What God Has Against the Church #2 - United and Distinct
Message Description
Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the message series, "What God Has Against The Church" teaching out of 1 Corinthians asking Christians to be united proclaiming the gospel even if they're not seeing eye to eye on internal issues with the church.
Message Transcript
So, I want to start today by telling you a story. It's about two men who lived in different countries and the countries were at war, they had an ongoing conflict. As they were in this battle, one of the men and his army were running because they were being defeated and he was crossing a bridge, and the other army was closing in on him, and he realized he couldn't make it to the end of the bridge. So, he jumped over the end of the bridge and held on with his hands, hoping that he could hold on long enough for the people to pass, and he might be undetected.
But this other man saw him, and he went over and there, his life held in the balance and was in his hands. He was about ready to just hit his hands so that he had to fall from the bridge to his certain death. And the man said, "Please have mercy on me for the sake of God." And the man thought, "For the sake of God? I believe in God." And so, he said, "You believe in God? And the man said, "Yes, I do." And he said, "Oh, that's great, I do too."
He was about to help him up. And he said, "Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, what kind of God do you believe in?" So, before he pulled him up, the man who was hanging with his life in the balance said, "I believe in the Christian version of God, I'm a Christian." The man up on top of the bridge said, "I am too. This is amazing." He was about to pull him up, and before he did, he said, "Well, wait, wait, wait, wait." He said, "What kind of Christian are you?" And the man who was hanging there said, "Well, I've been in the reformed faith."
And the man said, "Well, that's awesome. I have been too." He said, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. You're in the reformed faith, but what kind of reformation have you believed in? Is it Luther's or Calvin's?" The man said, "Well, Calvin's." And he said, "Me too." He was about to pull ... He said, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So, if you believe in Calvin's reformation, you're a Christian, you believe in God." He said, "That must make you like a Presbyterian. What kind of Presbyterian are you?" He said, are you PCA, PCUSA, EPC, ECO, which one are you in?" The man who was hanging there by the balance, said, "Well, I'm EPC." And said, "Amazing, me too."
He was about to pull him up, and he said, "Well, wait, wait, wait, wait. I need to know; I need to know. Are you open to all the gifts of the spirit operating in this day and age, or do you think that some of them have changed, morphed a little bit?" And the man said, "I don't even care." And the man said, "I don't know a whole lot either." He's here and the man is still hanging in the balance, and he is about to pull him up and he said, "But I do have another question, he said, "Do you believe in the regulative principle of worship or the normative principle of worship?" And most of you are saying, I don't even know what that is, and that's part of the point, is the man said at that point, "You don't believe what I believe, die, you are a heretic." And he let him go.
Now that's not a true story, just so we're clear, but it's a story to make a point. And the point is this and that is, sometimes there's a sense of something that we can agree on, but what we do is we keep moving this farther and farther to say, "But I want you to agree with me on so many fine points before I will somehow see you as being somebody who's part of me." We began a series last week that we're calling What God Has Against the Church. And what we're doing is we're working through the first several chapters of the book of First Corinthians.
First Corinthians is a letter that the Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Corinth. And we said that Corinth in many ways was a very cosmopolitan city. And so, the church is there, and the Apostle Paul writes this letter. And last week we talked about how he started. And even though he has all these words of correction, that's why we have the title, What God Has Against the Church, because my guess is there's a lot of us in this culture today who say, "I believe in God, but I'm not sure I like the institution of the church, and there's a lot of things that God I believe has against the institution of the church." You see it in First Corinthians.
But what we saw as we talked about this last week is that, in order to embrace God's work, sometimes we have to say that the church can be both ideal and flawed. It can be perfect and flawed. And here Paul takes on his first real challenge in the church. And it's the issue of division. In chapter 1:10, there are three commands that he says. He says that you should all agree that there should be no division among you, and you should be perfectly united. So, he hits them right off with these three bold commands. He says, here's what I want for you. I want you to be people who say the same thing, who aren't divided, and who can be perfectly united.
And there's a paradox here again. There's a paradox in the first nine verses, that the church is filled with saints and sinners, that it's enriched in every way and yet it's broken in some ways. And here the paradox is, he says, I want you to be divided, and yet I want you to still be unique. I want you not to be divided, to be united and unique, to understand that these two things work together. So, what I'd like to do is just point to what I think this passage points to. First, what is second, I think it points to what can be or should be, and finally, I think it points to how we move from what is to what can be.
