Unity In Christ above Culture
Acts 17 v 22 - 28 22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. 23 For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. 27 God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
1 Corinthians 9 v 11 – 12 & 19 – 27 11 If we have sown spiritual seed among you, is it too much if we reap a material harvest from you? 12 If others have this right of support from you, shouldn’t we have it all the more?
But we did not use this right. On the contrary, we put up with anything rather than hinder the gospel of Christ.
19 Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20 To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. 21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. 23 I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.
24 Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. 25 Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. 26 Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. 27 No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
Galatians 3 v 26 You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.
Last week I spoke about being citizens of heaven, not when we die physically, but from the moment God calls our name and we are born again, born from above, born of God.
When a child is born, in a sense it dies to the womb and is born to the world.
When we are born again, we die to our old lives and we are born into a new kingdom, a new citizenship. We are born into a new family.
Paul says that in Jesus, we are a new creation. The old is gone and we are brand new.
What makes life difficult is that we live in the not yet, St Augustine said “the Church is in the process of becoming what we already are.”
And so we have this tension between the value systems of this world, and the value systems of the kingdom of God.
Paul says to the Galatian Christians, “Because all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus
There are 4 significant points I want to touch on from that passage.
Two will need to wait for next week though.
The first point is that all Christians are one in Christ.
Many congregations today speak of “community” essentially two words, a common unity or a group of individuals united in a common purpose.
One of the dangers of Christianity over the last 3 centuries though has been the rise of individualism.
People have made their faith a private affair with their happiness, their wellbeing or their “being blessed” plumb centre of their faith.
For so many people, their faith is not about bringing glory to God, but about being saved.
Some Christians have the idea, “It is me and my Jesus and my Bible in my little corner”
“AS long as I am saved, that’s all that matters”.
But Scripture tells us all believers, all citizens of heaven, are part of the one same body of Christ. There are not 14 bodies of Christ. There is not a Presbyterian body of Christ and a Baptist one and an Anglican one and a charismatic one.
Paul says the hand cannot say to the foot, I don’t need you because you are not a foot like me.
There is one body of Christ and though we look different and sing differently, it is because we serve different functions within that body.
A friend of mine had a lung transplant two and a half years ago. I saw him briefly in Johannesburg three weeks ago and he told me that have tried everything to make his body accept the lung, but his body has rejected the new lung.
Can you imagine that?
To stay alive, his body needs this new member to inhale and exhale, to send the air around his body. But rather than seeing his lung as a part of his body, it sees it as an enemy to be attached and expelled.
I suspect it breaks God’s heart to see Christians spending all their energy trying to reject others from the body of Christ when we desperately need each other.
I think the reasons we are trying to reject each other are not based on issues central to be a Christian, but are linked to the 3 other points from what Paul says to the Galatians.
Paul says when we are clothed in Christ, when we live as citizens of heaven on earth, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.
When Paul says these divisions are now a thing of the past, he is speaking of three broad categories.
The first division is cultural between the Jews and the Greeks.
The second division is economic, between Slaves and free people.
The third division is gender, male and female.
So following Paul’s structure, let’s consider cultural divisions.
Being a Christian supersedes every culture.
There are two aspects to that statement.
In the first sense, there are many cultural things which in no way interfere with our faith. But then there can be things which form a part of our culture which go against our Christian beliefs.
Many Europeans say, “But we have no culture” and that is untrue. Our culture becomes invisible because it is the dominant culture.
It is a generalisation but I suspect South African men are culturally aggressive and angry. Sometimes our culture teaches our sons that they may not cry, and they have to be the toughest.
I would risk saying that culturally a lot of people in South Africa are workaholics. Some stuff I heard on workaholism is quite interesting though.
This may sound contradictory to the last statement, but I suspect a lot of South Africans are culturally still colonial, waiting for someone else to do it.
I think we have a culture which says if we steal from certain people, it is not theft. I worked with a guy who stole some fluorescent lighting for his garage. When I confronted him he said tit was a salary adjustment. Our culture says it is OK to steal pens and pencils from work.
When our culture is in conflict with our faith, as Christians we have to submit our culture to our faith.
Then the second element to the statement that our faith needs to supersede our culture has to do with sharing the gospel.
In 1 Corinthians 9 Paul says even though he is a free man, he becomes a slave to every person. TO the Jew he is a Jew, to those who obey the law he puts himself under the law, to the weak he becomes weak.
