United in Mind and Judgement

Holy Spirit, we come now to your Word, asking you to reveal its meaning to us, not so that we can simply learn new information, but so that we might receive and believe and obey what you've said. So we ask you to both illuminate our minds and open our spirits to hear from you tonight. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

You can be seated. I've noticed an interesting irony in the church that when the importance of unity among Christians is mentioned, it often elicits a defensive response. So Christians who are in disagreement are exhorted to show deference and love to each other, but in response to that exhortation, they often dig in deeper and begin to explain with all the more fervor how their position is right and their brother's position is wrong, as if to say, sure, I'll show deference as long as he agrees with me. And so the call to unity, ironically, often ends up entrenching us even more deeply in our disunity. Now, to some extent, I understand that response. I understand that response when the unity card, so to speak, is played by someone who is genuinely in the wrong, and it's simply a ploy to get us to compromise truth.

We do want to dig in deeper when that's the case. There is such a thing as unbiblical unity, unity that's grounded in all the wrong things, but church, there is also something as biblical Christ honoring unity, and it's with a call to that kind of unity that Paul opens his letter to the Corinthian church. Now, what's incredible about this is that Corinth had any number of issues that needed to be addressed by the Apostle Paul. This was a messed up church. They misunderstood the covenant of marriage, and evidently there was unbiblical divorce and remarriage being practiced. There was misconduct on several fronts in their corporate worship to the point that disorder and impropriety was happening on such a scale that visitors to their services left confused and Christians left unedified.

The process of church discipline was broken at Corinth, even to the point that a case of gross, open sexual sin had been tolerated and ignored. So if you had been sent to Corinth to begin cleaning up this mess, where would you have started? Perhaps you would have initiated church discipline and dealt with the most scandalous sin first. Maybe you would have said, let's get our homes, our marriages in order first.

Perhaps you would have started the much needed reform by addressing the very public problem of misconduct in corporate worship. Paul would eventually deal with all of these things and more, but notice where he starts. He begins cleaning up the mess at Corinth by insisting upon the necessity of Christian unity. Before addressing matters of church discipline or public worship or even the family unit, he addresses their divisive, schismatic hearts.

Now if this is at the top of Paul's to-do list, it must be important. I guess the question for us might be if Christian unity is not that important in our own estimation of what constitutes a healthy biblical church, why not? Why are we often content to tolerate what Paul seems to think is a matter of first-tier importance?

Well, I think there's several answers to that question. For one, we might be misunderstanding what Paul means by Christian unity. He addresses what it means right here in our text, and we're going to look at that in just a moment. But secondly, and perhaps more commonly, we might be underestimating how offensive disunity is to Christ within his church. In short, the point Paul is going to make in these verses is that if Christ was crucified in order to unite Christians into one body, then for us to tolerate division in that body is an affront to the person and work of Christ.

It's a big deal. It's a gospel deal. Now, thankfully, there's nothing that is currently dividing the church today into various factions, and so we really don't need this exhortation like perhaps some previous generations of Christians have needed it.

I don't hear you laughing, but I hope you realize I'm saying that entirely tongue-in-cheek. We have just as much need for this exhortation today as the Corinthians did in the first century. You see, unity is essential to the Christian faith, and so it stands to reason, doesn't it, that the enemies of the church will aim their biggest guns at our unity, divide and conquer. It was the case in Corinth.

It's the case at 2007 Stallings Road here in Harrisburg. Our unity will always be under attack, and so the wise Christian will go on the offensive by seeking to understand and pursue authentic biblical unity. Well, let's look at the specifics of this text for a few moments and allow it to educate us, to motivate us to the end of Christian unity. Paul begins with an appeal for unity, an appeal for unity. Verse 10 says, I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. So right out of the gate, notice that Paul appeals to the Corinthians as brothers, and sisters is certainly implied in that too.

He's not excluding the women. He frames his appeal for unity by referring, in the very title he uses, to the basis or the grounds for that unity. They are to be unified in mind and judgment because they've been unified already in status. Christ has made them one body. The basis of their unity is the familial relationship they have in Jesus Christ.

