Advice to the Unentangled: Part 2
Practical Church (1 Corinthians) • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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· 1 viewRelationship advice from Paul, part 2
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Transcript
Announcements
Good morning. Welcome to Southern Hills Baptist Church. Thank you for joining us today.
Happy Mother’s Day.
If you are a first-time guest with us, you will find a Connection Card in the pew rack in front of you. We would appreciate it if you would fill that out and place it in the offering plate. That gives us a record of your visit and allows us the opportunity of reaching out to you this week to answer any questions that you might have.
Online giving is available at our website, southernhillsbc.com. By clicking on GIVE, it will take you to our giving page where you can easily give by electronic check or credit card. You can also give during our offertory time or in the box at the info table. If you are a guest, please know that we do not expect you to give. Our members and regular attenders provide for the ministry of the church
The mission of SHBC “is to seek holiness as we covenant together as a faithful local body of Christ and to engage in the Great Commission by making disciples in our homes, our communities, and around the world.”
See bulletin for Calendar Updates
If you are a guest with us, know that this is our weekly Family Worship service. Our children will remain with us for the entire service. We do have a nursery available for children under 4 just down the hall if you would like to use it.
Please stand as we read our Call to Worship. This morning, we will be doing a responsive reading. I will read the words in white and we will all read the words in yellow.
Call To Worship
Go on up to a high mountain,
O Zion, herald of good news;
lift up your voice with strength,
O Jerusalem, herald of good news;
lift it up, fear not;
say to the cities of Judah,
“Behold your God!”
Behold, the Lord God comes with might,
and his arm rules for him;
behold, his reward is with him,
and his recompense before him.
He will tend his flock like a shepherd;
he will gather the lambs in his arms;
he will carry them in his bosom,
and gently lead those that are with young.
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.
He gives power to the faint,
and to him who has no might he increases strength.
Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.
Opening Hymn
Scripture & Prayer: Pastor Bob Micah 4:1-5
Song #1
Missions Minute: MISSION PARTNER
Today, we have two topics for our Missions Minute. The first is that Her Health’s Baby Bottle fundraiser begins today. We have empty bottles on the missions table. Please grab one of those on your way out today and fill it up with change over the next month. We will collect those in June on Father’s Day.
Also, you all know that today is Mother’s Day. Would any of us be able to participate in missions if it wasn’t for the woman who gave us life and helped us to learn compassion and empathy?
Today, we want to not only acknowledge, but celebrate, our Mothers. And so you will see these fine decorations up here on the stairs. As you know, I have zero artistic ability, so I did none of this. A big thank you to Veronica for putting these together for us. But we will have a gift for our ladies at the end of the service.
And so, I am going to invite our ushers up for our offering and we will pray over the Baby Bottles and our Mother’s on this beautiful Mother’s Day.
Offering & Prayer
Song #2 (Always Only Jesus)
Lord’s Supper
Please be seated.
(beat)
By His death and resurrection, Jesus has delivered us from sin and death. He took our sin and shame and—in its place—gave us freedom. And so, there is no one else due the praise and the glory that we give to Him today. It is always and only Jesus.
He was there—at creation, with the Father, shaping our reality by His own hands. He was there—with Adam, walking in the cool of the garden. He was there—with Abraham in the tent, wrestling with Jacob in the desert, with Moses in the burning bush, and with Joshua leading the Army.
And He submitted Himself to the will of the Father: to humble Himself and step down from His throne in heaven—all for the purpose of bringing us salvation from our sin and reconciling us to Yahweh God.
We’re going to continue our reading about Jesus from the book of John. Today we will continue in chapter 6:
So the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered them, “Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the Prophets, ‘And they will all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me— not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God; he has seen the Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” Jesus said these things in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum.
At this time, I am going to have our ushers come forward. If you are a follower of Jesus, in that you have accepted Him as Savior, bowed to Him as King, and been baptized in obedience to His commandment, we invite you to participate with us. In just a moment, we will pass the plates. Please take a piece of bread and a cup and hold it until we take together.
Pass
Instruction from Jesus: Read Mark 14:22-25
And as they were eating, he took bread, and after blessing it broke it and gave it to them, and said, “Take; this is my body.” And he took a cup, and when he had given thanks he gave it to them, and they all drank of it. And he said to them, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many. Truly, I say to you, I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”
Prayer of Blessing on bread and cup
Song #3
Pastoral Prayer
World -
Country-
State-
City-
SHBC-
Introduction
If you have your bible, please open with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 7.
