This is the Way

This morning we will be taking a dive into the first epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians. I recently read through the book of 1 Corinthians and found so many ways in which God spoke to me through His Word. Our texts today, chapters 12 and 13, particularly stuck out to me. One of the most enriching and life-giving features of the Bible is that when we read the same passage again in a different time in our lives, it hits us completely differently. Have you ever looked at notes that you had written down in your Bible or in your notebook and thought to yourself, “Goodness, how in the world did I come to that conclusion?” Or maybe you read the notes and think, “that doesn’t seem significant to me now, but I remember how important it was to me then.”

When reading Scripture today, I can’t help but read things through the lens of my context, and I’m sure the same is true for many of you. Now, it’s important that we do not read our situation into the text, but we must search the text to teach us, mold us, shape us, and tell us what its intended meaning is. When we receive God’s Word, it is for us, yes, but not only for us. The apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth in a spirit of love, but in a tone of discipline. There was much going awry and much turmoil under the “roof” of that church. So the purposes and intentions of Paul’s letter should inform us on how to read the text and apply it to our lives. I want us to take great care together this morning to do it in that order, and not confuse things by reading our lives and applying the text.

That said, I will return to what I meant before on how reading Scripture at different points of life affects our receipt of the truth. Do we not all read through Covid eyes these days? I confess that I do - and not in just the ways that seem to be about fear or the sickness itself, but in how the last 2 years has changed the fabric of togetherness, unity, and interaction.

King Solomon told us in Ecclesiastes 1 that there is nothing new under the sun, and the challenges that we face are also not new - but merely a different set of circumstances that precipitated them.

This brings me to our first question I’d like us to answer together today:

Who are we?

Let’s go into 1 Corinthians 12 and see what the Apostle Paul wanted us to know.

1 Corinthians 12:12–14 ESV

12 For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. 13 For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. 14 For the body does not consist of one member but of many.

1 Corinthians 12:26–27 ESV

26 If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together. 27 Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

These few verses here should center us back to our fundamental roles as individuals within the context of the whole. We are responsible for our own actions, yet also accountable to the actions of those around us in the community of faith.

When we see ourselves as members of a body, it changes our perception of the impact that our life, our service, our attitude, and even our sin can make on those around us. How often have you come into contact with someone who has sworn off Christians altogether because of bad experiences or because of perceived hypocrisy? How can we blame them? Our actions, positively or negatively, impact how the Body of Christ is received all around the world. While I may be a still committed follower of Jesus, I’m sure that my mistakes and habits have negatively impacted how others so not just my faith but the faith of the Church as a whole.

So we are trying to answer the question Who are we? and it’s right there in verse 27.

We are the embodiment of Christ

The Body here is a two fold meaning. It’s a word picture painted for us by the Apostle Paul, yes, where he describes us as different parts of the body, symbolizing the different gifts, strengths, interests, and abilities given to each of us. He really hits that point home in verses 28-30, asking if everyone can do everything. And of course, not everyone is.

But the embodiment of Christ in this age is the working out, by the power of the Holy Spirit (Whom Jesus sent at Pentecost), of all of these attributes. Your service to the Lord is in and of itself a witness to the work of Christ in you and through you. It’s being the hands, the feet, maybe even the mouthpiece for God in your context.

J. John’s description of being a Pastor

I work for a global enterprise

We have got outlets in nearly every country in the world

We have got hospitals, hospices, homeless shelters, and feeding programs.

We do marriage work, orphanages, educational programs, and even funerals.

We do all sorts of justice and reconciliation work.

Basically, our enterprise looks after people from birth to death, dealing with the area of behavioral alteration.

If we are a follower of Christ, we are part of the global enterprise that stretches even beyond the globe and into the rich history of our faith family.

Where have we gone wrong?

Too often the story about us, the Church, is that we have made more mistakes and hurt more people than we have helped. Let’s look at 1 Corinthians 13 now to shed some light on where they might have gone wrong and how we may have made the same mistakes.

1 Corinthians 13:1–3 ESV

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Let’s look back at verse 1: Paul is sharing with us the trap of power and influence. Have you ever turned on a tv and heard a smooth talking salesman or a sharp dressed pastor, one who said what you needed for motivation and made you feel good about the future? I know I have, too many times to count. Paul here in verse 1 is says that is worthless without the foundation of LOVE. What is Love? (Baby don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more) It’s desiring the best for someone and acting on it.

Paul continues in verse 2 with power: something that the Church is often accused (and sometimes rightly) of seeking. While the postmodern world may tell us that everything is about power and the shifting of it, the biblical Christian tradition would inform us and remind us that that is simply not true. The Lord Jesus Christ embodied the beauty of love as power, but not power for gain, but power for the sake of love and beauty. Paul is reminding us here that no matter how big your power is or how good you are at what you do, love is foundational for it to mean anything in eternity. Love that comes only from God Himself as we are reminded in 1 John 4.

The answer I belive

We love to live instead of live to love.

All I mean in this tongue twister is that every misstep and every sin as individuals and as the Body comes from our sin of self. We love to live and we constantly seek after ways to entertain, appease, distract, and comfort ourselves over the righteous goal of honoring God through obedience and seeking to expand His kingdom with our lives. We lack the compassion and the character to look at the circumstances of others and seek to understand them. We seek to reinforce our leanings, biases, and personal preferences and forsake the relationships built on a mutual love for one another and the gospel. We are looking for influence, power, and praise over gospel-centered love.

So this leads us to our final question today:

What is the way forward for us?

Once again, we ask the question that we allow the Scriptures to answer. Let’s pick it back up in verse 4 of chapter 13.

1 Corinthians 13:4–7 ESV

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Does anyone else roll their eyes at a wedding when they hear these verses? I confess that I do, but that’s only because I cringe at the clichés most of the time. These 4 famous verses are almost exclusively heard at wedding ceremonies, but if we take a moment to consider that the bond of marriage (of two people - one man and one woman - becoming one and the love required to maintain that bond) is not that dissimilar to the bond of the body of Christ, different people united to one case as the picture of the gospel for the world to see.

verse 4

verse 5

verse 6

Verse 7 is the summary and the answer to our final question: What is the Way forward for us?

This is the Way:

Bear all things

Hold fast to what is true and to one another

Jesus already bore our sins

Believe all things

Believe in Jesus Christ for the salvation from your sins!

Hope all things

Hope rooted in Christ is a hope that will never leave you or fail

Jesus’s resurrection is our hope

Endure all things

Endure together what you could not endure alone - because of the love that is in you