1 Corinthians 1:10-17

1 Corinthians chapter 1, we're going to be in verse 10.

1 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

So we're going to read 10 through 17 is our text this morning.

Starting in verse 10.

I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, 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.

For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarrels among you, my brothers.

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.

Is Christ divided?

Was Paul crucified for you?

Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name.

I did not baptize also I did baptize also the household of Stephanus.

Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.

For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

Let's pray.

Lord, we thank you for your word this morning in our trip through First Corinthians.

God, we ask that you would help us to be a church that gathers for the better and not for the worse.

Lord, that we would be a church that's unified, that we would lend ourselves to the unity of the saints, and that we would glorify you and our cooperation together.

And I ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

You may be seated.

Let's um go through this text, and we're gonna be looking at this these few verses, these eight verses, in 1 Corinthians 1.

1 Corinthians 1.

So just as an introduction, we're talking about this part of southern Europe, uh, the East, kind of uh the is the Israel, Turkey, Mesopotamia kind of region here.

Um Paul's writing from Ephesus to a church that is in Corinth.

Um we've already gone through a couple of sections.

We've gone through the greeting and then the Thanksgiving.

This is the third section in chapter one.

And um we're gonna get into the meat of the letter.

We're about to get into kind of of the rub for Paul, the issues that need to be addressed.

And you'll recall that um when we when we began this, I said that there's this letter is written by Paul as a response to a verbal report, right?

So Chloe's household is tattletaling, not in a negative sense, but but he says, look, Chloe is visiting with us, or Chloe is visiting with me here in Ephesus, and has given us a report about how things are going.

The second thing is that the church actually writes a letter and asks some questions specifically about marriage.

Uh they write, they write and ask questions about um meat offered to idols.

Is it okay to eat um steak that was sacrificed to an idol?

Is that okay or not?

Super interesting issue.

I can't wait again to get to that.

Um so, but then there's also these reports.

You know, there's a guy that's um in an incestuous relationship with his uh stepmom.

We've got um people suing each other in the church.

But right off the bat here, this first issue that he's gonna deal with is factionalism, or the word is um schism.

Uh literally, the Greek word that we're gonna see right there in the first verse of verse 10 is schismata, where we get schism from.

So this factionalism is gonna be talked about from chapter 1, verse 10, all the way through to chapter 4, verse 17.

Chapter 10, verse 1, through to 4, 17.

So this is gonna give us Paul, it's gonna give Paul a chance.

Basically, this messy part of the church, the factionalism, gives Paul a chance to explain his preaching method.

He's able to give the difference between and define the difference between being spiritual and carnal Christians.

He's gonna talk about the role of ministers in God's overall spiritual work in the world.

So he's gonna define his role in the broader context of God's work in people's lives.

He's also gonna he's gonna contrast God's wisdom with human wisdom.

So the factionalism, this di this div these divisions, these fights within the church, give Paul an opportunity to talk about some very fascinating things.

So the next few weeks, um, you don't want to miss, it's gonna be uh just some some really crazy concepts that Paul brings up.

Now, in order for us to understand this particular division, we need to go back to the book of Acts.

Now, you'll recall that the book of Acts tells us the story of the early church.

And one of those early churches is Corinth, right?

So Paul planted the church in Corinth, and you can go back and read Acts 18 to see Paul's first appearance there in Acts 18.

I think it goes up through verse 17, and that's where we stopped a few weeks ago when we read Acts 18.

But if you go further in Acts 18, you see some other things that take place in this church.

And one of the really important things is a guy named Apollos.

So we'll come back to the outline in just a second.

I want to take you to Acts 18.

This is in your Bible, Acts 18, verses 24 through 19.1.

So verse 24 says this.

Now a Jew named Apollos, a native of Alexandria.

Where's Alexandria?

Northern Egypt, right?

Yeah, so Alexandria is in northern Egypt, one of the biggest cities of the day.

He came to Ephesus, and he was an eloquent man.

Notice he went to Ephesus, not Corinth.

He goes to Ephesus first, which happened to be one of the places that Aquila and Priscilla also went to with Paul, and they stayed there.

So Apollos is intersecting with these two other characters that we already met, Aquila and Priscilla.

They're meeting, going to meet up in Ephesus.

And it says he was an eloquent man, competent in the scriptures, and he had been instructed in the way of the Lord.

This means that he understood the Judaism framework for the Messiah.

He was familiar with Jesus, probably being the fulfillment.

He, it says competent in scriptures, so being fervent in spirit, so he's zealous, he's charismatic, we could say.

