Sinners Made Saints — Christ has set us free ... to be like him

Text: 1 Corinthians 6:12-20

Theme: Christ does not set us free so that we can do whatever we want to do; Christ sets us free so that we can do whatever God wants us to do.

Date: 09/12/2021 Title: 1_Corinthinas_11 ID: NT07-06

Americans love slogans. Marketing companies are paid lots of money to create catchy slogans that will lodge in our brains. They’re normally short and punchy. Over the years, some have been quite good:

Nike – “Just Do It”

Disney – “The Happiest Place on Earth”

Kentucky Fried Chicken — “Finger-Lickin' Good”

Burger King — “Have it Your Way”

Energizer — “It Keeps Going and Going and Going"

State Farm — “Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is There”

Wendy’s — “Where’s the Beef?”

Maxwell House Coffee — “Good to the last drop.” Sometimes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Maxwell House has been using that same slogan for just over 100 years!

And, of course, we have political slogans, and because word’s mean things, the side that comes up with the catchiest slogan often has a leg up in the culture war. "My body, my choice" verses "It’s a child, Not a choice." More recently, we have "Black Lives Matter" verses "Blue Lives Matter" and even “All lives matter.”

Slogans are nothing new. We actually find several being used by some of the believers in the Church at Corinth to defend their libertine ways. The first is found in 1 Corinthians 6:12 when Paul quotes a slogan going around the church, “All things are lawful for me.” Paul mentions this slogan four times in this letter, so it must have been pretty popular. He also quotes a second one in 1 Corinthians 6:13, “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food.” OK, so they’re not as “catchy” as some of our more memorable modern slogans, but these are some of the “culture-war” slogans of his day that Paul has to deal with. Like the slogans of our day, the slogans in the Corinthian Church were meant to distill complex truth into a memorable saying.

I. CORINTHIAN’S SLOGAN — All Things Are Lawful for Me

““All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.” (1 Corinthians 6:12, ESV)

1. Paul quotes a slogan that had evidently become very popular within the church at Corinth

a. it was so popular that he refers to it four times

b. it was a saying used by some members in the church to justify a variety of sinful activities

1) some of these sinful behaviors are referred to in vs. 9-10; sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, homosexuality, greed, drunkenness, reviling, and swindling

2) it’s hard to imagine a congregation putting up with such behavior let alone celebrating it, but that’s exactly what is going on in the church at Corinth

2. they’ve accepted Paul’s preaching of their new found freedom in Christ, but they’ve taken it too far

A. CORINTH’S ANTINOMIANISM

1. Corinth had an antinomian streak among its members that resulted in a gross distortion of the Christian life

a. antinomianism comes from the Greek anti meaning against and nomas meaning law ... so antinomianism means against law

b. it is the antithesis of legalism

1) throughout the history of the Church antinomians have rejected any outward, moral, religious or social norms

2. to them the good life flows from the inner working of the Holy Spirit

a. indeed, believers are to “walk in the Spirit” and if we do we will not “fulfill the lust of the flesh”

b. in its extreme, however, antinomianism rejects any notion of obedience to Biblical commands as legalistic and moves into licentiousness — an unrestrained indulgence in sensual pleasure

3. in Corinth all things are lawful for me had turned into a carnal hedonism with believers living anyway they wanted and still claiming to be Christians

a. they had come to believe that sins of the flesh had no real effect on their relationship with God

b. they did not understand that their freedom in Christ did not set them free to do whatever they wanted

c. Christ sets us free so that we are able to do what God wants us to do

B. MODERN ANTINOMIANISM

ILLUS. There has always been an antinomian streak to be found on the fringes of Christianity. In the 2nd through 4th centuries there existed a Christian sect in North Africa called The Adamites. They wore no clothing during their religious services. The Church Father, Augustine, wrote of their practices, saying, “They called their church "Paradise", claiming that its members were re-established in Adam and Eve's state of original innocence. Accordingly, they practiced "holy nudism", rejected the concept of marriage as foreign to Eden, saying it would never have existed but for sin, and lived in absolute lawlessness, holding that, whatever they did, their actions could be neither good nor bad.”

There were periodic revivals of the group in 13th century Netherlands, and 15th century Bohemia.

