1 Corinthians 1 01-25-10

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No Compromise Radio Thanks for tuning in to No Compromise Radio with pastor and author,

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Dr. Mike Abendroth. Today on No Compromise Radio, we'll be hearing Pastor Mike open the

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Word of God in a recent message he preached at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, Massachusetts.

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Now let's join Pastor Mike in progress as he preaches through the Scriptures, verse by verse, with no compromise.

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Thank you. Please turn your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 1, 1 Corinthians 1, and I have an introductory question to ask you as you're turning your

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Bibles there. By the way, if you're a visitor, you should find a black Bible in front of you, maybe in the seat pocket, directly in front of you.

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You'll need one of those today. My question is this. When was the last time you said to God, God, thank you for Bethlehem Bible Church?

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God, thank you for Bethlehem Bible Church. Thanks for the saints at Bethlehem Bible Church. Let me approach it a different way.

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Has anybody here at Bethlehem Bible Church ever let you down? Has anybody ever sinned against you, done something that you think was not right or not good?

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Has anybody here ever disappointed you? The fact is Christians regularly get burned.

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Christians are sinned against by other Christians. Leadership gets burned by other

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Christians. The fact is Christians don't always act like Christians.

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We may be glorified in heaven, but now although God thinks of us as sinless because of Christ's work, in our practical life, we still sin.

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So how can you be thankful for a group of people when they're still sinful? When was the last time you said,

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Lord, thank you for the people at Bethlehem Bible Church? Let's make it more specific. How about those five or six people that you least like here at the church that give you the least of them?

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And you say, I don't even have the list until now. Now I've got the list. But those that you least line up with, maybe you've had a few scrapes and skirmishes as we live our lives.

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And you say, those particular people, when was the last time you said,

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Lord, thank you for those people. Thank you for your goodness. Did you know that the

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Apostle Paul thanked God every time he thought about it for the church at Corinth?

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That is shocking to me. It should be shocking to you. How could Paul thank God for Corinth? And my premise today is going to be very simple.

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We should be able to learn from Paul's example as he prays for a more sinful people.

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So that when we think of the people around us who are less than perfect, who are less than glorified, that instead of falling into the grumbling, complaining, pessimistic, you don't know what these people do.

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We don't fall into that. We fall instead into the right perspective and thinking about things from God's perspective, not from our own likes and dislikes.

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It's a very challenging message. Some people, especially in leadership, get so burned by other

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Christians, they don't even want to corporately gather anymore. They just as soon have house church because Christians burn other

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Christians. And especially if you're a leader, you know what? Sheep bite. Problem is, if a sheep bit me,

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I'd kick the sheep. But if they're the sheep of God, I can't kick you because you're

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God's sheep. It might be fine to kick a regular sheep. I remember once we went to my sister's farm and I'm just buttering you up before I put the knife in.

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That's why I get you to laugh, so you're like, oh, oh, oh. My sister said,

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Luke was really little. She said, now be careful, those chickens, they kind of poke you.

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Luke just runs over. I think you're probably four years old at the time and maybe you were so little that you just were still waddling over to try to catch the chickens.

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And one of those chickens jumped on top of Luke's head and started poking him with the thing. And I wanted to go get that chicken, chop its head off and let it see it run around a little bit.

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That's what I wanted. We still are less than perfect.

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And if you're married, you understand what it's like to live with another sinner. If you have children, then you just multiply more sin in a family and you have to realize how do we reconcile with each other?

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How do we forgive one another? How do we live together as a family? Much more so too in the church, there are more people here.

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So how can we be thankful to God for people who are sinful? Now we're not thanking

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God that they're still sinful, but we're thanking God for what he has done in these people. And that's exactly what we're going to learn about today.

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Thanking God for a group of people who are far less than practically perfect.

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You need to love this church. If you're a member or a regular tender, you need to love this church.

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God hasn't said he's going to bless the Elks Club, the Moose Lodge, the Girl Scouts or any other organization that could serve a very, very good purpose.

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For that matter, the American Cancer Society. I'm glad for many organizations. I'm not slamming them.

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But I am saying at the list, at the top of the list, there is the local church.

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And if you're not careful, your flesh may be energized by Satan, is going to want you to look at the church in a negative fashion, in a way that's less honoring than Christ would have you look at the church.

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You're to look at the church as, there's all kinds of metaphors, the bride of Christ, the body, the temple, all kinds of ways you could look at it, but you are never to look at it with disgust, disdain or disfavor, even though people sin against you.

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Leadership especially struggles with this because we know more about the sin and we know more about the people.

