Staying Unleavened
Notes
Transcript
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife. And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you. For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the 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? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Welcome
Last week, Pastor Dave ended his sermon talking about how we are one together. He used the word “intertwined” to describe what we are as members of this church. And we rolled what he said right into communion where I spoke about how it shows us that we are to be in communion with Christ and with each other.
And the fact of the matter is that we experience our union with Christ insofar as we are in union with each other.
Bold statement? I don’t think so.
You have heard me say before: there is no such thing as a solo Christian. At least not according to the Bible. Saying you believe in Christ and then not living that out in community with a local church that is an expression of the universal church is unknown in the New Testament.
And I have known plenty of people who I really do believe have faith in Christ, but they say they don’t “need” a church. They’re okay on their own. They can worship God by themselves in their own way. And as long as they are good doing it their way and not God’s way, I guess they are okay. But that doesn’t make it okay.
And I have known plenty of people who go to church, as in, they show up some or even most Sundays to a building and sit through a worship service - but who are not in communion with the church. That is perhaps better than nothing, but it still isn’t what the Bible means when it talks about being part of a church.
Dave pointed this out last week: you don’t come to church to come to church. We are here together. We are here to worship God together. We are here to become holy together. We are here to become Christlike together and carry out our calling together.
That is the way Christ expects us to do church. That is the way He enables us to fulfill our commission as a church.
It’s how He builds His church - the church He died for.
Last week when we took communion, as usual I talked about what Jesus said the night before He went to the cross, and I discussed what it means for our communion together.
Well, Jesus said a lot the night before He died.
He spoke about His death, and how He would send the Holy Spirit, He instituted Communion - and He told the Apostles what they were to do when He was gone. In fact, He gave them a commandment.
We read in John 15:
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.
How do we abide in Christ’s love? We keep His commandments. And what was the commandment He gave? That we love one another like He loved us.
How do we do that alone?
How do we do that when we are not in communion with each other?
How do we do that when we make church about being in a specific building once a week?
How do we do that when we are not serving each other?
The answer is that we don’t.
So what does this have to do with the Corinthian church and what Paul is writing to them about in our passage today? Everything. This is the heart of Paul’s letter. His letter is about being the church together.
Paul has established a few things at the outset. Christ is Lord. That means we obey Him. That means that we abide in His love by loving each other.
Paul has talked about the Holy Spirit Who has been given to us - just like Jesus promised that night in the upper room. And because we have the Spirit, we can understand what God has revealed. We can know Who Christ is, what He has done, and what it means for us.
That’s why, last week, Paul concluded the first portion of the letter talking about following Christ as the church together. Because we now can obey Him. We have the power of the Spirit living within us.
And now, Paul is going to give specific examples of how to carry this out beginning in chapter 5. And this is pretty much the rest of the letter - Paul explaining how to live out our calling as a church. These are practical, real-life applications for a church in a culture just like ours, as we’ll see.
So, Paul now addresses something else he heard was going on in the church in Corinth. He had heard about their factions and their pride, and now he talks about what their pride has allowed to happen to their church.
He writes:
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans, for a man has his father’s wife.
It has been reported - it literally says it has been “heard everywhere” - Paul is saying “look, everyone knows!” Knows what? That there is sexual immorality in this church, or as Paul says, “there is sexual immorality among you.”
Who is the you? The church in Corinth. We live in a day where pronouns are so important to so many people. Well, we in the church need to pay attention to the pronouns in the Bible. Because sometimes they speak volumes.
Paul is addressing the church as a collective. This is not for individuals. This is for one collective church.
In fact, this can actually say “there is sexual immorality in you.” He’s talking to the church.
This is a church problem. This is about what these intertwined Christians are allowing in their church.
And what was the problem in this church? A man has his father’s wife. It means he was sleeping with her. He was carrying on an affair with her. Now, this wasn’t his mother, this was his father’s wife - a different woman his father was now married to.
And the fact that this was happening in this church meant they were allowing sexual immorality of a kind that Paul says was not tolerated even among pagans. Why does Paul put it that way? Because it shows the heinousness of this sin.
Because the pagans of Paul’s day - in Corinth as much as any place in the known world - were every bit as sexually immoral as our culture is today.