For all of chapter 7, Paul has been giving principles for marriage. He began by speaking of the unity that is found in the marriage covenant—the idea that husband and wife are no longer separate, but belong to each other.
Then he laid down a practical biblical understanding of singleness, where he commended the life of the single believer as one solely devoted to following Jesus in mission.
He gave advice to married people, both in Christian contexts and in mixed belief marriages. And he went on a parenthetical journey to let us know that we should live in the places that God has put us faithfully, focusing on redeeming them in the Name of Jesus and for His glory rather than running away from them.
Last week, Paul began a section of giving advice, returning his attention to those who are single for whatever reason. He reminded those people of something that we can all use in our daily lives: that we should remove distractions in our lives and focus on the mission that God has set before us to make disciples.
And that as we remove those distractions and focus on Jesus, He begins to build His order into our lives through His Spirit, banishing the chaos that once lived in those spaces and setting us up for a life where we can leave our children an inheritance of generational blessings.
[TITLE SLIDE]
This week, Paul is going to continue his advice to those who are single. But, so not to rehash the same message from a few weeks ago, this morning we will be pulling back from the trees to see the forest. We will be looking at the underlying concepts of Paul’s advice and making it practical—not just for those who are still single, but for every follower of Christ.
Look with me to chapter 7. We will be in verses 36-38:
[MAIN PASSAGE SLIDE x2]
If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry—it is no sin. (/) But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well. So then he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better.
Paul again brings up the goodness of singleness for the purpose of mission clarity. He says that it is good to be married, but better for a believer if they find that they are gifted and called to remain single.
But let’s dig deeper this morning. Let us extract these concepts that Paul has given to the single person for good decision making and we will then apply them to all of life.
First, Paul tells them to examine their hearts.
[POINT 1 SLIDE]
Examine Your Heart (v 36)
So, maybe we should start with a question. What is the heart of a person?
Obviously, we all know that—scientifically—the heart is the most important muscle in your body. Your heart contracts an average of 70 times per minute to push out oxygenated blood to your brain and your limbs. And it will do so—on average—2 1/2 to 3 billion times in your lifetime.
But—in the bible—the heart is something different. There, the heart of a person is a metaphor for the innermost core of human identity. And, to be more exact, the Old Testament doesn’t use “heart” in this sense at all. In fact, in Hebrew it says that the seat of our affections and desires is…
Wait for it.
The kidneys...
That’s right. In Psalm 16:7, David says “I bless the Lord who gives me counsel; in the night also my kidneys instruct me.”
(Beat)
When the King James Version was produced in 1611, the translators went with the word “reins” instead of kidneys, but modern English translators found a correlative term in our use of heart as a metaphor. This not only helps modern people understand the concept, but aligns well with the New Testament, which also uses heart in Greek most of the time and kidneys only once.
With that, the metaphorical heart became more than just the seat of our emotions and desires. It took on the biblical understanding as the place where moral character is shaped.
With that understanding as our background, how can we examine our hearts? How do we know what is actually in there?
Well, Jesus says that it is from the “abundance of the heart” that “the mouth speaks.”
We must—then—look to what comes out of us: our thoughts and words and actions. Let’s get back to our passage in verse 36:
[PASSAGE SLIDE]
If anyone thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry—it is no sin.
The qualifier here for Paul is the heart of the person. He says that “if his passions are strong,” then the individual should be encouraged to marry.
This statement is interesting in Greek. The word his should not be understood as only instructions for a male. The pronoun is non-existent, so the translators are pulling forward from the “anyone” that Paul is addressing from the beginning of the verse.
So—in Greek—Paul says that “if there exists anyone past their prime who wills to be married,” that is okay. This goes beyond the self-control issue that he brought up in verse 9 and calls us back to last week in verse 28, where he says that “if you do marry, you have not sinned.”
The idea here is that if the individual feels in his or her heart that they should be married—a passion or a sense of calling, if you will—then other Christians should be supportive of their decision to marry.
(Beat)
So, let’s pull back and think through this together as a concept. Taken out of the context of scripture, our society would agree heartily with this idea that we should do whatever we feel is right in our hearts.
But if we are students of scripture, we know that Jeremiah reminds us in Jeremiah 17:9 that “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
Church—this is what the Western world doesn’t understand: that your heart and my heart are liars. We have lived with our sinfulness for so long that it is imbedded in our hearts. And even when we feel like we are doing well and living holy lives chasing after Jesus, sin can pop up out of a closet and say something.
And—in that moment—we can fall right back into our old patterns. We can forget that old liar living inside of us. We must remember that even as faithful followers of Christ, our sinful desires have not yet all been put to death.