So, here's the first thing, and that is, it points to what is, and I've alluded to this because verse 10 says this. It says, "I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree with one another." And this phrase means literally to say the same thing. It doesn't mean that you agree on every fine point, and it can't actually mean that, because what is First Corinthians, it's a corrective. When you read through the book of First Corinthians, he's taking on things that are wrong in the church.
So, it doesn't mean that he's just simply saying, let's all just agree to disagree and get along and never have any difference of opinion. And it can't mean that we say all the same thing because, in the book of Acts, Paul had a great conflict with some of the other leaders in the church over what he considered to be an essential doctrine. This is Acts 15. You can read it. He had a disagreement with Peter in Galatians two because Peter was not treating people well. And so, he called him out.
So, to say the same thing doesn't mean that you don't take an opinion, it doesn't mean that you don't have a take, but it means that you live in a place where you say our message is similar. Then he says that there be no division. And this phrase means that nothing tears you apart to have a division, our formal word here, that is translated from the original language. It probably doesn't do us a lot of good here, simply because it means that you're not torn apart. Then he says I want you to be perfectly united, or I want you to be restored so that you have the same mind, and you say the same basic thing.
And what he's doing here is he's saying, I want you to live in a way where you have a cohesive message. There is another story that's been told about a man who was marooned on a desert island by himself. And after several years he was rescued, and when the people who rescued him got there, they found three huts, and they asked him, they said, "Well, what's the first hut for?" And he said, "Well, that's where I live." And they said, "Okay, that's great. What's the second hut for?" And he said, "Well, that's where I go to church." And they said, "Well, what's the third hut for?" And he said, "Well, that's where I used to go to church." Because he had had to split from his own idea of what things were.
And here's what happens in this passage, is there's division but it's not doctrinal division that he is talking about here, that he's saying, get rid of all doctrinal division, but he's saying arguments. And here's why I say this. If you look, verse 11, he says, it's actually been reported from some in Chloe's household. We don't know exactly who Chloe is. She was some kind of a rich businesswoman. And she had had some people in her household who sat in essence. Here's what's going on. There are all these divisions in the church, and he uses the word arguments.
And again, our word arguments are probably a little weak, it makes it sound like there are just minor disagreements. These were heated debates. These were hot contentious arguments. And then he says this, and this is where you see what he's really driving at. This is verse 12. He says, "What I mean is this." So now he's going to tell us exactly what he means. "One of you says, I follow Paul, another, I follow Apollo. So, another, I follow Cephas, still another, I follow Christ." And so, what you have happened in the church in Corinth is an alignment around people around personalities. And commentators have tried to decide what were the camps, the Paul, the Apollo, the Cephas, the Christ camps that all existed. And it's hard to really know. We don't totally know.
Some have suggested that Paul were the camp that said, "We're spiritual, we care about outreach like the Apostle Paul did, and we're against legalism. We're the gospel-centered outreach people." That Apollos were the sophisticated people who said we get along with culture really well. And Cephas was the group that cared about keeping the rules, that they were the ones who were serious-minded, and that the Christ camp wasn't actually the camp that said we ultimately follow Christ and put this away, but that they were the ones who spiritualized everything and said, "We just follow Jesus, unlike all these other people.
And so, you had four camps that had come to being, that were driven by personality, driven by takes and opinions that took people away from the great message. Here's why this is an issue. I believe that the church has the greatest message for our world today. And yet most people in the world believe that the church's message is tied to one of these camp kinds of views in our day. That says what the church is about is it's about, and then they'll fill in their blank with something that they say, "This is the church's big message."
And here's why I say the church's message is a great message. In verse 17, he says that he's called to preach the gospel, and the gospel there is a word that means good news. And so, what the church's message is, is that there's a God who created and loves humanity, and yet, because of our sin, we don't always act in accordance with God's plan. But Jesus Christ came to this earth to save those of us who can't save ourselves, and he's guaranteed a better future for those who believe, and anyone can get in on it. That's the message of hope that the church has.
