1 Corinthians 1:4-9 - Grace In The Waiting

Introduction

This morning marks the first Sunday in the season of Advent, the season that leads us up to the celebration of Jesus’ birth on Christmas. The word “advent” means “approach” or “arrival”—so these weeks leading up to Christmas are a good time for us to meditate on what the First Advent—the first arrival—of Jesus meant for our salvation, even as we look forward to His Second Advent—His Second Coming—will mean for our deliverance from this present evil age.

And this leads us to one of the unexpected gifts that God has given us in 2020—these last eleven months of turmoil and upheaval and open, high-handed rebellion against God that we are witnessing all around us has sharpened our hunger for Christ’s return, hasn’t it? When things are going great and there’s plenty of money in the bank and a promotion in store at work and everyone’s healthy and able to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Jesus’ Second Advent— His Second Coming—doesn’t really take up much of our thoughts or affections as it does when all of those things are being shaken to the ground around us! So this Advent season is one for us to really lean into what we read at the end of Revelation:

Revelation 22:20 ESV

20 He who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!

Our passage today comes at the beginning of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth. Paul addresses the church as they are” wait[ing] for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ” (v. 7b), and says that he “gives thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus”. Do you see the parallel there? The Corinthians were waiting for the revealing of Christ in the grace that was given to them in Christ. So that is what I want us to see from these verses today:

We can wait for the REVEALING of the DAY of Christ because we are PARTAKERS of the GRACE of Christ.

Paul’s opening greeting here in these verses would have been an absolute bombshell to the church in Corinth. Because whatever they might have been expecting from Paul’s letter, it’s likely they weren’t expecting this kind of greeting. Because when you look at the track record of the church in Corinth, you find that they were a deeply flawed and messed-up congregation. (As one commentator put it, we often speak of our desire to be a “New Testament church”—but when we actually look at the problems and errors and sins that plagued the churches in the New Testament we might not be so eager!)

Just to give you an example of a few of the issues the church in Corinth was struggling with:

They were fighting and arguing with each other over which teacher they would follow—Paul, Apollos, Peter, Jesus (1 Cor. 1:12ff).

They were constantly taking each other to court, suing each other over trivial matters (1 Cor. 6:1-8).

They were incorporating elaborate feasts into their celebration of the Lord’s Supper, to the point where people were getting drunk and rowdy during Communion, with some people not even getting a chance to participate at all (1 Cor. 11:17-22).

And one of the most grievous of all errors, there was a member of their church who was openly carrying on a sexual affair with his own step-mother—even the non-Christians outside the church were horrified that they were allowing something like this, but they were actually proud of how “affirming” and “welcoming” and “non-judgmental” they were about it (1 Cor. 5:1-2).

Throughout the course of this letter, Paul had to sharply reprimand the Corinthian church for their behavior, saying for example in 1 Corinthians 3:1 that he couldn’t even address them as “spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ”. They were an infantile, selfish, immoral, contentious and worldly bunch of people whose communion services turned into drunken brawls and who were proud of their broad-minded acceptance of sexual perversion that shocked their non-Christian neighbors.

Now, if you were going to write a letter to a church like that, how would you start it off? Something like, “Dear meatheads…”, right? But look again at how Paul addresses this sinful, arrogant, divisive church:

1 Corinthians 1:4–9 ESV

4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, 5 that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge— 6 even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you— 7 so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, 8 who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

Does that not blow your mind? But that’s what the grace of God always does, isn’t it? The grace of God given us in Christ Jesus overshadows ALL of the sins and failures and immaturities and struggles that we fight with in our Christian lives. Paul starts of this letter to the First Church of the Hot Mess of Corinth with the words “I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God given to you in Christ Jesus!” Beyond everything else that was true of the church at Corinth—beyond their immorality, their arrogance, their fights and dissipation and divisions, they were first and foremost partakers of the grace of God in Jesus!

Of course that didn’t mean that there weren’t going to be some very harsh rebukes and stern corrections in this letter. (In fact, in 2 Corinthians Paul tells the church how heartbroken he was at having to rebuke them so strongly). But all of those rebukes and warnings and stern discipline over their sin was set into the context of these verses—that the grace of God that the Corinthian believers had been given would keep them until the Day of Jesus’ Second Advent.

