1 Corinthians 15:1-11 Of First Importance

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Mattawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filcik preaches from his sermon series titled First Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in.

The Gospel as the Church’s First Importance

Well, good morning and welcome to Recast Church. I'm Don Filcik. I'm the lead pastor here. And here we are, church. We're gathered together in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. He is our Lord.

He is our Savior. He is our hope. He is our love and he is our king.

Amen.

So this morning, this morning, scripture has us looking into something that Paul reminds us is of first importance. And I just want to clarify for you that there's only one thing that can be first. There's only one thing that can be of first importance.

Only one thing that is that is possible for us to say is vital to us in that first sense. So we ought to listen up. We ought to pay attention this morning to First Corinthians. For the past several sermons in First Corinthians, the focus has been somewhat on the church.

And that makes sense in a letter written to a church that is to correct them what they were thinking and what they were doing wrong. And so the focus has been a lot on their behavior and their actions and correcting that.

What do we do when we gather together? But now we kind of turn a corner at the start of chapter 15 to more focus on their beliefs. And all of chapter 15 will be about resurrection. God and His sovereignty has us in an extensive section about resurrection in the weeks leading up to Easter.

And so we're just going to be kind of continuing to carry on in this series through First Corinthians. And God has orchestrated it.

I haven't.

I'm not that great at timing. I mean, I can if I really needed to fudge things, but vacations and all that stuff come in here. And I didn't plan it out super creatively, but I just think it's awesome the way that God leads us to seasons like this where I can just continue on in First Corinthians and we can have Easter focus.

These first 11 verses will focus our attention on the gospel that comes through the proclamation of truth regarding Jesus Christ. Our faith is rooted in the historical life, the historical actions, the historical death, the historical burial and the historical resurrection of Jesus Christ.

And that was a lot of historical in there. But that's with emphasis to state that these things happened in real time. They were verifiable. They were they happened on this planet, in this place. This is not extended mythology.

It's not fable. It's not moral tale. It is true history that we look at and that is the core of our faith. Paul is seeking to establish unity in the church of Corinth over the gospel. The thing of first importance.

The gospel is the thing of first importance for us as a church. Let me just ask you and to challenge you to think through this this morning as a church, what is of first importance? What really holds us together?

What is the cement of our unity? I would contend to you that it must be the gospel or we are moving away from being a church. And then for us as individuals, this is where it becomes challenging to us as we sit here and we listen to this message this morning.

For us, what is of first importance? It might be a little bit challenging to think through. But if you were if somebody were to follow you along this week, I'm convicted to say I don't know exactly what somebody would designate as first of importance to me if they followed me all week long.

Some weeks they might say work. Some weeks they might say money. Some weeks they might say entertainment. And now I'll leave it up to you and the Holy Spirit to designate to you this morning what you need to take on more of in terms of gospel orientation in your life.

But man, I hope that the gospel is shining through our lives to others around us, especially at this time and season where I just have a sense. And I'm no prophet, but I have a sense that the door might be closing.

It's not closed yet. But how many of you know what I mean when I say the door might be closing on the opportunity that we have to be bold with our faith? I mean, we should always be bold with our faith, but where it's where it's easy, where we can share our faith quite clearly with others around us.

And and most of us are not at risk of getting fired from our jobs or or being kicked out of our neighborhood associations or anything like that because we are Christian and we share our faith. But we can imagine times coming where that might be the case.

And so what would it look like for us to be gospel oriented people where it's clear that the gospel is of first importance to us? Let's open our Bibles or your scripture journals or your devices to first Corinthians chapter 15.

And we're going to be just looking at these first 11 verses, first Corinthians 15, one through 11, to see what God puts as first in importance to us. And like I like to say every week, recast, this is God's holy word.

Probably the most valuable time for you to pay attention is right now. Right now, where we're going to hear it's going to be my voice speaking, but it's the very words of the almighty God that he has written and recorded for us.

So first Corinthians chapter 15 verses one through 11, encourage you to follow along and hear from him. Now, I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preach to you, which you received, in which you stand and by which you are being saved.

