The Church Divided

If they knew the real me, they wouldn't want anything to do with me.

It doesn't really matter where you've been for as long as you're sincere. You need to do this for you. You'll never be enough. If it is right, do it alone.

True. I might always be alone. I might always be safe with myself. I'm just looking for a place to count for myself.

I'm just looking for a place to be. Well good morning Summit family. We are beginning a new series today, not on horror movies in the Bible, in case you were curious, but on the book of 1 Corinthians. So you might want to take a moment, compose yourself, pray, ask God to relieve your fears and open your Bible to the book of 1 Corinthians. We're going to be in chapter 1 of course.

1 Corinthians chapter 1. Of all our four kids, it was our third child, Riah, who was born the quickest by far. She came lightning fast, as in we did not really, well we just barely made it to the hospital in time before she'd come into the world. A doctor called it precipitous labor or preposterous labor or something like that. I can't remember. But all I know is it was, it was, it was harrowing. As in like when Veronica woke up about 4.15 that morning and she said, hey, we need to go to the hospital.

Have you done this two times before? I was like, all right, now we start the timing of the contractions and, you know, kind of work our way and be there. She was like, no, there's no time. Just we have to go now. And so we're on our way there. And I remember it was about at that point about 5 a.m. And I was trying to convince her to let me pull into a Starbucks because, you know, it was going to be a long morning for me.

And I want to be able to have some energy. And she said, vetoed that, thankfully. We had barely gotten in the hospital, y'all. I mean, just literally walked in and they took, well, she, well, kind of got her in. And she, the people in the emergency room took one look at her and the whole place just went into, because they could tell it was time. And they got her in a chair and they're going up or running up to the room and doctors are yelling and nurses are coming in and they're shouting things about her getting into the right position. And not hyperventilating. I remember people yelling about that.

And I just push, push. And it was just pandemonium. And you could look I could look at Veronica's face and tell that she was panicky.

I mean, because it was we'd never happened like this with us before. And as all this pandemonium is going on around us, one of the midwife in there leans down very calmly, but very forcefully got right in her face and said, sweetheart, if you will push two times, if you will push two times, this baby will be in the world. Sure enough, I saw Veronica kind of register it. She closed her eyes. She pushed twice.

And Raya Lane was born into the world. I asked when I'm Veronica, when I asked her permission to tell the story, I asked if I could tell it where I was the one who leaned down and actually gave that word of counsel. And she said, just tell it like it happened. And I said, well, what was I doing at that moment? She said, you were part of the chaos.

You were part of the pandemonium. So Paul's first letter to the Corinthians is like a calm, clear voice that speaks to us in the midst of chaos. Things that the church in Corinth you are going to see are in absolute turmoil. And Paul is going to set up the gospel like a lighthouse that is going to guide them through the troubled waters of whatever issue that they're dealing with.

For Paul, the gospel is the clear, calm voice that cuts through the noise. Let me tell you a little bit about the church in Corinth before we start, because that'll help it make a little bit of sense. Corinth was one of the most up and coming cities in the Roman Empire.

And Paul had planted the church in Corinth on his first missionary journey. It was a city full of young people because of its location. It had a great port. It was an economic powerhouse. It was a place that a lot of people came for vacation. Appropriately mobile people from all over the Roman Empire came to move in there. Apple had announced they were buildings up in there.

Amazon had announced they were building there. Some of the most famous basketball programs in the world had established their headquarters there. It was a cosmopolitan.

It was young. It was very diverse. It had some great architecture.

You can still see if you're able to ever go travel through some of the ruins today. It had all scores of scores of temples to the Greek and the Roman gods. Paul had lived in this city for about a year and a half, and he led a lot of these young Corinthians to Christ. Y'all, he loved this church. He felt close to them. He felt connected to them.

They represented some of his very best work. But after Paul left, Paul started to get reports that they weren't doing very well. Scrolling through their Instagram feeds, he saw some things that really concerned him, primarily in five different areas. First, there were a lot of divisions among the body, factions, tribes.

We're going to see that today. Paul's going to deal with that problem in chapters one through four. Second, they had sex and romance, shall we say confusion, to put it mildly. I guess that's what you would expect in a city full of young people, but sexual sin was happening in the church, and a lot of people in the church were like, boy, I mean, what's the big deal?

Right? I mean, it's just sort of kind of how things are in Corinth. And two consenting adults, so, I mean, I don't see what the big deal is with it, and we're okay with it. So in chapters five through seven, Paul's going to dish out a lot of hard truth about sex and marriage and singleness and divorce. Third, there was a lot of acrimony over differences of conviction on what Christians were and were not allowed to do. A lot of these new believers had come out of a Jewish context, and they thought, you know, God doesn't change, and holiness is holiness. So we really ought to pay attention to the Old Testament law. But then there's a lot of other Christians there who were like, hey, we are free from the law, and we don't really need to go back into anything Jewish.

And so I'm just going to embrace my freedom in Christ. And so there was a lot of questions about stuff like that. There was questions about whether or not they could eat things that had been offered to idols, whether or not they should go places where there was idol worship.

