WWUTT 1486 There is Sexual Immorality Among You (1 Corinthians 5:1)

The Apostle Paul confronted sexual sin that was going on in the church in Corinth, a sin that was so bad, even the pagans said, we don't do stuff like that. We must be pure when we understand the text.

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Introduction to 1 Corinthians 5 and the Church’s Need for Purity

Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. And thanks to all of you for letting me have a week off. I had a bad allergic reaction to something and caused me to lose my voice for a few days. I really needed all five days of last week in order to get back up to almost 100%.

I'm about 95%. I might sound normal to you, but I can still tell where I'm a little bit weak. Anyway, thank you for your patience. And we come back to our study in 1 Corinthians. We're up to chapter five.

This is the shortest chapter that we've looked at thus far, only 13 verses. So I'm gonna start out here reading the whole thing, and then we'll do a little bit of review before coming back to our text.

I'm reading out of the Legacy Standard Bible the Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you. And sexual immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father's wife, and you have become puffed up and have not mourned instead so that the one who had done this deed would be removed from your midst.

For I, on my part, though absent in body, but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this as though I were present. In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled and I with you in spirit with the power of our Lord Jesus, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.

Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, also was sacrificed.

Therefore, let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people.

I did not at all mean with the sexually immoral people of this world or with the greedy and swindlers or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of this world. But now I am writing to you not to associate with any so-called brother, if he is a sexually immoral person or greedy or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or a swindler, not even to eat with such a one.

For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Are you not to judge those who are within the church? But those who are outside, God will judge. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves. Pretty heavy hitting chapter and the heaviest so far of what we've read in 1 Corinthians.

Factions, Boasting, and Fleshly Thinking in Corinth

Paul has been confronting this church with the factions and divisions that have formed among them ever since the beginning of the letter. We spent four chapters reading about that. He opens up in a very encouraging and loving way so that they know that though he has to speak harshly with them, he's doing this in love.

He said back in chapter one, verse four, I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God, which was given you in Christ Jesus, that in everything you were enriched in him in all word and all knowledge, even as the witness about Christ was confirmed in you so that you are not lacking in any gift, eagerly awaiting the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end beyond reproach in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

But then he goes straight into confronting them over the fact that they had been dividing against one another regarding which teachers they had listened to. Believing that Paul was closer to God than Apollos, Cephas, or even Christ.

And yet there were some that would say, well, I'm of Christ, so I've gone right back to the source. So it doesn't matter if you listen to Apoll, Apollos, Apoll, I'm Apolled. Anyway, to Paul or Apollos or Cephas, it doesn't matter if you listen to any of those guys because I listen only to Christ as if those other three guys can't give me anything.

And we've heard teachers even today that will say, you know, unhitch from the Old Testament, or they will say that our faith is based on an event, not a book. Of course, I'm talking about Andy Stanley.

That's exactly the things he says. That Christianity is from an event, it's not a book. It's talking about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's not the Bible. The Bible is not the basis of our faith.

But you wouldn't know about those events if not for the Bible. You wouldn't know about the gospel of Jesus Christ if it was not for Paul. Christ did not come to Corinth and proclaim the word of the kingdom or the message of the kingdom among the Corinthians.

Jesus did not do that in his earthly ministry. He sent his apostles, his disciples to go out and do that. Paul is an appointed apostle of Jesus Christ. Apollos is one who was made a disciple by others who shared the gospel with him.

And then Cephas, somebody who was with Christ during his earthly ministry, but even did not understand the resurrection until Christ opened his mind to understand the scriptures, as it says in Luke 24.

No one would know any of these things about Christ if it were not for the mission of the apostles and the disciples that had been appointed to go out and teach all that Christ had commanded them to teach.

And yet there were some in Corinth that were saying, this guy's better than this guy. This guy gets me directly to the source. You've got Roman Catholicism today that will say, we can't just go straight to Jesus.

You can go to Paul. You can actually pray to a dead saint.

You can go to Mary.

You can pray to St. Joseph, you know, whoever, and then they take our requests before Christ who takes it before God, which is absurd. As Paul says in 1 Timothy 2, there is one mediator between God and man, and that is the man, Christ Jesus.

You don't need to go through anybody else to get to Christ. If you were praying to anybody else, it would be to say that they are omnipresent and that they have God-like qualities. They can be wherever you are in order to hear your prayer.

There's only one who can do that, and that is Christ alone, for he is God. So you see, I'm just providing that as examples of how we've seen these different factions that have developed even among church history.

There are people that are going directly against everything that Paul has laid out here in the first four chapters of Corinthians, saying that I am a servant for your sake. I'm a servant of Christ for your benefit.

Apollos, same way. Also with Cephas, we have done this for you. We have labored in God's field, and you are that field. We have helped to build God's building, and you are that building. We have been good stewards of the house of God, and the church is the house of God.

We are servants. We don't sit around and talk about who's doing better or who's had more converts or all this kind of a thing. So don't cause divisions among yourselves over who is wiser or who is smarter or who is better.

For as Paul had said back in chapter one, verse 18, 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.

