What God Has Against the Church #7 - Boundaried and Open
Message Description
Senior Pastor, Dr. Kurt Bjorklund, continues the message series "What God Has Against The Church" teaching from 1 Corinthians. Today's message confronts sexual sin within the body of believers and how the community of the church is to respond with hope and healing.
Message Transcript
Let's pray together. God, I thank you for bringing people this weekend together in Butler, the Strip, Wexford, the Chapel, and online, and God, just before we jump into this teaching, I'm struck by so many things that are going on in our world. Things like Eastern Europe being on the brink of war, the protest and the government's response in Canada, some of the economic issues, some of the revelations of corruption, government, and media. God, it's easy in some ways just to be disheartened with what's happening in this world. Lord, we certainly pray for your hand to quell the war and to preserve liberty. But God, we also pray that you would help those of us who have faith in you to live in this world, this uncertain world, not with fear and timidity, but with the confidence of somebody who has been promised eternal life.
So, God, I pray this for me and for each person who's gathered and God, today, as we look at a challenging section of First Corinthians five, I pray that you would speak through my words. God, if I prepared things that don't reflect you and your truth, I pray you'd keep me from saying them. If there are things that I haven't prepared that would be beneficial to those of us gathered, I pray you would prompt me even at this moment and I would respond and speak those things even at this moment. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
So, let me ask you a question. If I were to say to you the church should be, and then I were to fill in the statement with a phrase, I want you just to think how you would respond. The church should be absolutely open and accepting of everyone. How would you respond to that? You don't need to shout it out. Would you be high on the yes side, or would you have some reservations? All right, how about this? The church should have some boundaries around it in terms of how people interact with coming in and becoming part of the life of the church. Again, how would you respond? A week or so ago, there was a pastor who made some statements in his church, and they probably wouldn't have garnered much attention beyond his church, but because it got attention in the Twitter-sphere, all of a sudden it blew up and people became very critical, and then people started defending what he said and all of this. I want to show this to you and again, I just want to see how you think you'd respond. Take a look.
"We have longtime members of fifty plus years greeting and welcoming new people who are walking in for the very first time. We have those who love traditional music and hymns, and those who know only contemporary music. We have choir lovers and non-music lovers, a pipe organ, and loud electric guitars. We have the 99-year-old World War II hero and the millennial immigrant who doesn't know anything about American history sitting in the same row and listening and learning about Jesus together. We have transgender, LGBTQ, straight, single, married, divorced, and cohabitating people. These same people attend, listen, serve, grow, and give."
Now, what happened was there was a longer part of that clip, he went into a bunch of political issues and some of that, but what happened was people zoned in on that and they said, "How can you say that the church should have people who have some things that, from many people's perspective, would be obviously wrong, sinful who are serving and participating, and you're not dealing with it?" So, I just ask you, how do you respond to that? We've been studying the book of first Corinthians together, and we've called it What God has Against the Church because it's a corrective, and what we've done each week is we've said that the church or Christians, in essence, have these paradoxes, two things that are together. Today what we're going to see is that Paul in First Corinthians addresses the issue of sexual immorality specifically, and he talks about this issue of church discipline, how to deal with sexual immorality within the church.
I believe that if we were to talk about what God had against the Corinthian church, maybe what he has against the modern church, it's that in many ways, there are few to any boundaries among many churches. What Paul I think is saying here is that there need to be some boundaries. So, the paradox, if you will, this weekend, is that the church is to be both boundaried and open. Now, this is a little different than talking about our own individual lives. A lot of times throughout this series I've made the point that ultimately, we are the church, and so whatever you do individually is the church. Here there's a little difference between how you interact interpersonally and how the church is to function.
Here, I believe, Paul is talking very specifically about the church, because he uses a couple of different words in the chapter to talk about the gathering of people of faith, the church at Corinth. To talk about this, what I'd like to do is instead of starting with the discipline issue, I want to start with the issue of sexuality, and I want to talk about a vision for what I'm going to call sexual beauty. Then I want to talk about a vision for a church community, and then a vision for the Passover lamb. So, three different headings. The reason I'm going to start talking about sexual beauty is that a lot of times what people do is they start, and they talk about God's standard, and they talk about what's off or missing in the standard, and they talk about it in such a way that it creates a sense that Christians only care about what people shouldn't do.