You’d like to think this kind of idiocy doesn’t exist among Christians any longer, but just this summer, Angela Dela Cruz and her husband Stephen launched a church plant in downtown San Diego. It’s called Living Faith Church and she’s the pastor of the Church. She’s also a Porn Star and makes porn movies ... directed by her husband, who is also listed as a pastor of the church. Their website advertises it as “a church for sinners by sinners.” It claims to be “the most non-judgmental church around.” In a May Instagram post Angela credited God for helping her separate her identity as a pastor from her porn star work. Folks, ya can’t make this stuff up! They’d fit right in to the church at Corinth

1. within Evangelical Christianity there is a subtle form of antinomianism called Free Grace Theology or the Free Grace Movement

a. now think about that for a moment ... as Baptists how do we argue against free grace?

1) grace is free; it is absolutely free, and all that is required to receive it is faith, right?

ILLUS. How many times have you heard me say that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to the Scriptures alone, to the glory of God alone? I am a theological child of the Reformation and what our Catholic friends call an obstinate Protestant.

b. Free Grace Movement advocates believe that good works do not merit salvation, do not maintain salvation, and do not prove salvation

“yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.” (Galatians 2:16, ESV)

1) OK, so far so good ... grace as the free gift of God is part of the warp-and-woof or who we are

ILLUS. “Warp-and-woof” is an idiom that refers to the underlying structure or foundation of something. It’s a saying that comes from the fabric industry and refers to the making of cloth. The warp are the threads that run lengthwise and the woof are the threads that run across and make up the fabric.

2) grace as the free gift of God is in the Spiritual DNA of every convictionial Baptist

2. the issue (and this is why I say the problem with the Free Grace Movement is subtle), is that their theology separates the salvation of Christ, from the Lordship of Christ

a. all that matters is that a person makes a profession of faith in Christ — if you do, you’re a Christian regardless of how you live

b. then, if a believer wants to respond further to the “call to follow” Jesus, he then becomes a disciple and undergoes sanctification

3. do you hear the problem with that?

a. it makes the Gospel proclamation a call to buy fire insurance and not a call to follow Jesus as Savior and Lord

1) the problem with an uncritical acceptance of Free Grace Theology is that it minimizes biblical repentance — an internal resolve to forsake sin, and biblical sanctification — the believer’s responsibility to grow in the faith and practice holiness

ILLUS. It’s a pernicious, soul-damning, Christ-dishonoring theology that too many preachers — including too many Baptist pastors — are preaching. The result is a church roll full of professing believers who haven’t darkened the doors of the sanctuary in thirty years, who’ve not given a dime in support of the church or missions, haven’t read their Bible in only God knows when, who live thoroughly secular lives, but insist that they are a “Christian” because they went forward in Church when they were ten and “gave their heart to Jesus.”

2) no ... that’s not biblical Christianity ... it’s a pastor manipulating children so the annual church report looks good

b. the grace we receive from God, by Christ and through the Spirit requires faith AND repentance and if both are real there will be a love for Jesus, and a love for his Bride, the Church, a hatred of sin in our lives, and a longing to grow in one’s faith

c. faith and repentance are like two sides of the same coin, or better — two perspectives on the same conversion event, with repentance being a turning from sin and faith being a turning to Christ

d. in short, we can’t preach the full gospel without preaching repentance

3. the slogan of our era, It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission is the stepchild of All things are lawful for me

a. neither are biblical, and both actually turn our freedom in Christ on its head

C. PAUL’S ANTI-ANTINOMIANISM ARGUMENT

1. in vs. 1-11 of chapter 6 Paul bluntly refutes the claim of the Corinthians “I can live any way I good and well please and still call myself a Christian”

“Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: ... ” (1 Corinthians 6:9, ESV)

a. don’t deceive yourself into believing that grace allows you to live any way you want; to do anything you want; to sin any way you desire

2. Paul was blunt about this because Jesus was clear about this

“Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him. ... , 23 “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” (John 14:21, 23, ESV)

3. Paul, in a sense, concedes that there is an element of truth to the slogan the Corinthians are appealing to

a. Paul repeatedly referred to the believer’s freedom in Christ

“For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Galatians 5:1, ESV)

“Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” (2 Corinthians 3:17, ESV)

“For the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:2, ESV)

1) and the list of verses where Paul declares the sinner’s freedom in Christ could go on and on

4. certainly faith in Christ must not be confused with obedience to a long list of religious “dos” and “don’t”

a. that had become the core of Jewish faith and Paul the Apostle would not saddle the Gentiles with a Law that even the Jews could not fully keep

b. Paul does not want to be bound to the Law or Religious Ritual and neither does he want his converts bound to the law

c. but freedom in Christ must not, cannot be an excuse for the flesh

5. Paul’s response to the Corinthian slogan is two-fold

a. 1st he tells the Corinthians, but not all things are helpful

1) some translations say, but not all things are beneficial, or but not all things are expedient

