Catfish, Gentiles and the Gospel

Introduction

Opening Story: Several years ago a slang term entered into the pages of our cultural lexicon: catfish. This is an expression used of a person on the internet or social media who assumes the identity of another in order to deceive. Thought you were talking to a girl, actually a guy; guy but really a girl. A certain ethnicity…when you found out they were not who they were projecting themselves to be the level of hurt and betrayal ran so deep.

Point: Paul is writing the Corinthians because he’s worried they are being a catfish. Mark Dever said the church exists to mirror the reflection of God to the world. They look nowhere like God. Divided, immoral, fighting over what Christians were or were not allowed to do, chaotic worship service and some were saying the resurrection of Jesus was just not that important. All of this leads to the conclusion they look nothing like who they were supposed to be.

Apply to today. That’s where we are now. Divided as ever. Dad quick reference. As bad as we’ve seen it…if I were not a Christian and my only exposure to the gospel was the way so called Christians interacted with each other on social media I would not become one…and of course the hurt that goes along with that.

The Cure: The Gospel. So how does Paul deal with this? As we learned last week, Paul’s cure in dealing with EACH of these problems is to call out the problem and to apply the gospel to each of them. This is how we are to deal with the brokenness in our lives- apply the gospel to every inch.

Illustration: Cod liver oil. Mom applied this one thing to everything. headache- cod liver oil…toothache…stomach ache…covid...mom’s medicine cabinet was not complicated…disclaimer about therapy.

(One of the crucial areas Paul applies the gospel to in our text is in the area of culture. Look at I Corinthians 1:22-23. Paul is going to show us how the gospel is to intersect with culture, and we are going to learn some really important things.)

The Gospel and Culture- I Corinthians 1:22-23

1 Corinthians 1:22–23 ESV

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,

Explanation: When Paul plants a church in the book of Acts he always asks two questions: where is the synagogue, because he wants to preach to the Jews, and where do the Gentiles hang out? Paul does this because he wants to reach the whole city with the gospel of Christ. Romans 1:16. He doesn’t want to reach just part of the city, but he’s driven by gospel greed. He does this with Corinth…Acts 18:4, “…[Paul] tried to persuade Jews and Greeks”. these two groups come to know Jesus and a multiethnic church is formed, that’s the power of the gospel!

Application: our desire to be a multiethnic church. Not diversity for the sake of diversity. Demographics of the Triangle. We just want this church to look like our mission field.

How are these two groups who hate each other able to come together? Paul says its the folly of the cross..it’s the gospel:

The problem of sin and its effects, kills our relationships with God and others. Adam and Eve hiding both from God and each other.

Jesus the only answer…dies on the cross.

Now we are made right with God and others through grace, and the Christian life is now called to live that out.

Scholarship Illustration. I had a need I could not meet. The school in its justice could not just give me a freebie. Someone stepped in with resources I did not have. I accepted. And enjoyed a great relationship with the school and my classmates. This scholarship was not a merit based one. That’s the gospel.

The gospel doesn’t take root in sterile environments, but is embodied in culture. Leslie Newbegin quote: “There can never be a culture free gospel. Yet the gospel, which is from the beginning to the end embodied in culturally conditioned forms, calls into question all cultures, including the one in which it was originally embodied”. Point: As a carrier of the gospel, I cannot disembody the gospel from my culture, and you as a receiver of the gospel can not disembody it from the gospel. THERE’S A FRICTION, A TENSION AMONG THIS MULTIETHNIC COMMUNITY COMPOSED OF JEWS AND GENTILES. WE CATCH GLIMPSES OF IT IN CHAPTER 8 AS PAUL DEALS WITH FOOD. SOME FEEL FREE, SOME DO NOT. WHY DOES PAUL DEAL WITH FOOD? ISSUE OF CULTURE. CLASH OF CULTURES.

POINT: WHEREVER YOU HAVE DIFFERENT CULTURES/ETHNICITIES THERE WILL BE A TENSION. I FELT IT HERE. GOT HERE THREE DAYS BEFORE GEORGE FLOYD. TENSION. NOT SAYING ENOUGH, SAYING TOO MUCH.

n other words, Paul understands two very important things about the gospel and culture:

The Gospel Must Contextualize to Culture, and the Gospel Must Confront Culture. What does this look like?

Memphis. Karl Barth- bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other hand. Old South city, where most of the people had grown up in church. Religious. Elder brother. I had to learn to preach the gospel to the elder brother. Contextualization said I could make some assumptions…Acts 2. they had a high biblical iq. But I had to confront their religion. I had to confront their racism. That’s what the gospel does, it contextualizes and confronts.

Bay area. So not Memphis. HIghly intellectual. MIT graduates. PH.D’s galore. Wanted to know how smart you were. Changed my preaching. Acts 17. Altar to an unknown god. Challenge their success idols. Palo Alto one of the highest rates of child suicides. Average home multiple masters. Challenge this idol. This is what the gospel does.

Marginalized. Contextualization. Learned pretty quick that justice is an apologetic. Cornel West- justice is what love looks like in public. I must speak to their poverty. Confront victimhood, or the demonization of affluent/whites

Application. What does this mean for us? I Corinthians 9:19-23. Gospel drives “I have become,” empathy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus. When something is being voiced by another cultural group, we stop and listen, and posture ourselves as learners. Beauty of the multiethnic church is it challenges our biases. But, the gospel should also call us to challenge the idols of our culture.

Foolishness to the Gentiles- I Corinthians 1:23b

1 Corinthians 1:23b ESV

but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,

Explanation: Historical context of Corinth. Busy thoroughfare, made for the perfect place for the Greek sophists. It was the Speakers Corner of its day. Seek wisdom. Wisdom originally meant skillful living. but by the time Paul writes it means a certain kind of Greek speaker who was witty, crafty with words and could dazzle an audience with his knowledge and how he said something. Greeks were masters of rhetoric: logos, ethos and pathos. It’s here where we see Paul using the gospel to confront their culture in three ways:

Greeks were fixated on celebrity speakers, real names. The gospel is the opposite. Study the bible it is not obsessed with the big, but with the little. I Corinthians 1:26-27. Examples of the little people theme: Israel is called the dusty one’s by the Egyptians, deemed to be unimportant, yet God uses them to take down mighty Egypt. Ruth is a starving immigrant on the brink of death, but she becomes the grandmother of David. David is the last one picked, deemed too insignificant by his father to even bring out. Mary is from a podunk town named Nazareth, yet she is the one to birth the Messiah. Jesus is a minority Jew, whose parents were poor and he’s a carpenter who is homeless. Why? So God would get the glory and not us. See how that’s opposite. Aluminum cans being crushed analogy.

Apatheia. Greeks thought it was appalling for a God to feel. The gospel says boy does God feel. He so loved the world. God demonstrated his love towards us.

Greeks said God was detached. Incarnation. God was so attached he took on flesh and dwelt among us.

to the Greeks it was moronic/folly/absurd that God would die on a cross. Gospel says its no gospel without a cross. Colossians 2:13-15. Expunge Illustration.

Tyler Johnson Illustration of his father coming to faith. The foolishness of the gospel! A clown holding a Romans 10:9-10 sign.