If you hold fast to the word I preach to you. Unless you believe in vain, for I delivered to you as a first importance what I also received. That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.

That he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. And that he appeared to Cephas, then to the 12, then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.

But by the grace of God, I am what I am. And his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach, and so you believed.

Let's pray as the band comes to lead us in worship this morning. Father, I thank you so much for the gospel, the simple message, a simple message that is profound in our lives, that has the impact and the push to move us from enemies of you to adopted into your family, from a life of hopelessness and futility and vanity and emptiness to a life of fruitfulness and usefulness in your kingdom of purpose.

Father, I thank you for the simple message of Jesus Christ who came here, died for our sins, was buried, and rose again on the third day. Father, I pray that that message would have its way in our hearts that dramatically impacts the way we live, that we would never grow bored of hearing the gospel, that it would be the very thing that saturates our hearts and minds and lives with power and with force that sets our feet on solid ground so that we can launch out into a week of service to others, because in the gospel, the oxygen mask has already been applied to us so that we can just go around giving oxygen freely to everyone else.

Father, I pray that we would live that way. We would live in a boldness of proclamation of the glorious truth that rescued us and then in turn has the power to rescue others around us through their faith and their belief and their trust.

Father, I pray that you would even now in that joyfulness of the gospel allow our voices to mingle now in praise to you in gladness for what you have done for us. Let our exuberance and our joy and our fervor and our boiling over with praise and gladness be a byproduct of that very gospel that we have believed, that knowing what we deserved in the eternal fires of hell to what we've been rescued to eternity with you, that that would just light our hearts with gladness and joy this morning together in this gathering.

And we ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. I encourage you, just like every week, to get comfortable, but re-find your way into your Bible, into 1 Corinthians 15, 1 through 11. It's good for you to have that on your lap so you can see the things that I'm saying over the remainder of our time is coming from God's word.

But if at any time during the message you need to get up and get more coffee or juice or donut holes, while supplies last back there, and if you need the restrooms, those are out the double doors down the hallway on the left-hand side.

Continuing in the Gospel and the Need for Perseverance

But we're going to dive in here. This section is the basis for a longer argument that's going on all throughout chapter 15. And we can be tempted to think that the only purpose Paul has here in this section that we're looking at is an isolated reaffirmation of the gospel and particularly the resurrection.

I was taught this primarily as apologetics, primarily as a defense of the faith. Here's all the evidences for the resurrection, and here's all the people that he appeared to, as if that was the primary reason that this exists, is so that I could win an argument with a non-Christian or something.

But he starts with, I want to remind you, remember, this is to the context of the Corinthians, he's speaking into this church, and he says, I want to remind you, fellow Christians in Corinth, of the gospel that I originally brought to you, that I originally preached.

And we could read it like a friendly reminder, right? But this passage will serve as support for a longer correction to the church in Corinth. You see, some in Corinth were teaching falsely against the resurrection of the dead, which is kind of hard for us to wrap our minds around, that a group would call themselves a church and not believe in resurrection.

But here, his purpose in reminding them of the gospel is to highlight that the gospel by which we are saved has resurrection at its very core. What he's going to state kind of later in this passage is that it's vain or empty to believe spiritual things about God or Christ without hope in the resurrection.

He's going to seek to establish the resurrection of Jesus Christ as a historical event, as a demonstration that the dead are indeed raised, as evidenced by the resurrection, the specific resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord.

So as we take this section apart, it stands alone as a beautiful reminder of the good news that has saved us or that has the power to save us and rescue us if we trust in it by faith. But this good news doesn't just save us into a waiting room where we twiddle our thumbs waiting for Jesus to return, right?

That's not what he saved us unto, but the rescue of Jesus saves us into work in the here and now for him. Amen? We've all got a role to play. We've got responsibilities. It's not just waiting for the sweet by and by, but there is work that he desires for us.

And the gospel is the fuel for the work that he has for us in the here and now. Our outline for this morning, for those of you that like to take notes, is this. Number one, continuing in the gospel. We find that in the first two verses, 1 and 2.