And then in chapter two, verse 14, a natural man does not accept the depths of the spirit of God for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned. It doesn't matter how much you try to dress up this faith that we have, it's never gonna look impressive to the eyes of the world.

People who are worldly, who are going after their flesh, they're not gonna look at this religion and go, oh, wow, that's really fascinating. You worship a carpenter that was crucified in Jerusalem? Well, yeah, sure, tell me more about this.

I wanna know this God too. That's never gonna look impressive to people who are worldly. They don't care about that. They want what their flesh wants and they want to worship gods that will give them whatever it is that they want because they're naturally minded.

They have not been transformed by the spirit of God to discern and understand spiritual things. And as long as we continue to go after those things in the flesh, we demonstrate that we are still people of the flesh and not people of Christ.

Even the admiration of the world, that's going after something that is in the flesh. We did not come about this faith by our flesh. It was not by our works. It was not by our effort. For going back to chapter one again, verse 30, Paul says, it is by his doing, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

So that as it is written, let him who boasts, boast in the Lord. Now, since the people of Corinth, this isn't everybody in the church, but it is a great deal of the majority of the church. Since these people of Corinth are going after things that are fleshly, which person is better?

Which teacher is better? They want their religion to look good in the eyes of the world because they're trying to understand these things on philosophical grounds, rather than being filled with the spirit of God.

Because there are these factions and divisions among them, there are also gonna be pursuits in the flesh that are bad, like really bad sins. That's what we get to here in chapter five. A sin so bad that even the Gentiles think it's bad.

There are gonna be those that pursue those sins, and then the rest of the church will think it's no big deal because they're still infants in the flesh. They're still in the flesh, infants in Christ, going back to what Paul had said at the start of chapter three.

So now here we go with a confrontation of a fleshly sin Paul is making here at the start of chapter five, and the rest, there's one guy that's doing this. It's not the whole church that is participating in the sin.

The whole church is not incestuous, because this is incest that is being confronted right here. So the whole church is not incestuous, but while this one guy is going after this, the rest of the church is doing nothing about it.

Why?

Because they don't think it's that big a deal. It's like it's on that guy. This is not something that hurts or affects the entire church. The church is thinking that way because they're infants. They're infants in the flesh.

They don't understand the things that they do. Even these superficial things that they're going after, they don't recognize that that's causing division. And so therefore they also don't see that this guy who's having an incestuous relationship with his father's wife, they don't see that that causes division in the church either.

That's his own business. That's a thing that's going on in their household, right? That's probably the mentality that the Corinthians have. So they're not thinking of this as something that's causing division in the church, but Paul directly confronts this as being leaven that leavens the whole lump.

So the church does need to do something about this. They're too busy arguing with each other. They're too factious. They're too divided to recognize that there are other grave things happening in the church that are dividing the body.

Sexual Immorality, Incest, and Church Discipline

So here we go, chapter five, verse one, Paul says, it is actually reported. Now there's astonishment in the way that he puts that. It's actually reported to me. I can't believe my ears. And if it had not come from Chloe's people, these are the folks Paul had mentioned back in chapter one, had come with a message to him about some of the things that were going on in the Corinthian church.

He's responding to a letter in which they ask some questions. That letter was probably delivered by Chloe's people, but then Chloe's people also saying to Paul, well, let me tell you about some other things that are going on in this church at the same time.

So there are some questions that Paul responds to in this letter that were asked by the Corinthians, but he's also got a report of some other things that are going on. So he's astonished at hearing this.

It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you. And it is a sexual immorality of such a kind. It doesn't even exist among the Gentiles that someone has his father's wife. Now it's not that Gentiles don't commit incest.

Of course they do. There are pagans that were guilty of all manner of sexual immorality, but incest was one of those things that even among pagans, though there may be some pagans that do such a thing, even among the pagans, they're looking at this going, oh, come on, those Christians, right.

These who are talking about sexual purity, these who are talking about holiness and righteousness and whatnot, one of them is committing incest. He's sleeping with his father's wife. That's astonishing even to pagans.

So a pagan would say that that's wrong. You shouldn't do that. You should not sleep with your father's wife. Even a pagan understands that. So how much more astonishing should it be for the church that someone among them is doing such a thing?

Okay, so this is an incestuous relationship that is being confronted here that's going on in the church in Corinth. It's sexual immorality. There's other kinds of immoral things that are going on that Paul is going to confront.

This is a big one. And it is so big, actually, that we read about this guy in 1 Corinthians 5, and we read about him again in the next letter in 2 Corinthians. I'll talk about that a little bit later.

But Paul basically saying to the church there in 2 Corinthians, don't let the man grieve too long, but forgive him. I've already forgiven him. You must forgive him, have him restored to the body of Christ.

But here, the guy is still in their midst, and the church is not doing anything about it. So there's a man who is committing incest. The rest of the, even the pagan culture around this Corinthian church knows about it.

They see that it's going on in the church and that the church isn't doing anything about it. And so to the pagans, they're going, so what makes Christianity so special compared to what we're all doing?

We're not even doing anything that bad. What's so unique about the church? Why would I want to become part of the church and give up my Sunday morning going to the games, you know, down at the Hippodrome or whatever, the Coliseum, the arena, whatever it might happen to be.

