Well, it is humbling to admit, but sin has the potential to make us better at war than we are at peace. I think that there's probably no one in this room who lived a completely conflict-free week this week. Some of you are smiling. Sin causes us to be better at division than we are at unity. Sin can cause us to be critical and argumentative, ready to take offense, ready to debate. And in that way, it should not surprise us that the church struggles with division. I would invite you just to look around in this room, do that for me, just look around.
A Dangerous Basis for Disunity
What would bring this diverse group of people into this room? We have a dangerous basis for disunity, don't we? We don't dress the same; we don't enjoy many of the same things; we live in different economic places, different locations; we can't really relate to what the other person finds exciting. I tell people how excited I am to live in Chinatown, and they look at me like I'm crazy. I think that they mow the lawn, and I think they're nuts. There are all kinds of reasons, political, economic, gender for us to have disunity.
And you add to that, that the DNA of sin is selfishness. I want to be in control. I want my way. I want recognition. I want power. I want to be 'lord' of my life. And so what is it that can keep us from this danger? What is it that has the power to unify us; the power to make this place, not a place of disunity, but a place of remarkable grace and remarkable love? It's important to say this, as we begin this study, that our unity, our love has been ordained by our Lord to be one of the most powerful living arguments for the truth of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Our unity and our love should make the surrounding world wonder, "How can these people get along this way; how can they love each other so; why are they so free of so much of what divides us; how can people of different cultures and backgrounds and nations enjoy such unity?" Jesus prayed that we would be one so that the world would know that He was sent, and that He is, in fact, the Son of God. Jesus said, "By this will all men know that you are my disciples; you have love for one another." Well, look, if you would, at I Corinthians 1, verses 10 through 17, with me.
It's not shocking if you bring a humble heart to this passage, that there's division in Corinth. You probably shouldn't be saying to yourself, "How in the world did that ever happen?" The propensity to this should be familiar to you. And the setup of this passage is really there in verse 11; it's been reported to Paul by Chloe, a person that we really don't have much information on, that there is quarreling among my brothers. And so Paul is writing to speak into that circumstance, and what he writes in the first two chapters of this letter is a powerful argument for the foolishness of man and the stunning wisdom of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
I don't know of a passage of Scripture that has the power to properly put us in our place that this passage does. I was reminded of that again as I read it over and over again over the last month or so. Now notice what Paul does in verse 10. He starts with this appeal, and if you would notice that this passage, verse 10 and verse 17, is bracketed by appeals to the centrality of the power of the Gospel. Now when Paul makes his appeal, he doesn't make it based on his apostolic authority; he doesn't do that because this church is already into the habit of following certain personalities, and Paul is wise enough not to want to add to that.
So he appeals to the Lordship of the Lord Jesus Christ, and he says, "I appeal...by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment." We will find it very clear in passages to come, that that mind that he's talking about is the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. That is the church's most precious possession. There is nothing more precious, nothing more needed, nothing more powerful, nothing more essential, nothing that should be more central than that message of hope, and life, and security in the crucified and risen Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
And it's that alone that has the power to pull us away from our selfishness, to pull us away from our prickliness, to pull us away from that tendency to be critical and to want to debate, and to want to win, because we get drawn into the glory, the preciousness, the beauty, the essentiality of the Gospel; the Gospel becomes more important to us than all those other things would be! Paul is saying, "Have one mind. Guard against anything that would divide you, anything that would rise to a level that only the Gospel could be, that would set the agenda for how you relate to one another, how you conduct your lives together with one another."
The Gospel Is the Paradigm
The paradigm for the community of the church is the Gospel! The reason we relate to one another as we do is the Gospel. The reason we worship as we do is the Gospel. The reason we relate to the outside world, to the city of Philadelphia, the way we do is the gospel of the Gospel. The Gospel is our motivation; the Gospel is our hope; the Gospel is our goal. We have nothing else! Do you believe that? When Paul is talking about this unity of mind - I want to make a distinction for you - he is not arguing for uniformity, because if we would follow later in this letter, we understand that Paul preaches the reality of the diversity that God has built into the body of Christ.
We have differing gifts; we have differing callings; we have different perspectives on the Gospel that are healthy and help us to understand its whole. In the last couple of years, there's a Sri Lankan theologian named Vinoth Ramachandra who has really influenced me in the way that I think about idolatry. He has written a wonderful book, Gods That Fail, and the reason he says such wise and insightful things about idolatry is because he's lived in a culture where idolatry is overt, everywhere, and his long-term experience of overt idolatry has given him wonderful insights into the dynamics of covert idolatry - the kind of idolatry that we most struggle with.
Now, that's a perspective that Paul Tripp, raised in Toledo, Ohio, won't bring. And so we need that diversity of gifts, and calling, and perspective, but it must all be unified by the purity of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Now look what is next in your passage; you actually have a bit of a case study of what happens when the Gospel is not central. When the Gospel is not central, there are things that happen in the church of Jesus Christ that are dangerous and destructive. First, the first fruit is this, "For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers."
It is our commitment to the centrality of the grace of our Lord of the Jesus Christ that the Spirit of God uses to rescue us from us. And because we're holding something of highest importance, because this message of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ is the precious treasure that we hold, then issues of secondary difference don't rise to the level of destroying the unity of the body of Christ. Oh, it's not that those things aren't important, but they must not divide us. They must not be cause for the breaking of relationship, the severing of the unity of the Spirit that is God's gift to His church.