So we find in these verses that if we are partakers in the grace of Christ, we can wait for the revealing of the Day of Christ. We see in verses 4-5 that

I. We have been ENRICHED by His grace (1 Cor. 1:4-5)

Verse 5 says that the grace the Corinthians received in Christ has enriched them:

1 Corinthians 1:5 ESV

5 that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge—

Paul says that they had been enriched in every way—the word translated “enriched” is the same word that is used to describe a transfer of wealth from one person to another. The church has been given a great treasure “in Him”—that is, in Christ. In Jesus they have a great treasure—first, they have been enriched with

Gracious SPEECH in Christ (cp. Ephesians 6:19; 1 Peter 4:11)

The grace of God they had received in Jesus meant that even though they had been tearing each other apart with their words, and even though by their actions they had been tearing down the reputation of Christ and the Gospel, their divisive and graceless speech did not in fact nullify the gifts they had been given! Paul would rebuke them for their fighting and arguing, but he wanted them to remember that God really had given them the ability to “speak as it were the oracles of God” (1 Peter 4:11), that He really could use their mouths to “boldly proclaim the mystery of the Gospel” (Eph. 6:19).

They were enriched in Christ for gracious speech, and they were enriched for

Gracious KNOWLEDGE of Christ (Philippians 3:8-11)

Here again, the Corinthian believers were “weaponizing” their knowledge about Christ—fighting and arguing in factions about which Apostle to follow, or one hundred and one reasons why it’s OK to eat food sacrificed to idols (or not!) Paul will have to call them out on the way their knowledge was “puffing them up” (1 Cor. 8:1), but here he reminds them that the grace of God they received does not just give them knowledge about Jesus—it allows them to really know Him personally!

For the Apostle Paul—who had spent so much of his early life being puffed up with knowledge—this great promise that he could know Jesus personally was the greatest aim of his life—as he writes in Philippians 3:

Philippians 3:8–11 ESV

8 Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ 9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith— 10 that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, 11 that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

The great grace of God that enriched the Corinthian believers was that they could know Jesus by participating in His death and resurrection—first of all in their salvation, in which they died with Christ to sin and were raised with Him to justification and freedom from sin’s penalty and power, but they also had been given the privilege of suffering as He did for the sake of sacrificial love.

They could share in Jesus’ sufferings by laying down their lives for the sake of others the way He did—taking on someone else’s anxiety and giving them their peace, stepping into someone else’s mess in order to offer them grace. And when they took on someone else’s pain and suffering in order to minister to them, they would know Jesus on a whole new level.

One of the veteran services guys I used to work with talked about the bond he and his fellow combat vets shared— “Same mud, same blood”. That’s the way the grace of God enriches your knowledge of Jesus—when you give yourself for the sake of others the way He did, when you have bled for those you love, when you have gotten down into the mud of their lives in order to minister grace to them, you will have a bond with Jesus that goes far beyond just knowing the “facts” about Him to knowing Him in a way that goes deeper than any other human relationship you will ever have!

We can wait for the revealing of the Day of Christ because we are partakers of the grace of Christ. We have been enriched by His grace, and verses 6-7 of 1 Corinthians 1 tells us that

II. We are EQUIPPED by His grace (1 Cor. 1:6-7)

Look at those verses with me

1 Corinthians 1:6–7 ESV

6 even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you— 7 so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ,

Verse 6 says that “the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you”—Paul says that even though the church was falling apart in so many ways, there was real evidence that they had heard and believed the Gospel! They weren’t just “playing church”, they weren’t a false church in which there was no true faith—they had really experienced the New Birth of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ. They had

Gracious ASSURANCE of SALVATION

in Christ. In the midst of all their struggles with sin and division and pride and immorality, they could rest in the sure knowledge that they really did belong to Christ! Even though their grasp of Him faltered, even though they felt like they lost more battles with sin than they won, what mattered was not their grasp on Christ but His grasp on them! All of the rebukes and corrections that were coming in this letter could not erase their fundamental identity in Christ—the Apostle Paul had seen the reality of their faith in Christ, and so he could speak to them as “people of the flesh” in 1 Corinthians 3:1, as “infants in Christ”—but the important thing was that they were in Christ!