He spoke and he taught accurately the things concerning Jesus.

Look at this.

It says, though he knew only the baptism of John.

So this guy Apollos, he's got all the pieces working for him.

Great guy, but he only understood the baptism of John.

So he didn't fully understand the baptism of Jesus, which, if you go back with us into Acts, there's a difference between the baptism of John, which was a baptism of repentance, and the baptism of Jesus, which was an identification with Jesus, an outward sign of this faith that you've placed in Christ.

So he's got it almost right.

He just doesn't quite understand how the baptism of Jesus fits into the believer's life.

So, verse 26, it says that he began to speak very boldly in the synagogue.

This would be in Ephesus.

But then Priscilla and Aquila, now Priscilla's the woman, and Aquila's the man.

Fascinating thing.

She is listed, she's always listed first, which was counterintuitive for the culture.

But Priscilla and Aquila, they heard him and they took him aside and they explained to him the way of God more accurately.

So they're filling in the blanks for Apollos.

And when he wished to cross Achai, Achai is the body of water between Ephesus and Corinth, and uh when he wished to cross Achai, the brothers of Ephesus, they encouraged him and they wrote to the disciples to welcome him.

When he arrived, he greatly helped those who through grace had be had believed.

For he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, showing by the scriptures that Christ was Jesus.

So he's this great apologist, right?

He's able to make a convincing argument to the Jews for Jesus being the Messiah.

Then we go into verse 1 of chapter 19.

It says, It happened that while Apollos was at Corinth, Paul passed through the inland country.

So again, just going back to our original slide here, you have Ephesus where Apollos and Aquila and Priscilla, or Priscilla and Aquila, hook up.

He gets his message kind of fine-tuned, and then he's commended over to the church in Corinth, where he has a powerful ministry.

Okay, so that all sounds really good.

Meanwhile, Paul's back over to the right of the blue arrow when it says that Paul's passing in the inland area, that means that he's in the region of Galatia, modern day kind of the center of Turkey.

So that gives you the context.

Now let's go into the text.

So in verse 10, we have Paul's appeal for unity.

We have Paul's appeal for unity in verse 10.

He says this in three different ways, three different ways.

He says, I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And if you've been with us for the last few weeks, you know that this the name of the Lord Jesus was very significant, right?

Because that's what unifies everybody is that we call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

He says, In that name I appeal to you 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, right?

So he's appealing to them, that they are agreeing.

The word divisions there is that word schismata, where we get the English word schism from.

He says, I'm appealing to you in Jesus' name that there not be these divisions among you, but that you would be united in the same mind and the same judgment.

What does this agreement, this same mind and same judgment, look like in the church?

Well, one of the common complaints that I get when I interact and I'm I just kick up, usually I don't go and fly a flag and say, hey, I'm a pastor.

Usually I just start talking to people about Jesus.

And oftentimes, when I have that conversation, um people kind of have these defense mechanisms to protect them from that conversation because heaven forbid we talk about Jesus, right?

And so one of the one of the defense mechanisms is to complain about the divisions in the church of, oh, you know, people, you know, why can't they all get it get along?

How come there's all these denominations that exist?

How come Christians are at odd with one another?

Um, and so um this is this is an issue, these divisions are an issue that exist.

Now, on the opposite side, though, you'll have um kind of the ecumenicalists or the ecumists, who are the ones that are trying to unite every division of Christianity, try to bring everything under one roof.

It is a um, and so the the the kind of the ground that we've got to navigate when we hear Paul say this is Paul just asking us to all um come to a complete and perfect census on our theology that we all believe the exact same thing about baptism, that we believe the exact same thing when it comes to the um communion elements, that we believe the exact same thing when it comes to worship, like should because there's gonna be some Christians who would be offended by the fact that I'm wearing jeans this morning, right?

So there's there's gonna be some camps that are like that, who would say, like, you're not a true Christian because of the way you're dressed, you know?

So we the church can find all kinds of things to divide over.

Some seem significant and some seem very insignificant, and we'll talk some more about that.

Paul is not saying that um Paul is not saying that there is going to be unanimity in thought.

In fact, at the end of this message, I'm gonna show you a really great video of a veteran saint who explains this so well named J.I.

Packer.

It's a two and a half minute video, and so I'm gonna allow him to somewhat answer that question.

But I want I want that it to hang in the air of like, what does he mean?

Only because in the next two verses, he's gonna answer the question.

There are um there are in the in the Christian church, there are a number of things that we would just say are false teaching.

Some of the things that are are kind of popular in our day and age is that God wants you to be wealthy and live a pain-free life.