And I know that doesn't seem like a super relevant question to us anymore. But in dealing with this, Paul is going to lay out a lot of biblical principles that show us how we can deal with differences of conviction in our church today. Things like how we approach politics or differences that we have in the best way to educate our children.

Homeschool or public school or private school, whether we drink alcohol, whether or not we get vaccinated, or how often we wear masks. That's going to be in chapters 9 and 10. Fourth, their church services were chaotic. They were chaotic. They had a group there that was like we were really in touch with the Spirit. And they kept having words that the Holy Spirit was putting on their heart, and they were getting up and disrupting the church service. And they were like, hey, if you don't listen to what the Spirit's doing in the church, you are quenching the Spirit. And everybody there wanted to follow the Spirit, but it just felt like chaos. And they had these questions about tongues, people praying out loud in tongues and saying this is from the Holy Spirit. And so in chapters 11 through 14, Paul is going to give us some guidelines about what it looks like to be a Spirit-filled church.

And what a mature version of that looks like. Fifth, there were some who were saying that the resurrection of Jesus and a lot of his miracles, in fact, were just not that important. More important, they said, was what Jesus taught and how he lived.

The justice things that he was about and the moral principles he laid out. So in chapter 15, Paul is going to explain to them why the resurrection, an actual physical bodily resurrection, is everything to the Christian. In discussing every one of these problems, you're going to notice that Paul defines or Paul follows a pattern. And that pattern is he defines the problem and then he leads the Corinthians to evaluate the problem in light of the gospel.

That's why we call it cutting through the noise. You say, hey, move all this and just look at the gospel and that'll guide you through. If you want to get your mind, by the way, around the Apostle Paul's entire teaching strategy in whatever book of his that you read, it's this, you take whatever is broken in your spiritual life and you apply the gospel to it. Because faith in the gospel is the cure regardless of the sickness. By the way, there is a lifetime of theology in that one sentence. You take whatever is broken in your spiritual life, whatever it is, and you apply the gospel to it because faith in the gospel is the cure regardless of the sickness. The gospel, the gospel, the truth that all of us stand condemned hopelessly before God, but God in his grace came to earth to do for us what we couldn't do for ourselves by living the life we were supposed to live and dying to death we were condemned to die and then offers us new eternal life, forgiveness of sins, justification. He offers that as a free gift of we will receive it by faith and we spend the rest of our lives in thankful worship response to what he has done for us.

That's going to be his through line. We're going to walk through each of those five sections of Paul's letter spending two to three weeks on each of them because honestly I feel like Paul could have written this letter to our church right here in Raleigh, Durham. Am I right? Do we sometimes have divisions in this church?

You're like, no, no, no, no. Summit members seem to agree on everything. Well, clearly you have not been a part of a small group or you are paying no attention to social media. And I don't just mean JV disagreements like Jordan over LeBron or Chick-fil-A over Popeyes or Myers-Briggs or Enneagram or whether or not essential oils cancels real medicine or not, whether the toilet paper should unroll from the top or the bottom.

I'm not talking about those things. We've got members that disagree on some really important matters and who come from some pretty wildly different backgrounds, which is why they approach these questions differently. Is it possible for Christians like that to actually be united or is that just a pipe dream, y'all? Is that a kind of thing of like, yeah, that's sentimental, we would like that, but when you actually get down to it, it just won't work until everybody has conformed to one way of thinking.

Is that how it is? How about sexual sin, sexual confusion? Is that present in our church? And do we have questions about singleness and divorce? And do some of us have questions about what it looks like to respond to the Holy Spirit in a church service and how to follow Him? Do we have people who question Christianity's miraculous claims?

I would say a hearty yes to all of those things. Now, I know when I say that, some of you look at that list and you're like, man, divisions and gossip and sexual sin and charismatic chaos, Corinth sounds like a pretty jacked up church. And to be honest with you, I'm not sure that's the kind of church I really want to be a part of. And now you're telling me that the church at Corinth reminds you of this church? Yeah, well, we don't want you either, you Pharisee, okay? So, no, just kidding, we do want you.

But listen, here's what I want you to see. Any church actually reaching people has these kinds of problems. Because when you reach lost sheep, they come in smelling like sheep, right?

And they leave sheep poop everywhere and sometimes you step in it and it smells bad. But, y'all, I will take those problems all day long if it means we're actually reaching people. Tim Keller says that there are two kinds of problems that churches have.

The first he calls living problems, living problems. The church is reaching unchurched people who are bringing in all their unchurched issues. And because a church like this reaches across political lines, they've got to wade through messy political discussions. And because people come from different cultural backgrounds, they've got to wade through uncomfortable cultural clashes. And because they reach across financial boundaries, they're not always agreed on on the right way for the rich and the poor to relate together in one body. And the people you bring in don't always know how to talk or behave in Christian ways.

Have you experienced this? I remember early on here I was part of this basketball ministry and by God's grace it led three or four of the guys to Christ out of this basketball thing. And I asked one of them, one of the best players there, it was our first Easter service. I'm like, man, it would just be awesome if you gave your testimony. And we went over his testimony, and I thought he kind of had it down and everything, and it was super powerful. When he gets up there to share his testimony, I've told you this part before, but they all had nicknames for each other. His nickname was Air because he could jump so high. One guy they called Flash because he was so quick when he would drive.