The Corinthian Christians were partakers of the grace of God in Christ—they had assurance of their salvation, and they had been given

Gracious GIFTS for MINISTRY (1 Cor. 12:7ff)

We read in 1 Corinthians 12 that the Corinthian church had been given “the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7). Gifts of speaking wisdom, gifts of faith, gifts of healing, prophecy, miracles, speaking in tongues and interpreting them:

1 Corinthians 12:11 ESV

11 All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually as he wills.

The Corinthian church had been equipped with some of the most miraculous, supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit’s power that any church ever saw—this was God’s gift to them in the early years of Christianity, to enable the church to grow and flourish and minister before the New Testament was completed. Once God’s voice had been fully spoken through the completed New Testament Scriptures the need for those miraculous “sign-gifts” no longer applied. The church in Corinth had been gifted with these powerful, glorious gifts from the Holy Spirit “for the common good”—for building up the church. But they were using those gifts instead to tear each other down, to compete and strive with one another over who had the most spectacular gift, or which gift was more important. And even though Paul will spend chapters 12 through 14 of 1 Corinthians correcting and disciplining their abuse of those gifts, he still affirms here in Chapter 1 that the grace of God they had been given ensured that they were not lacking in any gift that they needed for the sake of the church.

The grace of God enriches us in all speech in Christ and knowledge of Christ, the grace of God equips us to minister and assures us of the reality of our salvation, and the grace of God means that

III. We will be ESTABLISHED by His grace (1 Cor. 1:8-9)

As the church in Corinth looked ahead to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, they had the assurance that Jesus Himself would sustain them:

1 Corinthians 1:8 ESV

8 who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Think about that promise from the standpoint of the church in Corinth—that the grace of God would sustain them so that they would be guiltless in the Day of Christ! Despite all of their fighting, all of their immorality, all of their divisions and lawsuits and prideful striving and drunkenness and bitter divisiveness, the grace that they had been given in Jesus Christ meant that they had

Grace to stand GUILTLESS before His JUDGMENT (2 Thess. 1:7-10)

Paul describes the Second Coming—the Second Advent— of Jesus in his second letter to the church in Thessalonica:

2 Thessalonians 1:7–10 ESV

7 and to grant relief to you who are afflicted as well as to us, when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels 8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might, 10 when he comes on that day to be glorified in his saints, and to be marveled at among all who have believed, because our testimony to you was believed.

The Second Advent of Jesus Christ will not be like the First—in His First Advent, Jesus came as a baby in a manger, attended by shepherds and stable animals. He came to declare the arrival of the Kingdom of God, and that everyone who would repent could be forgiven of their sin and given His own righteousness, proclaiming “the favorable year of the LORD” to all who would believe.

But in His Second Advent, Jesus Christ will come as a conquering King and avenging Judge, attended by His mighty angels—it will not be an Advent celebrated by soft candlelight, but by raging fire. It will not be marked by peace on earth good will toward men but vengeance on those who refuse to acknowledge God and scorn the offer of salvation in the Gospel. It will be a day in which sin will not stand, guilt will be punished, and no excuses or justifications or extenuating circumstances will be entertained.

And for the sinful, divided, immoral, arrogant, embittered and selfish church in Corinth, it will be a Day in which they stand before the Avenging Judge Jesus Christ GUILTLESS! They will stand before Jesus Christ justified and holy and pure and spotless on the Day of Judgment—not because they managed to “clean up their act” before the Day came, not because they managed to pile up enough “good” works to outweigh their “bad” works—but because the grace of God in Jesus Christ to them meant that when Jesus died on that Cross He took all of their sin, all of their shame, all of their fighting and divisions and arrogance and immorality and selfishness upon Himself, and bore the full brunt of the wrath of Almighty God for them!

The grace of God establishes His people by His grace—they have grace to stand guiltless before His judgment, and it promises

Grace to stay ETERNALLY in His FELLOWSHIP (Ephesians 2:14, 16)

The Corinthian Christians’ ability to stand guiltless at the Second Advent of Christ doesn’t come about because of their perfect faithfulness:

1 Corinthians 1:9 ESV

9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

It is the faithfulness of God to them that calls them into the righteousness and purity of fellowship with Christ—even though Paul was going to have to rebuke them for the ways they had broken fellowship with each other because of their arguments over eating food sacrificed to idols or following Peter instead of Paul or having the gift of tongues versus the gift of healing—the grace of God to them was that they had been called into fellowship with Jesus Christ first—and in Him they could find the strength to form that unity with one another:

Ephesians 2:14 ESV

14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility

Ephesians 2:16 ESV

16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.