You may turn on the TV and you may see a preacher on TV saying that.

And then he may attach it and say, Well, if you just give your money, call this 1-800 number, you're gonna get healthy even faster, right?

We call that the health and wealth gospel.

Or there's another group that may say, if you have enough faith, then you can be pain-free and be wealthy.

Um another group, another kind of false teaching that exists out there is that God just cares about love.

We can determine morality within the context of our culture.

Don't worry about sin or judgment, just love.

Um, and they kind of emphasize the love of God, but not the moral bounds that he gives.

So, again, how do we reconcile Paul and Jesus' appeal for unity and false teaching?

First of all, Paul is not asking for tolerance of every idea.

We'll see later in this book that he refutes false teaching.

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul rebukes those who do not believe in the resurrection.

Nor is he talking about a moral tolerance.

Because when it comes to these people that are suing each other and the guy that's sleeping with his stepmom, he rebukes this guy and he tells them to take that guy and put him out of the church until he repents.

That's a disunifying activity.

So Paul is not saying you need to approve of and agree with every bad thing that exists in the church.

He's saying you need to be unified around Jesus.

You need to be unified around Jesus.

There is a place in the church for a person who does apologetics.

Do you know what apologetics is?

Apologetics is the person who argues against uh they argue for the the uh validity of Christianity.

So they would engage in arguments about is is there a God?

Is the Bible the word of God?

Is Jesus the only way to the Father?

Uh is there um uh is there yeah, is there any other way for to be saved?

So uh a Christian apologist is going to make the case for Christianity being true.

But then do you know what a polemicist is?

A polemicist operates within the church to deal with heresy, to hold different role, which is where your identity uh where you're identifying false teaching and you're um opposing it.

So a polemicist is one who defends the church from false teaching.

But that is not what's going on here.

Paul and Apollos, Peter, and Christ are all good teachers, which we're gonna see in a minute.

But it is an error to create factions around those personalities.

So let's go a little bit further here.

The description, the description of this schism.

1 Corinthians 1, 11 and 12.

For it has been reported to me by close people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers.

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.

So you've got to appreciate here that he says, I want you to be unified, but then he gives a substantiation by saying, Here's why I'm telling you you need to be unified.

It's because Close Household has told me that there is these quarrels that exist.

And then he even goes further in verse 12 to say, here's what I mean.

When I say there's quarrels, here's the specific quarrels that I'm looking at.

And so he writes this out, it makes you think that maybe there's some people in the church who were engaged in this behavior and they don't even realize that they are taking a stand and identifying themselves with Apollos at the expense of the unity of the church.

Is it possible?

Is it possible that these Christians thought they were being noble in their cause?

Is it possible that these Christians were almost self-righteous and saying, Look, I identify with Apollos and therefore I am more spiritual?

And Paul is making it explicitly clear, trying to wake them up and saying, No, you are hurting the unity of the church, of Jesus' church.

Now, why is this going on?

Well, there's a scholar named Bruce Winter who's written about this extensively.

He gives a comprehensive picture of first century sophistry.

Uh the word wisdom in Greek is Sophia.

Anybody named Sophia in here?

I've known a few Sophia's in life.

It means wisdom, right?

It's a good Greek name.

So sophistry was this role of being a professional orator.

You would go and you would just give speeches, right?

We have people like that today who just they talk really well.

They're fascinating in the things that they say.

Some of the people that I love to listen to podcasts, so um that's kind of our modern day form of, I think, sophistry, but you've got like, you've got atheists like um, what's the guy?

Sam Harris, you've got Jordan Peterson, you've got different characters like that who would be like a s uh a sophist, right?

Just presenting their ideas.

So these guys, in this day, the way that they would um, the way that they would come across was early on in their delivery, they would um attempt to build themselves up and to tear down the last guy that spoke.

So that was the game, that's how the game worked.

It was like a part of being a good deliverer of your wisdom was to tear down the last guy and to really get allegiance.

And so this guy, Bruce Winter, who's done a bunch of work on 1 Corinthians, he would suggest that Paul here is trying to divorce this church culture from what was common in the Corinthian culture.

That they were taking this um this kind of favoritism and tribalism that came from their Corinthian culture and they were importing it into the church and picking out their favorite teachers, which is which is not healthy at all.

Um but Paul has a response.

Paul is going to deconstruct this schism in this way.

He starts by asking three questions.

Is Christ divided?

Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

Then he says in verse 14, I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name.

I did baptize also the house of Stephanus.