2) whatever liberties believers have, (and we do have them) choices must be carefully evaluated as to their spiritual benefit

3) many practices, though lawful for Christians, will have detrimental effects on the believer’s walk with Christ, on the lives of others, or on the church

4) this consideration must be brought to bear any time Christians contemplate a course of action

b. 2nd, he tells the Corinthians I will not be dominated by anything

1) this flows right out of the clause not all things are helpful because the Apostle understands that there are some behaviors, while not necessarily sinful in themselves, can become habit forming or even addictive which at that point they become sinful

ILLUS. One of the Christian pod casts I listen to is The World and Everything in It produced by World Magazine. Last week one of the segments was on a drug program in Louisiana that helps users get off drugs and stay out of prison. One of the women they talked to told how, after her very first hit of methamphetamine, she was addicted.

2) Paul’s heart desire is to be dominated by Christ alone and to that end he will discipline himself and deny himself and die to self in order to live fully in Christ

3) this is the meaning behind his most famous line from the Letter to the Galatians

“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2:20, ESV)

D. PAUL’S ACCOUNTABILITY ARGUMENT

1. one of the issues with the Free Grace Movement is that many adherents of it see their freedom as so absolute that they believe themselves free from being like Christ

a. Paul will counter the antinomian argument of his day and ours by reminding the Corinthians that they are accountable to Christ

2. he deals with a second slogan that was as equally popular as the first ... “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”

a. this is not so much a “second slogan” within the Church at Corinth, but a defense of their immoral lifestyle

1) what they are implying is that as the stomach was made for food and food was made for the stomach, that the body was made for sex and sex was made for the body

b. if we had to update this slogan to a 21st century expression it would be “It if feels good; do it”

1) let’s face it, in our thoroughly secularized culture, where all behavior has been relegated to how does this make me feel? this slogan is our society’s central dogma

c. Paul is going to turn this around and tell them, “No. If you are a professing Christian, the body is ... for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.”

d. the Apostle is reminding them that some things are temporal, and lack permanence and therefore should not become dominate in the believer’s life

3. at the end of vs. 13 Paul reminds the Corinthians of the central tenant of the Christian faith ... Christians are one with Christ, and Christ indwells us, his church, (the Lord for the body) and makes us all one in him

“But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.” (1 Corinthians 6:17, ESV)

a. this is not some esoteric spiritual truth, but a literal truth — Christ actually indwells us by the Spirit

b. therefore, whatever we do with our physical body, Christ is right there participating in it with us

1) now that’s a theological thought that’ll thoroughly blow your mind!

2) our physical body’s significance is not just eternal, but immediate and temporal

c. Paul points out a teaching of Christianity that we have tended to forget or ignored in a thoroughly sexualized culture — casual sex is never as casual as it may seem

d. this is why Paul writes in vs. 13 that the body is not meant for sexual immorality

e. it’s why Paul writes in vs. 16 and 18 ...

“Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.”” (1 Corinthians 6:16, ESV)

“Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body.” (1 Corinthians 6:18, ESV)

4. from a biblical perspective, even sexual relations outside the bonds of marriage create a union of flesh and spirit between the participants

a. sex is never “just sex”

1) it is a biological function, but it’s not merely a biological function

a) it’s God’s intended way to bond a man and a women together emotionally, mentally, and spiritually

2) because a believer’s flesh is united to Christ, when a believer becomes one flesh with another, he or she sexually joins Christ to that person

b. this does not compromise Christ’s holiness, but it certainly compromise our holiness

5. sexual sin, therefore, in any of it’s manifestations is unlike almost any other sin a believer can commit

II. PAUL’S SLOGAN — You Are Not Your Own

“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own,” (1 Corinthians 6:19, ESV)

1. Paul is going to end this section on sexual immorality in all it’s various hues and colors with his own slogan — Christian ... you are not your own

2. divest yourself of the thought that your freedom in Christ allows you to live any way I want, and still claim that you are a Christian

A. WE ARE THE TEMPLE OF GOD’S HOLY SPIRIT

ILLUS. In Paul’s day everyone knew where their gods lived. If you were to ask a pagan, “Where does Zeus live?” that pagan would point you to a temple in the Forum of his city. If you were to ask a Corinthianite “Where does Aphrodite live?” they would have pointed to the acropolis overlooking the city and say, “Up there. That’s where the goddess of love lives.” Temples were those places in the ancient world where heaven and earth, where the eternal and the temporal, where the supernatural and the natural intersected. Temples where “cosmic crossroads” (Tim Keller), where the divine resided, and the presence of the divine was mediated to humans by priests and rituals.