Maybe even a little worse, because many of their religions required sexual sin. Yes, some pagan worship rituals required that people had sex as part of their worship of false gods.
Yet, even what this man was doing would be looked at as wrong by those pagans.
tie it in to how people today are loose sexually but would certainly look upon a man sleeping with his father’s wife as wrong
It was wrong then, too.
And not only that, Roman law forbade a man to sleep with his step-mother, and violation of that law came with the penalty of exile to a prison island. So even the pagan Romans - the great enemy of Christianity at the time - even they wouldn’t tolerate this.
And yet, here was the church in Corinth, tolerating it. Tolerating a particularly heinous type of sexual immorality.
This is what our culture today calls for: tolerance. And by tolerance, of course, the world means let everyone do whatever they want and tell them it’s okay.
These Christians were doing that. They were living this out in the church by allowing this sexual immorality to go on. By ignoring it, they were tacitly approving of it.
Let’s talk about sexual immorality for a minute. This sin is a theme throughout the whole Bible. It is often used metaphorically to talk about sin in general, or other specific sins. In particular, it is often used to refer to worshiping anyone or anything other than God.
And the word Paul uses here covers a host of sexual sins. Paul uses the word and the concept often in his letters to describe the basest physical desires of fallen man.
But this is particularly important for Paul to address in this church. Because avoiding sexual immorality was foundational to this church.
If we follow the chronology in the book of Acts, the church is Corinth was founded by Paul about a year after the Jerusalem council.
If you don’t know the history, read Acts 15-18 tonight. Gentiles were converting to Christ in large numbers. The Jewish Christians were still trying to figure out how the Law fit into the Gospel, and there were questions raised by some about Gentiles following the Law, in particular, circumcision.
The council decided that circumcision was unnecessary, and gave only four instructions to all churches and all Christians:
Abstain from things polluted by idols
Do not eat any animal strangled to death
Do not eat the blood of an animal
And do not commit sexual immorality
These four things the council forbade were not only part of specific holiness laws from the book of Leviticus that explicitly included non-Israelites living among the Israelites, but they were all part of pagan worship in the first-century Roman Empire.
And the idea is - like so many of the Old Testament laws about what Israel could eat and what they could wear - and most importantly how they worshiped - obeying these things would make Christians stand out among the pagans around them.
And Paul was part of the council that made this decision. Paul was the one who personally delivered the decision to the Gentile church in Antioch. Paul then goes on a missionary journey and we are told:
As they went on their way through the cities, they delivered to them for observance the decisions that had been reached by the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem. So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and they increased in numbers daily.
And not long after this, Paul finds himself in Corinth where he preaches, and Gentiles are converted, and he plants a church. What do you suppose Paul told them they had to observe, even as Gentile believers?
Abstain from things polluted by idols
Do not eat any animal strangled to death
Do not eat the blood of an animal
And do not commit sexual immorality
And Paul will address idol and food issues later in the letter. But here, he is addressing one of the foundational rules of this church because they were allowing sexual immorality into their church.
Because worldly wisdom had entered the church in Corinth, this kind of thing was being allowed.
And again, that culture was not unlike ours when it comes to sexual ethics.
So this is not very different from today where “churches” hold and even teach sexual ethics contrary to the Bible. Drive around our area and look at the rainbow flags on some of the church buildings. Worldly wisdom has infiltrated these places.
Paul says there is no place for such sin within the church.
And as we will see next week, he makes a very clear distinction between what happens inside the church and what happens outside. He does not call for us to condemn sexual sinners outside the church.
But we do not accept sexual sin in the church.
So Paul says this sexual sin is being allowed, and adds:
And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn? Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
Paul tells them they are arrogant. It is the same word translated “puffed up” back in chapter 3. This is talking about pride.
To use Dave’s terminology from last week: the Corinthians were too big for their britches! Remember, pride deceives. It’s a liar.
Their pride deceived them and they rationalized turning a blind eye to “someone else’s” sin within the church.
But they should have mourned over this sin.
We see mourning in the Old Testament as a proper reaction to sin among the people of God.
