The Church Divided, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. 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. Welcome to Summit Life with pastor, author, and theologian J.D. Greer.

I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. You know, the same divisions that were present in the early church are still at work in the church today. I'm sure I didn't need to tell you that, but because of this, it's important for those of us in the body to recognize the roots of self-righteousness and separation. And guess what?

We've all got tendencies that can lean us in that direction. So today pastor J.D. is going to walk us through four corrective measures meant to help us deal with a spirit of divisiveness in the church and ultimately how to find unity in the gospel. We kicked off this study of 1 Corinthians yesterday.

So if you'd like to catch up, you can find all the Summit Life messages free of charge at jdgreer.com. Now let's continue the teaching we began yesterday titled The Church Divided. So Paul gives four correctives to this spirit of divisiveness.

If you're taking notes, write these down. Number one, he says first you got to understand unity. You got to understand unity. Look at verse 10, be united with the same understanding and the same conviction. Be united how?

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, you know, pixie stick and try to wave, you know, magic Holy Spirit dust on everybody and say everybody's going to think the same thing about politics now.

Everybody's going to 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 on 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.

We had walked through some of the most painful chapters together as we buried some loved one in their life. 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? Paul was like, look, there's some things I actually don't think you're totally right about. 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 going to 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 going to see this throughout Paul's letter to the Corinthians. He's going to identify a number of beliefs and say, y'all, we got to 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. Unity is not abandoning the 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 got to embrace grace.

You got to really embrace grace. This is the main point so 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. The point was Paul was like I didn't 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. 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's 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 ask 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 is here is he identifies a bunch of things that don't bring salvation. He's like this is what 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 were pondering life in Athens and Jerusalem salvation appeared on a hillside to a bunch of poorly educated shepherds in one of the poorest parts of Israel. Jesus sees in the same way he 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 you know 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's wisdom that saved us. It was what Jesus did that saved us.

Think about it. What is Jesus's most famous teaching? It's a 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. Only two of the gospels tell us about Jesus's birth. Only two of them tell us about his temptation. John's gospel doesn't even mention the last supper or you know 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's 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 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 and go doo doo doo you know that's something he's talking about. He's saying foolishness of preaching means it's just simple. I'm not trying to fill your head with 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 going to 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 going to 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 what's that got to do with 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. So 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. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. Find out more about this ministry by visiting jdgreer.com today. We'll be right back with more teaching from First Corinthians in just a moment but I wanted to tell you about our new featured resource this month. It's called Cutting Through the Noise 14 Five-Minute Studies in First Corinthians. This resource is the perfect companion for our sermon series that we just began and it's designed to help you dig deeper into this most important book of the Bible. It's actually designed to help you spend time in God's Word even when you don't feel like you have time. Begin the discipline of opening the scriptures each day with this new study from Summit Life. It's yours when you generously support this ministry with a gift of $35 or more.

Give us a call at 866-335-5220 or visit jdgreer.com to get your copy today. Now let's get back to our teaching on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Greer. Nathan Coles who was a Connecticut farmer in the 1730s tells the story of listening to the great evangelist George Whitfield 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 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 has 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 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 did they, 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.

It is 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, 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. 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, 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 were 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've got to wean yourself off a celebrity.

You need to wean yourself off a celebrity. Look at the last part of verse 13. Throughout these verses, Paul keeps saying, what significance did 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 Paul or Peter? Are you actually dependent on one of us for your salvation? Y'all listen, celebrity has 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 is taken on new levels. Here's the thing. For a lot of people associating yourself with some celebrity, that 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's 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 is him. Ultimately, it's him.

And because of that, you will never lack. Let me ask you a real down-to-earth question. If I died tomorrow, I might have had a heart attack tonight and wasn't around tomorrow, would you leave this church or would you stay? If your answer is 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. I'm saying that over time, you got to 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. Finally, summit, let's resolve that at this church, we're going to make the gospel the one thing that we unite around. It's going to 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.

They're just not that significant. And so let me be very clear. I'm not talking about ever backing down from preaching truth. We got to be unapologetic in our stands for the sanctity of life, the sanctity of marriage. God's designed for gender, other unpopular things, and 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 that 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? A strong message kicking off our brand new teaching series called Cutting Through the Noise. This is Summit Life with Pastor JD Greer. We're just beginning to explore how to stay anchored in the gospel in a world full of distractions and noise. And as we begin this new series, we would love to send you a copy of our newest resource called Cutting Through the Noise, 14 Five-Minute Studies in First Corinthians. And it's yours with your gift to our ministry.

Simply call 866-335-5220 or visit jdgreer.com. All of these resources are possible because of friends like you who've given generously to support this ministry. And I'd like to invite you to take your partnership to the next level by becoming a gospel partner. A gospel partner is someone who commits to supporting Summit Life on a regular monthly basis. It's such a blessing to rely on these gifts each month as they help us accurately plan for our next opportunities here at Summit Life. Thanks to these partnerships, we're able to expand onto new radio stations, help to plant more churches and reach more people with the gospel every single day.

Thank you. Thank you for joining with us. I'm Molly Minovitch reminding you to join us tomorrow for our next message in First Corinthians titled, So You Want to Be a Leader? Join us Wednesday, same time, same place for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.