The second point is confirmation of the gospel, verses 3 through 8. And the third is the changing power of the gospel, verses 9 and 11. And look at all those C's. I alliterated for us this week just to prove that I can from time to time.

I just choose not to most of the time. Thank you. You appreciate that? All right. I'll keep that in mind. So if I'm alliterating, I'm alliterating for the back corner over there. But our first point is this, continuing in the gospel, verses 1 and 2.

In these first two verses, Paul is reminding them of the origin of their faith in Jesus Christ. It took someone proclaiming that message in speech for them to believe. But here he is again telling them something that they already know.

He says, I'm reminding you. And he knows that they know. And how does Paul know that the church in Corinth knows these things? Well, he knows because he's the one who originally told them. He's the one who proclaimed the gospel to them.

So I'm reminding you of those things that were first. Those things that I brought to you of first importance that were the foundation of your faith early on. While I think that Paul treats them as though they are believers, I think he remains relatively agnostic.

Agnostic is just a big word that means without knowledge. He remains relatively agnostic when it comes to knowing with certainty whether any individual belongs to Jesus by faith and trust in the gospel.

In other words, it's a little hard for us to determine whether somebody else is a Christian.

Do you get what I'm talking about?

How many of you just kind of look at the world around you, you've hung around the church for a while, and you've just recognized that you're not a very good measure of people's spiritual content, like what's going on in their hearts?

In Romans 8 .16, Paul writes that, and you don't need to turn over there, but you could jot that reference down and look it up later. It's a good reference, Romans 8 .16. Paul writes that each person must depend on internal confidence that they indeed are resting and holding fast to the gospel, that they are indeed saved by faith in the gospel.

This is what he says in Romans 8 .16 to quote him. The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. What I'm getting at is that Paul is slow to give anyone confidence lest they trust in his endorsement.

What's Paul's endorsement? Do you really care what Paul thinks about your eternal state? Do you really care what Don thinks? I mean, you meet with me in my office, and you say, I just don't really know where I'm at.

Do you want to hear me say, yeah, you're in. Yeah, you're okay. You're all right with God. Is that valuable to you? Does that really matter? I don't have the keys to heaven over your life. I mean, it's more important that the Spirit himself bears witness in your spirit that you are his.

Paul was slow to give confidence lest they trust in his endorsement, and I'm also slow to give confidence to anyone that they are saved. I can see only external evidences. That's the same thing that you can see.

You don't ever see a changed heart. You can't point to somebody and say, your heart has changed. What you can do is see the externals, and how many of you know that anybody can fake kindness for a season at least?

You know what I'm talking about?

You can fake good deeds. You can attend church without believing in Jesus Christ or trusting in him fully for your salvation. You can even have a testimony of your conversion without being converted. I had a suite mate in college.

Just to give you an illustration, a story. It's a true story. I had a suite mate in college who played baseball for the Christian Liberal Arts College that I attended. The college itself was going through a slump back in the 90s when I was attending there, and I went to a Bible college for two years, transferred to a Christian Liberal Arts, graduated with a bachelor's degree there.

I was there my junior year, and I had a room with a bunch of freshmen and sophomores because they had a requirement on campus that your first semester there, you had to stay in the dorms.

It was just kind of like, ugh.

So my suite mate crossed the bathroom from me. There were two guys in one room, two guys in another, and a bathroom in between. He was there on a scholarship to play baseball, and he gave over the course of that semester zero evidence of the Spirit's life within him.

It culminated in conversations where he told me outright, I don't believe any of this hocus-pocus. I don't believe the gospel. I don't believe Jesus. I asked him, I said, how did you fill out your application?

Your application required you to say that you have a relationship with Jesus Christ. How did you manage that? And in a moment of honesty, he said, I talked with a Christian friend from high school, and I gleaned enough to fudge a testimony on the application to get through.

Whew.

And then he went off to spring break in Florida. He came back, met the love of his life, packed up partway through his sophomore year, and ran off with a girl and her son. He didn't have me fooled, but he had the school fooled.