They're family. They're brothers and sisters, and so Paul is saying, you're one body already, so act like it. It's important that we recognize this before we get into the specifics of that call to unity because Paul is not talking about some sort of pluralistic syncretism with the world. He's not exhorting Christians to be limp-wristed with their faith in the name of tolerance and peace. This isn't some sort of ecumenical call to join hands with well-meaning heretics. No, he's speaking to the church of Jesus Christ alone. He's speaking, in fact, to specific members within a particular local church, and he's exhorting them to act like and think like the brothers and sisters that, in Christ Jesus, they already are. It's easy for us to talk about Christian division as a problem that exists between this church and that church or between this denomination and that denomination or between conservative Christians over here and liberal Christians over there. It's easy to keep the discussion in those contexts because all of those things are a safe distance removed from us.

It's out there, and so we can critique it without getting our hands dirty. What we need to realize is that Paul's concern has to do with division within a single local congregation. These people who were divided knew each other face to face. They worshiped and served alongside one another.

They interacted on a regular basis. This wasn't some theoretical unity that Paul wanted them to pursue. It was a real unity that involved real people who lived together on the same proverbial block of the kingdom. These verses apply primarily to the relationships represented here in this room. Christian unity starts right here among brothers and sisters.

Notice then that Paul's appeal in verse 10 has three parts. There's the objective or goal of unity. There's the means whereby that goal is achieved, and then there's the effect or the evidence, the proof that unity has happened.

Now, Paul doesn't list them in that order, but I'm going to talk about them in that order just for the sake of expediency tonight more than anything else. Let's first consider the objective, the goal of unity, and what is that objective? Paul says that there be no divisions, no schisms among you. A schism is a split. It's a crack.

It's a tear. It's a condition brought on by competing aims, conflicting purposes. I want to go right.

Well, I want to go left. We can't both do what we want to do. Someone is going to have to defer to the other or else there will be a schism, a division. The goal, the ideal, the objective is that there be none of that in the body of Christ. If we're all agreed that our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, and if we're all claiming to have the mind of Christ and claiming the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, then for us to be so confused as to simultaneously hold to conflicting ideas of where it is we ought to be going or what it is we ought to be doing, all of that then reflects negatively on our claims. The world sees that and says these people don't have the Holy Spirit.

They don't have the mind of Christ. They can't even agree with each other on what glorifying and enjoying God looks like. The objective of unity is to do away with those differences, differences that undermine our witness and our very purpose as a church. But Paul not only tells us what the objective is, he also tells us the means of achieving that objective.

How do we get there? Well, we get there, verse 10, by learning to be united in the same mind and the same judgment. And I think in many ways this statement is the key that unlocks the whole passage. See, most Christians I'd imagine agree that the church ought to be unified.

We don't dispute that. What we seem to find ourselves in disagreement about is how we're to go about pursuing this kind of unity. Well, Paul tells us how to pursue it right here, and it has to do with what we think or believe and the way we judge.

Being of the same mind has to do with believing the same objective absolute truths. It refers to doctrinal unity within a body of believers. Unity in this arena requires that a group of Christians make a conscious commitment together to believe this and not that, to interpret these passages of scripture this way and not that way. In other words, to hold to a common confession of faith.

I make this point in our new members class, but it's worth making again. Every church has a confession of faith, whether they acknowledge it or not, whether they write it down or not. Even churches that claim to have no creed but Christ believe something about the person and work of Christ. The benefit of a written confession of faith is not that it gives us something on top of scripture to believe in. No, the benefit of a written established confession of faith is that it gives us a means of measuring our adherence to the Word of God.

It provides a baseline of belief that is fixed. It can certainly be evaluated and amended as needed, but it provides a way of holding us accountable to what we believe and why we believe it. It forces us to be specific and precise with our beliefs so that we're less vulnerable to all the winds and waves of doctrine that blow our way. Church, the purpose of our creeds and confession and catechisms is not to give us some antiquated stack of books that we can dust off every time officer training rolls around. No, it's to give us an established body of doctrine that will enable us to better pursue the sameness of mind to which Paul calls the church.

For the sake of unity, we ought to know what the Westminster standards contain. And where we find areas of disagreement, we ought to desire and pursue agreement. And where we can't seem to find agreement, we ought to graciously defer to one another. It's all part of the pursuit of sameness of mind. But Paul also calls us to be of the same judgment.

