What God Has Against the Church #5 - Deep and Wide
Message Description
Senior Pastor, Dr. Kurt Bjorklund, continues the message series "What God Has Against The Church" teaching from 1 Corinthians. The church is called to be a place where followers of Christ not only grow deep in their understanding but also widely embrace all the opportunities to engage in kingdom restoration.
Message Transcript
Good morning and welcome to Orchard Hill. I feel like the last several weeks I've started almost the same way. And that is I've said, "Before we get into the teaching, I have some good news." But I actually have some good news again today, and it won't sound like it's good news if you haven't been reading your church emails. I know that not everyone reads them, but if you've been reading the emails, you know that in our Strip District Campus, we had a little transition. And the reason I say this doesn't sound like good news is when somebody leaves who's been there, you always are like, "Oh, that's sad." And so, Josiah Leuenberger who had served here at this campus with young adults starting in 2018, in 2021, asked to go to the Strip District to lead that campus. We were in a transition and coming out of COVID, and he's done just a super job there. Did a good job here in Wexford. And Josiah took a new position in Tennessee at another ministry. So that's not the good news. That's sad news.
We're sad to see Josiah go, but here's the good news. He told us in December, and I'm able to tell you today that a man named Dan Irvin, who many of you may know, has accepted the role to be the lead for our Strip District Campus. And Dan and Casey have attended this campus for about 10 plus years with their three boys. And before that, Dan had attended here when he was in middle school and high school. So, he went through our student ministry, kind of came through everything. So, if you were doing student ministry around here, 15, 20 years ago, you have helped influence Dan who is now going to be leading our Strip District Campus. And the good news here is anytime you have a transition, to have it resolved quickly and well like that is just the hand of God. And so, we're thrilled with that and excited for Josiah and what it will mean for him and his new adventure as well. So, I just wanted to share that this morning. Let's pray together.
God, we thank you for just how sometimes you lead in ways that we don't expect, and maybe at first, we don't even like, but then once we wrap our heads around it and see what you do next, we can see your hand. God, I pray for Josiah and Brittany as they move to Tennessee, that you would just go before them and establish friendships and opportunities for them there. And God, as Dan and Casey return to Pittsburgh and Dan takes the leadership role for us in the Strip District, God, I pray that you would just arrange the logistical details of their transition and that you would allow that to just be something that would move that campus forward even farther than it has over the last year. And God, we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
Just one more thing about that. And that is when you come to one service of Orchard Hill it's kind of hard to sense the different things that are happening. There are typically eight services on a weekend, and our Strip District Campus has really not just returned from COVID but gone past where it was pre-COVID. Like here, we're still kind of coming back a little bit, I would say. And there, just the young adult population and the people who are part of it, it's been so fun just to see what God is doing. I'll be down there in just a couple of weeks to be part of their weekend, but it's really fun just how God is working in different places.
Today we are continuing our series through the Book of 1st Corinthians, and we've called this series What God Has Against the Church. And one of the things that are true in life, in general, is that it's easy to sit outside of something and be a critic. What I mean by this is you can very easily watch something that you're not directly involved in and say, "Well, if I were involved in this, this is what I would do." Now, the classic easy example of this is if you watch football and you say, "How did the coach make that decision at the end of a game." All of us have done that at one time or another where we've said, "What was Tomlin thinking?" And it's easy as somebody who sits on a sofa and consumes football to assume that I actually have equal knowledge to Mike Tomlin. In fact, I'm pretty convinced that that's the case. I'm kidding about that, by the way. But at the moment that a decision's made, I actually start to say, "You know what, I think I have a better understanding." And what I don't understand is all the dynamics of a locker room, all the analytics that go into it. And certainly, that doesn't mean that our coaches always make the right decision, but my point is, it's really easy to sit on the outside and be a critic. It's easy to do this with our schools.
If you're involved in a school system, it's easy to say, well, why did the school board do this? Or why did the principal or the administration do this? And to assume that we know. Now, again, that doesn't mean that every decision that your school board or your principal, or your teachers make is right. It just means that it's really easy to sit on the outside when you don't have all of it in front of you and say, "I know better." And it's certainly true in the church. It's easy to be somebody who says, "I come frequently. I pay attention. I participate. I contribute. So, I have a pretty..." And you may be right about what it is that you say, this should be different, this should be better.
But one of the points I think of 1st Corinthians is Paul, as he's writing this to the church at Corinth, is writing and he's saying, "I want you to know that there are some things that God has against the church." And so, he's pointing these out throughout this letter. And the reason that we've called it this is that it's legitimate, especially if you're marginal about the church; like you can take it or leave it. What I want you to know is some of the things that you look at and you say, "Church, I don't know about that." You're not alone. Some of these things go back thousands of years, and you're not the first person to have ever said it would be better if.