One guy they called Money because he never missed a three-pointer. I was like, hey, I need a nickname. They called me No Don't Shoot. That is not a joke.

I wish it were. They was like, well, you're No Don't Shoot. So this guy's telling me, he's talking about how I'd come in and started to get to know these guys, and he said, man, I first saw a pastor coming up to play on our team, and he said, he said, I just shook my head, and I said, no, no, no, no, not him. And here's what he said, he, S-U-C-K-S. I know it's not a horrible cuss word, but just for your kids. He's like, he's like, and I'm just like, this is my first Easter service.

All the grandmas are there. Everybody's dressed up in their Sunday best, and he just, and I'm like, how did I not go over, don't say things like that in the pulpit. And then I have this even worse thought of like, what else is he about to say, because I've heard this guy talk on the basketball court. You know, people, they don't always know how to talk, right? I remember being part of a prayer circle one time or prayer thing, and I'm praying with a guy, and he, in the middle of our prayer circle, drops the F-bomb to God, like with no kind of like inhibition that it wasn't appropriate. This is so blank and hard, Lord.

And I'm like, I feel like that's sincere, but man, bro, you've got to not say that in prayer, okay? So they don't always know how to talk, but that's okay. I'll take those problems all day long, if it keeps me away from the second kind of problem, which are dying problems. A church with a dying problem, because in a church like that, everybody's from the same political party, so there's no fights there. Everybody's from the same ethnicity, so there's no clashes.

Everybody's from the same income level, so they all agree about money. Everybody is, you know, from a church background, so they know what to say and what not to say. They think the same, they look the same, they act the same, they vote exactly the same, but folks, that's not a church.

That is a quickly dying Christian country club. So the question is, what kind of church do you want to be a part of? You want to be a church with living problems or dying problems? Because you're going to be a part of a church with problems.

I'll take living problems all day long. You with me? Say amen. Say amen if you agree with that.

All right, so today, we're going to jump right into the first problem, and that is the problem of divisions. Look at verse 10, chapter 1. Paul says, Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree in what you say, that there be no divisions among you.

By the way, here we go. This is like Paul's thesis statement for the next four chapters, maybe for the entire book. Notice that he invokes the name of the Lord. Paul always spoke with the authority of an apostle, but now he is actually even raising that a level higher. I'm bringing God's name into this.

This is as weighty and important an issue as I'm going to deal with. This is top-level, top-shelf stuff for Paul. This gets to the core of who we are. Let there be no divisions, no factions, no tribalism, no sense of varsity or JV squads in the church. You say, well, what kind of divisions were there exactly in this Corinthian church? Well, some of them, I explained to you, were theological in nature. Some of the questions about whether they could eat meat offered to idols and what to do with the Old Testament laws and that kind of stuff. So some of the divisions were theological.

Some of the divisions, however, were purely personality-driven. Look at verse 11. For it has been reported to me about you, my brothers and sisters, that there is rivalry among you. One of you says, I belong to Paul. And another, I belong to Apollos. Or I belong to Cephas, which was another name for Peter.

Or I belong to Christ. Some were like, hey, I'm a Paul guy. You know, Paul is such a good theologian. Man, his testimony is amazing. His letters are awesome.

I'm trying to memorize some of these letters. I just love Paul, Team Paul. Others are like, yeah, well, you know, Paul is great with the theology and everything, but Paul is boring.

By the way, Paul himself admitted that in 2 Corinthians. He said, I am mighty in my writing, and I am weak in my speaking, which meant that he was boring. You've heard the one about the usher who's seating people in church, and the little old lady asked to be sat in the front row. And the usher said, oh, ma'am, you don't want to do that. Our pastor is so boring. Like, he will put you to sleep guaranteed, and if you're on the front row, everybody will see that.

He'll see that, and you'll be really embarrassed, so don't sit on the front row. And this little old lady turned to the usher and said, young man, do you know who I am? He said, no, ma'am. She said, I'm the pastor's mother. And the usher said, uh, do you know who I am, ma'am? And she said, no. He said, thank God.

Turned around and walked away. That would have been Paul's preaching. Paul had a preaching style that only a mother could love, right?

So these people were like, I'm not a Paul guy, because Paul, man, he doesn't reach a lot of people because people want to come hear him. I'm an Apollos guy. Apollos, you see, was this guy who showed up in Corinth right after Paul. Acts 18, you can read this, that whole story there. And Apollos was a guy who they say was just eloquent, which meant he could preach pain off the walls.

Now, he was a little weak in his theology, though, and so every once in a while, one of the other apostles or church leaders had to take him aside and say, hey, man, you didn't really say that exactly right, or that's not 100% the right way, but man, could he preach. And so after Paul had planted this little small church, Apollos came in and blew the thing up. I mean, just it grew, and people loved them some preaching of Apollos.