And how many of you know that Paul here acknowledges that he could be fooled? I believe that the elders of this church who read your membership applications, read your testimony, we could be fooled, I can be fooled, and I'm actually quite gracious.

If you give me a credible testimony, I just believe you. You tell me that you have given your life to Christ, I'm going to believe you.

And then we're going to talk about the fruit,.

And we're going to see the fruit over time, but I'm not going to call you a liar. I'm not going to get a mind too deep. But here in Corinth, Corinth has had a borderline wild spring break going on in their church, and Paul's acknowledging it.

So he's reminding them, I preach the gospel to you. You seem to have received it. I trust that you're standing in it, and it is saving you as long as you keep holding to the word, the gospel that I preach, unless, and then he adds this caveat at the end, unless you believed in vain.

So from these two verses, verses 1 and 2, we can glean the following insights about the good news of Jesus Christ. Five insights here, pretty brief and pretty quick coming at you. The first is it must be preached.

So if you're taking notes, this is kind of like, in verses 1 and 2, this is the structure. It must be preached. News is a spoken message. News requires words. Nobody is sharing the gospel when they are digging a well in Africa.

That's not the gospel. It is not the gospel that you are feeding the hungry down at the food pantry, or that you're going down to the gospel mission and volunteering. That is not the gospel. That's nice.

It's kind. It's good works, but it is not the gospel. I've said this often, but the gospel comes to a person through spoken, a spoken, proclaimed message about Jesus Christ. It must be spoken to be the gospel.

The gospel is not good works done for people. The gospel is not doing a good job for your employer. The gospel is not being a good neighbor, a good brother, a good citizen. The gospel is a good message about Jesus Christ.

The content of that message is going to come in the second point, the second big movement of this text. But for now, Paul tells us that the gospel is something preached to the Corinthians with his mouth.

He spoke it.

You are not proclaiming the gospel if you are not either writing words or speaking words. Words are required. The second thing is that the gospel must be received. It's proclaimed. It must be preached, but it also must be received.

And this might seem obvious to most all of us, but this speaks to the moment of conversion, that it's received. When it's received, it's both believed with mental assent and trusted with our will. Belief is kind of, I would say, more the mental side, but when combined with trust, we get faith, faith that rescues us, that can save us by trust in the message.

I can believe that Jesus died for my sins, or rather, I can believe that Jesus died for sins without believing that he died for my sins. You see what I'm saying? I can believe facts without making it personal.

I can believe that Jesus died for sins, but keep my trust in my own good works or my own righteousness or my church attendance or my tithing or my, my, my, when saving faith is a complete and utter trust in what Jesus has done.

Receiving the gospel is hearing it, believing it is true, and placing my trust in that good news alone for my rescue from sins. Third, the gospel places us in a new position. I love this one, the phrase, in which you stand.

The gospel is where you stand, Corinth, he says. It shows that the gospel is like a location, like saying you stand in an elevator or you stand on a rock. It's a place, a place thing in which you stand.

In this case, Paul was trusting due to the profession of faith at Corinth that they now stand in a place called the gospel. Where the gospel is received, the people stand in a new place. Their feet, our feet, taken from the unstable shifting sand of sinful priorities, our feet taken from the ever-moving target of cultural acceptability, are standing no longer in hopelessness and moved away from the ever-present hopelessness of a life lived without any true measure of success.

What is the measure of success for the world today? Is it how much you enjoy and how much you squeeze out of this life? Is it money? Is it how much money you have at the end? Is it even in a more, like what sounds right to our ears, is it how much you loved?

Like somebody even on a positive side and kind of moving towards, well, at least some spiritual notions is, well, how much you loved? If you loved well, then that's a good target. But how many of you know that's a tough target?

Like that's shifting, that's moving, right? But no, the gospel places us in a different place, and we are placed on the solid foundation of love and grace toward us in Jesus Christ, a firm foundation on which we can launch out into lives of service and love for others because our foundation is stable.