But now think about this; if a pagan were to ask Paul, “Where does your god live?” Paul would have smiled a smile and pointed to himself, and said, “My Christ lives in me. He is my hope and my glory.”

1. that thought was revolutionary in Paul’s day ... it still is

ILLUS. Hindus cannot make the claim “Vishnu lives in me” ... Buddhists cannot make the claim that “Siddhattha Gotama lives in me” ... Muslims would never dare claim, “Allah lives in me” and similarly Jews would never ever say, “Yahweh indwells me” — in fact the Jews of Jesus day had him crucified for saying, “The Father is in me and I am in the Father.”

a. only Christians claim, “Christ lives in me”

b. this makes the Christian believer different than any other religious believer in the world

2. it means that we don’t live good lives so that our God will accept us, but that we live good lives because our God has accepted us in Christ, that He indwells us, and enables us, by His Spirit, to live good lives which brings Him glory

B. CHRIST IN US DEMANDS MORE OF US THAN THE LAW EVER DID

1. the Apostle tells the Corinthians you are not your own — you were bought with a price

a. Jesus is not merely Savior, he is also Lord who has exclusive rights to your life

b. you say, “Pastor. Wait a minute. I’m not sure I like that. That wasn’t fully explained to me when I came to Christ. I don’t think it’s fair that God demands this exclusivity of me.”

1) as I see it, you have one of two choices:

a) 1st, you can repent and confess “Jesus, I repent of my independent willfulness. You are my Lord, and I surrender all that I am to you.” Or

b) 2nd, you can become a reprobate who leaves the church, and leaves the faith to live life as you please

2) there is no third option

c. Christianity is not like joining a club — you cannot exercise your membership as you see fit

2. just a few chapters later in 1 Corinthian 9 the Apostle speaks of the Law of Christ

“To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law.” (1 Corinthians 9:21, ESV)

a. though scholars are divided over what Paul meant when he spoke of the law of Christ, the best option is that the Apostle is looking back at what Jesus told his disciples on the night of the Last Supper

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.” (John 13:34, ESV)

b. Jesus taught that all of God’s commandments, all God’s laws where wrapped up in two simple statements ...

1) love God with all of your heart and soul, and mind, and strength, and ...

2) love your neighbor as yourself, with the later caveat that we love others as we love as Christ loved us

3. Christ does not set us free so that we can do whatever we want to do; Christ sets us free so that we can do whatever God wants us to do

a. and we do so out of a heart of love and gratitude because we have received grace and not because we’re attempting to earn grace

C. GLORIFY GOD WITH YOUR BODY

1. if we accept the truth of the Scriptures: That God in His creative design for His creatures, decreed that sexual relations were the means of reproduction, and fulfillment, and that He declared it “good”, then He has every right to establish the boundaries that control it — and those boundaries bless us

a. God created gender, and sexuality and sex for His glory and our pleasure

ILLUS. Leslie Vernick, a Christian Counselor and author, writes, “We need to begin living at the point where everything, and nothing short of that, is about the glory of God. That is the end for which we were made and, as Christians, that is the end for which we should live.”

2. even in their sexual lives, God’s people are to be different from the world’s people

“You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes.” (Leviticus 18:3, ESV) (He’s referring to their profane sexual practices)

a. for some reason we assume that the world knows how to find joy in sex but that God is clueless about it

1) think about what your thinking when you think that

b. if we really believe that God is the Creator of the cosmos, including the world in which we live, then why is it so difficult for some Christians to understand that God is the creator of gender and sexuality and sexual function?

c. and if God is the creator of gender, sexuality and sexual function, then he has the right to declare “This is how it is best expressed.”

4. if we belong to the Lord, we simply cannot follow the ways of the world in regard to expressing our sexuality

Unfortunately, we live in an era where many professing Christians are following secular trends when it comes to premarital sex, cohabitation, dating, and one’s views of the LGBTQ community and homosexual marriage. Simply put, Christians have surrendered to cultural trends over Scripture when it comes to gender identity, sex, marriage and alternative sexual lifestyles and behaviors.

In these verses Paul sounds a clear note about human sexuality, and the need for believers to be sexually pure — glorify God with your body! In an overtly sexualized culture it will not be easy. It wasn’t easy in Corinth, either, but Paul calls the believers of that congregation to take off the culture and to put on Christ. The Apostle is calling the believers at Corinth — as well as you and I — to be outrageously out of step with the culture when it come to sexual licence we don’t have it.