So now you've got these factions. Some are like, I'm Team Paul, theology is my jam. And others are like, no, no, no, I'm Team Apollos because I'm into growth and reaching people because that's what Jesus wants.

He wants to bring in the lost sheep. And Team Paul is like, well, you stink. And Team Apollos is like, well, you stink, right? Apollos has weak theology. Yeah, but Paul is boring. And what good is your theology if I'm bored?

I heard a guy one time got so bored, he fell out of a window and won a Paul sermon and died. What good is his great theology if people are dying in the middle of church and things were getting pretty heated? Well, there was another group that felt this way about Peter, and then my favorite, there was a group that was like, I belong to Christ, right? Because in every church, am I right? In every church, you've got the Jesus juke guy, right? I'm not into your theology books or your favorite preachers, just me and my Bible. By the way, commentators say this might have been the most arrogant group of all of them because they just assumed they didn't really need the church. They're just like, just me and Jesus, we're fine. All right, so those are your different personality-driven factions.

By the way, do we see these same kinds of divisions at work today? Uh, yeah. You've always, in every church, you've always got Bible knowledge guy. He's like, just give me John Calvin, more John Calvin, John Piper, and John MacArthur, the first, second, and third John of American Christianity.

All right, just give me more of those guys. They're always complaining that there's not enough meat in the sermon. And by the way, I am all into spiritual feeding.

I hope that is obvious to you. But sometimes this group, I'm telling you, is really self-centered. It's like all they want from church is for it to be a classroom that puffs up their head with theological knowledge, but you start to sense that there is pride and self-centeredness at work. They don't care about reaching people, and they're not really that much into spiritual growth. They just like to learn. They just like to learn because it makes them feel like they are superior. What's ironic to me about this group is that they masquerade as spiritually mature. They know how to talk that way. But you know what they remind me of when I was going through this? I was thinking, when my kids were like toddlers, and they would be in the high chair with the bib, and it was time to eat, and I wasn't giving them food that they liked, and the way that they like it, they just started to bang on the thing, like, feed me, feed me.

And then every once in a while, they would just show their disgust by taking the plate and just flipping it over, you know, on the floor with the spaghetti on the floor. And that's, to me, like the email I get from some of these members that are like, you didn't use enough Greek heiress tenses and have enough Old Testament cross references in the sermon for me to feel like I was spiritually fed. Again, I'm into deep preaching, but for some, it's not about spiritual maturity.

It's something else. Other people are like, no, no, no, I'm the experienced guy. I mean, if I don't get goosebumps in church, and if the altar's not filled with people weeping after it's over, if I don't cry during worship, it wasn't a spirit-filled service. And others are like, no, no, no, I'm the take-care-of-the-body guy. Church ought to be about discipleship. Who cares how big it is? We just got to do life together.

Small groups should last at least four hours. And everyone should know every detail of everybody else's business, otherwise it's not a church. Some are like, no, I'm missions and evangelism.

The whole church's success is measured entirely by how much money and how many people you were sending out. Others are like, no, no, I'm the social justice guy. I'm all about love in our community. That's what Jesus would be like. And still others are like, give me diversity or give me death.

The only thing I care about in the church is that it looks like a rainbow on stage. Now, there's truth in all these things. And a gospel-loving church pursues all of them.

Summit is trying to pursue all those things. And let me further say, there's nothing wrong with being particularly attracted to one of those. Having even a proclivity toward one of those, that might be an evidence of your own spiritual gifting and how you're supposed to contribute. What is wrong is when those preferences are accompanied by a spirit of division, self-righteousness and separation. So Paul then gives four correctives to this spirit of divisiveness.

Four of them. If you take a note, write these down. Number one, he says first you gotta understand unity. You gotta understand unity.

Look at verse 10. Be united with the same understanding and the same conviction. Be united how?

This is very important. How are you to be united? By magically starting to agree on everything? Paul did not write the book of 1 Corinthians to settle all the arguments. He didn't come in with his theological pixie stick and try to wave magic Holy Spirit dust on everybody and say everybody's gonna think the same thing about politics now.

Everybody's gonna think the same thing about these convictions. No, Paul says be of the same understanding and conviction about the gospel is what he means. Be of the same understanding about the importance of the gospel over these secondary things and the same conviction about the primacy of the gospel. A lot of people call for unity in the church but they don't really seem to know what it is, at least not biblical unity.

Write this down. For Paul, unity was not uniformity where everybody in the church agrees on everything. That is not the biblical vision of the church. The New Testament church is a church where Jesus is so large that it makes disagreement on secondary things much less important. You guys ready for some frank talk?

What was most disappointing for me in 2020 was for how so many church people, they seemed willing to walk away from their church over a relatively small disagreement, at least small in light of the gospel or in light of eternity. Well, you did not say enough about this particular culture issue so I'm leaving. Well, you actually said way too much about this particular culture issue so I'm leaving. I don't agree with how you approach vaccines. I don't agree with what you're doing with masks. Y'all, I've talked with people that have been at the church for 10, 15 years.

