Union with Christ - Horizontal Obligation

This morning we will continue our reading through Mark. This morning, chapter 4, starting at verse 21. And he said to them, Is a lamp brought in to be put under a basket, or under a bed, and not on a stand? And for nothing is hidden except to be made manifest, nor is anything secret except to come to light. If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear. And he said to them, pay attention to what you hear.

With the measure you use, it will be measured to you, and still more will be added to you. For to the one who has, more will be given. And for the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away. Let's go to prayer. Heavenly Father, thank you for this time we've had in singing to you and worship. As we prepare to hear your word, God, I please ask that you would be with us in this room.

I said you would be with those parts of us that maybe have a hard time concentrating and thinking about other things. Be in those parts of us that we find to be weak at this time and bolster us. God, I want to lift up my brother, Brother Michael, as he comes forward to share with us what he has studied. Please be with him. Please bless him, bless his tongue, bless his mouth, his words, and the time he has spent in your word.

Please let your word wash over us and fulfill us in the way that you need us to be filled. We worship your holy name, God. Amen. Thanks for that. Good morning once again. Greetings from Lerue Baptist Church, your sister church in the Fire Association down in Lerue, Ohio.

Hello, I have accompanying with me today Pastor Tim's grandson, Ryan. Ryan, you are the oldest grandson, correct? Oldest grandchild, right? And so Ryan's here with me. He's a dear brother, member of our church as well. Turn to 1 Corinthians 3.

I appreciate the prayer of the brother, Tyler, this morning. I find that being easily distracted is something that we probably inherited from our father, Adam. And we are easily distracted all week long, and then we're easily distracted during the very time that we should be most focused on the Lord Jesus Christ. And I appreciate that even as the preacher you can get distracted during the worship of God.

And so hopefully God will answer that prayer by his grace. What I want to do this morning is I want to review 1 Corinthians chapter 3 with you. We looked at, we read it last time I was here. And then we just looked at the concept of union with Christ from the perspective of our relationship to God. What I want to do today is I want to look through the chapter itself and actually, on a pretty shallow level, get a look at what's going on in the chapter.

And then apply that concept of our union with Christ to our horizontal relationships to other Christians. So whereas last time union with Christ, excuse me, union with Christ meant a number of things about how we relate to God, I also think it means a number of things about how we relate to one another. And we will only scratch the surface of what those are.

Suffice to say, if you read your New Testament and you see things like love one another, admonish one another, forgive one another, speak to one another in psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, things like that, Romans 12, which is just a chapter of commands for the most part. What you see is a bunch of things God wants you to do, and these are all motivated by the fact that you're in union with Christ, and thus with every other Christian that is in your church and throughout the world. So 1 Corinthians 3, leading into this chapter, will remind you that Paul begins the letter to the Corinthians, a church that he himself planted, and he reminds them of the fact that the wisdom of man is foolishness to God, and the wisdom of God is foolishness to man.

And that's in your first chapter. In the second chapter, Paul talks to them about how he preached not with eloquence or human wisdom, but he just preached Christ to them. The preaching of the cross is foolishness in chapter 1. And in chapter 2, Paul's telling them that he preached the truth of God to them. And that the reason why some people don understand it or don agree with it has nothing to do with its actual wisdom It doesn have anything to do with its rationality The reason why some people don agree with what God has said is because they not spiritual They don have the mind of Christ They not born again And so in order to understand the things that God has said and to see them as beautiful and wise, you have to be born again.

That's why you can meet some of the most intelligent people that you know who are not Christian and they will speak of the things of God like they're meaningless, like they're futile. And here you are, a Christian person that knows that the things that God has said are beautiful and perfect and mysterious and even wise beyond our understanding. Because it's not an intelligence issue, it's a spiritual issue.

So then when we get to chapter 3, Paul says, brothers, referring to the church at Corinth, he says, I could not address you as spiritual, but as worldly. He says, as infants in Christ, I gave you milk, not solid food. Again, I'm reading from the Berean Standard Bible, so if it reads differently from the one that you're looking at, that's why. He says, in fact, you're still not ready, for you are still worldly.

So he tells them that he had to treat them like infants, where he was feeding them what he's calling milk. So when you get an infant, you give the infant milk, you don't give the infant steak right away. To be able to chew on something, you have to mature and grow and get strong enough to do so. And so he's telling them that he was not able to give them the solid food yet where they could really advance in the faith.