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And if you're not careful, you can get into a trap of thinking unbiblical thoughts, and I think it will be good for your soul today, leadership or no leadership, to say,

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Lord, let me have the view of Bethlehem Bible Church that Paul the Apostle had of crazy

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Corinth. Wouldn't that be a good thing? So when you say to yourself, somebody has hurt me or burned me,

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I don't want to be so flippant to say, join the club. If you think you've gotten burned, you should see how many times

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I've gotten burned and I'm still here. I don't want to do that, although maybe I do. We all kind of want to one up people.

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But I want you to say, there's a way to think about saints from God's perspective so that you'll be more thankful.

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So like with the trial, instead of looking low, looking horizontally, you say, I think

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I'm thinking about things the wrong way. I'm thinking about work the wrong way. I'm thinking about child raising the wrong way.

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I'm thinking about neighbors the wrong way. I'm thinking about relationships between husbands and wives the wrong way because I'm thinking about horizontal issues only and I'm not thinking, you know what,

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I should start with God and work my way down. That's exactly what Paul did. So 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verses 4 through 9 will help us understand how to be more thankful by the word of God energized by his spirit so that you'll be more positive when it comes to the local church.

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If Paul could be thankful for carnal Corinth, we ought to be thankful for us because we're much less carnal than Corinth.

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Now before we get to verses 4 through 9, let me just finish up. We ended at the end of verse 2 last time.

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If you're new to the church, we're in the book of 1 Corinthians and we're on our way to wrap things up speed -wise.

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We've covered chapter 1, verses 1 and 2 in the last 14 weeks and we're almost ready to kind of dive in.

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I hope to cover about 5 or 6 verses today. As we look at the introduction, I want to say this from the start.

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This is not just an introduction because he's following Hellenistic Greek introductions and you just need to say dear sirs or sincerely and kind of write that out.

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It is an introduction, yes, but it's an introduction with a purpose and the purpose is littered with all kinds of ideas.

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It's layered with thoughts about who God is and how to think about Him. For instance, as I showed you a couple of weeks ago, how many times do you find

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Lord Jesus Christ mentioned in verses 1 through 10?

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Well, you'll find it very often and very regularly. Why? Because Paul is trying to tell the church of Corinth, you need to recognize

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Jesus as the Lord because you're not living up to His Lordship. So you see in verse 2,

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Lord Jesus Christ, verse 3, Lord Jesus Christ, verse 7,

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Lord Jesus Christ, verse 8, Lord Jesus Christ, verse 9, Jesus Christ our Lord, verse 10,

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Lord Jesus Christ. And so Paul has reasons for what he does, it's just not filler.

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When you study 1 Corinthians, just don't quick jump down to verse 10 and go, let's get into that division part because that's more interesting.

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He has a reason why he goes through these things. And so part of the greeting that he gives is found in verse 3, but there's a reason for the greeting, grace to you and peace from God our

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Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Now what you don't know, salutations in the

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Greek back in those days used to be in third person. Paul makes it more personal, Paul makes it more intimate,

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Paul brings it together a little bit more and he says in second person, grace to you.

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Here's this apostle who spent 18 months at Corinth, he knows the people and he could almost imagine those different saints as he says, grace to you.

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And he gives this twofold blessing, both grace and peace. Notice though before we go too fast, the source from God our

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Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. One preposition from Apo, one preposition yet we have

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God the Father and God the Son. Links the Father and the Son together as the common source of grace and peace.

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There's God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit. The Father isn't the Spirit, the Spirit isn't the

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Son and the Son is not the Father. There is one God and God gives grace and peace from the

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Father and through the Son. This is an interesting way to talk about the deity of Christ and two members of the

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Trinity. This is a very regular thing. Keep your finger on 1 Corinthians and turn with me to 1

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Thessalonians. No, let's go to 2 Thessalonians, 2 Thessalonians farther to the right in your

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Bible and I don't want you to miss this because we just assume at the church that you believe one

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God manifest in three persons. That when Jesus was getting baptized, the

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Son was getting baptized, the Father said, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased and then the

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Spirit descends on him like a dove. Jesus was not using ventriloquism. He was hearing from the

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Father. One God, three persons and you see in 2 Thessalonians chapter 1 verse 2, the same grace and peace from the

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Father and Jesus, not from the Father and from Jesus, but one single source.

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Grace to you and peace, 1 Thessalonians 1, 2, from God the Father and the

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Lord Jesus Christ. Look with me at verse 12 of the same chapter, 2

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Thessalonians chapter 1 verse 12. So that the name of our Lord Jesus will be glorified in you and you in him according to the grace of our

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God and not our Lord, but one source to the grace of our

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God and the Lord Jesus Christ. God the Father is God, God the Son is

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God and God the Spirit is God. One more selection, second chapter of 2

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Thessalonians verse 16 please. This is just the way Paul writes and he doesn't just throw it out there.

