I can't. But you're still going to be held accountable for how you deal with the counsel, spiritual counsel of your overseer. And the accountability comes on me to not overstep the bounds.

There's a huge amount of authority in a very small area for overseers of the church. That's the truth. So let's move on. I was joking about the five points. The faithfulness and conscience of the steward.

Faithfulness, Conscience, and the Fear of God

So we talk and we start turning and looking at what Paul anticipates.

He says,.

It is required of stewards that one be found faithful. They have to be trustworthy. Many churches are destroyed from untrustworthy overseers. And they can do that in many ways. They can do it by stealing money.

They can do it by sexual immorality. They can do it by being liars and pleasers of men, ear ticklers. They can do it by being afraid to deal with problems that are plaguing the sheep and hurting the sheep.

They can do it by disrupting and destroying families with their grading, hobby horse, third tier doctrines where they cut Christians out of the kingdom over matters that Christians can disagree about.

And did you know that? There are many issues that Christians can disagree about and it should not make our blood boil. We should understand that we're dealing with family members in unity of the Holy Spirit and that we can sharpen each other.

Iron sharpens iron through friction. We can be okay with that. We're not going to die. It's not even like getting spanked. It's just having a conversation and no one's going to die. Words are not violence.

Okay? The steward has to be found trustworthy. But then the question comes in and that's what this text is about. Found faithful by who and by what standard? And the answer to this is obvious. They are found faithful by the owner which is the one that matters and if they are faithful to the owner then they are by definition faithful.

And this is why it's a small matter to him to be judged by the Corinthians because it doesn't matter what their warped judgment was because if God finds him faithful then he is faithful. And what is the standard?

That is the requirements of the law. And we have those for elders. We see the qualifications in 1 Timothy and Titus. We see them throughout the New Testament when we look at the ministry of the apostles and how these men were.

And if your overseers don't look like that then you should pray to God that they would repent or be removed in shame and disgrace. That is the line that we walk. And so Paul was not worried about being examined by the church or any human court.

Why?

Is it because he's arrogant? No, it's because he hadn't done anything wrong. And what is the answer? God sees everything. God can send a man to hell and damn the eternal soul. What can you do to me? That's the question.

What can you do? Paul knew that there was nothing against his own conscience but then his own conscience is not the arbiter of whether he's faithful or not. God is and God's law is. See the church or the human court, you guys, the human court, no one can do anything of note to us compared to what God will do to the dishonest manager.

That is the office that I've stepped into. And that is this, that the judgment for me will be tricky on judgment day if there's thorny stuff. And as a man who I looked up to fell in the last month, what he said is he knows that when he comes to the Father that he will not be told, well done, good and faithful servant for his job as an overseer because he brought disgrace to the church.

But he hopes that he will be found good and faithful steward as a sheep because his faith is in Christ. It's a dangerous thing. It's a terrifying thing. And what we say is you'll hear it, listen, the fear of God is so gone in our culture that you'll hear things like this.

You'll hear, well, who are you accountable to, Josh? And the real answer, the overreaching answer is God. I am accountable to God. And what you'll hear that as is, he's accountable to no one. And the reason you will hear that is because bad, crooked, perverse men have used that without the fear of God in their hearts.

And they have blasphemed the name of God and taken him in vain so that they can hoodwink the sheep and fleece the sheep. And the fire will be hot for them, friends. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

And no one will be judged more harshly than the one who is a steward of the household who steals from the house. So yes, in a very real sense, my accountability is before God. May I not blaspheme his name by saying so.

In the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God. We should be afraid of God. What can God do? Will God take the abuse of his law lightly? Will God take the fleecing and the molesting of his precious people lightly?

No, he will not.

He will not.

So understand this. There's a friction here. And two things have to be true.

One is this.

The elder must not fear the judgment of even his own church. But he has to fear God. The elder must not fear the world. Only God. And we know why that sounds weird is because it's been used the way I described.