Why would I want to give up my Sunday morning doing that and going over to church when I can live the way that I've always been living, just like you Corinthians are doing the same thing. I don't need your club.

I don't need your social club. I got my own group of friends over here. So because the Corinthian church is not doing anything about it to the rest of the world, it looks like they're just as sexually immoral as we are.

So Paul is astonished hearing such a thing. It is actually reported that there is sexually, there is sexual immorality among you. And of such a kind, it does not even exist among the Gentiles that someone has his father's wife.

You know, even as sexually depraved as our culture is, there are still sexually immoral things that will happen that will get the culture in a certain kind of buzz about it, and they will say, that's terrible behavior.

Astonishingly, even as sexually depraved as our culture is, there are still certain things that if you were to do it, the rest of the culture would look at it and go,.

Wow, that's bad.

I'm not even that bad. I can't believe you would do such a thing, right? I mean, even though there is kind of this push or this effort to make pederasty or pedophilia normal and acceptable, there are some people out there that are trying to push this as normal.

By and large in the culture, that's still largely frowned upon. Now, our children are being incredibly sexualized right now. And you're talking about like the drag queen story hours that are going on at public libraries.

You have drag queens appearing on Blue's Clues. There's drag queens on Disney Plus. I mean, all this stuff that's going on to try to push this sexual perversity in front of our kids, even that itself is to a certain degree, pederasty.

It doesn't have to be some kind of a sexually immoral encounter for it to be pedophilia. So there's some element or some attempt to normalize this in our culture. But by and large, the culture still accepts that the sexual exploitation of children is wrong.

I remember several years back when Tiger Woods got caught in all of the sexual immorality that he was doing. And this started with, didn't his wife chase him out of the house and like club the back of his SUV?

Well, it took one of his golf clubs to the back window or something like that. And everybody saw this on the news, a helicopter flying overhead. Some major thing had happened in the Woods household. And then it turns out, I mean, Tiger Woods is a sexual deviant and he's had adulterous affairs all over the place, had a phone that was full of all these contacts, these women that he had, that he was sleeping with outside of his own marriage.

The culture looked at that and they saw Tiger Woods as a scumbag. I can't believe you would behave such a way, Tiger, as sexually depraved as our culture was, they're still looking at, Tiger Woods is a guy who wronged his wife.

That was the perception that the culture had. So yeah, again, sexually depraved culture, really, really bad. Like our culture is worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. That's how bad our culture is. And it's only a matter of time before God's judgment is poured out upon it.

And yet, as bad as our culture is, there are still some things that even the culture would say, yeah, that's really bad. You shouldn't do that, man. That's terrible for you to do that to somebody else.

There's some moral ethic that still exists there.

Why?

Well, because God gave everybody a conscience. Now, as the culture falls into more and more immorality, God is gonna give this culture over to its own depraved mind. And then they're gonna start accepting worse and worse sins and all this stuff becomes normalized, just like I was talking about a moment ago.

As it says in Romans 1 .18, that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They know what the truth is, but they suppress it because they love their sin.

They would rather have the desires of their flesh than die to themselves and take up a cross and follow Christ. And the only person who does that is a person whose heart has been transformed by the Holy Spirit of God, to be convicted over their sin because they heard it in the law, to turn from their sin and turn to Christ and this is because the Spirit has regenerated them to hate their sin and love God's righteousness.

It is a supernatural working of God in a person's heart that turns them from the depravity of this world to the righteousness of Jesus Christ. So we're reading here about a sexual immorality that's so bad, it's even astonishing to the world.

And we as Christians need to understand the call to purity that is upon each and every one of us, that we would live lives of holiness before God, that we would commit our bodies unto the Lord as a spiritual act of worship, as is said in Romans 12, 1.

As we read also at the end of chapter six, verse 20, here in first Corinthians, for you were bought with a price, therefore glorify God in your body. Do you not know that your body is a sanctuary of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God?

You are not your own. So honor God with your body. So we're gonna go on for the next two chapters here, chapter five and chapter six, talking about sexual immorality. I didn't preface this episode by saying you may wanna listen to it first before letting your kids listen to it, since this is the subject matter we're gonna be talking about over the next two chapters.

But we'll pick up here again tomorrow. Let us understand, at least for now, as we depart from the devotional today, that we are called to holiness, that we must be holy as God is holy. Let there not even be a hint of sexual immorality in you, but commit yourself fully unto God.

We'll be talking about church discipline and cleansing out the old leaven as we continue here in first Corinthians, chapter five tomorrow. Heavenly Father, thank you for the guidance of your word. Thank you for the gift of your son.

Thank you for your spirit in our hearts that has regenerated our hearts to hear the gospel, be convicted over our sin, and love the holiness of God. Turn us from our sin to the righteousness of Christ.

Keep our thoughts pure. Keep them meditating on Christ today, that we may commit our whole bodies unto the Lord as a spiritual act of worship. Forgive us our sins. Lead us in righteousness for your name's sake.

It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Closing Prayer and Ministry Sign-Off

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