Ordered By The Gospel

You might notice in your bulletin that the sermon title says “Called Out” and the text is 1 Corinthians 1:1-9. That was the original plan at an earlier point this week. But I decided to go in a slightly different direction, and preach a sort of “Introductory Sermon” to this new series.

This morning we start a new sermon series: “Ordered By The Gospel.” And it’s going to be a series on 1st Corinthians.

And I want to begin with that series title, because it is vulnerable to some misunderstanding.

You could hear “Ordered by the Gospel” and you might think I mean “Commanded by the Gospel.” As in “The Gospel orders us around and tells us to do stuff.”

And that is not what I mean.

We are commanded to believe the Gospel. But the Gospel itself is not a command. The Gospel is news. The Good News of what God has done in Jesus Christ. His life, his death, his resurrection, his ascension, his present rule and reign and his return on the Last Day.

That’s the Gospel.

And when I say “Ordered by the Gospel” I do not mean “Commanded by the Gospel” or “Bossed around” by the Gospel.

I mean “Ordered” as the opposite of “Disordered” or “Out of Order.”

Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is like coming home to a house in utter chaos, utter disarray, utter mess, and going room by room, one at a time and setting the furniture straight. Cleaning up the broken dishes. Cleaning up the dirt and so on. Bringing order to the disorder. Meeting the lies and confusion with truth and clarity. Bringing light into the darkness. And so on.

That is what I mean by “Ordered by the Gospel” and that is what Paul is doing throughout Corinthians. He’s going from one room to the next, finding the problems and answering them not just with advice, but with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Letter is Paul’s effort to show that all the chaos in Corinth has a common root: they are thinking like the world, boasting like the world, desiring like the world, worshiping like the world, and then trying to staple Jesus on top of it. The problem is not just that they have a bunch of sins. The problem is that they are out of order. And the gospel sets them right.

B. Sermon Text

So, let us begin then with the first few words of the first letter of Paul to the Corinthians. You can find it on Page 1131 of the Bibles in your pews, and it will also be on the screen behind me.

Will you please rise for the reading of God’s Holy Word

1 Corinthians 1:1–3 ESV

Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes, To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

C. Transition to Sermon

The First Century Church in Corinth lives forever in the imagination of the Christian Church as a spectacular example of what not to do.

Because what had happened in Corinth was a terrible separation between what the believed and how they lived.

An idea had developed. That our faith in Christ is one thing. And our divisions are another. Our doctrine is one thing, our sexuality is another. Our faith is over here, but our lawsuits, our marriages, our food, that’s in a separate category.

And to this, Paul says “No. Christ is Lord of all of it.”

Paul does not lay out the theology then say “Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to your practical problems.” Instead he says “Your practical problems are theological problems.”

Your divisions. Your arrogance. Your confusion about worship. Your confusion about your bodies. Your confusion about food. All of these are Gospel problems.

And as much as we love to attach the word “Gospel” to everything we do today, we are still vulnerable to the same problem. We are tempted to think that the Gospel gets you into heaven, and then good advice sorts out the rest of your life. What we will see in this series that the same gospel that saves you is the gospel that straightens you out.

D. Sermon Points

And so there are at least three things I want us to think about this morning as we start this series together:

I. There is a Mess

II. God Means to Clean It

III. Cleansing Starts with Grace

E. Sermon Prayer

Let’s Pray

Open our eyes, O Lord, to behold wonderful things in your Words.

By your own words, show us our own unfaithfulness. And enable us to hear again your glorious and precious promises. Write your words upon our hearts, and inscribe them on our lips. So shall all glory be given to you as we hear, read, and learn your Word together.

In Jesus’s Name.

Amen.

(Adapted from a portion of “A Minister’s Bible” from The Valley of Vision)

So, the first point...

I. There Is a Mess

As a Pastor, one of the things I hear often in church life and in exchanges online is “We really need to get back to how it was in the early church! If only we could be like the early church! We have to return things to the way it was in the early church!”

And that impulse is pretty understandable, on one level. In the early church you have lots of stories of amazing courage and glory and power.

And there is no shortage today of church-trashing. It’s very popular today to trash the church in public. And again, on one level, that’s an understandable impulse.