Often the church is seen as being puritanical or restrictive, or just wanting to tell other people what to do in their bedrooms. But what I'd like to do instead is say that there's a vision in the Bible for what I'm going to call sexual beauty, and I use the word beauty again, not just morality, because the message of Christianity, the message of the Bible is that sex is God's idea and it's a good idea, a beautiful idea, a wonderful thing. So sometimes even when we come to a chapter like this, we say, "Well, sex is this bad kind of outcome, but it's important for us to hear and affirm that this is God's idea, that it's good, that it's beautiful." If you're a parent, I especially want to encourage you to message that to your children, but here's the challenge, and that is sexuality in our world is often perverted from the way that God created it and intended it.
What I would say to you is that our world wants the freedom to express themselves sexually however they want, but they don't want the outcome that comes from sexual self-expression. They actually want the outcome that comes from the beauty that's talked about in God's standard. Here's what we see. This is First Corinthians five, verse one, which says, "It's actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you." Now, sexual immorality, here's a word that meant sex outside of the bounds of marriage. So, the beauty that's being pictured here is the committed relationship, the lifelong committed relationship between a man and a woman who say we are covenanting with one another to express ourselves sexually in this marriage and that exclusively. Now, I realize just the way I said that, in our modern world, that has a lot of flags for some of us.
You're like, "Man, woman, what are you saying for sure?" and all of that. That topic, by the way, is coming in two weeks. If you read ahead, it's First Corinthians 6, 9, 10, 11. So we'll hit that. But here, that is what's being talked about, and it says, "Here's the issue. It's a kind," the sexual immorality that you have, "that even the pagans don't tolerate. A man is sleeping with his father's wife." So here he's saying, listen, in the culture that they were in, that was frowned upon. It probably still is frowned upon in our culture, but he was saying even the pagans don't do it, but in your church, you're proud about it. What you're doing is you're saying we're so accepting, we're so welcoming, we're so current that we're really happy about Joe who's sleeping with his dad's wife. Okay.
So, that isn't really an awesome start here for this passage, but here's why this is a vision of sexual beauty. I said that our culture wants to express itself sexually, however, they want to, but they don't actually want the results of it. Here's why I say that. One of the good movements that have happened in recent years is the Me Too movement, but do you know that Me Too would cease to exist if people committed to one sexual partner for a lifetime in the covenant of marriage? In other words, what's happened, is our culture said, "We need to get rid of actual predators." Rightly, but one of the reasons ultimately that there is no beauty in this area is because people have said, "This is a need of mine, and I need to get it met wherever and however I can, even if it means that I take advantage of somebody."
Our world still hates the idea of betrayal that takes place when somebody cheats on somebody and yet statistics tell us that a lot of infidelities occurs in marriages and certainly, we could talk about the pain that happens around divorce when people say, "I'm not going to stay in a relationship for a long time." Here are just some of the current stats. Depends on whose stats you look at, but this is one source I found. It said 36% of current marriages end in divorce, which is down by the way, from where it used to be. Then one in two kids who grow up today will experience growing up in a divorced home. 21% of kids who are raised today will do so without a dad at home.
Why people divorce according to these stats, 73% say it was a lack of commitment, 56% said they argued too much, 55% say because of cheating, and 25% because of abuse in the relationship. Certainly, that's not in and of itself something that anybody should stay together in, and I'm not advocating for staying in an abusive situation. But what I'm pointing to is that there's a lot of brokenness in this area because people simply say, "I don't want to stay together." There was an article that came out recently and it was called “Sorry, Harvard. Fathers Still Matter.” The article traced the conversation over the recent years about talking about fathers mattering and it cited speeches by President Barack Obama when he was president, so you're going back a little bit now, where he would stand up and say, "It matters that we have fathers. We need fathers in homes."
In fact, here is one of the things that he said. He said, "I want to break the cycle where a father is not there with the children and where they grow up without a father. Because when a child grows up without a father," this is Barack Obama when he was president, "They are five times more likely to live in poverty and to commit a crime than when they have a father in the home." In a study that was done just shortly after that, people came out, sociologists, and said, "We conclude that most scholars agree that children who grow up with both biological parents in the home do better." But then what happened, and this is what the article traced, is a Harvard study came out talking about the myth of the two-parent household and it basically tried to debunk the idea that you need a father in the home for something.
Then The Atlantic came out with a study that said that it's the quality of the relationship, nothing else. But what this article concluded is that when it comes to homes having both parents, means that children are less likely to be in prison, to be in poverty, and more likely to graduate from college if they have a father in the home. They're less likely to be in prison, less likely to be in poverty, more likely to graduate from college. Now you may say, "Okay, that's a lot of data and stuff that you just threw out there," and let me say this; if you are a single mom, a single dad, God can do amazing things, but the statistics are the statistics and all I'm pointing out is this and that is that when we as a society say, "We want to do things our way, not God's way," there are real consequences that we actually don't like.
