Looking Beyond the Mess and Seeing Grace

Looking Beyond the Mess and Seeing Grace

Allen Snapp 1/11/15

In the 90’s a man going by the pen name Ted L. Nancy wrote letters to various businesses, asking questions that could only be described as bizarre. Here are a couple samples:

• A letter written to Ralph’s Supermarket Customer Service: 

I recently bought a sponge from you. When I got home I used my sponge then went to sleep. I put my sponge on the kitchen sink. The next morning when I woke up that sponge was in the bedroom with me. How did it get there?

Another time I was just sitting in the living room reading when l looked down. I noticed that that sponge was right by my feet. How did it get there?

I took that sponge and locked it in a room. All night I heard banging.  He goes on to ask if he should send the haunted sponge back to them or take it to the store and get a new one. Ralph’s Supermarket wrote back apologizing that he received a defective product and urging him to return the sponge for a prompt replacement.

• Nordstrom Dept Store

I am a regular shopper at your Nordstroms store in Glendale. In the past few weeks I have noticed that a new mannequin you have in the store looks just like my deceased neighbor. I have passed this mannequin from many directions and the resemblance is uncanny…Is it possible to buy this mannequin so I may present it to my neighbor’s family? This family is in some need of good loving. 

Nordstrom responds they don’t normally sell their mannequins and politely question how comforting it would be for someone to receive a mannequin that looks like a deceased loved one, but they are willing to make an exception and sell the mannequin if he desires. 

• Coca Cola 

Dear Coca Cola, I have a beverage called Kiet Doke. Will it interfere with your beverage - Diet Coke? The taste is not similar at all! (Mine tastes like Pepsi). Let me know so I can continue to sell my soda. Thanks.

Coca Cola’sresponse is gracious and respectful, but leaves no room for doubt that this is not acceptable and they are going to land on him if he does not cease and desist in marketing Kiet Doke. Nancy backs down and assures them that he is going to pull his 11 cans of Kiet Doke from the shelves immediately. He closes by graciously inviting them to try his new product: Piet Depsi. 

All of this back and forth correspondence was compiled in a book called Letters from a Nut. The 1^st letter to the Corinthians is a part of a larger body of correspondence, and in fact Paul writes this letter in response to a letter the believers in Corinth wrote to him in which they asked him a number of questions, questions that make it clear a kind of hyper-spiritual nuttiness had overtaken the church. So 1 Cor. could 

be called Letter to a Nutty Church, because Paul is writing to graciously, but firmly, set them straight.

Background of Corinth

The city of Corinth was (and actually still is) a Greek city located on the Peloponese Peninsula which is just south of the Greek mainland. Corinth was a major sea port and a very wealthy and prominent city; in fact by the time Paul traveled to Corinth it was the fourth largest city in the Roman Empire. It also became famous for its excessive sexual immorality, to the point where the term to “corinthianize” came to mean living in sexual immorality. 

Paul’s missionary travels brought him to Corinth around the year AD 50 and it was such a hard place to plant a church that he must have been tempted to be discouraged and maybe even give up because the Lord found it necessary to speak to him and tell him not to be afraid and not give up, because the Lord had many people in the city that belonged to Him. Paul stayed there nearly two years.

The letter of 1 Cor. was written about 3 years after Paul left them and through the letter they wrote to him and some reports that have come to him, Paul can tell that the church in Corinth is having some serious problems. 

The mess at Corinth

• There are divisions within the church
• There is immorality in their midst that’s so bad it would make the average pagan blush
• Communion services were a mess: the poor went hungry and the rich got drunk 
• The charismatic gifts were being abused
• On top of this, they have grown very proud about their spirituality 
• Then over all of this, there were many in the church who questioned Paul’s authority and credentials as an apostle, and so there is an increasing wedge coming between them and Paul. 

With all that in mind, let’s read Paul’s greeting to the Corinthians found in vv. 1-9 and then let’s pray together.

1 Cor. 1:1-9 

The first three verses contain Paul’s greeting to the church and even in this greeting he is beginning to instruct the Corinthians: 

Called by the will of God to be an apostle… Paul was always cognizant of the fact that his apostleship wasn’t something that he or any other man instituted. He was an apostle because it was God’s will. Many of them are questioning his apostolic authority and he wants to remind them that it was God, not man, who called him to be an apostle.