We disagree in humility, but we disagree in a submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the truth of the Cross. We would do nothing to detract from the message of the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. There's a second thing that happens - personalities become central. Paul says, "What I mean is that each one of you says, 'I follow Paul, I follow Christ, I follow Cephas, or I follow Apollos.'" It is a great danger that we attribute to people what is the work of the risen Christ. And when we are not faithful in reminding ourselves of that faithful teaching, and preaching, and encouraging one another in our fellowship with the fact that every good thing that we enjoy is the gift of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, then it's very tempting to attribute that to people.
We should not attach our identity and security, our spiritual sense of well-being to a man. We must not; we cannot; we should not. We have differing gifts in the leadership here at Tenth Church. Phil Ryken is not a Carroll Wynne, in case you didn't notice. Paul Tripp is not a Jonathan Olsen. Jonathan Olsen is not a Bruce McDowell. We do not want to come to a place where we're attaching ourselves to the gifts and graces of men, but only to the gift of the Lord Jesus Christ, and understand that the most gifted man, the person that God has used the most in your life, that person has been made wise, and that person has been gifted to be usable only by the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.
That person is an incarnation of the Gospel zeal of your Lord, bottom line. A third thing that is surely here in this passage, though probably not as evident, is that, if the Gospel is not central, then the things of the Lord begin to be used for personal agenda. Surely there is personal power in this 'party' spirit. In fact, you sort of have it there, "What I mean is that each one of you says, 'I follow Paul,' or 'I follow Apollos,' or 'I follow Cephas,' or 'I follow Christ.'" Maybe you would be tempted to think that the Christ party has it right.
Those are the real mature people. Maybe those people have it the most wrong. Maybe what's going on there is the worst of spiritual one-upmanship. "Oh, you're of the Cephas' party? I follow Christ." Now that's invoking the name of Christ, not for the glory of Christ, but for the glory of me. How horrible is that? That I would actually use the Gospel for personal attention, personal power, and personal gain! Now, let's be honest. These things are temptations for all of us. It is surely tempting for us to give ourselves more to conflict than we do to peace.
Attached to a Personality
It is surely tempting for us to attach ourselves to a particular personality. And shockingly, it is tempting to all of us to somehow use the truth of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ for some kind of personal attention, personal power, personal recognition, for personal gain. Where does all of this lead? Well, it's there in the last verse of the passage: the Gospel gets emptied of its power. Look how Paul responds here in verse 13. He responds with three rhetorical questions. These questions are not hard to answer.
"Is Christ divided? [Absolutely not!] Was Paul crucified for you? [Absolutely not!] Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?" What these rhetorical questions are arguing for is the irrationality - the Gospel irrationality - of this division. "Christ is all and in all." If you are God's child, you are in Christ, and Christ is in you. Can Christ be divided, or was Paul crucified? What is your sole hope as a sinner? Is it not Christ? In the deepest drama of the usefulness of a person's gifts, that person is not your hope; that person is being used of God to bring before you, "What is your hope?
What is your hope?" Your hope is Christ! Were you baptized in the name of Paul; were you united to Paul, or united to Christ? And then Paul ends with his own example. I wish we could spend more time on this. He was very careful in the way that he participated in the sacraments, baptism here, and the way that he preached, not to do anything that would rob the cross of its power. He said, "I came to you not with words of eloquent wisdom." Paul is not saying that he didn't seek to preach in a powerful and persuasive way.
He's pointing to the great philosophers who prided themselves in their wisdom, who prided themselves in the turn of a phrase, who prided themselves with the power to persuade people by their use of language and their use of logic. And so people would follow a logician because he was so persuasive. And Paul says, "I don't ever want to preach the Gospel in a way that would draw attention to me, because if I'm doing that, I'm robbing the cross of Jesus Christ of its power." We have but one hope: it is the living reality of a crucified risen Savior who suffered the effects of the fall, living a perfect life, dying as the Lamb of sacrifice, carrying our guilt and our shame; His righteousness being given over to our account; His sacrifice, purchasing our adoption into the family of God; His resurrection conquering sin and death and guaranteeing for us life eternal.
That is the most precious gift of the church, and we must guard its purity, and we must rally around that with unity of heart and unity of life, unwilling to let anything get in the way of the message of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Is that your heart? Is the Lord Jesus the most important thing to you in all of life this evening? Is His truth more precious than any jewel you could ever hold? Is He, to you, Jesus, Priceless Treasure? Let's Pray: Lord, we cannot stand above the church in Corinth in self-righteous judgment because we have all these propensities.
We do align ourselves with personalities. We often give ourselves to criticism and debate in ways that diminish the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. We're not always that picture of remarkable love and persevering unity. And yet on the other hand, we are so thankful for Jesus. We are so thankful for the cross. We are so thankful that we can stand before you, dirty, and weak, and broken, and be unafraid, because all of our sin has been covered by Your blood, and we stand before You--righteous because of Jesus.
Lord, may that draw us together in a unity of worship and joy that displays the power of what only the cross can do. In Jesus's name, Amen.