We look around today and we see households out of order. Husbands abandoning their responsibilities and reducing their wives to annoyances. Wives reviling their husbands and trying to manipulate them into better behavior. Children despising their parents. And that’s just the households, don’t get me started on the church drama. Gossiping, slandering, infighting, divisions, arrogance, abuse of authority, lukewarm faith, cowardice.

But if only we could get back to the Early Church! Then we wouldn’t have all those problems, right?

Then you read Paul’s Letters and...well, not so much.

Paul has to write a letter to the Galatians to urge them to stop trying to revive Old Testament shadows that are meant to point to Christ. He says certain teachers have gotten so obsessed with the law and with circumcision, he wishes they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves.

Paul had to tell the church in Philippi to resolve a serious conflict between two women in the church. Euodia and Syntyche (Phil 4:2). He rebuked these two women and said they needed to stop building factions within the church and using gossip to divide the body.

Paul had to write to the Thessalonians because some were so sure that Jesus was about to come back that they stopped going back to work.

Titus was a church planter in Crete, and Paul had to tell him “What is said about them is true, they’re lazy beasts, liars, and gluttons, and they need some correction.”

And almost every single New Testament Letter written by Paul contains basic instructions on the household: the duties of husbands, wives, and children.

And You think the Modern Church is a Mess? You might be right. But the Bride of Jesus has done some growing since the first century, believe it or not.

In Corinth they were getting drunk at communion, if you can imagine it. Those must have been some big plastic disposable cups!

But they were also using communion to divide the body. There was serious sexual immorality and they were proud of it. Proud of their tolerance.

There was infighting and disputes that they couldn’t resolve without going to the pagan Aphrodite-worshipping judges.

The Corinthians were confused about worship and they were fighting over it. Does that ever happen today? They were also fighting over their favorite preachers. Can you imagine that?

“I’m on the Apollos Team.”

“Oh, yeah? Well I’m on Team Paul.”

And then—I love that this is in the Bible. Some moron sprints into the room just to say “Well I’m on Team Jesus.”

The early church was a mess.

And this is why First Corinthians still rings true today. Because every church has its own chaos that needs sorting. It’s own temptation to factions. It’s own celebrity culture. It’s own worship wars. It’s own mess.

That is why we need to know that

II. God Means to Clean It

Paul writes to Corinth as an Apostle, and as someone familiar to them. He had planted a church there in Acts 18. It was there that Paul famously shook out his garments before the Jews in the synagogue and told them

Acts 18:6 ESV

And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, “Your blood be on your own heads! I am innocent. From now on I will go to the Gentiles.”

Corinth was a cosmopolitan city. Had all sorts of people from all sorts of places. Jews lived there. But the church would have been mostly Gentile.

And Paul comes to them in this letter with words of correction that are rooted in their misunderstanding of the Gospel. Indeed, one of the most famous passages in 1 Corinthians is the one in Chapter 15:

1 Corinthians 15:3–4 ESV

For I delivered to you as of 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,

So what is the Gospel? It is not religious vibes meant to make you feel warm. And it is not a simple call to behave. It is the announcement that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

And because that is true, the gospel is not merely a pardon for guilty men. It is the power of God for new creation. It forgives rebels, yes. But it also reorders rebels.

The cross puts everything in its place.

At the cross, you learn, and you keep going back to it to keep learning that God is God, and you are not. That Grace is central and boasting is excluded. That holiness matters and there’s no such thing as trivial sin. That your body matters and immorality is not a small issue. That the Church is one, and factions are a lie. That worship is about God, and not self-expression. That the future is embodied life and resurrection is not optional.

There is a mess. And God means to clean it with a bloody cross. Because the Gospel does not merely tidy up the edges of your life. The cross tears down your idols, drags your pride into the daylight, and then rebuilds you from the inside out.

So there is a mess. And God means to clean it. And

III. Cleansing Starts with Grace

Here’s where the text we read at the start comes into play. The Church in Corinth is a mess. And frankly, its messes have messes.

So where does Paul start?

Where would you start?

I think most of us would probably start by severely questioning these people’s salvation. Right? If we are honest. We would start with something like

To the Church in Corinth, if you can even be called a Church. Apparently you have the audacity to call yourself Christians. That’s downright hilarious if not offensive and blasphemous. Let me explain to you how the Christian life looks, and then you tell me if your life looks like that. By the time I am through with you, you might know how to spell the word Christian.

But that’s not how he starts.