Now, I know some people will say, "Okay, that's about extreme cases, but isn't it good for consenting adults to do what they want to do? Maybe this guy in Corinth and his father's wife were consenting. Maybe the father was okay. Maybe everybody was okay with it." But here's the issue with this. When you have the idea that my way of living is what I'd call serial monogamy, where I find somebody and I'm committed to them and then when it doesn't work, I'll move on to somebody else, but at least for a season, we'll be committed, here's what ends up happening. When you move on, you end up feeling used and discarded, and you still don't generally find the kind of ultimate fulfillment that you're hoping to find.
In fact, there's one part of a book that was written a couple of years ago by Danny Akin called God on Sex, and here's what he says. He says, "It's not surprising that a University of Chicago study," so again, now he's not talking about what the Bible says, he's talking about what the University of Chicago study says. He says, "It's not surprising that a University of Chicago study reports that those doing it God's way," we just talked about the beauty of sexual intimacy, God's way, "Report the most satisfaction in their sex lives. When the University of Chicago researchers set out to discover which religious denominations had the best sex, they learn the faithful don't do all of their shouting in church." That's his line, send any critiques to Danny Akin in that. He says, "Conservative Protestant women report by far the highest satisfaction, mainline Protestants and Catholics five points behind. Those with no religious affiliation were more than 33% behind and Unitarians, you do not want to read any further."
Then he said this, he said, "Sexually active singles had the most sexual problems and get the least pleasure out of sex. Men with the most liberal attitudes towards sex are 75% more likely to fail to satisfy their partners." Then he says this, "The most sexually satisfied demographic group are married couples between the ages of 50 and 59." There is hope. Now, I read that just simply because we tend in our culture to think that people who are the freest on this are the most satisfied, but research shows the most satisfied are people who actually make commitments and keep them. This shouldn't surprise you if you've been around the church. In the very beginning, in Genesis chapter two, we're told that it was God's plan that a man and a woman should leave their father and mother and were told to be united to one another. The old King James says to cleave, and I like that because that rhymes. Leave and cleave.
But to be united to one another and the two shall become one flesh. Jesus quotes this, picks it up in the gospels. The Hebrew word for be united is the word "debach." I just like how that sounds. Debach, and what it means is that you take two things, and you bring them together in such a way that they can't be separated. So, to debach back means in essence, that you put something together in such a way that it will never come apart. What that means, if you think about it this way, if you ever glue two pieces of wood together, or two pieces of paper together, and then you separate them, do you know what happens? You take a little piece of the wood, the one wood that's glued to the other, and it goes with the other piece and a little piece of this goes with this.
Here's what happens in serial monogamy, and that is you come together, you come apart. You come together with somebody else, you come apart. You come together with somebody else, you come apart. If over the course of your life, there are 10, 15 people, what happens is you have less of yourself to give to somebody down the line because a little piece of you has gone with each one of those people. So, if you're a young person here, if you're in high school, you're in college, you're a young adult and you're thinking, "Look, I have time to settle down. I have time to get with somebody, but for now I'm going to enjoy where I am, I'm going to enjoy the people God brings into my life," what you're doing is you're leaving just a little piece of yourself with each person and you're missing the beauty that God intends for you to have.
If I were to put it another way, I'd just simply say this and that is embracing God's ideal is what brings real beauty. I mean, just think about what we dream about with love songs. So, I Googled top 100 love songs just to kind of do that. Here's one that came up. This is a 1980s remake, but I think a lot of you will know this. "Clock strikes upon the hour and the sun begins to fade. Still enough time to figure out how to chase my blues away. I've done all right up till now, it's the light of day that shows me how, and when the night falls, the loneliness calls. Oh, I want to dance with somebody. I want to feel the heat with somebody. Yeah. I want to dance with somebody, with somebody who loves me."
Okay. I'll stop there. Here's the point. A little later on in the song, it says, "I've been in love and lost my senses, spinning through the town. Sooner or later, the fever ends, and I wind up feeling down. I need a man who will take a chance on a love that burns hot enough to last." Okay. So, Whitney Houston sings this song, and whatever you think of it, here's what is not in the song. Oh, I want to dance with somebody for six months and then somebody else for a year. Then when that's done, I want to feel the heat with somebody for two years. No, I want to find somebody who can take a chance on a love that's hot enough to last. Even Whitney Houston wants the beauty of God's way.