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You must believe that there's one God manifest in three persons. If you don't,

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I don't know how you explain this, that you say, well, Jesus is somehow lesser than the

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Father. Well that can't be because how can grace and peace come from someone less than the

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Father? 2 Thessalonians 2 verse 16, now may our

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Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father who has loved us and given us eternal comfort and good hope by grace, comfort and strengthen your hearts in every good work and word.

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God the Father is God, God the Son is God. And so back to 1 Corinthians chapter 1, both grace and peace together in this introduction with a profoundly theological meaning,

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Paul says, that's what I want for you. It's just not hello, it's just not greetings, but he says I want grace and peace to be given to you by God.

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Now what's grace? We're just going to look at this from a very simple perspective today. Not many people understand grace like they ought to.

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I look at all the words in our society when we think of grace. When I used to trip at home, my father would say, way to go grace,

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I was graceless. Say grace before your meals, it's the first name of girls,

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Grace Abendroth. There's a more theological meaning here.

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Sometimes we get so close to it, we forget. It's like climbing up some Mount Everest and once you get past 25 ,000 feet in the death zone, you don't really remember what you know to be true at a lower level.

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What is grace? I used to think to myself, it is unmerited favor, but Sinclair Ferguson is much better in his explanation.

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It is demerited favor. Certainly, Paul isn't saying,

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God, give them what they deserve, is he? He's saying, I want

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God to grace you. I want God to give what you don't deserve to him, I mean, what you don't deserve to you.

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And then he says, grace to you in what? These are never switched around, it's always grace and then peace.

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What does it mean, peace? Now sometimes peace can mean this feeling. Remember if you're anxious in Philippians 4 and you pray, and you pray to God, he will grant you what?

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The peace that passes all understanding. It's a subjective feeling where you're anxious, you have every right in the world almost to be anxious, except you have a father and the father knows everything and so you have a feeling of peace.

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There's also the peace in the Bible that's objective. We as unbelievers were at war with God.

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He was at war with us. We were enemies, we were fighting. God hates all those who do iniquity,

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Psalm 5, 5. We hear this in today's society, God loves the sinner but he hates the sin.

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Friends, you can't somehow say, well, I'm the person and outside of me over here is my buddy named sin.

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No, you are who you are, one whole thought, mind, soul, strength, everything that you are and God says you're my enemy and he hates his enemies.

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They are at war with him and so there's hostility between the two and then

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God says based on my son's work of making peace, lay down your arms, lay down your weapons and the only way there can be peace between these two enemies is through a mediator or through someone who can represent men,

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Jesus Christ the God -man, and who can also feel and absorb the wrath of God that was due people.

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And so you've got different ways to think of peace. It can be a peaceful feeling generated by the

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Holy Spirit, Galatians 5, the fruit of the spirit is what, love, joy, peace, or it could be the cessation of animosity between two people, there can be peace,

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Romans chapter 5 says we have peace now with God, very objective, or here it's more of a greeting.

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This is right out of Hebrew greeting. If you are greeted by someone in Israel today, if you go with us in 2011,

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I think that's where we're going, how would you greet someone in Israel today? Shalom.

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And what does that mean? Peace, good. That's a trick question.

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It means peace, but we sometimes think peace is, how would

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I describe it? When all else fails, look at your notes, right? Sometimes we think peace is the absence of something, you say well

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I have peace with my wife, means well we have no more fighting, we're not fighting anymore, we're not discussing heatedly, it's an absence of something.

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But here, shalom in this greeting, the Hebrew transport to this is what, a presence of something, have a well -rounded life, have a full life, have all the goodness of God that flows out of grace.

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And so there's a kind of peace that's a feeling peace, there's a kind of peace that means you're not at war with God anymore, and there's a peace that, it's like saying, greetings, have peace, have well -roundedness, shalom.

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That's what Paul is saying, that's what he wants for these saints there. Now he moves into this prayer of thanksgiving, verses 4 through 9, and that's where I really want to focus in on today, that's what

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I want to focus in on today, is this prayer of thanksgiving to God that you can learn from Paul, so that you can be thankful for Bethlehem Bible Church.

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Let me give you five reasons every Christian here can be thankful for your church.

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Maybe you're listening on tape, maybe you're just visiting, and you go back to your church and you say, I don't really,

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I'm not at the best church, I'm not at the perfect church. Well you can still be thankful to God.

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And by the way, when you get rid of the complaining and the grumbling and all that stuff, with thanksgiving, your life will be much more honoring to God in practice, and you'll just get rid of this.