We see kings mourn over the sins of the people during the monarchy. We see Daniel mourn over the sins of the nation of Israel that led to their exile. Upon their return to the land, Ezra mourns over the sins of the returning exiles.
We see it in the New Testament. Like when Jesus says “blessed are those who mourn.” Or when James tells us to cleanse our hands and purify our hearts of sin and to mourn and humble ourselves before God.
This is what Paul tells the Corinthians they should do when sin enters the church. When there is sin among God’s people.
They should mourn over that sin.
And so should we when there is sin in our midst.
And this goes with the judgment Paul already spoke about. We’ll look at this in more detail next week, but like I said a few weeks ago, there are right judgments and wrong judgments. The Corinthians - and all Christians - are not to look at the sins of others and judge them so they could exalt themselves.
That’s wrong judgment.
And we’ve probably all done this before. We’ve all looked at someone who has sinned and thought like the Pharisee who thanked God he wasn’t that kind of sinner.
No. When a brother or sister in Christ sins, we should mourn over that sin. Our hearts should break over the fact that sin has entered our community of faith.
And that means: we can’t turn a blind eye to it. Sin needs to be addressed in the church. We should judge rightly, recognize sin among us, and remove that sin.
We should lovingly rebuke, correct, encourage - we should tell the offending brother or sister the truth in love: “brother, you are in sin and you are dishonoring Christ with your actions.”
And he has to be told that he needs to repent - using Dave’s metaphor from last week, we need to love each other enough to administer the spanking when it’s needed.
And if that doesn’t change anything, what does Paul say to do?
Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
There was sin among them. That sin needed to be removed from among them. And that may mean the sinner needs to be removed from among them.
Now I want to take a pause here and take a big picture view of a few things. Because we can glean a lot from this situation in Corinth and what Paul says about it.
First, we see here the relationship between the Law and the Gospel.
Now, we need to realize a few things about “the Law.” When we speak of the Mosaic Law, we need to realize that it does not apply to the church. Christ has fulfilled it completely. It was binding on the nation of Israel until Christ came, and now it is fulfilled because it pointed to Christ and was meant to preserve a people to bring forth the Messiah.
But the moral law behind the Mosaic Law - the moral law that reveals the character and design of our God - is still very much binding on everyone. This is the Law that the Spirit enables us to follow.
LBCF XXI. 1. The liberty Christ has purchased for believers under the gospel is found in their freedom from... the severity and curse of the law.
We are free from the Mosaic Law. We are not free to ignore the moral law, however.
So we see that there is a difference between the specific commandments of the Mosaic Law and the principles of the moral law. This is taught all over in the New Testament.
Like, the fourth commandment specifically commands a day set apart unto the Lord on the seventh day of the week. But in the New Testament, the church worships on the first day. The specific is law fulfilled - Christ has achieved the rest the Sabbath pointed to.
But the principle still applies. We devote a day to the worship of God.
Or just read through the Sermon on the Mount and see how Jesus says the moral law applies to Christians. In many cases, it is a stricter law than the Mosaic Law. Anger is murder. Lust is adultery.
The specifics of the Mosaic Law were to help Israel understand that the moral law means we love others as ourselves.
Now let’s look at the situation in Corinth. This man was sleeping with his father’s wife. In the Mosaic Law, this was forbidden.
You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father, which is the nakedness of your mother; she is your mother, you shall not uncover her nakedness. You shall not uncover the nakedness of your father’s wife; it is your father’s nakedness.
This comes from the very holiness code the Jerusalem council pulled from in their decree. We see here that sleeping with your mother or your father’s wife is a sexual sin against your father.
And what does the Law command as punishment for this sin?
If a man lies with his father’s wife, he has uncovered his father’s nakedness; both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.
That’s the Mosaic Law. Sleep with your father’s wife, and both of you die. This is not binding on the church. Paul does not tell the Corinthians to take the man and his stepmother outside the city and stone them to death.
But the moral law behind that command is binding. So Paul says:
1 Corinthians 5:1–2 (ESV)
a man has his father’s wife… Let him who has done this be removed from among you.
The Mosaic Law prescribed death because the sinners and the sin needed to be removed from among God’s people.
In the Old Testament the camp of Israel and later the land of Israel had to be holy because God walked among them - they had to be holy because He Who was among them is holy.