This term is more subjective than the previous one. It seems to describe matters of wisdom more than matters of absolute doctrine. It deals with the proper application of doctrine. Proper judgment requires a knowledge of right doctrine, but it also requires discernment and prudence and care in its exercise. So, for example, that we support mission work is a doctrinal issue, but which missionaries Grace Church is going to support is a wisdom issue.

It's a matter of good judgment. It's a matter of good application of the principles we confess. And Paul says, interestingly, that in both mind and judgment, we are to be united. There's to be unity in belief and behavior in what we think as well as in how we implement what we think. This is the means whereby we achieve Christian unity.

Now, this, I suppose, is where a lot of counterfeits rear their ugly heads. For example, authentic Christian unity is not measured in terms of politeness and friendliness in the church hallways. We ought to be polite. We ought to be friendly.

No one's questioning that. But, brothers and sisters, we can be the most polite and friendly church in town and still lack the sort of unity that Paul is demanding of the church. We can pursue authentic unity without sacrificing authentic friendliness, and we should be pursuing both, but we ought never to get the two confused. Paul is calling for unity in mind and judgment. And then, finally, his appeal describes the effect, the outworking of this unity. We see it there in verse 10 where Paul says, I appeal to you that all of you agree.

The King James, in this case, has a more literal translation than the ESV. It says that you all speak the same thing. This unity of mind and judgment, a unity that eradicates all points of division and schism, is to be so pervasive that oneness is achieved right down to the very words we speak. Now, perhaps this scares us a little bit and conjures up images of some cult group all droning the same mantra in a mindless, brainwashed state.

Paul doesn't mean that at all. He intends there to be this incredible external state of unity, but it's a state that's rooted in genuine conviction and belief, not mindless adherence. We are to say what we say because we really do believe what we say. That's the ultimate proof or evidence or effect of unity. One commentator said, how complete the agreement ought to be so that no diversity may appear even in words. It is difficult indeed to attain such a degree of unity, but still it is necessary among Christians from whom there is required not merely one faith, but also one confession. As we consider Paul's appeal for unity in full, then, I think we find a couple of ditches, a couple of extremes, which we need to be on guard against. The first is the ditch of making too little of unity, and I suspect that this is a danger to which Presbyterians are particularly susceptible. We love doctrine, we love truth, and we should, but if we're not careful, we can blindly pursue doctrinal precision with little to no regard for unity.

It's truth without love. If we discover a point of theological disagreement, let's do the intellectual labor of working through it, but let's not neglect the relational labor of working through it with grace and deference and mutual submission. We need to guard against making too little of Christian unity. But on the other side of the road is the ditch of making too much of Christian unity, that is, pursuing unity with little to no regard for truth, and it's also a danger we need to be aware of. This isn't truth without love, it's love without truth.

Now, Paul primarily addresses the first ditch in this passage. The Corinthians' idea of unity was doctrinal precision without love, and it was producing all sorts of unnecessary factions within the church, but there is also the danger, and one that perhaps is much more prevalent today, of pursuing love without doctrinal precision. It's a fake, pretentious sort of unity. It's the co-exist bumper sticker sort of unity, but it certainly is not biblical, authentic unity. Ours is a sincere unity that produces in us a real love for one another that is grounded in real conviction of biblical truth, and it's this ideal to which Paul appeals to us to pursue. Well, next we see the cause of disunity. The cause of disunity in verse 11 says, For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarreling among you my brothers. What I mean is that each one of you says, I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I follow Cephas, or I follow Christ. Isn't it interesting how we can talk about sports or restaurants or hobbies, we can agree to disagree, and we walk away with a smile, but when it comes to matters of religion, we take no prisoners.

We either conquer the hill or we die on the hill, even it seems when our viewpoints aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. Now Paul doesn't give us much information concerning the nature of the factions present here at Corinth. We simply get the names of each faction. I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, I follow Cephas, which is Peter, by the way, and I follow Christ. Now we could speculate about what these different factions stood for. Paul was the founder of the Corinthian church, and one can certainly understand how those relatively new converts would have been loyal to their founding minister.

That makes sense to us. Apollos evidently followed Paul at Corinth. 1 Corinthians 3, 4 says that Paul planted and then Apollos watered. Now we also know that Apollos was particularly gifted at speaking. Acts 18 describes him as an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures. Paul, on the other hand, was not a polished speaker.