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It's easy to complain. How does the Bible approach complaining? It doesn't just say quit complaining, it says don't complain and then do what?

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Something positive. So what do you tell a thief? Stop stealing. And work.

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What do you tell a liar? Stop lying and tell the truth. So here

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Paul says, I want you to be thankful, and we all have it in our hearts to just be complaining, grumbling, the people did such and such, the elders do such and such.

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When I meet those kind of people, when I meet me, I know I haven't been thankful like I ought to.

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Show me a grumbling person, I'll show you someone who needs a good dose of today. I'll never forget, as long as I live,

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I think it was 12 years ago I preached a sermon, and we were having a bunch of things going on at the church and a lot of growth, and you pray for growth, and you pray for rain, and then there's mud, and we had all these people, and I was preaching through James, and I preached on complaining.

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And I said, if you complain and you're convicted by it, join the club. I mean, we all complain to our shame.

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And we really are complaining against God's sovereign, providential working. You complain about the wife, you're really complaining that God gave you this wife.

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You're complaining about the wife that you don't have, you're really complaining to God about Him not giving you the wife, etc., etc. And I preached from James 5, and I said, if you're a complainer that is going to be unrepentant, make this the last

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Sunday you come to Bethlehem Bible Church. They all did what you're doing right now.

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Then I was greeting people at the door, and somebody came up and complained about the sermon. It is

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God's will for your life not to complain. So what do you replace it with? We replace it with thanksgiving.

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Let me show you five reasons that if you're here today as a Christian, you can be thankful to God for a less than perfect church.

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Because if Paul could thank God for Corinth, can't you thank God for Bethlehem Bible Church?

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Number one, you could be thankful for the people at Bethlehem Bible Church because God has graciously saved them.

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Because God has graciously given them saving faith. That'd be a good way to thank God, wouldn't it?

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God thank you because they're saved. Let's take a look at the verse, 1 Corinthians 1, verse 4.

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The sermon comes right from the text. An odd thing in today's evangelicalism, but it's true.

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Verse 4, there's one main verb in the whole sentence found in verse 4.

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What do you see at the end of verse 4? Comma, at the end of verse 5, comma, at the end of verse 6, comma, at the end of verse 7, comma, at the end of verse 8, comma, verses 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

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There's one main verb, and that verb is thank. I thank my God.

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Now, Paul isn't commanding you to be thankful, but we're learning from Paul with preaching application that we can follow

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Paul. I thank my God always concerning you, concerning Corinth, concerning you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus.

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The first thing you can be thankful for at Bethlehem Bible Church, a less than perfect church is, God has saved people here.

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God, thank you for saving these people, salvation by grace alone through faith alone.

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The way the language is set up in the Greek is, it goes back to something in the past that has been done, that has been accomplished by another.

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God, you saved them. This isn't sarcasm. This isn't

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Paul in a backhanded way, you guys are all sinful and I just thank God for you. No, he really means it.

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He has an attitude of, God, you have graciously done in Christ for them what they haven't deserved and you are to be praised.

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I thank my God always concerning you. The thanking is an ongoing, every time

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I think about you, Corinth, I say, thank you, God, for their salvation. But it's a tense in the original, an aorist passive, if you'd like it, an aorist passive participle for the grace of God, which was given, a one -time gift given by another, salvation grace.

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Paul is saying this, I could be thankful because you aren't running around worshiping

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Aphrodite anymore. You're not running around worshiping Apollos anymore.

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You're not worshiping Zeus. You're not worshiping the Navy God, Melchat, that we learned about before. You're not.

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And if I look at you, I could say, if it wasn't for the grace of God, who would you be worshiping? Our ancestors in England, maybe we'd be with them worshiping trees.

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I've been to India and you think, you know, if it wasn't for the grace of God, my Indian friends that live in India and even here now, they'd be worshiping a whole variety of horrible gods,

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Ganesh and Saraswati and all these people. But we look around, we don't worship ourselves anymore now, do we?

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Is that something to be thankful to God for? I think so. We don't worship, I say this in no jest at all, but if you want to laugh, that's fine.

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We don't worship the Red Sox anymore. Okay, you can laugh. Think about it.

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People worship sports. You were born a worshiper and you will worship something. And you'll get all into it and you'll look at it and you'll figure it all out and just consumes your mind, your thoughts, everything.

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It's by the grace of God that you at Bethlehem Bible Church don't worship rock and roll anymore. That just sucks people in.

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Whatever your past idol was, yourself, your wife, your kids,

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I don't know, the Virgin Mary, it could be a thousand different things. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible -teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life -transforming power of God's Word through verse -by -verse exposition of the sacred text.

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Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston.

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You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.