Now, the church must be the same. We are to be holy because Christ is holy. And He is among us in the church. We are where His presence is.
So, we have to remove sin from the church - in ourselves and in each other. And unrepentant sinners are to be removed until they repent.
So here, Paul says the moral law still applies in that the sinner and the sin need to be removed from among God’s people. Paul says to excommunicate the man.
And the man is, in a sense, to be dead to the Corinthian Christians. As we will see next week, Paul says not even to associate with the man outside of church.
But Paul says the sinner also to be delivered to Satan for the destruction of the flesh:
For though absent in body, I am present in spirit; and as if present, I have already pronounced judgment on the one who did such a thing. When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
Paul is advising the church to excommunicate the man. To officially throw him out of the church. He says he is behind that decision.
And unlike the Mosaic Law that said to administer capital punishment to remove the sinners from among the assembly of God’s people, the type of punishment Paul is prescribing is meant to be rehabilitative.
You see, it isn’t meant a permanent punishment.
Paul addresses this same issue with this man in his second letter to the Corinthians because they misunderstood this:
For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him. For this is why I wrote, that I might test you and know whether you are obedient in everything. Anyone whom you forgive, I also forgive. Indeed, what I have forgiven, if I have forgiven anything, has been for your sake in the presence of Christ, so that we would not be outwitted by Satan; for we are not ignorant of his designs.
Paul tells them here, after some time has passed and the man has repented, that they are to forgive the repentant sinner. They are to reaffirm their love for him. The point in removing him was to preserve the holiness of the church, but also to turn the man over to Satan for a time that he may suffer for his sin so he would repent.
Paul talks about this same thing in Romans 1 - that turning people over to their sin is itself a punishment for sin. God does it, so should the church do it.
So he tells them:
you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
This man did have to die… to his sin.
Remember, Paul sets the flesh against the spirit often in his letters. The flesh is that part of us that is the old man we still struggle against - and we all do! - and the spirit is the part of us regenerated by the Spirit as someone new who wants to obey God and who can obey God.
Paul is telling them that this man is to be thrown out of fellowship with the church, that he may learn from his sin, and kill that fleshly part of him that rules over him.
And in this we see not just the relationship between the Law and the Gospel, but we see how church discipline is part of God’s plan for His church. It is part of God’s plan to make us holy. It is part of how Christ builds His church.
Because we see by what Paul says, that church discipline is to be aimed at restoration. It is a tool to be used unto holiness. It isn’t punitive, it is sanctifying.
And unfortunately, church discipline is avoided by many churches. We are, after all, living in the age of tolerance.
So many churches do what the Corinthian church did - turn a blind eye to sin. And why? Well, because of pride. That’s why Paul tells the Corinthians who were allowing this that they were arrogant.
I mean, were they above obeying this? Are we?
Were they too good to do the hard things? Are we?
Pride will rationalize away the fact that we think that. But that is what we are really saying when we don’t carry out discipline within the church. We think we don’t need to obey God.
And why is this so important?
Because not carrying out appropriate discipline hurts the offender and the church. Which is why Paul says:
Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?
Remember, the Corinthian’s boasting was misplaced. Paul told them not to boast in man, or in themselves, but only in Christ.
This rationalizing tolerating sin within their midst was an outworking of their misplaced boasting - of their pride.
But the problem is that allowing sin to remain in a church affects the whole church. As I said - this was not a “that guy” problem. This was a whole church problem.
And if our church allows sin in its midst - when we see a fallen brother or sister stuck in sin and we do nothing about it - that’s a whole church problem. That brother or sister doesn’t have the only problem. Montclair Community Church has a problem. All of us, together.
Paul explains that by saying that a little leaven leavens the whole lump. He is using the metaphor of baking bread. If you are a baker and have baked homemade bread, you know that you add leaven or yeast to the dough. But you add much more flour than you do leaven. You don’t need much leaven to affect the whole lump of dough.
Paul is using that to illustrate what happens when sin is tolerated and allowed to continue within the church. The sinner is not the only one affected. The whole church is affected.
But there’s more here. Because Paul’s discussion of church discipline shows us something else. We see here that Paul assumes an official church membership in Corinth.