The more difficult concepts that Christianity does offer, you have to grow into them. You have to drink the milk first. But he tells them it's because they're still worldly. And if you stopped right there, you'd have to ask yourself, what does it mean to be worldly? Because we all have an idea of what it means to be worldly. And it usually means to do all the things that other people do that we don't do at our church.

It's usually how we think about it. And a lot of times our idea of worldliness is dictated by our cultural Christianity where we live. You know, I'm up here in a shirt and tie, and for some people, if I had come up in a t-shirt, you'd say, well, that's worldly. And that's not what Paul's talking about here. Paul defines his terms very often in the scripture.

I'm going to give you a hermeneutical tip here. When you're reading the Bible, especially Paul, as he brings up questions in your mind, as you're reading the things he writes, keep reading. Paul usually just answers his own questions that he's bringing up in your mind. So Paul says, since there's jealousy and dissension among you, are you not worldly?

So he defines worldliness in this context as jealousy and dissension among the members of the church. So he's not talking about your neighbors that aren't Christian. He's not talking about your co-workers that don't go to church. He's talking about within the church, when there's jealousy and dissension, that you're acting worldly. You are living carnally.

You're living according to the flesh and not according to the spirit. And he's going to explain to us exactly why. He gives him the example by saying, are you not walking in the way of man? And he says, when one of you says, I follow Paul, or another, I follow Apollos, or earlier in chapter 1, I follow Cephas, that was Peter. Or I follow Christ. One guy will say, oh, I just follow Christ.

And he says, you're being worldly. And his point is this, that the Corinthians were a culture that it was a celebrity culture, just like we live in here. And it's the norm for humans to create celebrities. And what would happen is you'd have a rivalry at church, you'd have some kind of dissension, some kind of disagreement, and somebody would say, well, I got saved under Paul's ministry, you know, the apostle.

And they'd try to act like that made them somehow the right one or the better one. And then the other person might say, well, I was saved under Apollos, and he was the eloquent speaker, And he hung around after Paul left and had grown the church more than Paul had. And Paul's point is that in Christ, and remember, I want you to think of all this from the perspective of union with Christ.

In Christ, we're all equal. And in fact, Paul's about to say we're not anything. So Paul says, what then is Apollos? What is Paul? They are servants through whom you believed as the Lord has assigned to each his role. And if you know your Bible, there's a little ring of Romans 12 there about verse 3 when Paul says that God has given each member of the church a measure of faith and giftings and it's all according to what the Spirit wants.

Paul says, Whether it was Paul who preached the gospel and a person got saved or whether it was Apollos is irrelevant because it's Christ who's to be glorified and magnified. And so whether you got saved under a really well exciting preacher in the 20th or 21st century or maybe you just heard the gospel from a guy whose name you don even remember The point is God uses the tools that he wants to use for his purposes and we not to exalt man He says neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything That was verse 7, but only God who makes things grow. Verse 8, he who plants and he who waters are one in purpose and each will be rewarded according to his own labor.

So while the individual man that God chooses to use or woman in your life to feed you the gospel, to feed you the teaching of Christ, to disciple you and grow you is unimportant from the perspective of exalting that man, your work is important as a Christian. God uses Christians in each other's lives. And we will be rewarded according to our own labor.

So our labor is important. And Paul says, we are God's fellow workers, you are God's field, God's building, in verse 9. So turning to verse 10, Paul goes to this analogy of a building. And everybody knows what a building is, it's built brick by brick, there's a foundation, and the building stands or falls in the storm, in the judgment, in the fire. So in verse 10, Paul says, by the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder.

I find it interesting that Paul, who would have espoused and demonstrated the virtue that we call humility, called himself an expert builder. Humility doesn't mean pretending you don't do stuff well. Humility means starting the sentence with things like, by the grace God has given me. Paul worked harder than any other apostle, he says, later in the letter.

Verse chapter 15, I think verse 10. But it's always by grace. And what Paul's saying here is even though it's by grace, we still have to put in the effort. We are the ones that are responsible to wake up in the morning and do what we've been called to do. And so you get up and you be an expert builder. You work hard to plant seeds or water, whatever your role is in the church.