And our brother Sosthenes…this is probably the Sosthenes mentioned in Acts 18:17 who was the ruler of the synagogue in Corinth when Paul was there. If so, it would mean that two synagogue rulers in Corinth, Crispus and Sosthenes, came to faith in Christ, one right after the other. 

To the church of God that is in Corinth…(vs. 2) the church doesn’t belong to man, it belongs to God, and no church is alone or has the corner on God’s work of grace. All those who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ belong to God’s church. 

The Corinthians were becoming proud of their spirituality and were in danger of thinking they were “special” – better and superior to other believers. This kind of pride can be a problem for any church, large or small. A sense that “we do it right” can infiltrate the church and put a wedge between us and other believers. 

I remember when I first encountered this form of spiritual pride. I got saved as a teenager in a small Methodist church, and when I graduated I moved about a half hour away and began to go to a high powered, very charismatic church. The music was loud, the worship exuberant, the preaching dynamic. And suddenly that little Methodist church with its hymns and gospel songs and not so charismatic preaching seemed sub-par to me. When I’d visit I could feel this sense of superiority – I was assessing (really, judging) everything they did and they weren’t making the grade. It was pride and the crazy thing about pride – and if you struggle with pride please hear this – is that it’s directional compass doesn’t point to true north. The prouder of our spiritual superiority we get, the more spiritually immature and deficient we reveal ourselves to be. It’s deceptive. 

Paul reminds them – and us – that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ is a part of the church of God. There’s only one church, and only one Lord, and we are all brothers and sisters in him!

Grace to you…Paul prays God’s grace and peace over them. Paul knew that the entirety of God’s work in His people is summed up in the word “grace”. Last week we talked about the pipeline God uses to convey His power to His people through His promises. That pipeline is constructed of grace. Nothing of God’s good work would come to us if not for grace. Paul’s motivation for writing this letter isn’t to “get something off his chest”. It’s to impart grace to the precious believers in Corinth. He’s not writing to tear them down; he’s writing to build them up. 

And with that gracious greeting, Paul then lets them in on his constant prayer for them (vv. 4-9).

Looking beyond the mess and seeing God’s grace at work (vv. 4-9)

The thing that stands out to me in these opening words is how gracious Paul is to this messed up church. He’s going to get to the correction, but he begins by taking the time to encourage them, and not just encourage them in general, but in the very things that are creating the problems. He thanks God always that they were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge. Those two words, speech and knowledge, logos and gnosis, refer to spiritual speech and spiritual knowledge. Speechrefers to charismatic speech like prophecy, tongues, words of knowledge and words of wisdom, etc. Knowledge refers to spiritual knowledge – something they are very proud of and something Paul will address in 1 Cor. 8 when he warns them that knowledge puffs up but love builds up. So these two things, speech and knowledge, are the epicenter of the chaos and abuse that they are experiencing as a church, but Paul thanks God that they are enriched in them both! 

Here’s a big lesson that I feel the Lord has for us in Paul’s example: he looks beyond the mess and he is able to see God’s grace at work. He doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. He doesn’t try to correct abuse of the gifts by encouraging disuse of the gifts. 

As believers it’s easy to fall off on one side or the other: either we ignore problems in the church as if they don’t exist. Churches can fester with things like sexual immorality, broken relationships, unethical practices, and spiritual abuses, and no one talks about it. No one addresses it; no one brings correction to the offenders. No one tries to work through the broken relationships. It’s like a dysfunctional family – everyone knows things are messed up but no one says anything and after a while everyone just gets used to that being the way it is. Paul won’t do that: this letter is written to address the serious issues festering in the Corinthian church.

But on the other side, it’s very easy for us to write other believers and other churches off when we see messy problems in their lives. It’s easy to only see the problems and not look beyond the mess to see God’s grace. Where this leads is a critical and judgmental spirit and that is spiritual death.

Grace guards us from a critical spirit

I love a quote about worry by Arthur Somers Roche that says: Anxiety is a thin stream of fear trickling through the mind. If encouraged, it cuts a channel into which all others thoughts are drained. I would say that a critical spirit can do the same thing. Critical judgments about others can start out as a thin stream but over time cut a deep channel into our thoughts and attitudes and after a while everything else drains into those channels. Eventually we aren’t even conscious of how critical of others we are – it just seems natural. And because we may indeed be seeing real problems, it feels justified. But it’s spiritually toxic. Whole churches and even denominations can have deep channels of criticism about other churches and denominations running through them. Listen, sometimes it’s necessary to address and correct spiritual error and abuse – this letter is a tribute to that – but we need to be careful that we don’t do it from a sense of spiritual pride and superiority on our part, and a critical spirit towards others that can’t see or acknowledge the grace of God at work in them.