I know Christians, and I even know pastors, who don’t really advocate for church membership. They don’t see it as necessary, for one reason or another. Or they have a view of the universal church that undermines the role of the local church.
But the New Testament is clear on a few things. Like, pastors and elders of a church have a responsibility specifically to those who are members of the church we lead.
As the preacher of Hebrews said to the church:
Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.
Whose souls do we watch over? For whose souls do I have to give an account? For every visitor that ever comes here? For everyone that comes for a season, disappears, and then doesn’t return my phone calls?
And who are Christians to obey? Who are “their” leaders? Who do they entrust care of their souls to? The pastor of whichever church they visited most recently? To the pastor of the church they go to until they disagree with the pastor and leave?
The Bible assumes there is a distinction made. Elders can say “these are the sheep I am responsible for” and each Christian can say “those are the elders I submit to for the care of my soul.”
But it goes much deeper than that. Paul is saying is that this goes way beyond the relationship of pastor and congregant. This is about how we all relate to each other as members of the same local body.
Think about what Paul says here:
1 Corinthians 5:1 (ESV)
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you
Who is the “you?” We already saw: it isn’t anyone visiting the church the week this letter was read. This isn’t their responsibility. The “you” is the church in Corinth. The membership of the local church.
Or how about when Paul says this?
When you are assembled in the name of the Lord Jesus and my spirit is present, with the power of our Lord Jesus, you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.
Who is the you that are assembled? Who has the authority to excommunicate this man? Anyone who happened to be there?
And what are they excommunicating him from? If he is not being removed from membership, he could just go to the church in Athens next week and nothing really happened. That wouldn’t be a punishment.
Even when Paul addresses this in his second letter, what does he say?
For such a one, this punishment by the majority is enough, so you should rather turn to forgive and comfort him, or he may be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. So I beg you to reaffirm your love for him.
Who is the “you” that should forgive, comfort, and reaffirm their love for this man? And how, exactly, did they determine a majority when they decided to excommunicate him? A majority of what?
Paul is assuming there are official members of the church who make these decisions together.
In other words, while the Bible talks of elders’ responsibility to their church and the church’s responsibility to their elders, it also speaks - like Paul does here - of the whole church’s responsibility to each other.
Paul is telling the Corinthians that in the local church, we are all responsible for each other. Not just ourselves. Don’t let the worldly wisdom of individualism into the church. MCC, we are responsible for each other!
Because we are all one, together.
There are no “that guy” problems. Only our problems.
Paul will address this in detail later when he talks about the local church as the body of Christ and He says:
1 Corinthians 12:24–27 (ESV)
God has so composed the body…that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.
And while Paul mixes his metaphor with the reality of the unity of the church and uses the idea of members of a human body to the members of a church, this doesn’t make any sense for the Corinthians - or for us - if Paul does not have a specific, defined group of people in mind.
We rejoice together.
We suffer together.
And sin affects us all when it is in our church.
I told you there was a lot here.
We see both the dividing line and the unity between Law and Gospel.
We see the necessity at times of making a division between church and member when an unrepentant sinner needs to be disciplined.
And we see the unity of the local church as a self-governing, defined entity ruled by the majority.
And this is exactly why the sin of one member affects the whole church.
1 Corinthians 5:6–8 (ESV)
Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
Leaven in the Old Testament is discussed primarily in regards to the Passover. Because of the urgency of the Exodus, Israel could not leaven their bread. There was no time. In fact, God commands them not to leaven the bread.
So to commemorate the Exodus and the salvation from slavery, to this day, unleavened bread is eaten during Passover.
And Passover was called Passover, of course, because any home marked with the blood of the Passover lamb would be passed over by the destroyer.
And this is one of the many portions of the Law that the New Testament says explicitly points to Christ. Because He is the Lamb of God Who takes away the sin of the world.
He is our Passover lamb, as Paul says here.
That is why we - the church - are unleavened. Paul is still using leaven as a metaphor for sin. God’s people are truly unleavened - we are regarded as sinless - because Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.
And Paul wants us to metaphorically celebrate the passover festival without the old leaven - without the sin we once lived in. Without that sin ruling over us.
And without sin being allowed in the church.