And we'll get to that because a lot of this, I think, leads up to the fact that each Christian has a responsibility to each other Christian, particularly to exercise your gifts. You've been given free gifts from the Holy Spirit so that you can help other Christians, so that you can help the church. And so you should do that well. Paul says, I laid the foundation, verse 10, and someone else is building on it, but each one must be careful how he builds.

For no one can lay a foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. So Jesus Christ is the foundation, then you're building on it. And now he's trying to give you an example of how there's Christians that can build poorly, and there's Christians that can build well. If anyone builds on this foundation, verse 12, using gold, silver, precious stones, and then he says, wood, hay, or straw, his workmanship will be evident.

So he's giving you two options. You can use eternal things, things that are going to last through fires of judgment, or you can use things that will burn up to build a church. So you can use all sorts of shenanigans. If you look around, there's some empty seats here, right? It would be real easy to fill them. We could fill them with all sorts of worldly means.

We could use all sorts of means that your pastors refuse to use to try to just artificially bring people into a building. Thank God they know it'll burn up. It's not going to last on the last day. What's going to last is when you build a church by the foundation which is Christ and by the preaching of the word and the discipleship of people by the word of God.

Unfortunately, that's not always a recipe for lots of growth all the time in a largely pagan culture. The temptation will be to use these things that will attract people that will get them in the door. And just remember, whatever you win them with, you have to keep them with. You're not going to get people to come in the door with raffles, bounce houses, casino nights.

These are really things that churches do if you weren't aware of that. You're not going to get people in the door with those things and then keep them by standing up and just preaching verse by verse through the Bible to them. You're going to have to keep making it more exciting. You're going to have to keep titillating their senses because Christ isn't enough.

If he's not enough for them to come in the door, he won't be enough to keep them. Verse 13, his workmanship will be evident because the day will bring it to light. So on judgment day we'll know. It'll be revealed with fire and the fire will prove the quality of each man's work. If what he has built survives, he will receive a reward. If it is burned up, he will suffer loss.

He himself will be saved, but only as if through the flames. So Paul somewhat graciously is saying that there even will be some Christians who make these mistakes. What they built won't last, but they don't lose their salvation just because they didn't do things with precious stones. But do you want to be a workman whose workmanship lasts on the last day?

That's what I want, to do things the way God has said. And then Paul continues in verse 16 where I think he bringing it all together I want you to keep in mind the context is there dissensions and there jealousy among the members of this church Another good point is when people say things, I think they're called like reconstructionists or something. When they say we need to get back to the first century church, your first question should be which one?

Corinth? Yeah. Corinth had a lot wrong with them real early. They needed correction. And thank God, so we get the Bible. But Paul says, do you not know that you yourselves are God's temple?

My pastor pointed out to me that this sentence, which if you read it in the King James, you can see this. The you is a plural. He's not saying you individual Christian are the temple of God, which we believe is true, right? We hold the Holy Spirit. He dwells us. What Paul is saying is that you, the church, are the temple of God.

It's an analogy that everybody would have understood at the time, which is Paul saying, Do you not realize that God dwells among you? So the idea being this, you're jealous of your brother because they asked him to preach that week and not you. You're jealous of your sister because she gave someone a word of wisdom and they listened to her when the week before you gave her the same word of wisdom and she ignored you.

And now you're jealous. Why'd you listen to her and not me? Why does that guy get to be a deacon or an elder and I haven't even been considered? Everybody has these ideas in their head of what they should be doing. And they're committing the same error of saying, I follow Apollos, but they're basically following themselves. And what Paul is saying is, while you're out there, jealous of your brother, jealous of your sister, having dissensions and quarrels among you, the Lord Jesus Christ is living among you.

And he's invisible. We can't see him, touch him. I was going to say we can't see them, touch them, taste them, and feel them, but in a sense when we do communion we get to experience all of our senses for just that moment with an image that God gave us of communion. But Jesus is among you all the time as a church. And so while you're secretly jealous even in your heart, maybe you're smart enough to know, well I'm not going to voice my jealousy out loud.

Christians are very good at faking humility. But you know who sees right through that? The Lord Jesus who is among us. So Paul's trying to exhort them. You yourselves are God's temple. Verse 16, God's spirit dwells in you or among.

He's not saying in you as he's saying later in your heart. He's saying he's among you as a church. If anyone destroys God's temple, so if you're one of the people who's going to split up a church because you didn't get your way, or you're just going to leave because you didn't get your way, forsake the assembly as is the habit of some, or maybe you'll stay but you'll secretly house bitterness and resentment in your heart.