Now there are a few complaints that are pretty common about the church. And in time, I think we'll come to many of them through the study of 1st Corinthians. Certainly, you hear people talk about things like, "The church is irrelevant. I go and it just doesn't have anything to do with my life." You hear people talk about the people of the church, where they'll say, "People are hypocritical. They're judgmental and I don't want to be a part of that group." And certainly, that could be true in some settings, a lot of settings, but there are a few other things that you hear routinely about the church and what people say, I'm not sure that I like about the church. And sometimes these things lead people to say, "I'll be spiritual, but I don't want to be religious. I'll believe in God, but I don't want to participate in the life of the church."
Here are just a couple. Sometimes people will say, "Well, the church needs to address certain things that will help me understand or apply things to my life." And often it'll be phrased as we need to go deeper. The church needs to go deeper. And the other thing that you hear a lot is the church needs to do more. Why doesn't the church do more stuff to impact the community?
And here's one of the things you'll see if you read through the New Testament. And that is what you'll see is that there's an assumption that the New Testament writers make, that if you believe in Jesus, if you believe in God, if you follow Jesus, that you will actually be engaged in ministry, not just a receiver of ministry. What that means is that when you think about church, you don't just come as a consumer going to receive some services saying, "I'm receiving these things because they're helpful to me," but you actually become a participant in what it means to provide the ministry.
In fact, when we come to 1st Corinthians 3, some people will read this and they'll say, "This is really to church leaders." And although it certainly includes church leaders, the you that's mentioned are not the church leaders. It's everybody who's at the church in Corinth. So, when he starts out and he says, "I couldn't speak to you as mature people basically, but I had to speak to you as infants," he wasn't just talking to the church leaders. He was talking to everybody.
And so, what I'd like to do is just look at this passage with you this morning. And what I think you'll see is that the church is called to be both deep and wide. And if we end up emphasizing one to the exclusion of the other, we'll end up being not the church that God calls us to be, not the people God calls us to be. And it's really easy sometimes to say, well, I'm all about this to the exclusion of this. I'm all about reaching people and depth doesn't matter. I'm all about depth and depth is what matters. So, I'm not about reaching people and end up not doing what this passage teaches.
Paul's writing and the first thing we see and learn here is that we're called to be deep. And we see this because in 1st Corinthians 3:1-4 here's what he says, "Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit." Now, this is a shorthand way of Paul talking about maturity. Living by the Spirit means that you've surrendered your life to God and that you're choosing to say, "I'm aligning my life with God." So, he says, "I can't address you as people who live by the Spirit," but he says, "but as people who are still worldly." Now, different translations use different words for our word worldly here. This is the NIV. The ESV talks about flesh. The King James Version calls it carnal. And it's used three times right here in these first few verses where he talks about being worldly or fleshly versus being spiritual. And what he's doing is he's drawing this distinction and saying, "You think one way, but you're actually not living according to the Spirit of God. You're letting your own flesh; your own worldly desires drive you."
Then he says this. He says, "You're living as people who are still worldly." End of verse 1, "mere infants in Christ." Now my take on this, is this is not a compliment. This is not Paul saying, "You guys are infants." This Paul taking a little shot at the people and saying, "Here's what's true about you. And that is you are immature and worldly, fleshly. You're not being driven by the Spirit of God." This by the way is not easy church growth stuff at this point. This isn't the kind of thing that everyone's like, "Great. You just called us all a bunch of spiritual babies, Paul. Let's sign up for the church."
Then he says this, "I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you still are not ready." Now he's talking about their capacity, and he says, "I couldn't even give you stuff that was hard to digest because you weren't ready for it." And then he says this, "You are still worldly..." There it is again. "For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly?" The third time that he talks about worldly, fleshly. In other words, you're not being driven by the Spirit. That's what he's saying. Not just your worldly like in that the world drives you as much as it's a sense in which your flesh or the world is more important to you than the things of the Spirit. And he ties it to quarreling, which means a hot dispute, not just simple bickering and jealousy.
And then he says this, "Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, 'I follow Paul,' another says, 'I follow Apollos,' are you not mere human beings?" And so, what he's doing here, I believe is he's calling them and saying, "As people, you are called to have a walk with God that drives your decisions and the process and how you live."