He acknowledges so himself in 2 Corinthians 11. So perhaps the Apollos faction had a taste for the very Greek art of rhetoric, which Paul lacked, but Apollos had in abundance. Then there was the Peter faction. We don't know of any specific interaction that Peter may have had with the Corinthian church, but Peter was Jesus' right-hand man, after all. He was a leader of sorts among the 12 apostles, and he seemed to have a particularly deep interest in the Jewish ceremonial law. Maybe it was one of these distinctives that gave rise to the Peter gang at Corinth. And then lastly, and most piously, there was the Christ faction.

You know, I suppose if you have to pick one of the four, based on the names given to us here, you got to pick this one. Can't you just imagine the other three factions rolling their eyes when the Jesus people say, well, we follow Christ? The truth is we don't know what distinguished each group, which means Paul is not condemning the doctrinal distinctives of each group. He's condemning the fact that they were even groups. You see, there's nothing antithetical about the respective ministries of these four men.

They were on the same team. Paul and Apollos and Peter were like-minded friends, and Christ was the one who called these men to do what they were doing. The issue wasn't doctrinal, it was moral. The issue was that there was a fight at Corinth where there shouldn't have been a fight. That's why even the Christ faction is thrown in with the other factions. Of course we're followers of Christ above all, but we can even profess to be followers of Christ in an unnecessarily divisive and factional way. Paul and Apollos and Peter and Christ were not in a theological contest with each other, and yet the Corinthian believers were turning their differing personalities or gifts or roles or whatever into some badge of status and credibility. They were dividing what Christ says is undivided, and it was sinful. Now don't read verse 12 and think that Paul is condemning doctrinal distinctions of any kind. There is a time and a place to divide over doctrine.

Just read the first chapter of Galatians to see that Paul himself was no pushover when it comes to doctrinal heresy. What he's condemning is the unnecessary division of the church into factions, and what makes it unnecessary is not that doctrinal purity doesn't matter. What makes these divisions unnecessary and wrong is that they're grounded in self-promotion and status and rank and self-flattery.

They're grounded in pride. You know, had there been a faction of Simon the sorcerer or a faction of Judas the betrayer, no doubt Paul would have addressed this as an orthodoxy problem, but the issue at Corinth was an orthopraxy problem. They were believing true things, but were sinfully using those beliefs as the basis of creating cliques and fabricating disunity where there should have been unity. And we dare not compromise the truth in the name of unity, but the sort of disunity Paul is condemning and the sort of disunity we ought always to repent of is the kind that needlessly sets up factions that are motivated by a desire for superiority and recognition and legitimacy. Where you see this sort of disunity in a church, there is selfish, unrestrained pride. That's ultimately the cause of disunity.

Lastly, then we see the basis for unity. The basis for unity, verse 13, is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

Three rhetorical questions that all imply the answer, no. Christ is not divided. Paul was not crucified for you and you were not baptized in the name of Paul. On the contrary, Christ and his bride are undivided.

Christ was crucified for you and we have been baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. The basis of true Christian unity then is Jesus Christ and him crucified. You see it's verse 13 that elevates this whole discussion of unity to a matter of first importance. This is a gospel issue, not a preference, not a matter of taste or culture or upbringing. Being of one mind and of one judgment to the point of sharing the same confession of faith in all things is a gospel reality because otherwise the work of Christ and the lives of his people is torn asunder into conflicting purposes and contradictory effects. That's why I said earlier that our tolerance of division in the church is an affront to the person and work of Christ.

This is a gospel issue. To illustrate the point, Paul turns to the subject of baptism, the very sign that is intended to demonstrate the unity of the church and yet a sign that evidently and ironically had become the basis of much division at Corinth. Paul is rejoicing that in God's providence the number of Christians whom he baptized in Corinth was kept to a minimum. Otherwise the Corinthians would have been even more entrenched in their various factions. Verse 14, I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius so that one may say that you were baptized, so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. I can hear the conversation. Yeah, old Paul baptized me.

No kidding, I had to settle for Apollos. Well, brother Peter was the one who baptized me. Now that man can baptize. Paul says, who cares who you were baptized by?

The efficacy of it comes from who you were baptized into. Now don't think that Paul is downplaying the importance of baptism. Understand that Paul was not rejoicing in the scarcity of baptisms.