If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. Paul is very gracious to the Corinthians who commit a lot of sins and errors. And he never really outright says you should really watch out. You know, like Jesus says, many will say, Lord, Lord, but I'll tell them I never knew them. Jesus says that. Well, this is by implication.

If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. By implication, Paul is causing people to think, I need to examine myself and I need to repent if I'm committing jealousy and dissension among God's people or God will destroy me. For God's temple is holy, he says, and you are that temple, so don't do it. Verse 18, let no one deceive himself. If any of you thinks he is wise in this age, so now he's going back to what he said in chapter 1, the wisdom of man is foolishness to God, the wisdom of God is foolishness to man.

If you think you're wise in this age, become a fool so that you may become wise. He is in no way advocating that you become a fool according to Proverbs. Paul was an expert in the Proverbs, I promise. He's talking about the foolishness that you will be seen as possessing if you simply proclaim things like Christ is sufficient for your needs. If you simply tell people that we can do church by singing songs and hymns and spiritual songs to the Lord, we can read scripture, we can pray, and we can open up the Bible and a man can preach it.

If you just say, we're going to do those things and have the Lord's table and baptisms, that's enough. And in the United States of America, 70% of Christians probably think you're foolish if you believe that. And what Paul's saying is quit worrying about what people think, quit worrying about people's judgments of you, and worry about what the Lord thinks and what the Lord thinks only.

He is the one that possesses all wisdom, and if you follow his wisdom, you will always appear wise in his sight, not compared to him, but because you're doing what he has told you. So be okay with the world. The world thinking you foolish. Be okay with the world criticizing you and saying, well, if you would only do this different. Do things the way the word says.

The wisdom of the world is foolishness in God's sight. Verse 19, he catches the wise in their craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise are futile. So his whole point up to this has been, you are boasting in men. You're doing exactly what the world does. The world follows personalities.

The world follows individuals. The world makes celebrities out of people that have no talent whatsoever except the talent to make themselves a celebrity somehow. And what's really sad, if you pay attention to any of these Hollywood people especially, they get really popular. They get to make a lot of money. And boy, do people love it when they fall. And they pile on them quick too.

And the girls and the guys that were beautiful 10 years ago, that everybody was exalting for that, nobody even remembers them now. Or even worse, they'll criticize them because now they actually look a little older. There's nothing good about this world system. So Paul says in verse 21, Therefore, because of everything I just told you, stop boasting in men.

Quit it. Why? How? How can I stop boasting in men? It's what we know. It's what we have.

He says, all things are yours. Whether it's Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death Or the present or the future. All of them belong to you. I can't even explain to you what it means that all things are yours here. But what I can tell you is this. If he who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, Will he not also graciously give you all things?

The point is this, he will withhold no good thing for those who walk in his ways. That's a promise. You will have everything that you need. You think in your heart you need something. You think in your heart that you want something. That's what causes quarrels, jealousies, and divisions among you.

You think you need it. You think you want it real bad. You think it's what God wants. We're real good at that as Christians too. Thinking, well, no, this is God's will. Well, if it was God's will, you'd already have it.

All right? You have exactly what God wants you to have right now, including your status and or position among other Christians and in the church and things of that sort. And when we become content with that and actually stop coveting what other people have and start being happy for other people, When we start being joyful that God using another instrument other than us that when we show that we actually here to exalt and glorify Christ and not ourselves Now I want to be used by God Don get me wrong That part of the desire That part of the effort that I put in so that I can be a person that God would want to use And I'm afraid that oftentimes in my life when things haven't gone the way I wanted, I can trace it back to there was something wrong in my heart that my father knew about before I did, and he protected me from some kind of achievement or accolade that I could have gotten that I would not have handled properly.

Thank God he knows better than I do. And then finally, everything belongs to you. Verse 23 says, and you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. Now you have union. So I want to bring up two points about union with Christ for our horizontal relationships. That's your relationship to every other Christian.

And I'm going to say, particularly in your local church, you owe every Christian in the world something. But it's your local church where God has chosen and instituted, modeled, and commanded that we carry on so much of this work. I want to read to you part of the Confession of Faith. London Baptist 1689, chapter 27, paragraph 1. All saints that are united to Jesus Christ, their head, by his spirit and faith, although they are not made there by one person with him, have fellowship in his graces, sufferings, death, resurrection, and glory.