Sometimes faithfulness to living holy lives feels like a game of whack-a-mole. Just when you think you have one sin problem put to death, another pops up. Just remember that it is because we are drawing closer to the holiness of Jesus by His Spirit that those sins are revealed to us.
So, how are we to not just feel what is in our hearts, but test our passions and motivations?
The first thing that we must do is to be aware. Pay attention to what comes out of your heart as it overflows into your mind and your tongue and your limbs.
Let’s work through these backward, starting with the limbs and the tongue. Do you love and serve others through your actions and speech? Even if we think we do, let us be aware of how we respond, because it is in times of conflict and stress that our hearts are truly revealed. Let’s look at some examples:
When someone cuts you off in traffic, do you sigh and shake your head or do you flip them the bird and try to get them back?
When your incompetent neighbor needs help with something, do you help him out of love or out of obligation? Or, do you close the garage and go back into hiding in the house so you don’t have to deal with him?
When you get in an argument with your spouse, do you try to resolve it or do you prefer justice by seeking to hurt them in the way that they hurt you?
Do you say things that are mean-spirited or that you will regret later?
Do you constantly find yourself apologizing for lashing out to those that you love?
Be aware of how you respond in these moments. Catalog them in your mind. And then, move on to the second step: filter the reactions that come from your heart through scripture.
Does your speech and actions align with scripture?
Is love your primary response in times of conflict?
Would you be driving the same way if Jesus was in the passenger seat?
(Beat)
Let’s move on to the mind, the gatekeeper to our speech and actions.
Do you—Christian—constantly battle with your thoughts?
Many of you know what doom-scrolling is. It is when you are online and you fall down a rabbit hole, looking for something interesting or watching random videos for hours. Our brains are constantly seeking the next surge of endorphins when we come across something that excites us.
And our brains work the same way with our thoughts. Sometimes, instead of smashing the varmit in whack-a-mole, we instead follow the mole down the hole and spiral in hours of sinful thoughts—whether lust or anger or self-loathing.
We become Alice, lost in her own mind, down a rabbit-hole, picking forbidden door locks, and chasing shadowy characters while the world passes us by.
We must be aware of our thoughts, because they come from the heart. The more space we give to our unholy thoughts, the sicker our heart is.
These are the ways that we examine our hearts. And most of us will find that we do not like what we discover. So what do we do then? What is our next step?
[POINT 2 SLIDE]
Take Captive Your Mind (v 37)
Paul will go on to explain this step to the church at Corinth in 2 Corinthians chapter 10, where he explains what Christians do. He says that:
[SCRIPTURE SLIDE]
We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ,
Paul explains that our failure to have holy hearts starts in the mind—that we must “take every thought captive” and make it be obedient to Christ.
Have you ever tried to wrangle a disobedient and wild toddler?
This is what it is like to bring your mind into obedience. Even Paul struggled with this. In Romans chapter 7, he writes “For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.”
This is a constant battle for every follower of Christ who still dwells in these corrupted human bodies. Our minds wage a spiritual battle every day to win our hearts.
When chaos reigns in our mind, it will be the king of our hearts. But if we submit our minds to King Jesus and work with His Holy Spirit, our minds start to be put into order. And our part of that ordering process—what we call sanctification—is to catch that wild toddler in our minds and bring it into obedience to Christ.
It is in that process of learning self-control that we become more holy. And what happens in the mind will affect the heart, which will overflow to our tongue and limbs—and even back to our mind.
There is a strange relationship that mind and heart have in the bible. It is by the hearing and reading of the Word that comes through our minds and shapes our hearts. And then that heart overflows from its new shape back into the mind.
Let’s jump back into our passage at verse 37:
[PASSAGE SLIDE]
But whoever is firmly established in his heart, being under no necessity but having his desire under control, and has determined this in his heart, to keep her as his betrothed, he will do well.
Paul tells the single person that they can be married without anyone in the church looking down upon them for their decision. But, if that single person feels called to singleness and—here’s the key phrase—having their “desire under control”—then it would do them well to stay single.
This person that Paul is describing is someone whose mind is ordered enough that they have learned self-control over their desires. The word that Paul uses for desire here is clear that the desire is to be married and bear children. This desire needs to be held in control for the single person to fulfill the calling to stay single.
This individual feels a calling in their heart that has now aligned with their ability to control their desire to marry. If this person has examined their heart and found this to be the case, Paul encourages them to stay single.
So, let us pull back once again to the bigger concept. Self-control doesn’t just happen automatically. It takes hard work. It takes the willingness to change and to conform to the image of Jesus by His indwelling Spirit. It takes daily seeking Him in the Word and in prayer.