Here's my point. In a sense, I'm just pleading with you before we get into the discipline issue of this to get a vision for sexual beauty, to get a vision for what God wants. Then maybe when we come to First Corinthians five, we'll understand this a little better. This is where the vision for the Christian community comes, because now you're in the church and you have this man who's sleeping with his father's wife, and verse two says, "And you're proud. Shouldn't you rather have gone into mourning and put on your sackcloth.?" What he's doing is he's saying, "Shouldn't you have repented?" Then in verse nine, you get this picture of community. It says, "I wrote to you in my letter, not to associate with sexually immoral people." There's a thought that there were actually four different letters to the Corinthians, but only two at this point are inspired and kept for the church.
So, he says here, "I wrote to you," and he says, "Not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral or the greedy or the swindlers, or idolators. In that case, you would have to leave this world." So now he starts to talk about the indication of the church, and he says, "I'm not telling you not to associate with people who do things that you don't agree with, or don't like." He says, "Then you'd have to leave the world." But now he's talking about people inside the church who are flaunting the ideals of God, is what he's talking about. "But now I'm writing to you that you must not associate," this is verse 11, "With anyone who claims to be a brother or sister," somebody who says I'm a follower of Jesus. I'm part of the fellowship, "But is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater, or a slander, a drunkard or a swindler. Do not even eat with such people."
Now, there's so much here that we could talk about. First, I think it's important just that we acknowledge that the Christian community is a place where we make much of the idea of the message that Jesus accepts sinful people. The Christian community is never intended to be a place of perfect people. There's a difference between those outside and those inside. Inside this text, he's talking about a difference in the way that we approach this. But what he's doing is he's saying, "I want you to understand that there is a time for what I'm going to call church discipline." In verse five, he says, "Hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord." So, what's he talking about when he says, "I want you to hand him over to Satan."
He didn't just go out into the marketplace and say, "Oh, here's where Satan is. Here he is." What he's talking about is you take somebody, and you put them outside of the church, and this is Matthew 18 as well when there is a hardness to the teaching. Now, clearly, the church, speaking globally, has said a lot about sex, but I want you to notice in this passage that there is a list of sins here that doesn't just stop at sex. In fact, what he's doing is he's saying this. He says, "I'm not writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral." Then what else is there? Greed, idolatry, slander, drunker, or swindler. "Do not even eat with such people." When's the last time that you thought about this and said, "Wow, that's kind of a greedy approach," or "That person is always running somebody down," or "That person has an idol."
Now to be fair, one of the things we need to understand about discipline is what are the issues that are up to this? Because if you just look at this, probably all of us would say at some point I've had some immoral thoughts at a minimum, if not immoral acts. I've done some greedy things. I've had idolatries. I've slandered. So, can any of us be in the church? But what happens is, as a result of that, some of us say, "Well, then there's no reason to ever have any standard at all. What we need to see is that what's at stake here is this, and that is when sin is unrepentant, this is the idea, some of you are proud, should be putting on sackcloth. When it's persistent, in other words, it's not just a one-off mistake, but it's something that you persist in, when it's public and when it's settled, and by settled, what I mean is you're saying, "I am not thinking of turning back. I'm not just stuck in this, but this is what I'm doing," and it's known, then it should be dealt with.
Here's why this is so important. Verse six says, "Your boasting is not good. Don't you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? Get rid of the old yeast so that you may have a new unleavened batch, as you already are." Now, what that's pointing to is how much you and I matter to each other. See, if together we say, "Well, this is okay," then we all start to think that something's okay. As a result, then the church becomes compromised in some way. Certainly, when this passage talks about those inside, those outside, there's a word of caution even inside. In Matthew 13, beginning in verse 24, Jesus tells a parable, and his disciples came to him, and they were talking about it, and he says, "Listen, the kingdom of God," or you could say the church, but he says, "The kingdom of God is like this. There are weeds growing up inside the harvest field."
The workers go to the master of the field basically, and say, "should we pull out the weeds?" And he says, "No, no. Be very careful. Because if doing that, you'll also pull-out good crops." It's Jesus’ way of saying be open. But here Paul says you also need to be boundaried. So, what are the times to be boundaried? When it is something that is persisted in, it's unrepentant, it's public, and it's a settled issue for the people. To say whether that's a sexual issue or something else, then it's time for the church to say, "We will take action."