So we're united to Christ. That was the sermon last month. Now listen, by implication of that, because that's true, and being united to one another in love, you're connected to each other. You realize that, right? They have communion in each other's gifts and graces and are obliged to the performance of such duties. Ooh, for some Christians, being obliged to the performance of duties is kind of a bad phrase.

The Bible has no problem telling Christians you're saved by grace and you better get up and work. And you have commands from a Father who's always right and always loves you. And it says, public and private in an orderly way, as do conduced to their mutual good, both in the inward and outward. Man, you owe other people your gifts. Let's turn to 1 Peter chapter 4.

1 Peter 4. Peter exhorting the church. The end is coming. Persecution's coming. We'll start in verse 8. He says Above all love one another deeply Because love covers over a multitude of sins Show hospitality to one another without complaining Right here, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God, each of you should use whatever gift he has received to serve one another.

If anyone speaks, he should speak as one conveying the words of God, or the oracles of God. If anyone serves, so there's really there's speaking gifts and serving gifts when people divide them up. If anyone serves, he should serve with the strength God provides. Why? So that in all things, God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To whom be the glory and the power forever and ever.

Amen. Christian, you have been given a gift from God. You have at least one. We all believe this, that you have one gift from God, and the reason God gave it to you wasn't so you could hold on to it and cherish it and be thankful for it. It wasn't only for those reasons. He gave you that gift so you could edify the church.

And for you to be jealous of somebody else's gift is shaking your fist at the God who chose the gifts for each of his instruments. And for you to despise your gift, like what if your gift is one that you're good at and you kind of don't like doing it? You have to get over yourself. God gave that to you so that you could be the one that's planting and watering and helping build a church.

You're the one that's supposed to be helping one another. You think, no offense, that Pastor Greg has all the gifts? He doesn't. He can't do it all. You need every single brick in that building to build the building. And so use your gifts.

Discover your gifts. Go to the elders. Say, I don't know what my gifts are. They would love to help you, I promise. Don't take a spiritual gift quiz online either. Go to your elders.

If you didn't hear me say that. Go to your church to find out how you're gifted and how you can be used. And you know what? They may have an idea of something you could do to serve the church that is not glorious to you. You realize that, right? That it's okay to help the church in whatever way God wants you to help.

And for any given season, it might not even be the most fun gift to use. But use your gift for others. You're united to each other, so you actually are obliged. You owe it to them. And secondly, I think you need to acknowledge the fact, like it says in 1 Peter 8, above all, love one another deeply. I think you need to acknowledge the fact that your union with Christ means you united to other Christians And there is an inseparability about that That means that when you hurt or despise or resent other Christians, when you're jealous of other Christians, it's almost like you're hurting yourself.

It's like your hand getting angry at your foot and grabbing a hammer and hitting it because your foot wasn't working that day well. I am all for private and public rebuke if a Christian is in a grave error. I think part of loving your Christian brothers and sisters would be going to them if they have a pattern of sin that needs to be addressed. So I am not saying to ignore Christians that are in error, especially grave error.

But I do think that there is a way that we need to make sure we are looking at other Christians, that our heart disposition that we can talk to God about is one of actually caring about them. So what you have to remember is that the most rebellious, disobedient, vile Christian on the earth right now, and there's one by certain mathematical properties, there's always one of every extreme, right? The worst Christian that's alive right now is your brother or sister.

And you are commanded to love them. And your father loves them. And I think sometimes we can be good at rebuking and identifying error, and I think it's important. I mean, churches were praised for identifying error in the Revelation, right? But in my heart, I need to ask God, God, you need to make me love people who I'm in disagreement with. You need to make me somebody who actually thinks of them as another person that's united to you by grace.

And that for me to actually love them properly means that I need wisdom from God. And I need a heart change that helps me to do it in a way that is the way God would have me do it. So you're united to Christ. You can't be ununited from him. And thus you will not be ununited or disunited from any of your true brothers and sisters in the faith. So serve them with your gifts, discover your gifts, and love one another deeply because love covers a multitude of sins.

Would you pray with me? Father in heaven, we thank you that your word is sufficient for all of our needs. We pray that we would allow it to wash over us, that you would take your truth and use it to conform us to the image of Christ. We thank you that you will be with us even to the end of the age. In Christ's name I pray. Amen.