I had married their children, that we had walked through some of the most painful chapters together as we buried some loved one in their life and I'm like, now you are leaving because you disagreed with what we're doing with masks? We Christians, we say we hate cancel culture but it is amazing to me how so many of us canceled our church over disagreement on something that was relatively small. Again, small at least in light of the gospel. For Paul, unity was not uniformity but for Paul, unity was also not relativism. Relativism is where you say, you know, everybody's kind of right about everything.

That's ridiculous. That's just not true. There are right and wrong approaches to many things. On some of these secondary things, there is a more biblically mature way to approach things. The question is the importance that we're giving these things in our fellowship. Do we have the same conviction about the gospel and the same understanding of its importance? And Paul was like, look, there's some things I actually don't think you're totally right about and we're coming from a different perspective and I hope over time maybe we'll see it the same but you know what? I'm not gonna let that divide us because the gospel is more important. Similarly, unity is not abandoning the faith. There are some Christians who think the only way we can be unified is by refusing to take a clear stand on anything.

But you're gonna see this. Throughout Paul's letter to the Corinthians, he's gonna identify a number of beliefs and say, y'all, we gotta agree on this because if we don't agree on this, then we have no identity as God's people. Things like the person and work of Christ, the nature of saving faith, the inerrancy of the Bible, God's designs for gender and sexuality. I was once part of a global meeting of Christian leaders. They wanted to issue a joint statement on Christian witness and so they produced a five-page document called Christians and Evangelism in the 21st Century and we were all supposed to ratify it.

So I spent an hour or so reading through the thing. It was a five-page document that was filled essentially with progressive talking points, progressive political talking points, but not a single line in the entire thing about the necessity of trusting in Jesus for salvation. So in the little discussion time, I got to a mic and I was like, hey, I'm just curious, this five-page statement on evangelism doesn't have anything about evangelism and one of the spokespeople said, well, we didn't want this to be theologically divisive. And so I'm like, in our joint statement on evangelism, we can't even unify around the gospel itself? That's not unity.

I mean, needless to say, I didn't sign the statement and nor did a bunch of other people that we would go through ministry with. Unity is not abandoning of faith. Finally, unity is not sentimentality where you paper over divisions and never talk about them and just smile for the camera. Like I've told you, this seems to be what a lot of churches want. Diversity is a snapshot of the stage because that looks good, but these people never actually do life together and those, by the way, who are outside the majority, the majority never seem to find themselves in positions of influence.

You're multicolored, but you're not actually multiethnic. That's not Paul's vision of unity. Paul's vision of unity is real people from different backgrounds and different perspectives and preferences who find a larger uniting hope in Jesus. Unity is having the same understanding and conviction about the gospel and understanding of its importance in the spiritual life of the believer and in the mission of the church and then attempting to think through everything else in light of that, which leads Paul to corrective number two. Paul says after you understand unity, you gotta embrace grace. You gotta really embrace grace.

These are the main points. Let me read several verses here to you. Verse 13, is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in Paul's name? I thank God I baptized none of you except for Crispus and Gaius so that none of you could say you were baptized in my name. I did, in fact, baptize the household of Stephanus. Beyond that, I don't recall if I baptized anyone else.

Let me digress for just a minute because I love that verse. We know that Paul dictated his letter to a scribe and Paul was like, I didn't baptize any of you except for Crispus and Gaius. I did baptize them.

And I think one other guy named Stephanus, maybe him and his house. Yeah, I did in fact baptize him, but you know, it's kinda hazy at this point. I don't really remember that much and the scribe is just dutifully writing all of it down and it's becoming inspired scripture, okay? The point was, Paul was like, that wasn't a major thing for me there, is baptizing people, certainly not in my name.

Verse 17, for Christ did not send me to baptize. No, Christ sent me to preach the gospel, not with eloquent wisdom so that the cross of Christ will not be emptied of its effect. And you're like, well Paul, maybe a little eloquent wisdom would help so people don't fall asleep in your sermons and die.

That would be amazing. But Paul's like, it's never been supposed to be about winning people in my personality or the power of my eloquence. The power is in the gospel. It's not in my persona. Verse 20, so where is the one who's wise?

By the way, that's a very practical question for them as they're hearing this. He's like, look around, look around. Where's the one who's wise? Where are all the Greek philosophers? Where are all the PhDs?

Where are they? Where's the debater of this age? For since, in God's wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom. God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preaching.

It wasn't the philosophers who figured it out, right? Verse 22, for the Jews asked for signs and the Greeks seek for wisdom, but we preach neither of those things. We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles. Yet, to those who are called, to those whom the Holy Spirit is working in, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God because God's foolishness is wiser than all that Athenian wisdom and God's weakness is stronger than all that human Jerusalem strength. What Paul does here is he identifies a bunch of things that don't bring salvation. He's like, this doesn't bring salvation. Jesus didn't save the world, he says, through philosophical wisdom. The Greeks over in Athens and the Jewish philosophers in Jerusalem, they're not the ones who figured this out. God did not save the world through philosophical wisdom. While the eggheads were pondering life in Athens and Jerusalem, salvation appeared on a hillside through a bunch of poorly educated shepherds in one of the poorest parts of Israel. Jesus, in the same way, says he didn't save the world through earthly success.