And what Paul is doing here is he's saying what you're doing instead is you're dividing up about camps and littler things, not on important things, not things that don't matter at all, but you're dividing, you're having quarrels, you're having arguments. You're not agreeing, you're not united. You don't have the same mindset. Now, I get that, having just said that, what you could say is, "Okay, that was then, the church of Corinth. Yeah, they're a mess, we know that." So let me just bring this today.
And here's what I have seen in the last two years, and I've been involved in church ministry my entire adult life. So, this is an area that I've experienced for a long time. I won't tell you how long, but it's been a long time, and I've never seen two years like the last two years, where people have gotten so amped up about things that are to the periphery of the overall message of the church and decided that it should be central. And here's how I would put this, and this is purely my take. I don't have any data. This isn't out of the Bible. This is Kurt. So, take whatever I'm going to say here with a grain of salt.
If you were to say, this is the church, like that, the way the church has often thought about politics and positions over the last several decades has been this. And now there are clearly churches that align hard to the right, like this, that's a church on the right. Here's a church on the left. Meaning if you go to these churches, everyone agrees with your politics. But by and large, the way larger churches, churches like Orchard Hill have thought about politics is to say, we try not to get too political. And the reason we try not to get too political is we don't want people to come into the church and hear politics and go, "Oh, you're an operative of the right or the left, this is what you're about, this is the message."
We want people to hear the message of Jesus Christ, the good news, that Jesus died for sinners, that there's a great future, and anyone can get in on it. Now, that doesn't mean that you never take positions because there are things that the Bible talks about, but it means on things that you don't have to get into the weeds of politics, you try to stay away from it. So, for example, I would say that the Bible's really clear about God's heart for immigrants. Okay? You can't read the New Testament, the Old Testament, and not say that God cares about immigration and immigrants.
But what we haven't tried to do is say, "Therefore, we have this well-developed platform of immigration that every Christian should agree with." Okay? That's in politics. Do you understand the difference? But here's what's happened, in my view in the last two years, especially, and that is people have now on the right or the left come, and I'm going to guess this is about 20 or 30% of people on both sides. And again, there's no data to this. This is my observation guess, who have started to say, "If you, the church, the church I attend... This is broad, this isn't just Orchard Hill, but this could be Orchard Hill. "If you don't affirm some of the things that I believe that are hard on the left or hard on the right then I'm not sure I can be a part of the church."
And the way that I've seen this play out is, isn't what you say, it's not like, "Oh, you said this, and I don't like it. It's you didn't say this. You didn't say it strong enough, hard enough, long enough, therefore I'm not sure I can be a part of the church." And here's when I saw this really come to fruition is, sometime in the last couple of years, I had some conversations with some people on the left and the right of this. I'll tell you what the issues were, and you can go back and listen and see if you can even make more sense of this if you want to.
On the left, I had some people come to me and say, "I'm really concerned about Christian nationalism and the fact that Orchard Hill isn't taking enough of a stand on Christian nationalism." Now, if you say, "I don't know what Christian nationalism is." I'm going to tell you, but you may say, "What's the big deal?" Christian nationalism is the idea that America and Christianity are tied together, and that it's God's will ultimately that America succeed. Okay? And so, there are people who tie their faith in their Christianity so tightly together that the two of them are one and the same.
And so, there was a group who came to me. And by the way, if you go back and listen over the last couple of years, you can hear, there are times when I've talked about Christian nationalism. I've talked about why I think there are some challenges to that. Why I don't think it's a fully biblical understanding. So, it's not like this hasn't been addressed, but some people were like, "If you don't make this the message of Orchard Hill, I'm not sure I can be at Orchard Hill because I'm so concerned about what's happening in our country right now and the right-leaning Christian right that's going hard on this."
And in very close proximity, I had some people come to me from the right, who said, "I'm really concerned that critical race theory is going to destroy our country, and if we don't make a bigger stand against critical race theory, then somehow we're not being biblical." Now again, if you go back and listen, you can hear places where I've talked about critical race theory, some overtly, some more subtly. And if you're not familiar with critical race theory, critical race theory is the idea that there are victims and oppressors, and everybody fits into one of the two camps.