I’ve been a Christian for 40 years now and over those years I’ve seen that churches can pull away from other churches for just about any reason. It’s much better today and I am grateful to see a much greater sense of unity and working together between churches, but this critical suspicion of churches that do it differently is still out there. 

Those raised in a church that taught that the charismatic gifts died out when the canon of the Bible was completed, and that the charismatic movement is a spiritual forgery from Satan, will probably tend to think there’s nothing good in the charismatic churches. I will admit that there’s excess and some serious mess in some quarters of the charismatic movement, but there are also healthy, vibrant, charismatic churches that love the Lord Jesus are seeing God do amazing things. Real mess. Real grace. 

Those raised in a charismatic church probably heard about those “dead” churches where they don’t raise their hands when they worship, don’t allow the spiritual gifts, maybe don’t even sing contemporary worship songs – they’re still singing those old hymns. The pastor probably graduated from one of those cemeteries…I mean seminaries. And yes, there are churches out there that are spiritually cold and lifeless. But there are also churches that aren’t very expressive in their singing but are very expressive in their dedication to Christ and his word. They may not believe that tongues or prophesy or healing is for today, but they believe that God is working powerfully to save and sanctify His people by the power of the gospel. Once again, there’s real mess. And real grace. 

The danger on either side is that we forget that the church is God’s church and that He loves His people and is committed to us, warts and all. Paul affirms that the power of Christ was confirmed among them and they have every spiritual gift available to them but he also points out to them that they haven’t arrived – they are still waiting for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ (vs. 7). None of us have arrived yet. We are all awaiting the coming of our Lord Jesus. Until then we will be growing…and imperfect.

Then Paul writes something amazing: who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. Guiltless? The Corinthian church is anything but guiltless. There is serious immorality going on right under their noses and they have come to believe not only that it is acceptable, but that it confirmed how spiritually “mature” they are! This reveals how confident Paul is in the cleansing power of Christ and in God’s sustaining, keeping power. 

Verse 9 tells us what that confidence is anchored in: not in their faithfulness, but in God’s faithfulness – God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. God called you into relationship with Him through His Son Jesus, and He is committed to that relationship.

It’s not our grip holding on to Christ that saves us, it’s his grip holding on to us. We need to really get that truth deep in our hearts. But then we need to bend that truth outwardly to our brothers and sisters, both in this local church and other churches that preach Christ. He is holding onto them too, even if there’s some mess. Let’s remember to look beyond the mess and look for God’s grace at work. 

There’s something else supremely important that Paul emphasizes throughout these opening verses that I want to point out as we close. This was a church that was getting distracted by a hundred lesser things: what preacher they followed, how spiritual they were, how wise they were, how good they were at speaking in tongues, and so many other minor distractions that can fill a Christian’s eyes.

Paul centers them once again on the one thing that is supremely important: Jesus Christ. These opening nine verses are Christ-centric. 

…an apostle of Christ Jesus(vs. 1) …to those sanctified in Christ Jesus (vs. 2)…the name of our Lord Jesus Christ (vs. 2)…from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ (vs. 3)…given you in Christ Jesus (vs. 4)…testimony about Christ (vs. 6)…as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ (vs. 7)…guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ (vs. 8)…called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. (vs. 9)

Ultimately what draws us together and binds us together, what creates unity in the church, and fosters love and joy and peace, isn’t whether we all agree on the charismata, or when Jesus is going to return, or whether worship should be led by an organ or an electric guitar. Not whether our church is small or large, a mega church or a home church. Not whether we use the KJV or ESV or some other translation of the Bible. 

The center of our faith is Christ. If someone is in Christ, they are my brother or sister. They may be a mess just as at times I’m a mess. And so are you. But the same Christ who promises to never leave us, promises to never leave them. Let’s remember to look beyond the mess and see God’s amazing, undeserved, ocean of grace at work in His church. And let’s always thank God for that grace, like Paul did.