Now, I can tell you as a church, that our leadership at times has been involved in some discipline issues. Here's what usually happens, and that somebody will say, "I'm going to follow Matthew 18. I'm going to confront somebody," then they don't get a good reaction, then they bring two or three, and then they bring it to leadership. Usually, by the time it gets there, somebody says, "You know what? I'm out of here. I'm done and I'm going down the road and new church, nobody knows. I'm going to start over."
So, it never ends up being told to the church as Matthew 18 says, and in our modern world, that's understandable. But in that culture, there weren't 27 churches in Corinth. There was one. So, when somebody was put outside the church, it was a way of them being outside the church and tell kind of the community that idea. What is at stake here is that when you or I am in a good place spiritually, that we say, "I submit myself to the church by becoming a member," and in doing that, what I'm doing is I'm saying I want somebody to come and tell me that I'm erring when I start to sleep with my father's wife. Okay? I'm reading back into the passage. Hopefully, that's not the exact issue, but whatever that is, that's what you're doing. You're saying, "That is what I want."
When I start to go down a path that is clearly not right, I want some people that are in the small group that I've been part of for years to be able to say, "You're pretty angry and bitter right now, and you're talking about somebody incessantly. You know what? It seems like this new thing or one of your kids has become your idol. It seems like greed has become way too important to you. You know what? On this sexual issue right now, it seems as if you've blurred your lines." What the Christian community does is help us to stay true to what it is that we've already come to believe. Christian community is a place where we experience the goodness and beauty of God.
I love the call to worship that we sometimes use in our liturgical chapel service. It has a call to worship every week, and this is in the regular rotation. We do it sometimes at some of our other campuses and services, but this is the call to worship, and this is what sometimes is said at the beginning of a service. "To all who are weary and need rest, to all who mourn and long for comfort, to all who feel worthless and wonder if God cares, to all who fail and desire strength, to all who sin and need a savior, this church opens wide her doors with the welcome of Jesus Christ. The ally of sinners, the ally of his enemies, the defender of the guilty, the justifier of the inexcusable, the friend of sinners, welcome." I love that because it points right to this last thing that we want to have a vision for. I don't know if you heard this when it was read, but verse seven says, "Get rid of the old yeast so that you have new unleavened batch - as you really are."
Then it says this, "For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed." So why is this broad to this chapter about church discipline and issues that seem so current? I think the reason it's brought in is that the imagery is so rich. So beautiful. Right here in the middle, Paul is saying Christ is our Passover lamb and for many of the people there, even if they weren't ethnically Jewish, they understood the Jewish sacrifice system. In the Old Testament when people sin, they would bring a Passover lamb and sacrifice it, and it would prefigure in my mind what Jesus would do. So, they would have this picture of having to have an atonement for sin, and now they're being told that Jesus is the Passover lamb. Jesus is the one who died on the cross for our sins.
You see, the beauty of the Christian community is that it's a place where those of us who have sinned come and recognize and acknowledge our sin freely and openly because we're not trying to pretend to be something we're not. But it's also beautiful because of the Passover lamb, we can call each other to the place of saying God's way is really our best and so I want to live my life in alignment with that. Sometimes people see church community as little more than sin prevention, and sometimes the church has played into that by just simply talking about what is wrong and how somebody should never do certain things. As a result, a lot of people in our culture see God as some kind of a cosmic cop who's looking for anybody having a good time, and he is going to try to penalize them.
But the picture here of a Passover lamb is so much better because it's a God who says, "Even if this is an area you've struggled in, even if this is an area where you've been serially monogamous, and you've left a piece of yourself with a bunch of people, I can redeem it, and I can bring beauty. Even if you've been divorced and your kids are struggling, I can redeem and bring beauty. Even if you've been one of the people who's been a perpetrator of some of the things that are wrong in our world, I can bring beauty, because Jesus is the Passover lamb who has died on your behalf."
See, the church community invites you, invites you to a spiritual life that is shared and corporate, and allows you to be part of something that brings beauty into our world. That's the invitation that God gives us in First Corinthians five. I hope that you will be a part of that in a deep way, and I hope that I will be as well.
God, we acknowledge that we need Jesus to be our Passover lamb because none of us have lived without greed or idolatry or slander, or sexual immorality. But God, I pray that in acknowledging that, we wouldn't simply say, "Oh, well, we all sin so we might as well sin." But instead, because we see the beauty of how much you are for us, that we would acknowledge your way as being better than the way we might be drawn to right now, and then we would bend our knee to you and seek the beauty that you offer and bring when we align our lives with your truth. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ, amen.