Our foundation is rock solid in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Amen? So the fourth thing is the gospel saves us progressively. Once it's received by belief and trust, once conversion has happened and we've trusted in the gospel, then it saves us progressively.

That was a highfalutin word, sanctification, a process kind of in that whole salvation realm. Salvation is a process that begins at a point in time, but it can be really easily confused, but it's not hard to illustrate from everyday things.

I became a pastor back when I was hired by Berean Baptist Church in 2005, April, actually. April 1st was my first day as a pastor. What does that say? April Fool's Day? I kind of expected it to be a joke, and maybe it's still proving to be.

I don't know, but April 1st, 2005, Berean Baptist Church hired me, but it can also be said that I'm still increasingly becoming a pastor. I got that title on a day, but that didn't make me a pastor. It was a title that was given to me, but it's a progressive thing that has been going on in my life.

A point in time never confers to us our full identities because we are always changing, and we are meant to be always growing. We are rescued at a point when we genuinely receive Jesus Christ, and we genuinely receive the gospel, but we are also being saved by the progressive work of sanctification by which God is making us more and more like him throughout the twists and turns of life, more Christ-like, more like his son.

So the gospel stays progressively. Fifth, the gospel is evidenced by holding fast to the word of God, the very gospel that saves us. When it's truly received, it is evidenced by a perseverance. It's important to identify that Paul is not saying that perfection or sinlessness or always getting it right is required to maintain your salvation.

No.

Often people with more sensitive consciences will read between the lines of what Paul is saying here and think that they need to do a bunch of things to prove to others that they are Christians. And that process begins in their heart to trust themselves for their salvation, how much they give, how much they attend church, how good they are, how much they give to the poor.

That's exactly the opposite of what following the logic of this passage ought to produce in our hearts. What is Paul saying? That one truly saved will hold fast to? Does he say they will hold fast to their good works?

Hold fast to their church attendance? Hold fast to tithing? No. Look with me at verse 2. And by which you are being saved if you hold fast to what? What does the text say next?

To the word.

To the word I preached to you. The word preached to you in context is the gospel.

That's what he's talking about.

Holding fast and keeping the gospel, the thing in front of you. The one who has truly received Jesus Christ as Savior will continue to hold to the gospel. Their trust will remain in Christ and his cross.

Trust in the empty tomb will be our hope. His sinless perfection credited to us. Our filthy sin laid upon him there, him paying the punishment as our substitute and our place. I think all of us have experienced probably in our lifetime someone who seemed to have a strong faith in Christ, and they then deconstructed before our very eyes, a word that's more common today than it was a while ago.

And some would say, some might be tempted to think, oh, they lost their salvation. And despite it being very nuanced, I would say, no, they never had salvation to begin with. They may have known the gospel.

They may have even believed it was true, as in the end of verse 2 as it declares there, but they never received it by faith. I find it interesting that Paul speaks this way over a very jacked up church.

This place is messed up. And this shows me that he had room in his understanding of the gospel for a really messed up Christian. He says, that's possible. It's possible that maybe you all are just messed up, but you're actually in the faith, and he had trust that God would correct them if that's the case.

But what he's warning them against here, you need to understand. What is he warning the church against? What's he warning us against? A gospel-less Christian. A gospel-less Christian. That is not a thing, church.

A Christian that doesn't believe in the sacrificial death of Christ is not a thing. They're not a Christian. A Christian that rejects the resurrection of Jesus.

Is not a thing.

Are you getting what I'm saying?

That's not real. You can't say, I'm a Christian,.

I just don't believe in resurrection. I'm a Christian, but I just don't believe in that whole bloody atonement thing. That makes you outside of the realm of a Christian at that point. One might believe a lot of things about Jesus, but that is empty belief, like as in even the demons believe many facts and things about Jesus, but they do not trust him.

They do not rest in him. They do not hold fast to the message with any sense of hope. Now, there's a type of belief that is just factual assent to things without trust, without resting in him. Recast church, the instruction from this first point is simply this, continue in the gospel.

