Pursuing Beautiful Community

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Where are you going? What’s your destination? How are you going to get there? What’s your journey going to be like?

Loneliness is skyrocketing
What we see with loneliness — and also with addiction — is that when we feel shame around some aspect of our life, it drives us further inward and chips away at our self-esteem. When you’re lonely, what you need most of all is to reach out and connect with others. But the shame around loneliness pushes you in exactly the opposite direction. The longer your loneliness persists, the harder it is to reach out to other people because you don’t feel you’re worthy. This is why the downward spiral of loneliness is very challenging to break.
Individualism
Pursuit of Success (acquiring wealth, power, or reputation)
Expressive Individualism - It’s a sin to be repressive of someone else’s desires.
How can you have good community when you judge people?

Big Idea: To pursue beautiful community, we need to pursue different things than the world pursues.

Read 1 Cor 5

Pursuing Sovereignty

Rather than boasting in tolerance

In the Greco-Roman world, extramarital sex, indeed a wide variety of forms of nonmarital sex that Jews and Christians would find aberrant, including various forms of incest, was not considered shameful. Jews and Christians were in a notable minority in their attitudes about fornication, prostitution, adultery, incest, and the like. But what Paul faces here, a man having incestuous relations with his father’s wife, was considered inappropriate by most pagans in the Greco-Roman world. As MacDonald points out, it is not in this case the impurity of the outside world that is in danger of polluting the community but the immorality that has been allowed to penetrate the sacred community itself.

God’s control of things is not contrary to the responsibility of man. It is the very foundation of it. If God were not in control He could not hold man responsible. Man is accountable to God because God is sovereign; he should obey God because God is in control of things. Moreover, man has significance because God has sovereignly ordained significance for man. Whatever responsibility we have is founded on God’s sovereignty, not in spite of it. Without God’s sovereignty man would have no responsibility.

A person’s willingness to tolerate sin shows that he believes that God doesn’t need to be obeyed. If God doesn’t need to be obeyed, then none of us should come together seeking that. If, however, you want to solve suffering and loneliness, you still have to submit to God’s control of you to solve those problems. If you assert God isn’t responsible for dealing with suffering and loneliness, then you will go find someone/thing else who you believe is in charge and will solve it. Turning away from God as the one in charge of everything destroys your ability to find and enjoy anything. You will bounce between the poles of tolerating everything and accusing all the people around of failing to connect with you.
Running the Grand Canyon (pic)

Pursuing Celebrating Grace

Rather than celebrating out of control desire
Acts 20:29–30 ESV
29 I know that after my departure fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock; 30 and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.
Micah 3:5 ESV
5 Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who lead my people astray, who cry “Peace” when they have something to eat, but declare war against him who puts nothing into their mouths.
2 Peter 2:1–2 ESV
1 But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. 2 And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed.
2 Peter 2:19–20 ESV
19 They promise them freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption. For whatever overcomes a person, to that he is enslaved. 20 For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first.
Slaves can’t have community. Free men have community. Not the twisted freedom of hidden desire that enslaves.
Soccer Coaching
Celebrating Grace… what has God done, what is He doing
Celebrating sincerity and truth not self-serving deceit…grace not technique
You can’t tell stories of grace if you aren’t paying attention to what He’s doing. You can’t see grace if you don’t know what God’s Word says and believe it.
I’m just like that person who started that email chain, except for God’s grace.

Pursuing the Comfort of one another

Not holding it over one another
welcome not calculation…obedience not holding it over people
Satan is in the business of isolating us and causing us to despair rather than trust and hope
Going “off brand” - atheist youtuber who was vegan
Doug Huston - “know you as a person”
This is why we pursue the discipline of sin when we are required. We want a true community centered on God, His sovereignty and grace and treating every member of that community as worthy of love and care.

Paul wants the Corinthian Christians to be involved in the internal judicial process, but not to take their disputes to outside courts, which is precisely the opposite of what is happening. This reveals Paul’s view of Christian community. He sees the Christian community as having reasonably well-defined boundaries and thus as a subculture that even has its own judicial procedures. This is how Paul wants the community to be, not how it was actually functioning.

The sexual problems discussed in chs. 5 and 6 were created by the male members of the community. There was in Greco-Roman society a very clear double standard with a shame code in regard to the behavior of married women. 6:12ff. is not, any more than 5:1–5, about the behavior or arguments of Christian women trying to justify their behavior.

In regard to Paul’s vision of community, he is trying to establish a high group consciousness with what I would call a mid-grid in terms of both stratification of roles and individuation. Paul believes that human identity must be established by the right dialectic between the one and the many, between identity as an individual and identity as a group member. He knows that “in order for the group to work or have substance there must be a collection of individuals who give over some of their identity and independence explicitly and/or implicitly to the group.”

Paul knows that he is dealing with a voluntaristic community, much like a guild or club in Roman society. In accord with this similarity, he wishes to affirm some asymmetrical roles, such as his own and that of his coworkers toward the Corinthian ekklēsia and some roles at the purely local level as well, as seen in 16:15f., though Stephanas may be an example of achieved status. Paul’s own status as Christ’s agent is in his view not an acheived status but a designated status verified through Paul’s actual work.

In Paul’s thought there is a dialectic between factors that lead to ordering in the community and factors that tend, conversely, toward leveling in the community. One might expect that possession by all of the Holy Spirit and of the Spirit’s gifts would be a totally leveling factor. Paul makes it clear, however, that there is a ranking of roles—listed in chs. 12 and 14—based on what is most beneficial to the group as a whole. Paradoxically, Paul’s view of leadership as obligatory service to the group prevents a more stratified approach to leadership.

For Paul the Christian society stands over against nature because nature and human nature are fallen. Therefore, clear boundaries must be established between what may seem natural and what is appropriate behavior. “A concern for purity is not a concern for a hierarchy among the participants, but a concern about the boundaries of the group. Purity and the perception of danger in taboos are markers for group separation from the rest of the world, which is perceived as impure.”

Questions for Community Groups
Why is a common definition of sin so important to the community? What happens negatively when you promote tolerance as a community? What objections do you feel toward confronting and dealing with sin?
What do you wish for in the community? How can you give it to others?
When have you told each other - "Do what God wants you to do. I'll support you.?" How could you do it more often? What happens when they don't do what you expect?
How can you more often share answers to prayer with each other? How can you boast in grace with each other? Where can you be grateful for one another?
How can you comfort one another when repentance has occurred? When do you need to build trust after pain? How does 1 Corinthians 2 illustrate this?
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