And I ultimately talked about that and talked about why that's not a perfect representation of biblical views. There are some things in both of these that we can understand and learn about. But I talked about some of the challenges to it, but some said, "You know what? If that's not one of the leading messages of Orchard Hill, then I'm not sure I can be a part in anymore." Okay? Now, why do I go into this? Because here's what I believe is happening to the church, broad church, not just Orchard Hill, broad church. People are saying, "I want what is being emphasized by Paul, Cephas, Apollos to be emphasized here. I want this to be the big deal. And if it isn't, then I don't know if I can be a part of it."
And I think this is exactly what Paul is talking about here when he says, "I don't want you to be filled with divisions, I don't want you to be a place that has a mixed message around this." Now, don't hear me say that I don't think Christian nationalism is an issue and I don't think critical racism is or critical race theory is an issue. I think there is a place for those conversations. I actually think the church should be a place where we can talk about the merits of ideas and have conversations about them. And I don't think what Paul is saying is shut down conversations. What he's saying is, there's a bigger message that's more important that I want you to stay engaged in so that you don't let that become the message of the church. That's what I think he's saying.
And here's what happens in history. And again, I've been at this long enough, I've seen lots of waves of movements in the church world. And that is, somebody will become well known for a season and they'll teach something, and a bunch of people will listen to that teacher, and they'll say, "Oh, that's what we should do." And they listen to somebody and they say, "That's what our church should do." And it becomes divisive because they're annoyed that their church, somehow doesn't do what they think the church should do.
And what we're doing in a sense when we do that is we're becoming selective in saying, "I think that this is now the most important or of equal importance to the message, the good news of the church." And when Paul says this, he says twice, he says, "I appeal to you, brothers and sisters." And he says my brothers and sisters, again, he's saying, here's what I'm sad about in a sense, why I'm appealing is, he says, "You're dividing in a place where you should be united." And I have to tell you, I'm sad when I look at the landscape of the church, our church, because there are people I know who have been part of the community, had friends for 20 years, who have had a sense of community raise their kids with other people that say, "I'm not sure I can be a part of this anymore because of this exact issue."
Now, don't, again, misunderstand me. My heart is not to say those people, my heart is to say, we together want to say, even if we elevate some issue to being important, we don't want to be people who are part of these, choosing ups sides, camps, and saying we're taking smaller issues, not on important issues, but smaller issues and making them the issue. So that's what is. But I think Paul also here points to what should be. And these are just the opposite of these when he says that there should be no division, that you should say the same thing, and that you should be perfectly united. What he's doing is he's saying in essence, here's what I want you to do. I want you to have a message that's overall pointing to the big message. I want you not to be divided on everything else. I want you to have clarity around these things.
As I mentioned, I've been around enough with these camps over the years to have lived through what it should be that the church should be seeker-sensitive, missional, that it should do global evangelism differently, that it should be all about social justice, that it should be about education. That worship should be its primary focus, that it should have healthcare. I've been around and seen leaders that have risen to prominence, and then either fallen or just ridden into the sunset that talked about how their boat crew is their means of evangelism or how they reverse tides because they want to make sure that they're living on the edge, and they live below their means.
I've seen all of this, and my point is just to say, what should be is that the church is a place where we can have challenging conversations, but our message isn't, we're all about this fad or that fad, this camp, that personality, but we are about something bigger. Which again, is this good news that's pointed to here in first Corinthians chapter one. Don Carson put it this way. He's a professor and a writer. He said, "The church is made up of natural enemies. What binds us together is not common education, common race, common income levels, common politics, common nationality, common sense, common jobs, or anything like that. Christians come together because they've been saved by Jesus Christ. They are a band of natural enemies who love one another for Jesus’ sake."
Do you know what the Apostle Paul is driving at in First Corinthians? And I think Don Carson picks up well, he's saying there should be people from all over the spectrum that come together that make up the church because we have some natural differences, and yet we all say I'm united around the most important message, the good news of Jesus Christ, that the priority of the gospel, verse 17, where he says, "I'm so glad in essence that I didn't baptize any of you. I wasn't commissioned to do that. I was commissioned..." And then he says, "To preach the gospel." And that word in the original language is this word that means good news.