And each day, we must look at our hearts and examine their overflow by the Word of God, and then take captive those chaotic thoughts that remain in our minds and bring them into obedience to the Word.
(I hope you see a common thread here—that in order to do any of this, we must first know the Word.)
Let me give you an example of this:
From the ages of 12-16, I spent every Summer at my uncle’s house working for his landscape business. I learned how to work hard and what it was to be a loyal friend. But I also learned a hatred of drunkenness. At 12 years old, my uncle’s roommate would come home and punch me in the arm and tell me to go and make him a drink. And I would.
But I would get back at him by sneaking into his room and stealing his pornography. And at 12 years old, I became addicted to it. I hated alcoholism, but I unknowingly enslaved myself to something else.
Lust was, and is, my biggest fight in my spiritual life. And while I have reformed my reactions and behaviors through the power of the Holy Spirit, I have to constantly work at examining my heart.
And sometimes, when everything is going great, and I’m not expecting it—a little gremlin of lust will pop up. At that moment, I have a choice. Will I follow the gremlin into the forbidden forest, or will I pull out the sword—which is the Word of God—and vanquish my foe?
(Beat)
That brings us to our final point in our passage this morning.
[POINT 3 SLIDE]
Make a Wise Decision (v 38)
We must learn to make wise decisions. Notice what Paul tells the single person as he closes this section. He says:
[PASSAGE SLIDE]
So then he who marries his betrothed does well, and he who refrains from marriage will do even better.
He says that the single person who marries is doing a good thing. But the single person who has examined their heart and has control over their desires and chooses to stay single does even better.
Reflecting then on last week, Paul says that it is a higher good to live a single life devoted to Christ, because there is no reason to be distracted from the mission of making disciples.
What does Paul mean to say by this? Does he mean that we should abandon the mandate to “multiply and fill the earth” for the purpose of growing the kingdom of God on earth?
No. He merely means to say that single people should consider whether God is calling them to a life of singleness, and that in their singleness they may be able to make more disciples than those who marry and have children.
Let us think of a married couple who have 4 children and who are faithful and obedient servants of King Jesus. They take the mandate to “multiply and fill the earth” seriously, as they do the mission to “make disciples of all nations.” They participate regularly in the life of the church and raise their children “in the way that they should go.”
Statistically speaking, in their 25 years raising 4 kids, 3 of them choose to follow Christ. And let’s say that being also focused on discipleship, they even led 3 others to know and follow Jesus in their spare time. In 25 years, this married couple would have made 6 disciples, or 3 each on average.
But the single person who takes the mandate and the mission seriously has less to distract them from the mission. Let’s say that in 25 years, they make 1 disciple every 2 years. That means that in 25 years, this single person would have made 12 disciples of Jesus.
Paul is not disparaging marriage. In fact, Paul encourages people to marry and to have better, Jesus-focused marriages. But when it comes to singleness, Paul is simply doing math. He is not commanding believers to marry or to abstain from marriage. He’s looking at his watch (figuratively, of course) and realizing that time is short and that believers need to make as many disciples as possible before Jesus comes back.
He is employing his holy pragmatism once again. He is trying to grow the church and bring Jesus as much glory as possible by giving sound advice to the church members in Corinth.
And he is hoping that they will consider his advice, examine their hearts, bring their desires into submission to King Jesus, and make a decision from the Godly wisdom that is available to them by the Holy Spirit.
(Beat)
Now, let us pull back to the forest once again. How do we make wise decisions? What steps can we take to grow in Godly wisdom and make better decisions than we are making right now?
I want to offer you some practical advice this morning. Before we begin, we need to realize that making wise decisions is more than just choosing the best option available to you. It’s digging in to the mind of God by the wisdom that He makes available to us through His indwelling Spirit. This is what Paul spent much of chapter 2 talking about and what we also learned from the book of James last year.
Godly wisdom—like faith— isn’t something that we receive in bulk on the day that we bow to King Jesus and submit ourselves to His Lordship. Access to both is available through the Spirit, but they are like muscles that must be exercised to grow stronger. Gaining Godly wisdom for our practical use in life comes through three steps:
First, we must seek out wisdom by going to God in prayer and asking for it. When was the last time that you asked the Father to guide you through a decision that you made?
Maybe you sought Him out in making a life-changing decision or for buying a house or a car. But, how often do we ask Him for wisdom when we are shopping at the grocery store or when we pay our monthly bills?
