Build right!

1 Cor 3: 1 – 22

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 05 Oct, 2008

PAUL’S OVERARCHING idea is to urge the Corinthians to do nothing to hinder the spread of the gospel or to stand in the way of loving community between them.

He begins with the key concepts of holiness, grace and peace. This is a holy church, not because they are particularly good, but because they are God’s chosen vessels, redeemed through Jesus. They are recipients of grace because God has redeemed and equipped them for every good work. They are people of peace because God has called them to unity and peace with one another.

Next, Paul tells them to keep their focus on the cross, and to seek a wisdom which comes from the Holy Spirit rather than rely on human speculation -— that is, on human guesses about the nature of God and the universe.

Today, he narrows down the issues before the Corinthians, and tells them to mend spirituality, shun idolatry and develop community. All are vital to any church which wants to progress.

Mend spirituality

Social researchers today tell us that the majority of people count themselves as spiritual, but far fewer want to see themselves as religious.

If you were to come to earth from Mars, and read the newspapers, or watch movies, you would get the impression that Christians are divided into safe, mainstream Catholics, and wierd and dangerous evangelicals. There is very little to attract people to those images.

But we can also do ourselves a lot of damage. Too many archbishops forget to think before opening their mouths; and there have been too many scandals lately.

But when people abandon organised religion, they assume that all organised religion is the same, that it is corrupt and opposed to human values. And they throw it all away, and think they can create an effective spirituality based on feelings, and mental states, and the guesses of human guides.

Paul’s attitude is totally different. He writes,

1COR 3:1 Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly — mere infants in Christ. 2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. ³ You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men?

Paul’s view of spirituality is that it has to do with right attitudes and right behaviour.

Don’t misinterpret this passage. Paul isn’t teaching that there are two classes of Christians, the spiritual kind, and the worldly or carnal kind.

For Paul, all Christians are spiritual, because all Christians are ultimately indwellt by the Spirit of God. But having the Spirit does not mean that everyone will always be open to the Spirit’s direction.

Paul tells the Ephesians that he prays

...that Christ may dwell in [their] hearts by faith.

That is a rather strange prayer. Doesn’t Christ already dwell in the hearts of Christians, of those who have faith?

This is where the Greek is handy. The word used for dwell means something like, settle down and make his home.

Our son and daughter–in–law and the children are coming to stay with us. We have had to make changes to make room for them.

It has been panic stations. Rooms we had been able to close off since the kids all moved out have had to be opened up so they can be occupied again.

The spare bedroom was particularly bad, with paint flaking off the ceiling and dropping like the gentle rain from heaven — probably not healthy for anyone sleeping in there. We have done a lot of work to get it liveable.

On the other hand, the living and dining rooms weren’t so bad. Chris and I renovated them about 4 years ago. The hall would have been OK, too, if the plaster hadn’t come off the walls when we tried to take the wallpaper off. That was another earlier renovation job. I am not a tradesman...

Jesus wants to live in every room in the house of our lives. He wants to live in the living room, where you invite guests, but he also wants to go into the room where you lock the ironing when guests arrive, and in the bathroom even if you didn’t use the BAM Easy-Off before he gets there. He wants to be welcome everywhere.

But the Corinthians had lots of places in their lives where Jesus was not fully welcome. In particular, they were bickering among themselves like children, and not behaving like mature believers, not revealing mature attitudes towards each other or the world around them.

That is what carnality is like, what worldliness is like.

It is important for us, as Christians, to consider where and in what ways we are going along with the world rather than doing as Jesus would have us do.

When I was a teenager, we heard many warnings against the worldliness, like drinking, drugs, and premarital sex, or a few other things.

There wasn’t much talk about the worldliness of running Christian ministries more by profit and loss sheets than by the pages of the Bible. There wasn’t much talk about the worldliness of going into a profession because it was popular at the time, rather than making obedience to Jesus the basis for a life plan. There wasn’t much talk about the worldliness of having a car because everyone had one, rather than having a car because it was necessary or part of your ministry to people,

And these Corinthians were unspiritual, because, when it came to their relationships, they had no agreement.

The peace that should have marked their lives together was not evident among them.

So Paul urges them to mend their spirituality, so that he can talk to them as spiritual people and not as though they didn’t really comprehend the gospel yet.

Shun idolatry

The next thing Paul tackles is actually a form of idolatry, and it is very prevalent in the church these days,

He tells them,

4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere men?

  3:5 What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe--as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. 7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 8 The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labour. 9 For we are God’s fellow workers; you are God’s field, God’s building.

  3:10 By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should be careful how he builds. 11 For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. 12 If any man builds on this foundation using gold, silver, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, 13 his work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work. 14 If what he has built survives, he will receive his reward. 15 If it is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.

We must be clear on this: when we become followers of a leader, we can be on the road to being idolaters.