But even our own conscience as elders has to be kept clean, but it's not the end. We read it in Acts 20. Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to shepherd the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood.

Is God gonna take it lightly? We should be very afraid, Corey. Very afraid. God is not going to take it lightly when you mess with the people that are described this way. And you understand this. I try to give the church a hammer all the time on us.

And I'm gonna give you a few here. I want you to identify. How do you know when the elder's in sin? It's in the dark for a long time, isn't it? Before these things come out. Let me give you some things to look for.

An elder who is in sin by definition is going to have a conscience that's not clean. He knows what he's doing and he is suppressing the truth and unrighteousness and it's gonna start leaching out like acid from a corroded battery.

And here's what you're gonna see. He is going to try to hide from God's law or project other areas of God's law. So he will redirect you to other acceptable sins. He will diminish some and hide in others.

And the ones that he's gonna heighten are the ones that he's not involved with. He is going to point out other's bad behavior to avoid focus. It is very easy for an elder to look out and to slam other elders across town to make you believe that we are the holy chosen ones with white robes and there's no one else out there who's doing what we're doing.

And the reason he might be doing that is because he is trying to redirect attention from his own filthy conscience. He will minimize certain actions. He will blame shift. When you catch him on something, he'll turn it around on you and he will use what God has given him which is this stewardship of the mystery to make you feel like an idiot for what you observed.

Don't be fooled by that. Don't let him be a fast talker. Don't let him Jesus juke you and pull a bunch of verses out of context and make you feel like you're one inch tall. Sin is sin. And our five year olds know he's going to use his position to shield and to insulate himself.

He will build a merry band of yes men and he will withdraw from the congregation and no one will ever call him on anything because he's too important to hold to account. He might get mad. He might blow up the church by getting mad.

Good, the church needs to be blown up if you have an elder like that. The lamp needs to be taken away. He will twist God's word to his own certain destruction. Should be afraid. Should be very afraid.

So what does this mean? Accountable to God only? Yes, in an ultimate sense, yes. But we are Baptist here and there is wise polity that keeps place and I think that what we do is as we look at the last verse, there's two edges of a coin here because again, Paul is looking out and he's saying there's going to be a couple of types of judgment.

So let's look at a balance here and we do have a balancing verse he says, it is a small thing to be judged by you. I almost hear him in a mocking voice and the mockery is coming in chapter four if you've read ahead, okay?

But then he also says, it's anathema to anyone preaching a false gospel. So the church has some responsibility for dealing with false teachers, right? And then we get the legal standard in 1 Timothy about when you should bring charges against an elder.

So yeah, accountable to God but the church does not have to sit there and relentlessly put up with a man who is exhibiting terrible behavior. Let's read the verse and we're going to tear it apart. Therefore, do not go on passing judgment before the time but wait until the Lord comes who will bring to light the things hidden in the darkness and make manifest the motives of hearts and then each one's praise will come to him from God.

So can the congregant say boo? Are you just locked in? You signed a blood oath of covenant membership. I know more than you.

You're wrong.

Is that the way it works? No, no. But here's the thing. Every man can be judged and should be judged rightly and the judgment that comes rightly is never about motivations. It's always about evidence.

We are not God and we presume judge not lest ye be judged. That is talking about the kind of judgment Paul is talking about here which is the judgment that's unrighteous to make because we can't know.

God can judge in a way that we can't because he knows everything. There is nothing hidden to God. There is a lot hidden to us and we cannot judge people based on our gut feelings about them. We cannot judge people based on their associations.

We cannot judge people based on their tone and we cannot judge people based on I saw this happen over there but I don't know what they said. And we also can't judge people to hell or qualification based on secondary and tertiary doctrinal arguments.

So let's harmonize the two things. 1 Timothy 5 19 through 20 we probably haven't thought about this enough. Do not receive an accusation against an elder except on the basis of two or three witnesses.