Beyond that, I don't even know whether I baptized anyone else.

So questions, rhetorical questions, right, that he's putting out there, these questions are causing, they're there to cause you to think.

Can you break Jesus up into a bunch of pieces so that I've got a chunk of Jesus over here and then you got a chunk of Jesus over there?

No.

Christ can't be divided up, right?

We can't divide Jesus up.

Into pieces.

Was Paul crucified for you?

Obviously not, right?

And were you baptized in the name of Paul?

This question causes Paul to just riff, right?

He's going to be like, no, you weren't baptized in my name.

And then he starts to go back biographically and just recount his own time there with this church.

And he's saying, look, baptism wasn't a big deal in my ministry with you.

That wasn't the thing that I was emphasizing.

I wasn't making a big deal out of baptizing because he says in verse 17, for Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ should be emptied of its power.

Now, Paul's not saying that baptism is unimportant.

He's just saying it wasn't his calling.

Now you'll recall from Jesus' ministry that Jesus had his disciples doing the baptizing.

There was, it was important, Jesus in Matthew 28, he's told his disciples to go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

In Romans chapter 6, Paul says that our baptism is important.

Romans 6 · chapter mention

It's our picture of being separated from sin.

So baptism is significant to Paul, but he's just saying, it's not my calling.

I was called to preach the gospel.

And notice, he's teasing next week's sermon.

It's not with words of eloquent wisdom, like a sophist, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

So this is the way that Paul addresses the factionalism initially, the schism that existed in the church.

He's putting it back on them, saying that your identification with me, Paul, and some of you saying you're of my tribe, that's inappropriate.

Now, Cephas here is referred, that's that's Peter, right?

So this group, this church was kind of split into four pieces: Paul who came first, Apollos who came second, Cephas, they may have been connected with Cephas because people may have traveled from the church in Jerusalem over to Corinth, or maybe Peter did some ministry in Corinth.

We don't know.

And then there's the real purists who are like, I'm of Jesus, you know, I don't identify with any person.

So that's the situation that this church is facing.

Unity, unity was so important to Jesus.

In John 17, Jesus prayed that his church would be unified.

And here we have this growing church about four years into its development, and they're a mess because they're in these little tribes.

So let me just kind of apply this into our own life and kind of weave this beyond Corinth for us.

In um 1054, there's what's called the Great Schism.

Up to 1054, you had the Catholic Church.

Basically, there was one church, one Christian church that primarily existed.

Now, there was maybe minor um, there was, not maybe, there was minor um groups that existed around, but but primarily the church was the Catholic Church.

Now, there's a whole great study of what was going on in Africa and Christianity in Africa with the Copts and those in um uh in Southern Africa, the Southern African continent, but um the church history that we're most familiar with was the Catholic Church.

But in 1054, there was what's called the Great Schism, uh, and it and this is, I think this is pulled off Wikipedia, a succession of ecclesiastical differences and theological disputes between the Greek East and the Latin West.

It predated the formal rupture that occurred in 1054.

Here's what they disagreed over.

Prominent amongst these issues was the procession of the Holy Spirit.

What is the procession of the Holy Spirit?

The procession of the Holy Spirit is did the does the Holy Spirit come from Jesus and the Father, or does the Holy Spirit, is it just granted by the Father?

This was the dividing issue between the church in the East and the Church in the West.

Now you think like, wow, you guys got upset over that?

No, that this is just this was just one of like the political points that was being made.

It was really a power struggle.

Um so then we have whether the the bread, the communion bread, should it be leavened or unleavened?

That's another part of the division, right?

Should it be crackers or should there be yeast in the bread?

Um and then you have the bishops of Rome's claim to universal jurisdiction.

So you had the church center in Constantinople and you had the church center in Rome.

And there was a struggle over which um where power should be centered.

And those in Constantinople did not feel like they were being given enough authority.

And so we have the division, the great schism that takes place.

So we have the Christian church up to 1054, and then at 1054 it breaks off, and we have what's called the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church.

So, and we have Eastern Orthodoxy to this day, right?

We have one um up kind of close to my house, up in Butcher's Hill.

Um then in 1517, you have Luther who nails his 95 thesis to the door at Wittenberg or Wittenberg, and um you get this division of Protestant and Roman Catholic.

And so those are kind of the three primary streams Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Eastern Orthodox.

Um those are the three primary divisions amongst the the Christian church.

And um and that's where we stand kind of to this day.

And maybe there will be a unification in the future.

It's it's difficult right now.

There's some substantial um differences that exist between the different camps.