Paul knows what he is about to address. He knows the factions, the immorality, the lawsuits, the immaturity, the table abuses, the showboating in worship, the false teaching. He knows all of it before he writes a single line.

And how does he begin?

1 Corinthians 1:1–3 ESV

That—by itself—is astonishing.

He does not say “you disaster of a church.”

He does not say, “To the almost-faithful.”

He does not say, “To the people who really ought to know better by now.”

He says: Church of God.

He says: Sanctified in Christ Jesus.

He says: Called to be saints.

He says: Grace and Peace.

This means Paul is not naïve about their sin, and he is not soft on their sin. He is actually setting up the rebukes that will come later. But he does it by beginning with what is deepest and truest in Christ.

So their sin is real. Their disorder is real. Their immaturity is real. But Christ’s claim on them is deeper still.

Paul starts talking to them not according to their sin but according to their Baptism. According to their covenantal identity. He starts there before getting to all the ways they are failing to live in terms of that identity.

They are not saints because they have it all together. They most decidedly have the opposite of whatever together is. Paul is not going to soft pedal that or tell them Jesus died and rose so they don’t have to feel bad about it.

But he begins with the reality that these men, women, and children are are saints because they belong to Jesus. They are sanctified not because the process is finished, but because they have been set apart in Christ and are being made holy by Him.

Because the reality is that the gospel tells the truth about what is wrong with you without surrendering the truth about whose you are and his faithfulness to you.

Conclusion

So, to tie this all together.

I want us to be mindful as we start working through this letter that there are two errors we can make when a church is messy.

And the errors are sentimentalism and cynicism.

So, first, sentimentalism.

Which sounds like this:

“Oh, sure, things might be bad, but you know, we’re all sinners, after all. We are all broken (so broken! so broken!) nobody is perfect, let’s not get too hung up on sin and correcting it.”

And that sentimentalism is alive and well in the modern church.

This is why I do try to moderate how often I talk about brokenness. Because I have noticed in the last 10-20 years, in many places people have slowly started replacing the word “sin” with “brokenness.”

So you won’t hear about how sinful people are. You’ll hear about how broken we are. “Oh, we’re just so broken.”

And that’s true. Full stop. We are very broken. Broken by sin.

But the problem with constantly running to the language of brokenness is that you can’t repent of your brokenness. You can’t. You can repent of your sins. But you can’t repent of your brokenness.

Paul doesn’t allow himself or the Christians in Corinth to slip into that kind of sentimentalism.

So that’s the first error. The other is cynicism.

“This place is a mess. These people are hopeless. The worship is boring. They’re too distracted with worldly things. There’s no redemption here. There’s no Holy Spirit here. Just burn it all down.”

And again. Sometimes some of those things are true. But as a friend of mine liked to ask me frequently “Is your name Bryan Rhodes? Oh, from the way you were talking, I thought your name might be Holy Spirit.”

Yeah, you are not the Holy Spirit. Which means your frustrations, annoyances, irritations and powerful gut feelings do not get to be the voice of God.

Only God gets to be God.

And Paul comes to the Corinthians, being the victim of neither sentimentalism or cynicism.

He speaks as a father. And he speaks as an apostle. He speaks with a rod in one hand and the sweet medicine of the Gospel in the other. He refuses to baptize the disorder, but he also refuses to deny Christ’s work among them.

And that is faithful Christian ministry.

Our God is not sentimental about sin.

And our God is not cynical about the saints.

And some of you might need the first half of that. You have made peace with sin and disorders that God means to kill. You’ve made peace with your house being upside down, your worship being about you, your life being about obedience to your impulses.

And some of you might need the second half of that. You get so discouraged by your sin, or by the sins of the church, that you have forgotten how Paul begins—with the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ. Grace and peace that is good enough to save you with baffling patience. Freely you have received. Therefore, freely give.

So this is not a series about “those awful Corinthians.” This is about what the risen Christ does with a disordered people.

He does not abandon them in the disorder. He calls them saints. And because they are His, he sets them in order.

And Paul begins where we must begin. Not with the mess, but with Christ. Not with the failure, but with the calling. Not with human chaos, but with God’s grace and peace.

And the same God who spoke to the saints at Corinth still speaks to the saints at Grace in Alexandria.

He still calls us saints and still sets our mess aright.

In the name of Jesus, Amen.

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