You see, we are made truly unleavened through faith in Christ. And through faith, we strive for holiness, whereby we become what we have been made - the leaven of sin is removed from us as we strive for holiness.
Because we need to be unleavened. Unleavened, Paul says, through sincerity and truth. In word and deed. In how we live out being the church together.
Paul has not changed subjects, here. This is still about the sin the Corinthians were tolerating within their church. They were allowing leaven in. Old leaven - the fleshly part of this man that led him into sin and kept him from repentance.
For the church to celebrate the festival - to celebrate Christ’s work - in sincerity and truth - the leaven needs to be removed. As in the Old Testament, God’s people need to purge the evil from our midst.
And that happens through repentance, or through excommunication with the aim of restoration.
And Paul says part of this celebration of the festival - our celebration of Christ’s work - part of that is together removing sin from our midst, and becoming holy together.
And we do that not only by each of us striving for personal holiness - which we are called to do - but we do that by all of us striving for holiness. Striving to remove the leaven of sin from the one lump that is Montclair Community Church.
And if we think of that in terms of what I have to do, it really is a very overwhelming thought, isn’t it?
But if we think like Paul, and think of this as what we have to do together, we are thinking about what it really means to be a church.
And we need to remember everything else Paul has said. We as a church aren’t left to ourselves. God is here. He is in our midst. He is in each of us to will and to do for His good pleasure, and He is with MCC to will and to do for His good pleasure.
All we have to do is let God have His way in our church.
We sang this morning about letting in the God that already lives within us.
We sang:
This is His home here in our chest
At every door our Savior’s knocking
Oh let Him in, oh let Him out
With every yes His kingdom’s coming
This is not about becoming a Christian. The “yes” isn’t to the forgiveness offered in Christ.
The yes is to holiness.
This comes from Rev 3:20. Richard used in his reflection last week.
He spoke about Christians needing to open the door to commune with Christ. I say “Amen” to that. But don’t forget that when Christ said this, He was speaking to a church - to people who were already Christians.
And we looked at part of that passage a few weeks ago because the church in Laodicea was so similar to the church in Corinth that Paul wrote to. They were arrogant. They thought they had arrived. They had gotten too big for their britches.
And Christ tells them that, and that they need to understand the truth. They as a whole church needed to be what Christ called them to be. Christ says this is for the church in Laodicea.
So when we read:
Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.
This is about us - a local church of God’s people - saying yes to Christ in how He tells us to be a church.
That is how we experience communion with Christ. That’s what Jesus is saying.
And that is why we experience that communion only as we experience communion with each other as a church.
That is how we obey Him, abide in His love, and fulfill His commandment to love each other.
Or in simple terms: that is how to be a church together.
That is what Paul is calling for in Corinth.
That is what every church needs to strive to be.
Let’s be that. Let’s commune with our Lord, together.
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. Including ours.
Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump, as you really are unleavened. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us therefore celebrate the festival, not with the old leaven, the leaven of malice and evil, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
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Invite Elders Up
Elaine Addeo
Wes, Sarai, and Patrycja Barnett
Teresa Gomez
Gaired and Nayara Jordan
Kenny Salamea and Maria Villagran
Romans 12:3–10 (ESV)
3 For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. 4 For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, 5 so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; the one who teaches, in his teaching; 8 the one who exhorts, in his exhortation; the one who contributes, in generosity; the one who leads, with zeal; the one who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.
9 Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. 10 Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor.
Do you affirm your personal faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior?
Do you agree with, and will you uphold the mission of Montclair Community Church and use your gifting to help us obey the Great Commission?
Do you affirm that as a representative of the ministry of Montclair Community Church, you will strive in all areas of your life to live for Jesus Christ.
Would you like to become a member of Montclair Community Church, and will you commit to serve and love your fellow members as called and gifted by God and to contribute to the needs of the church.
As we heard this morning, Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 12:
1 Corinthians 12:26 (ESV)
26 If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together.
MCC, Do you affirm your commitment to these newest members of our church family, to serve and love them as called and gifted by God?
Do you commit to help bear their burdens, to suffer when they suffer, and rejoice when they rejoice?
Do you accept these brothers and sisters as members of our church?