Some of its um of its power power struggles, and other of it is is theological points that will have to be worked out.

Um here's here's the interesting thing.

If you go and you type in Christian unity, this is what will come up at the top of your study.

I didn't know this till this week, because this is not a part of my Christian tradition.

But in the Anglican Church and in Roman Catholicism, um maybe, I'm not sure how many Roman Catholic churches follow this, but the octave of Christian unity is a holiday that's been being um observed, a week of prayer for Christian unity.

Um it's been observed for over a hundred years now.

I think it started in 1912.

And um uh and so it's fascinating that here we are this week studying this text, and there's Christians, not necessarily from my Christian tradition, but there's Christians all around the world that are praying for the unity of the church.

And I think that that's an appropriate prayer.

We should want to join in that prayer, that God would give us a greater sense of unity.

Now, I'll say this this is during the age in which we live, in the Internet age, the Internet has helped with some aspects of Christian unity.

Because it is harder for a character like a Christian leader to say, hey, follow me and don't follow those guys over there.

Because the internet has disintermediated that um leader, because if I were to say, like, everybody else is wrong and I'm right, you just go home and on online you can find some awesome pastors out there, right?

There's great, better preachers, way better than me, that you can listen to and you can be edified by.

So the the disunity, we live in an interesting age.

So the disunity that exists is, I think, a bit different.

And I'll give you three of them.

The first is this disunity that is based on um association, race, economic status, academic pedigree, career accomplishments, political party, and neighborhood.

Those are some of the things that we find grounds to disagree over.

And we need to be really careful as Christians.

What I've found is that it's very easy to want to be disunified with other camps and then to find a theological excuse for the disunity.

Okay, so in our city, in Baltimore, we have um we have black churches and we have white churches and then we have mixed churches.

I'm glad that we are a diverse church, right?

And there's lots of flavors of us.

Um but one of the things that I have found is um, especially amongst white people, is that they will look at the black church and they will see the black church doing church differently, and maybe having a different theological position, and they will use that nuanced theological difference as an excuse for disunity.

And I'll tell you this there is a lot of overlap between Christians in terms of what we believe.

There's things that we call closed hand issues and open hand issues.

The stuff that we want to fight over and that we want to say, look, we're not unified with you on this issue are things like how salvation works, that Jesus is the only way.

We want to be, we we are willing to be disunified with somebody over that.

The inspiration of scripture, we're willing to be disunified over a church.

If they say, look, the Bible is not God's word, then we're okay with with being disunified in that sense.

But man, there's a lot of churches that do church very differently from us, but they believe in Jesus as the only way.

They believe um in salvation through Jesus alone, through faith alone.

They believe that the Bible is inerrant and in God's inspired word, and we need to look for unity.

There's another way though, disunity based on a competitive spirit.

We have this ability to just be competitive where we just um maybe you know we don't we want to have a church that's bigger than another church, or we want to have a name or reputation that's better.

Um, and so that can be a basis for disunity.

And then also disunity based on envy and jealousy.

Disunity based on envy and jealousy, which is which is similar, right?

So we need to guard our hearts, we need to strive for the unity of the church.

I love the phrase that Paul closed with, where he says, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

I want to close with this this week, three things.

First of all, consider, let's consider our own hearts and our behavior.

Are we the source of any disunity, factionalism, or cis schism?

We need to confess this as sin to the Lord and we need to repent, right?

If are if we are that source, then we need to um we need to confess it to the Lord, and then we need to repent, go in the different direction.

Second, we need to pray for one another in our church, and then pray for the churches that we see throughout the week.

You may not know the pastors or individuals in a church building, but as we pass by different church buildings and signs throughout the week, let's lift them up in prayer.

Okay?

Let's do that this week, right?

There are awesome brothers that are serving the Lord this week and sisters serving the Lord this week in our community, and we want to be praying, praying for our brothers and sisters in other churches.

And then a theological question for you to consider this week: Is the power of Christ's cross evident in my life?

When we say that that the cross is the power of God, I want you to just meditate on this.

I want you to give it some thought this week.

Is the cross, is the cross having its power, its influence in my life?

If you're struggling with attitudes, if you're struggling with conf interpersonal conflict, if you're um struggling with a vision for life, I can guarantee you if you meditate on Jesus' cross and what it represents, it will have a powerful impact on your life.

If you're struggling with forgiveness, the cross of Christ will be the key that unlocks your heart.

So let me just encourage you, saints, this week, to give um give these, to respond to this text in these three ways.

To consider your activity to um kind of the hearing of faith to this text might look like like these three things.