I have learnt a lot as a Christian from C S Lewis, from Smith Wigglesworth, from Francis Schaeffer, from Ruth Paxton, from John Wesley and George Fox, from Keith Miller and many others.

I have been tempted to think of myself as a Wesley man or a Schaeffer man.

I have known Christians who could think of no on else to learn from other than Schaeffer, or John MacArthur Jr or John Stott. Others go for Billy Graham or Creflo Dollar. It doesn’t matter. It’s the attitude of the follower, not the person himself or herself.

Emile Durkheim, a sociologist, looked at Aboriginal religion here in Australia, and the role of tribal totems. Each tribe and each subgroup of the tribe had its own totem, and that totem said something about the members of the group. If you were under the eagle totem, you were an eagle kind of person. By tying religion and totem together like this, very strong social bonds could be formed.

It is similar to the ancient religions, where a person might worship Ares, the god of War, because that person was also warlike. And, the more he worshipped Ares, the more warlike he would become. Another might worship Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and sex, and increasingly travel down that path.

When we exalt one Christian leader over another, then we are saying, “That leader who speaks for a person like me.”

I mentioned John Stott. He is a very intellectual teacher, with a good reputation for Bible teaching from a Calvinistic perspective.

He appeals to people who like to think of themselves as intellectual Christians.

And many of these use the fact that they like John Stott so that they can present themselves as being more intellectual that ordinary Christians. It lets them feel superior.

Paul says that each Christian leader has a different role. He and Apollos were very different. Some people suggest that Apollos wrote Hebrews in the Bible. If so, he is very much more systematic in his thinking than Paul is. He does not jump from thought to thought. You can see why some loved Paul and not Apollos and vice versa.

But Paul says that they are both in the building game and, if he himself built the foundations, it was Apollos who knocked up the walls, or, if Paul was the ploughman, Apollos watered the seeds, but all growth comes from God.

There is no justification in becoming a follower of one particular leader: it is idolatrous.

There is a negative side to this, too. There will be teachers you don’t like, as well.

When I was in College, I often had to attend lectures and teaching sessions with people whose teaching style or preaching I didn’t like.

So I used to pray before attending, that God would still speak to me, and so often he would — even though I still disliked the speaker.

Some speakers are no good. I attended a lecture once from one of the parachurch organisations, and there were heaps of excited people there, saying how wonderful he was, but he was talking nonsense, quoting the Bible and saying that it said things that just were not there. But he also manipulated people to think that anyone who disagreed with him must be spiritually suspect.

Don’t follow such people.

But the simplicity of a Billy Graham or the profundity of a C H Dodd or a G E Ladd each has its place. Each one does what he has to do in God’s eternal purposes. Don’t run after one or the other, but learn from all.

Don’t run after Paul or Apollos, either. Shun idolatry, and just keep following Jesus. But always remember that he sends his servants to us to lead and direct as needed. Otherwise we will end up building rubbish which has to be bulldozed down and burnt.

Develop Community

Paul writes,

  1COR 3:16 Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? 17 If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.

  3:18 Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a “fool” so that he may become wise. 19 For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness” ; 20 and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.” 21 So then, no more boasting about men! All things are yours, 22 whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future -— all are yours, 23 and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.

Following different leaders, no matter how good they are, breaks down community.

The goal to which Paul, Cephas, Apollos and others were all aiming was to build the Corinthians into a single–purpose building for God’s glory; to make them all together into a holy shrine to God. Anything anyone does to destroy that is so totally opposed to God’s will, that destruction can come rapidly to such people.

Here is where this rivalry over leaders really shows its ugly side. Idolatry and tribalism are closely linked in many instances, as we saw moments ago. And this is exactly what was going wrong with the Corinthians. They were becoming tribalised, dividing into groups depending on which great Christian leader they wanted to have as their banner. Stott, Thielicke, Spurgeon... they were all just ordinary men, using the gifts they had been given. Once we enlist under the banner of one or the other, we form tribes, and we can’t be a united structure when we are a divided nation.

Just as Australia might not have fallen to the English if the Aboriginal tribes had been able to unite and struggle together against invasion, so Christians face a battle against the world, the flesh and the devil, but united in Christ we can win the battle. As Paul says, all things are ours, and we belong to Christ as Christ belongs to God.

We are not divided, all one body we
One in hope and doctrine
One in charity...

It’s the only way to go forwards.

Conclusion

We have learnt a lot about the dangers of following a leader over the years. Some of the lessons have been painful, but I trust we will not need to learn them again.

However, I still want to encourage us to seek spirituality and to seek community, because these things are the stuff that advance is made from. If we want to march out into battle, we need to know who we are and where we get our orders from. And that requires maturity in our outlook, a willingness to ask not, “What will make things easiest for me here?” but what would Jesus have me do here?”

As we seek his will in the unity of the Spirit, he will bless us and do mighty things through us. So let’s do it!

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2008. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)