1 Corinthians 4
It’s All A Gift

First Corinthians is very a “dense” book. By that I mean there’s often a lot of information in a small amount of verses. That leaves preachers like me with something of a dilemma. I could go through the book essentially verse by verse, but that would probably take the best part of a year, maybe longer. If I were to try and take bigger chunks and preach everything that is in that chunk it usually ends up being confusing. People get information overload. So the challenge is to decide what you’re going to address and what you’re going to skip. This week, we’re going to restrict ourselves to the middle section of chapter 4 of First Corinthians.

Just to set the scene a bit, we’re coming to the end of Paul’s discussion of leaders and leadership in the church. He has been talking about how he and Apollos are servants of God who have planted and built the church according to the gifts that God has given them. Now we’re going to pick up again at verse 6.

Paul takes all that he has said up to now about himself and Apollos and says, ⁶ Now, brothers, I have applied these things to myself and Apollos for your benefit, so that you may learn from us the meaning of the saying, “Do not go beyond what is written.” Then you will not take pride in one man over against another.

Last week we talked about how the church is founded upon and built up by the gospel, and by the teaching of scripture. If we try and build a community on anything less than that, it may be a nice community, but it won’t be the church. Now Paul gives us the other side of that truth; not to go beyond what is written. Our faith is built on scripture. And it is bounded and shaped by scripture. We’re called to believe no less than what scripture teaches, but also not to add anything to that; no extra bells and whistles, no extra rules and regulations.

It seems like every now and then someone writes a book that captures that idea. In the 1940’s C.S. Lewis wrote a book called “Mere Christianity.” A few years later John Stott wrote one called “Basic Christianity.” Just recently N.T. Wright wrote one called “Simply Christian.” Each one is an attempt by the writer to clarify, for his generation, what is at the core of Christianity. I would encourage you to read any of them. “Simply Christian” is the most recent.

If something isn’t in scripture, or if it can’t be supported from scripture, then at best it belongs on the fringes of our faith. Our first response to any teaching or idea (new or old) should be that of the Bereans in Acts 17, “¹¹ Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.” (Acts 17.11)

Remember that Paul was preaching Jesus as the Messiah, and many Jews rejected that as “going beyond what was written.” But as the Bereans read and studied and discussed together, God made his word clear to them. He still does the same for believers today.

So, in this verse Paul is warning us against two things; going beyond what is written, and taking pride in one man over against another. I’ll take the second one first.

The dangers of labels

Taking pride in one person over against another

In Corinth people in the church were “taking pride in one man over against another” by labelling themselves in relation to important names; Paul, Apollos, Cephas, etc.

This was when Christianity was only a few years old. Today we have 2000 years of church history. More history, more names of men to take pride in over against another; Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer, Wesley, Seymour, and so on. Some of you might recognise most of those names, some of you don’t. That’s OK. The point is that almost every major stream in the Western church is attached to the name of one man or another. And today, as a result of television and other technologies, there are a host of other voices of other teachers, men and women, who give us the opportunity to take pride in them, over against someone else.

How do we deal with that?

Paul gave us the answer in the last chapter. Respect the insights and traditions that these leaders gave to the church, but recognise that they too are, to use Paul’s words, “just servants.” But, unlike Paul, they were not, are not, inspired. That means that, as simple men and women of God, they get some things wrong. None of them are infallible.

[A highly respected professor at Tyndale Seminary once told his class that, if he got to heaven and found that he was 80% right in what he taught, he would be really happy. That’s not to say that he taught things he didn’t think were true. It was just a humble recognition that he didn’t know everything.]

That whole list; Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, Cranmer, Wesley, Seymour, and the contemporary names, Piper, Wright, and Stanley, Hickey, Meyers, and Hinn, they’re all human and they all get some things wrong.

Going beyond what is written

Which brings us to the other problem Paul identifies in this verse, “going beyond what is written.”

Each one of those names I mentioned is part of a tradition that looks at faith in a particular way. Some of those traditions are named after their founders; Lutheran, Calvinist, Wesleyan. Each of those traditions, including the TV evangelists, has its own set of writings, apart from scripture. Much of that is good. We can learn a lot from reading those leaders and writers that God has given as gifts to his church. The danger is that we read scripture through those writings, instead of reading the writings in the light of scripture.

We have no excuse for that. For over 1000 years the scriptures were locked up in Latin and only priests could interpret them. Then in 1526 William Tyndale published the New Testament in English for the first time, as he said, so that “every ploughboy” could read it. That’s still a good target audience. For “ploughboy” read “every check out girl” or “every McDonalds server.” And that’s a moving target, too. Bible translation is an ongoing project because language changes all the time. You can pray for Cindy Westfall as she is part of a team that is producing a new English translation of the Bible. Pray that they will produce a translation that is faithful to the original, and that is easily read by anyone who can read English.

We need to be reading and studying scripture, not just what other people say about scripture, no matter how big, or how old, their name is. That’s why I encourage everybody to be in a Bible Study of some sort. Because it’s important that we read scripture, not just read about it; and because reading scripture is something that is best done in community. That way we’re able to challenge and correct each other, because we too are not infallible. To quote John Stott, one of the great preachers of the 20^th century, when he was asked the best way to study the Bible, he said, “With as many people as possible from as many cultural backgrounds as possible.” That way we can balance out our biases and hear the text more clearly.