That's what the Jews wanted. Earthly signs of success that validated the Messiah. So they wanted the Messiah to be rich and successful and command a successful military. Problem was, Jesus never got rich.

He never commanded an army. He never really even had a large following. At his death, there were like a hundred people who were loyal to him and not even that loyal because all of them scattered when he went and when he went to be crucified. That's not a success. You just didn't have a lot of earthly signs. Most of his followers are not living their best life now.

There was no kind of thing like, man, that just validates, that's all these signs of how successful. Jesus didn't save the world through modeling obedience to the law. In fact, the ones who obeyed the law the best, the Pharisees and Sadducees, they were the ones who led in rejection of Jesus. Instead, it was fishermen and carpenters and moral misfits, prostitutes and tax collectors. They were the first ones to recognize and believe in Jesus. Paul says, look around. Who do you see in your church?

You see those people. Jesus didn't save the world through the impartation of biblical wisdom. Listen closely to this one because I don't want you to misunderstand it. Teaching is important. It's what I do every single week and I'm trying to give you biblical wisdom. It's how you learn the gospel, but hear me. It was not Jesus' wisdom that saved us. It was what Jesus did that saved us.

Think about it. What is Jesus' most famous teaching? It's the Sermon on the Mount. Did you know two of the gospels don't even record the Sermon on the Mount? I do not know of a single parable that is told in all four gospels.

Not one. Not one single teaching of Jesus spans all four. Only two of the gospels tell us about Jesus' birth.

Only two of them tell us about his temptation. John's gospel doesn't even mention the Last Supper or the first version of communion or the Eucharist or whatever you call it. Neither Matthew nor John mentions his ascension.

However, all four gospels, all of them record Jesus' betrayal, his arrest, his trial, Peter's denial, the people's choice of Barabbas, the inscription on the cross, the crucifixion and the resurrection. So what does that show you about what the gospel writers see as essential? It's faith in his work, not knowledge of his teaching that saves you. Now, that doesn't mean those other things are unimportant, just that God did not save us by sending us down a teacher to educate us or a politician to reform us or a military king to protest us or a life coach in order to help us make our lives work. He sent down a substitute to die for us, a substitute who would live the life we were supposed to live and die the death we were condemned to die, and now he saves us through the foolishness of preaching. When Paul says foolishness of preaching, it doesn't mean that I'm up here with a little beanie on, a little propeller, I'm going doo, doo, doo, doo, you know, that's what he's talking about.

He's saying foolishness of preaching means it's just simple. I'm not trying to fill your head with a bunch of wisdom. I'm trying to put before you a Jesus that you can trust in, depend on, and love.

It's very simple what I'm doing. I'm not trying to fill your head with knowledge. I'm trying to show you a person that you can commit your whole life to and you can just love. So now, verse 23, Paul says we preach Christ crucified because Christ is the power of God and Christ is the wisdom of God. You're not gonna be saved by obtaining enough wisdom or power or righteousness. Christ has all of those things in perfection and when you receive him, you get the fullness of all of them in him. So again, my goal in preaching is not to fill your heads with enough knowledge that you'll be acceptable to God. My goal is not to give you so much practical wisdom that you're gonna have no more problems in life because you got a perfect marriage and perfect family or perfect singleness or whatever. My goal for you is for you to see the beauty and the sufficiency of Jesus Christ in all of those things so that you will trust and love him. It is not sophisticated by worldly standards.

It is rather foolish. Christ did it all. Trust him. That's my only real message. You say, well, what's that got to do with unity?

Okay, pay attention. When you embrace that message of grace, and I mean really embrace it, the spirit of divisiveness leaves you. You see, behind divisiveness always lurks a spirit of pride and self-justification.

You are attracted to certain things because they make you feel superior to others. Having more Bible knowledge than others makes me feel righteous. So I take pride in being part of a church that excels in Bible knowledge because it sets me apart from other people and makes me better than them. Being successful in ministry makes me feel more righteous than other people, so I want to be a part of a church known for that. So I got to attach myself to a church that grows because that's my justification.

Being the most zealous for social justice makes me feel righteous, like if everybody in the world were like me, we wouldn't have any problems. That's the one thing that's got to be true of my church because I want to be identified as that. But we are not saved by any of those things.

We are saved by Christ and Christ alone. At the end of the day, all my wisdom and all my Bible knowledge and all my success and all my virtue and social justice, they are all filthy rags, or to use Paul's words, scubala, which we translate as dung, but commentators say is a really polite translation that if it put the real translation in there, you wouldn't be able to read that verse to your kids. He says, all my righteousness, all my wisdom, all my success, all those things are just dung. What I have is him. And in him, I've got all the power of God, all the wisdom of God, all the righteousness of God that has been gifted to me in him.

And when you embrace that, your pride crumbles and the spirit of divisiveness just leaves you. Nathan Coles, who was a Connecticut farmer in the 1730s, tells the story of listening to the great evangelist, George Whitefield, hearing him preach. Here's how we recorded his conversion.