Continue in the gospel. Keep that your thing. Make that your one thing. I say this often, I get up here and I'm a one-trick pony. There is one message I want you to hear loud and clear over a lifetime of preaching, the gospel, that Jesus died for our sins, that he was buried and that he rose again.

On the third day.

I hope you hear that through me regularly. Hold fast to that message. Hold fast to the cross and the empty tomb by which you are being saved. This leads Paul into a very simple and formulaic creed of that which is of first importance to the Christian message, the gospel itself.

The gospel message is so simple, and yet it's very rich in its implications. Our second point is the confirmation of the gospel, verses three through eight. Paul delivered to them mail he had received from someone else.

I deliver that to you which I also receive. Namely, who was it that he heard it from? Who did he receive it from? Jesus Christ himself. He's saying in verse three that he was not the author of the gospel, it was a message given to him.

Now, it must be some level of hyperbole or exaggeration that he said to them earlier in this very letter that he preached nothing to them but Christ and him crucified. He also included burial and resurrection in his original message by what he's reminding them of here.

But the atoning work of Jesus, his work on the cross, clearly took center stage in Paul's messaging. Wherever he went, the cross was central. But here is the simplicity of the gospel message that church has worked so hard to complexificate over the years.

I like to use the word complexificate because it's not a real word, but it makes it complicated, so you get what I'm saying. We have made it so complex, have we not? The gospel includes things like, in our world today and the global Christian scene, the gospel includes wells in Africa.

It includes buying a goat for somebody in a village. It includes the meals that we hand out and we give to people. It includes giving money to that guy holding the cardboard sign at the corner. We have a tendency to wrap a bunch of things up in the gospel, including our good works.

If we're not careful, there are things lodged in our own hearts that we need to be ready to be convicted of when I give you these three simple points.

Of the gospel.

It's such a simple message, church, that we ought to be able to communicate it anywhere at any time. And here it is. Are you ready for it? How concise can you state the gospel? In how many words can you state the gospel?

Here it is. Christ died for our sins. Christ was buried and Christ really raised. There's the gospel. And honestly, I would contend to you as I'm going to go through these that Christ was buried as kind of an addition in case they might think he didn't really die.

You can get it even shorter. Christ died for our sins and rose again victorious.

On the third day.

That's the gospel message. It's a message about him, not a message about me. It's not about my goodness. It's not about my worth. It's not about what I can accomplish. It's not about what a bargain he got when he bought me.

Not at all.

Christ died, why? For our sins. This is the first one here in this simple declaration, confirmation of the gospel. Christ died for our sins. This simple statement is a profound declaration regarding the death of Jesus in accordance with the scriptures.

Why does he say in accordance with the scriptures? Scriptures like Isaiah 53, jot that note down. If you've got one of those scripture journals or whatever, you're taking notes, Isaiah 53, and go back and read that.

His death was an atoning substitution for our sins. The little phrase for our sins is just packed. There's so much there. And it is unpacked in various Old Testament and many, many, many New Testament passages.

But the simple way to state this is he died to remove the consequences of our sins by bearing the punishment that they deserved. Him dying in our place, him taking the punishment in our place that we deserved.

Church, hallelujah.

Hallelujah. My sins are gone and I bear them no more because Christ died for my sins. Oh, it gives me chills to say that. It also is just shocking. It's scandalous. It's startling that he would pay attention to me and come to me in my need and rescue me.

Have you experienced it?

Do you know it?

Is that where your trust rests today? Is that of first importance to you? The second thing is he was buried. Christ was buried. I believe that this is an extra on the set with intention. Many times we see the gospel being the atoning death and victorious resurrection of Jesus with no mention of his burial.

I don't believe that you have to mention the burial in order to be proclaiming the gospel. You just have to have him really dead. Paul has an agenda here. This entire text is setting him up to tackle a belief among the Corinthians that Jesus was raised or wasn't raised.

That's what they're saying. He wasn't raised. If they remain in that disbelief, then their original reception of the gospel is called into question by Paul. They may well have just had an empty or a vain belief that was just kind of at the level of what the demons believe, just kind of like facts about Jesus, and we'll just can this fact.