Boasting about something other than but Jesus

Taking pride in one tradition over another and going beyond what is written both have a damaging effect on relationships within the church. But there’s something else that Paul addresses in this passage, something that Paul calls “boasting.” The word means basically “to take pride in” something. Sometimes it’s appropriate to boast, though usually only about other people. It’s appropriate for a parent to take pride in their children. Paul sounds like a proud father when churches get it right and live out the gospel well.

But there is a dangerous kind of pride that takes pride in yourself, in your background, in your tradition. That kind of boasting sets up a hierarchy of Christians. “My kind of Christian is “better” than your kind of Christian.” I’m not talking about traditions that have rejected the foundation of the gospel. I’m talking about our brothers and sisters who would affirm all the core beliefs of our faith – divinity of Christ, reality of sin, need for a saviour, salvation through the cross, all those kinds of things – but who are different in one way or another.

There’s always the temptation to think that we think that we’re saved by being a good Baptist or a good Anglican or a good Calvinist, that we’re saved by our theology rather than our faith in Jesus, that we take pride in, we can boast, in those things, rather than in Christ himself.

The antidote

So what’s the antidote for all this? How can we avoid focussing too much upon different teachers, or traditions or streams in the church.

Seeing ourselves as others see us

The NIV says in verse 7, ⁷ For who makes you different from anyone else? A better translation might be, “For who sees anything different in you?” The truth is that there aren’t that many distinctions between us as Christians. Anyone looking from the outside tends to see the similarities not the differences.

There’s a much quoted line from Robert Burns that captures this idea. One Sunday in 1786 he was in church and noticed a head louse crawling around in the bonnet of the lady in front of him. He went home and wrote his famous poem “To A Louse.” He starts off rebuking the louse for bothering such a fine lady, but ends up realising that, to a louse, we’re all pretty much the same. The last verse goes like this:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us! / It wad frae monie a blunder free us, / An' foolish notion: /
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, / An' ev'n devotion!

Which, translated into standard English says:

O would some Power the gift to give us / To see ourselves as others see us! / It would from many a blunder free us, / And foolish notion: / What airs in dress and gait would leave us, / And even devotion!

“To see ourselves as others see us,” would free us from many of our foolish notions. If we present ourselves to the world as Christians first – not as Baptists, or Pentecostals, or Reformed, or whatever – our combined witness is much more powerful.

That’s been one of the great blessings of being part of TrueCity. Churches from many different backgrounds working together to present a positive face of the gospel to the city of Hamilton. There are Fellowship Baptist churches and Convention Baptist churches. Those two denominations resulted from a very nasty church split in the 1920s, yet here we are, working together. There’s an Associated Gospel church. There’s a Brethren assembly. There are Christian Reformed churches and Anabaptist churches. I mentioned to one pastor that a generation ago some of our churches wouldn’t even have talked to each other. His response, with a smile, was, “And a few generations before that my kind of Christian were executing your kind of Christian.” The fact that we can work together is a testimony to how the Spirit is at work to bring the church together.

Seeing that all we have is a gift from God

And it takes the focus away from us and onto our Lord. Because, as Paul says, What do you have that you did not receive?

This question sums up Paul’s response to this whole issue of focussing on names and traditions and distinctives.  It’s also one of the main themes underlying his letter to the Corinthians. What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?

It’s not like we made up the gospel, or discovered it, that it in some way belongs to us. No, while we were still God’s enemies he sent his Son to die in our place and he freely offers the gift of eternal life to anyone who will put their faith in him. So what is there for Christians to boast about, except the amazing love of God that reached out to me, a sinner? My theological training? Or my experience of God? My Christian heritage? No, just this one thing, that he has given me the gift of eternal life and invited me to follow him on a pilgrimage through this life with him.

Seeing that no-one has arrived

And that’s the third thing that we can do; remember that we’re all on a journey and no-one has arrived. Some of the Corinthians were talking as if they were already living in the New Jerusalem, as if they had already arrived. That’s what Paul is referring to when he writes, ⁸ Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! You have become kings—and that without us!

There’s a technical term for the way the Corinthians were thinking. It’s called “over-realised eschatology.” Here’s how it works. Jesus came to bring in the kingdom of God, to make all things new. He came healing and casting out demons. I have accepted him as saviour, so that means that I am in the kingdom. That means I will never get sick, I will always be successful, I am a child of the king, and I should live like a king. Sound familiar? It’s what we today call “prosperity preaching.” Become a Christian and God owes you a new house, a new car, and a life free from trouble and disease.

Once again this is something that sets up hierarchies of who’s a better Christian. Unfortunately, it often results in people blaming the victim, “The reason you’re sick is because you don’t have enough faith to be healed. If you really believed, then you’d be healed this instant.”

Paul’s response is to point to his own experience as an apostle. To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. ¹² We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; ¹³ when we are slandered, we answer kindly. Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world.

If the message of the gospel took away all your troubles then surely the messengers, the apostles, would be the best examples of that. But the reality is that their lives were very difficult.

The day will come when God wipes away every tear, and heals every wound, and sets all things right. That day is not today. That day is in the future when Jesus returns. In the meantime we are called to live today in light of that future. We’re called to journey together through a world that is full of brokenness, pain and sin, but always with our eyes on Jesus’ future coming. That’s what gives us hope to live today, to make a difference today, and to pull some small part of that future into the lives of those around us, today.

Take away

In two weeks we have the opportunity to celebrate our common faith and calling, across denominational boundaries, at the TrueCity Celebration. Take advantage of that opportunity to live out what Paul is talking about here; that we’ve all received the same gift of life and we’re on a journey together and that we have the chance to live out our faith together before the world, to the glory of God.