My priority, my whole reason for being, he says, is to tell the biggest, best story, not the little stories. Now, again, don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that this church shouldn't have views on all of these things, that it shouldn't have biblical instruction to say, "How does the Bible speak to it?" But what I'm saying is this, that those things should never become the biggest piece of what we do. And if you or I start to make it that, then we're acting in exactly the way that Paul is talking about right here.
And so how do we move, or how does he point to us moving from what is to what can be? And I would just simply say that what he does is he points to, again, this gospel being at the center, he says, this verse 17, "For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom and eloquence, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power." And so, when the gospel, when the cross, when the good news is central, what happens is it strips away my pride, my self-righteousness, my sense of my camp is better than every other camp.
Here's why we divide up into camps. And this is true of me as well. And that is, I want to believe that I'm right and that the people I associate with are right, and that we have it figured out. And that God likes me, and my kind better than he likes the other kind. Okay? Even saying that that sounds ridiculous. But there's a little piece of us that wants to believe that; that wants to believe if I have it right and I hang out with people who have it right, that God likes me better. And here's how you know this is ridiculous. If you have multiple children, you know that you have kids who have different takes on all kinds of things.
Like you probably have one who keeps their room really neat and one who is not so neat. And here's what I know. You might prefer how they do it, but you don't go, "Oh, the neat kid love them. The other one, not so much." No, no, you don't do that. You say, "I love my children, whoever they are, whatever they're like." And what we want to do is we want to believe I'm getting the star from God, because I've done that. But what the gospel does is it says, the ground at the foot of the cross is perfectly level, you are not better than people who see it differently.
And the way that we move from what is to what should be is by so being taken with that message that we say, "I am called to something bigger than simply saying I'm right and I hang out with people who are right like me." Again, I'm not saying it doesn't matter. But what I'm saying is we're called to be critical thinkers without a critical attitude, and we see this again, that use of brothers and sisters, he's saying you are in a family as Christ divided.
He says Christ isn't divided. So be a family. And even if you end up in a place where you say, "You know what? I need to go to a church that has a different emphasis. I want to be in a church where people are more here or more here." My comment is, "Okay, great. That's a legitimate thing, but make sure that you continue to say the message ultimately isn't whatever we find on these sides, but it's something bigger."
For years, I played basketball with the same group of guys I used to play several days a week. Now I have bad cartilage in my knees, no cartilage in my knees so I don't play very often. But when you play with people in the same context, day after day, year after year, you get to know people and they get to know you, and there's, especially in men basketball games over a certain age, there's always tempers and things that flare up that aren't really awesome. So, you really get to see people at their finest, and in this game that I play, there were a couple of other guys who were people of faith. One was a pastor to a different church.
And when we would play, you'd always have these conversations, and at one point there were a couple of guys who got really interested in faith. And here's what I found myself doing. And I don't say this to make credit. This is years ago. I hope I'm more mature today. But what I found myself doing is saying, "Yeah, but my faith isn't like their faith. They're not the same kind of Christian that I am." Because I wanted to try to appeal to the people. Do you know what I was doing in a sense? Standing over a bridge saying, "Do you see it the way I see it? Are you in the same category I'm in because God likes me and my category better than he likes you and your category?
And what this passage points us to is saying, there is a bigger message that God wants the church to give in Corinth and today in Pittsburgh. Then simply I've got to take, and I think it's right. Again, not saying you don't have a take and it's not important, not saying that there isn't truth, but what Paul says is this. He says, my dear brothers and sisters, I urge you, I plead with you, that you would say the same thing that you wouldn't be torn apart, that you would be restored together in mind and your perspective because I've heard from Chloe's household, that there's a group of you who are having hot disputes among you.
And here's what I mean, you're picking sides with people on either end of the spectrum and you're dividing over it. And he says, but what I want for you is to make the gospel, the good news, the best story ever. What people hear and encounter when they encounter the church of God at Corinth, and the church of God in Pittsburgh. God, I pray today that you would help me and help each person whose part of Orchard Hill today to get clear in our minds that you care about the truth. But at the same time, there is a sense in which you want us to make our messaging about something much bigger than even important issues, it's the gospel.
God, let that be so formative for me and for each person who calls this their church home, that what happens is, we unite around something big, even if we're natural enemies on a lot of other things. And we pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen. Thanks for being here. Have a great week.