Paul says, “I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. 23 I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.”
Paul will never compromise the central doctrines of the faith, but he will gladly shed the cultural packaging so that people will be open to hear the message of the gospel.
Paul’s faith is again more important than his culture.
In Acts 17 we read that Paul arrived at the Areopagus in Athens, and stood before a council of men whose culture and worldview was thoroughly Greek. In this setting Paul did not try to start a conversation about the God of Israel who formed a covenant with Abraham and so on and so on. As he looks around he sees the statue to the unknown god
In some earlier year a plague had been in Athens and sacrifices to their regular gods did not work, and so the Athenians built an alter to the unknown and offered a sacrifice to him, and immediately the plague lifted.
So Paul takes advantage of this opportunity, and tells them that he serves this unknown God, and he proceeds to tell them the gospel.
Paul steps out of his Jewish culture and becomes a Greek to share the good news with the Greeks.
But Paul goes even further. In verse 28 he quotes a poem and he says “In him we live and move and have our being”.
For decades Christians tried to find the source of this poem in Jewish literature. But it is not a Jewish poem. In fact it is a poem that was written by a Greek poet to the Greek god Zeus.
Paul immerses himself in Greek culture, he “baptises” this pagan poem and uses it to declare the praises of Jesus. And he does this so that the Greeks will hear the message.
If we don’t understand Paul’s motivation to share the gospel even if it means abandoning our culture, we will think Paul is schizophrenic.
In Paul’s letter to the Galatians Paul goes on at length about Jews who are forcing Christians to be circumcised to be a true Christian. He says emphatically, “You don’t have to be circumcised to be a Christian!” These Jews were retaining circumcision as a religious right of passage.
But then we read a story about Paul in Acts 16 which makes us think Paul is a hypocrite. Acts 16 says that Paul wanted to take Timothy on a journey with him but Timothy was a Greek and the Jews would frown on his being part of this ministry team, and so Paul takes Timothy aside and duly circumcises him.
Is Paul schizophrenic?
The answer is no. Paul is opposed to circumcision as a religious rite, but he is not opposed to the circumcision itself. And so to circumcise Timothy has no religious meaning, but it opens the doors for Timothy culturally so that he can share the gospel.
Many Christians throughout history have missed the point and got it terribly wrong.
When some missionaries arrived in the colonies around the world, they did not preach that people are saved by grace through faith, they taught that people are saved by wearing European clothes, by having European “Christian” names.
Rather than sharing the gospel of Jesus, many missionaries imposed European culture.
One wonderful exception is Hudson Taylor who was a missionary to China. When he started working in China there was a lot of resentment because Taylor was very much a European.
But he realised that unless the gospel affirms and values the culture of those it seeks to evangelise, the message will be meaningless. So Taylor and those who worked with him took on the culture of China, and began to dress in Chinese clothing.
Some say Hudson Taylor was the most effective missionary and evangelist since the Apostle Paul. I am not surprised because he understood the same principle, that as people who are called by God to share our faith, our culture is less important than the sharing of the message.
Hudson Taylor realised that to live as a citizen of heaven on earth meant to give up your right to your own culture for the sake of sharing the gospel.
Hudson Taylor wrote a letter to his sister Amelia in which he wrote, “If I had a thousand pounds China should have it- if I had a thousand lives, China should have them. No! Not China, but Christ. Can we do too much for Him? Can we do enough for such a precious Saviour?”
Paul said to the Corinthians, “we put up with anything rather than hinder the gospel of Christ.”
In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, because we become a Jew to the Jew and a Greek to the Greek that by God’s grace they may be saved.
Oneness in Christ
Oneness is possible because in Christ there is no separation of Jew nor Greek, Slave nor free, male nor female.
In closing
As I sat in my cozy little study last night, the door bell rang and Dylan came to say a lady was needing to speak to me. When I got to the door a lady from the neighbourhood in her fifties stood there sobbing. She said, “pastoor, please can you help me. My sister just phoned to say my 14 year old son was shot dead” Please can you take me to her, to the place my son was?”
Being human, I had all the suspicions run through my head. Is she drunk? Is this some kind of scam?
Then the thought came, “Would you hesitate this long if it were the lady from that house instead of that that house?”
The answer was “No”
Then the realisation came, “When we are in Christ, there is no Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. There is only a person in need.