I love this. This is the preaching that spawned the great awakening. My hearing Whitfield preach gave me a heart wound, and by God's blessing, my old foundation was broken up and I saw that my righteousness could not save me.

In other words, I came to a point where I realized that all the things I'd prided myself in, all the things that set me apart from others, they're all useless to God. His foundation was not his sin. It's not people's sin that usually sends them to hell.

It's their self-righteousness. Self-righteousness keeps far more people from Jesus than sin ever has. And so what happens is, when you are really confronted with the gospel, that whole foundation is broken up and the spirit of divisiveness, it just leaves you. Y'all, the gospel, the true gospel, cuts against the grain of your heart in a way that you will never quite get over this side of eternity. You want to be able to earn your way to God. You want to come up with something about you that sets you apart and makes you worthy so that you are not just a charity case. But when you'll come to that place where you say, I got no power, no wisdom, no righteousness, and no way to actually get those things, enough of them at least to be set apart, at that point in desperation, you will embrace Christ who is all those things, and that will cut off the source of pride, like cutting off oxygen from your body, and it will die in a matter of moments.

And yeah, you might still have different perspectives and different proclivities and different, you know, preferences, but they won't be accompanied by that smug sense of defensiveness and divisiveness, which leads me to number three. Paul says you got to enlarge Christ. You got to enlarge Christ. Verse 13, Paul says, is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? In other words, he's asking who's your salvation?

Who's actually your salvation? If it's all about Jesus, then why is Paul or Apollos or Peter, why does that even get brought up? He's not saying that when you become a Christian you lose all your preferences or differences of perspective, they just go away. He's just saying they become less important. And when you start dividing over them, y'all listen to me, that is a sure sign that secondary things are too large in your heart and your identity in Christ is too small. I'm not saying that when you get saved that when you really love Jesus that all these things go away. They don't.

I'm just saying that they start to become a lot less important and a lot less defining because Jesus becomes so big and they become so small. I always love going to local college basketball games where the whole crowd is cheering for the same team. I don't think they should let any fans in from the other team because that's not part of the experience. So with the Cameron crazies, you're like, it's just we're all for Duke. And you're like, you know, at the Dean Dome, we're all for the Tar Heels. And you go into NC State's arena and we're all, you know, making the Wolfpack signs and sounds and you got the Eagles over at North Carolina Central and you're like, who do you actually pull for? I pull for whoever invites me.

That's who I pull for, okay? I'm on their team in that moment. But what I love is I love looking around the room and you'll see like people that you know in a lot of other spheres of life don't agree on some things. But for that magical hour and a half, they're all united. They're all united around something that is so big to them that they forget about their other disagreements. And when our team wins, man, you know what?

You are crying and hugging and high-fiving random strangers in the crowd because you're just so united in your love for this one thing. There is an aspect of that that ought to be true in the church. Y'all, we're just so overwhelmed by Jesus that the other differences seem less relevant and when we come to church, our commonality in Him outweighs any secondary perspective or preference. Like I said, one of the most disappointing things to me about the last 18 months was it became crystal clear to me that a lot of Christians, I don't mean new ones, I mean long-term ones, for a lot of them, their politics or their cultural perspective was so big and their Jesus was so small.

And that was shown by how quickly they canceled their church membership over some small thing that became in their heart so much larger than Christ. Number four, here's Paul's last thing. He says you gotta wean yourself off of celebrity.

You need to wean yourself off of celebrity. Look at the last part of verse 13. Throughout these verses, Paul keeps saying what significance do these earthly leaders have for your spiritual maturity and your identity? Are you baptized in the name of Paul? Was I mentioned at your baptism or Apollos or Peter? Are you actually dependent on one of us for your salvation? Y'all listen, celebrity's always been a part of the Christian church.

Larger than life leaders that have a big impact on your spiritual growth, people that God gifts with talents and gifts. That's not accidental. God did it intentionally.

You can see that here in the book of Corinthians. But in our social media age, that celebrity's taken on new levels. Here's the thing. For a lot of people, associating yourself with some celebrity gives you a sense of identity. I'm set apart because I'm associated with that person. I'm on team so and so.

I like their posts and I follow them and I'm on this person's team. And Paul says you should not be set apart by anyone in your heart except for Jesus. All the righteousness, all the specialness, all the power that you need, it's all in him. Sure, there are certain earthly leaders that might be helpful to you on earth and you might even gravitate toward them, but you're not depending on them.

They're just tools, temporary tools in Jesus' hand. I love the first verse of Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd. Who's your shepherd? By the way, shepherd means pastor. Who is your pastor? Who is your actual spiritual shepherd? The Lord is my shepherd.

Therefore, I will never lack anything. Who's Paul? Who's Peter?

Who is JD? None of these out of us are actually your shepherd. We're just tools, temporary ones, and your master's him. Ultimately, it's him.

And because of that, you will never lack. Let me ask you a real down-to-earth question, all right? If I died tomorrow, and I just had a heart attack tonight and wasn't around tomorrow, would you leave this church, or would you stay? If your answer's like me, again, I'm not making you turn this in, just honest, hard answer. If you're like, I think I'd probably stay, good for you. Your allegiance is to this body. Your allegiance is to this mission.