The wounds of division, the bitterness of their striving against each other, the jealousies and grudges and “personality conflicts” that set them against each other—the same blood of Christ that washed away the hostility between them and God will wash away every division between each other! And that fellowship that Jesus’ blood purchased for them not only binds them together here in this life, but for all eternity with Him and with each other in Heaven!

Like the church in Corinth, we are waiting for the revealing of the Day of our Lord Jesus Christ. And like the church in Corinth, we are beset all around with divisions, strife, bitterness, anger, immorality and pride—all around us in a culture and a nation Hell-bent on rejecting Christ, and within our own hearts as we battle the sin that still dwells in us and would threaten to destroy our fellowship.

But we are partakers of that same grace of Christ that enriched, equipped and established our brothers and sisters in Corinth all those centuries ago. Church, you can wait for the Second Advent of Christ because you have been enriched in Christ in all speech and all knowledge! You live among a people who have become so adept at “weaponizing” speech that you can actually be prosecuted in a court of law for using the “wrong” pronoun!

And yes, the levels of insanity that you see around you regarding “hate speech” should sharpen your hunger for the appearing of the Day of Christ’s Second Advent—we pray with John “Come quickly, Lord Jesus!”—but take hold of the promise of the grace of God for you here in these verses, that you have been enriched in all speech in Christ, that you can speak into the darkness of this world with the boldness of the Holy Spirit of God that dwells in you, to “open your mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the Gospel” (Eph. 6:19)!

You have been enriched in all speech and knowledge of Christ, Christian—so “speak as it were the oracles of God” to the darkness of this world! You have been equipped by His grace with gracious gifts for ministry to the Body of Christ and to the world outside, and you have been given the most radical, most subversive, most scandalous message that this world will ever hear—that there is true forgiveness, true reconciliation, true elimination of all dividing walls of hostility in the Gospel of Jesus Christ!

This world operates on the fact that there can never be true forgiveness for sin—that there will always be guilt that needs to be worked off somehow. Guilt is the fuel for all of this world’s systems. White people can never stop repenting of racism, Christians can never stop repenting of “homophobia”, rich people can never be free of the guilt of having wealth, sexual offenders can never be free of their past—everywhere you look you see the condemnation and judgment of a world that refuses to acknowledge that there can be forgiveness.

And this is the message that fills your mouth, church, as you wait for the glorious appearing of Christ in His Second Advent—that freedom from guilt really is possible! The blood of Jesus Christ can wash away all of the stains of your past, it really can put to rest hostilities that have simmered for generations, it really can erase the envy and jealousies that devour us, it really can turn an immoral, bitter, divisive, selfish drunkard into a pure, loving, kind, selfless worshipper of God, with no remaining condemnation whatsoever!

Christian, you know it’s true, because you know this grace first hand! You have been enriched in all knowledge of Christ—you know that He forgives completely and utterly and makes you into a new creation where all of that old has passed away and all things have become new! And the grace that you partake in will establish you to stand utterly, totally and completely guiltless in the Day of the Second Advent of Christ—so speak with the riches of grace on your tongue, minister with the gracious gifts of His Spirit, and invite this poor, miserable world to join you as partakers of the grace of your Savior, Jesus Christ!

BENEDICTION

1 Thessalonians 5:23–24 ESV

23 Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 24 He who calls you is faithful; he will surely do it.

QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION:

What are some ways that the world around us uses words as “weapons” against each other? How does the grace of God you have in Christ give you the power to speak differently into the divisiveness and bitterness of our day?

Read 1 Corinthians 12:27-28 and Romans 12:6-8 for a description of some of the gifts God has given the church “for the common good”. Consider from these passages how has God equipped you to serve your brothers and sisters in Christ. How can you put the gifts you have to work for the sake of our fellowship this week?

In what ways have you seen the world around you use guilt to control people (for example, the phenomenon of “cancel culture”, where people are shamed and condemned for their words or ideas.) How does the grace of God in the Gospel break the power of guilt in our lives?