He was rejoicing in the fact that he himself had not performed many of the baptisms at Corinth. The Corinthian Christians therefore had less of a temptation to wrongly attribute the value of their baptism to Paul. He was not belittling the sacrament. He was condemning the Corinthian tendency to turn the sacrament into a status symbol. Paul goes on in verse 17, for Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel.

And we need to read that statement in light of the Great Commission. Christ did send Paul to baptize at some level, but he did not send him to baptize over and above or apart from the preaching of the gospel. It's a statement of priority that Paul is making here, not a disregard for the sacrament. He goes on, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. And again, this doesn't mean that there isn't a place for eloquent wisdom any more than the previous statement meant that there's no need for baptism.

In fact, Apollos' eloquence is commended in Acts 18, 24. Wisdom is certainly something that scripture tells us to pursue like it's gold. So there's nothing inherently evil in a person being well-spoken or wise. These are virtues. The question then is, in what sense can eloquent wisdom empty the cross of its power?

That's what we want to be on guard against. Now we're going to delve deeply into this question in future sermons because this is a central concern of Paul's letter to the Corinthians, but let me share very briefly two ways that eloquent wisdom nullifies the power of the cross. It nullifies the cross when the hearer is someone who loves status. It nullifies the cross when the hearer is someone who loves status.

One commentator said, we must consider who they are that Paul here addresses. The ears of the Corinthians were tickled with silly fondness for high sounding style. Hence, they needed more than others to be brought back to the abasement of the cross that they might learn to embrace Christ as he is, unadorned, and the gospel in its simplicity without any false ornament. If a person loves sophistication, then sophisticated rhetoric runs the risk of eclipsing the message of the cross. The cross demands death to self, so to package the message of the cross in a manner that conveys promotion of self in a manner that scratches the itches of our idolatrous heart is to subvert the very message itself. The secondly eloquent wisdom nullifies the cross when the preacher is someone who loves results. It's not wrong to use eloquence in such a way as to draw attention to the beauty of the gospel.

And Paul himself does that. At Mars Hill, for example, Augustine said something to the effect of, he who made Peter a fisherman also made Apollos a great speaker. So eloquence isn't bad. Bad eloquence is bad. Misused eloquence is bad. And eloquence is misused when it cleverly wins the emotions and minds and perhaps even the wills of people without actually changing their spirits. Eloquence is bad when its intent is to leave its hearers enamored with the speaker rather than with the gospel. Clever rhetoric can mask an inauthentic conversion.

It can be used by gifted speakers as a shortcut to bypass the true power of the cross. Incidentally, this can happen with overly simplistic and unadorned preaching as well. A preacher in an effort to avoid the pitfall of clever rhetoric may resort to down-home unsophisticated base speech, but he could be doing the same thing as the polished orator by appealing to the taste of his audience in order to manipulate their mind and will and emotions. He's nullifying the cross whenever he relies on some means other than the gospel to get results. And so both the preacher and the hearer need to be wary of their own idolatries lest those idols of the heart get in the way of the gospel. Paul is not criticizing baptism nor is he dismissing eloquence. He knows that they're both capable of placing the cross at center stage, but he is attacking any use of these otherwise good things that isolates them from the cross and from the gospel. We're out of time and so I want to simply give very quickly some practical suggestions as to how these principles we looked at tonight might be implemented in the body of Christ here at Grace Church. These aren't rules to follow.

These are merely suggestions to ponder. Consider sitting in a different place each time you come to worship in order to get to know a broader cross-section of the congregation. Consider performing a specific act of service for someone in our body with whom you know you have a doctrinal difference. Take note of anyone you tend to avoid at church and go out of your way to converse with them. Pray regularly for God's blessing to fall on those with whom you disagree. Consider ways in which you are in danger of nullifying the cross by drawing attention to yourself, your abilities, your gifts, your opportunities, your eloquence, your lack of eloquence, and stop doing it.

Read the Westminster Confession of Faith, the shorter catechism, and the larger catechism. And then finally rejoice with a brother or sister whenever you discover that you share a like-mindedness knowing that such unity in the church is good and pleasant and Christ exalting. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we are Yours and You are ours. May our love for the Gospel intersect with our love for one another in such a way as to bring You great glory and to bring us great joy. We pray it all in Jesus' name. Amen.