But if you're like, well, I'm pretty sure I'd leave, well, then your allegiance is to me, and that's a huge problem. Who is JD? Who is Paul? You're treating the church like a restaurant where your favorite chef happens to be serving. You're not treating it like the family of Jesus that you belong to, or a movement you're committed to. Jesus is your shepherd, and the Holy Spirit is in you. Who is Pastor JD?

Who is anybody? It's him that you belong to. I get that maybe you came to this church because my preaching connected with you, or our worship really engaged you, or your kids loved our kids' ministry. That's fine as a reason to come. But I'm saying that over time, you gotta develop family bonds, bonds that are stronger than preaching preference or worship style, bonds that go beyond me, bonds that can weather disagreement in the body.

Some of you left because you don't have those bonds. The church needs to become family to you. Leaving a church ought to feel like family. I'm not saying there's never a time to leave it.

There is. I'm just saying it shouldn't be like flipping TV channels because you're bored with the one that you're watching right now, or because you choose a new restaurant because it's got some new appetizers that you want to try. If you leave a church, it should feel like walking away from a family. You ought to engage the mission here. Don't be a spectator who comes because you like my style of preaching or enjoy our kind of worship.

It's fine to start there. But it needs to very quickly translate into engaging the family and living out the mission. You know, interestingly, every once in a while, we'll do a church survey here where we just kinda ask people to fill out a survey and it kinda helps us see where they're connected.

For those that indicate that they are spiritually growing the most, you know what the number one characteristic they have in common is? People will be like, oh, if you're in a small group, right? Small groups are awesome. Small groups are awesome. Yeah, small groups are awesome, but that's not what they say. Doing a quiet time every day, that's gonna be essential, right?

Nah. I mean, it is, but that's not what they say. The number one reason every single time that people indicate if you run it through a computer, the number one correlator that determines if you're spiritually growing at our church is if you volunteer. You're like, wow, I know.

It's surprising to me too. The only thing I can say is what Pastor Joby always says, which is there's just something about helping somebody else with their relationship with Jesus that helps you out with yours. We just recognize that the moment you start volunteering and giving back, that's when you really begin to grow.

That's when you grow. Campus pastors will tell you more about how you can do that today. Finally, summit, let's resolve that at this church, we're gonna make the gospel the one thing that we unite around. It's gonna be the thing that is so large in our hearts that all the other differences, yeah, they're there, and yeah, we'll talk about them, but they're just not that significant. I'll make this really personal, okay?

Last little bit, hang with me. A few years ago, I had a letter from a young lady in our church that included a picture of her being baptized. I wasn't there on the day that she got baptized, but she wanted to tell me her story. When she first came to our church, she was not a Christian at all, far from it. She was from the West Coast, some of the universities there, and she'd come here to do some grad school work, and she was, let's just say, very far left in every possible way, and there were some friends that invited her to come to Summit, but she said the first interaction I had with you was on social media. She'd said something really snarky in response to a pro-life tweet that I had put up, and I actually responded to her on social media, which I never, ever, ever do, but for some reason, I just did in that moment, and I kind of engaged with her a little bit. We went back and forth, and I didn't have any idea she went to our church.

I just thought I was interacting with somebody random. In the letter, she told me, she said there were so many things I didn't like about you, but I kept coming to the church, and eventually, I was overwhelmed by the truth of the gospel, and I got saved. She said, now for the first several months, I've been growing by leaps and bounds. She said, even though it was clear that you were pro-life, and you believed that gay marriage was not supported in the Bible, you still didn't align this church with a political party. If you had, I would never have been able to bring myself to go, but because you didn't, I heard the gospel, and I got saved, and now I feel like I'm relearning everything. I just want to thank you for not putting politics as an obstacle in my path to belief in the gospel.

Simon, I got a lot of perspectives. I got a lot of preferences that are important to me, but none of them are as important to me as the soul of a person like this, and so let me be very clear. I'm not talking about ever backing down from preaching truth. We've got to be unapologetic in our stands for the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage, God's design for gender, other unpopular things that if it makes people mad and makes them want to go to another church, then fine, they're going to have to do that, but we just want to be a church where Christ is so large, and He is so big, but a lot of these other things are like, yeah, yeah, that's important, but not as important as that, and we come together around Him, and our unity in Him is so much bigger than our lack of uniformity and some other things. Is that the kind of church you want to be a part of? It's the kind of church I'm in for, okay? Why don't you bow your heads, bow your heads at our campuses. If you're there at home, I want you to bow your heads.

I want you just to, let's just take a moment and just sit there. Let the Holy Spirit cultivate this in your heart. Hey, listen, if you've never received Jesus, that's where this starts, just knowing Him.

The whole time I'm talking to you, you're like, man, there's something about this I want to know more of. At the end of the service, every service, you'll see pastors, prayer team members down front. We'd love to talk to you about that, how you can begin a relationship with Jesus. Just hang there for a moment and our worship team will come at all of our campuses and they'll lead us to make Jesus big and the expression of our worship.