Do we ask Him to lead us when our hearts beg us to pay the minimum on the credit card so that we can buy that new pair of shoes that we want?
Do we ask Him for wisdom when we know that we will encounter the same homeless person on the way to work from our favorite coffee shop?
Do we pray and read our bibles daily, seeking to hear the Word of God?
We must be diligent in seeking out God’s wisdom.
(beat)
Second, we must learn to attune ourselves to God’s Holy Spirit. We need to teach ourselves how to listen. That is a difficult thing for us to do. Our lives are always so busy these days. There is always a phone or a tv or a radio playing in the background. How often do we stop and listen?
Do we know what the voice of the Holy Spirit sounds like?
Do we pause in silence to listen after we pray?
Are we having a conversation with God or are we just talking at Him?
Jesus says in John 10 that the sheep will follow the shepherd, “for they know his voice.” He will go on to say that He is the Good Shepherd and that “my sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me.”
Is that you? Do you know His voice? Could you pick it out of a crowd?
If not, go back to step 1 and begin seeking out God’s wisdom.
(Beat)
And third, we must test what we hear. Not every instruction that we get is from the Lord. And until we know His voice and have gained His wisdom, we must constantly test the leadings of our hearts.
Our own spirits, or inner voice, can mimic the voice of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the wickedness that remains in us will lead us toward sin by speaking through our spirit like a ventriloquist. Other times, we may hear things from other spirits who are not loyal to Yahweh God. How can we distinguish between these voices?
We go back to the Word and filter everything through it.
Does my leading align with scripture?
Does the desire of my heart to buy those new shoes help me or others to image God better?
Am I furthering the kingdom of God in delaying to pay off my credit card?
Does my heart want me to invest in people or in things?
We must test all things through the Word. And the more that we practice these steps, the easier it gets to make wise decisions.
We must know God’s Word. We must pray. We must listen. And we must learn discernment.
(Beat)
Do you remember the old cartoon gag where a little angel and a little devil pop up on someone’s shoulders, trying to influence them as they make a decision?
Whether it’s Tom the cat deciding to kill poor little Jerry or not or Bugs Bunny thinking about giving Elmer Fudd a spoonful of his own medicine, the little devil always wants to cause more chaos and the little angel wants them to be kind. And in some of the cartoons, if they keep listening to one of the two over and over, the other will shrink or disappear.
This is a lot more realistic than most people realize. Except, instead of an angel and the devil, we have the Holy Spirit on one side and our own spirit on the other. Our spirit speaks from the sinful desires of our heart, begging us to give in and fulfill its longings. But the Holy Spirit offers the wisdom of God.
Church, which spirit do you listen to?
Which spirit do you regularly feed?
Because I will promise you this: the spirit that you feed will get louder. And the spirit that you starve will keep getting quieter.
And this is the process of sanctification: choosing to submit ourselves fully to the Spirit of Jesus and consistently choosing wisely by His counsel. And as we do that over and over, we will learn the voice of the Holy Spirit as it grows louder.
And as we consistently deny the sinful desires of our own spirit, it will have no choice but to be pounded and shaped into the image of the Spirit of Jesus. This is how we are conformed and how we become more holy: not by making the best decision, but by submitting ourselves to God’s wisdom.
Feed the Holy Spirit in your life by engaging with Him daily. And starve the bad decisions by denying the lusts of your heart. And if you do this, you will find that wise decisions get easier and easier to make.
Or, in the words of Paul to the Romans,
[SCRIPTURE SLIDE]
But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.
Put on the Lord Jesus Christ by learning to listen to His Spirit, and as you consistently make wise decisions and deny the flesh, you will be made into His image—into the holy imager of God that He created you to be.
Application
This is the calling of every believer to holiness. It is not just for the single people. Each of us is called to submit our lives to the One who ransomed them at Calvary.
[PREVIEW SLIDE]
Next week, we will wrap up Paul’s advice to those who find themselves single as we continue through the highly practical book of 1 Corinthians.
Invitation
If you are here this morning and you have never experienced the voice of the Holy Spirit, it may be that you have never submitted yourself fully to Jesus. He calls you to come and be part of His family this morning—to let go of the baggage holding you back from giving Him everything.
Or maybe you just haven’t learned how to seek after Him and listen to His voice. We would love to help you with that. Come and pray with me after service and we can walk through that process together.
CLOSE IN PRAYER
CLOSING HYMN
Mother’s Day Gift - Ushers pass out to every woman and girl
BABY BOTTLE- grab one on the way out. Bring back in 6 weeks on Father’s Day.
CONGREGATIONAL BLESSING