Now, sometimes I've been around church long enough that sometimes when people talk about deep, what they do is they say, "Well, deep means deep study, and I need more study." And it sounds humble. By the way, I'm a fan of deep study. I mean, when I have free time, like a couple of hours free, I don't binge watch TV shows as much as I'll like to read stuff about the Bible. I'm a fan of deep study. So, what I'm going to say, take with a grain of salt here, but what some people do is they assume that listening to deep teaching or reading deep things makes them mature. But what it does instead is it makes you smart, not mature. And the reason I say this is because right here in this text, he's not saying what you need is more depth, although he is talking about meat, which implies depth. What he's talking about is the inability of somebody to feed themselves because what's true of a baby? That they can't feed themselves.
And so, what he's saying is you can't even take what you have and apply it so that the Spirit is driving you. What you're doing instead is you're basically saying, "I'm taking just more content." And so, what happens when you get more content is you become smart, not necessarily Spirit-led. Does that make sense?
Let me put it this way. When my wife was pregnant with our first son, and by the way she was pregnant, we weren't pregnant. She was pregnant. That's just my little pet peeve for our current age where it's like, "We're pregnant." No, dude, you're not pregnant, she's pregnant. But I digress. When she was pregnant with our first son, she started getting all these books and reading them, and we're old enough that I think the classic back then was What to Expect When You're Expecting. I think they have updated versions now. And she would read these books because she wanted to be a great mom, and she would prioritize it.
But here's what I can tell you about those books; they helped her have some ideas, but they didn't actually help her parent at all when it came down to it. And those of you who are parents, you know exactly what I'm talking about. When your toddler starts to scream, you don't go, "Well, what did they say in What to Expect When You're Expecting?" No, what helps you at the moment is compassion. One of the things, and I think is just my opinion, I think my wife has been a great mom to our boys, and what's made her a great mom is not that she read a bunch of books years and years ago or books over the years, although it helped her, just like Bible study helps us. It's that she decided to be fully present, fully invested. And because of that, she was able to challenge our kids when things were not quite lined up in their lives because they knew how much she loved them and cared about them.
And what I'm saying is this when it comes to spiritual life. Depth is not necessarily getting smarter. It's taking what you know to be true and integrating it into your life. You see, there's this sense in which when you grow in Christ, you start being able to feed yourself, you start being able to digest what you're given, and then there's this life change. Instead of quarreling and jealousy, you start to have real change in areas of your life so that you're Spirit-led, not led by the flesh. And one of the places that you see it because Paul brings this up again, he brought it up already in 1st Corinthians 1, is this alignment to personalities. He says, "This is one of your issues. Some of you are following Paul, some Apollos." And these were both good leaders. So, it wasn't an issue of who was a good leader and who was a bad leader. It was you're aligning around personalities rather than actually growing deep in your life.
I remember when I was in college, my wife and I were dating, I was working at this church. It was a big church, and I was interning. And there was a group of people in this church at the time who decided that the pastor wasn't a solid enough, good enough preacher. And being a young person at the time, I was kind of sucked up into it. And I remember one night we went over to babysit. My wife-to-be, girlfriend at the time, went over to babysit for one of my professors who also attended this church. And he was an economics professor, and we were just watching his kids. And I don't know if I was trying to show off or what that I knew what was going on in the church politics, but I made some derogatory comments to the preaching. Just kind of like, "Yeah, if there's anything good that comes out of that this weekend." And I'll never forget his response.
You know how sometimes you just have a moment where somebody says something and you're just like, "Wow, that's how I want to be, instead of how I just was"? This was one of those moments. He said, "I've been around the church a long time." And he said, "The pastor," mentioned him by name. He said, "He doesn't always have a textbook sermon, but I find if I come to church with a mindset that says, 'What does God have for me?' I get something from God every single weekend." And I remember just thinking to myself, "That's probably what spiritual maturity looks like." I think that's what 1 Corinthians 3:1-4 is saying, that if you're an infant, you sit around going, "Feed me, give me, take care of me." Instead of saying, "How can I come to a place of depth before God and with God?"
Now, again, I'm not suggesting there isn't a place for more teaching, deeper teaching, those kinds of things. But what I'm saying is most of us are educated beyond our compliance with God. And so being spiritual means aligning my life. So, you have this call to be deep.
I also think here you see a call to be wide. And the reason I say this is because in verses 5 through 9, Paul takes on this idea of Apollos and Paul being what people are following. He says, "What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul?" In essence, he's saying, they're not much. He says, "They are only servants, through whom you came to believe - as the Lord assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The one who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be rewarded according to their labor. For we are co-workers in God's service; and you are God's field, God's building."
So again, he says, the leaders, he says, are the workers. You're God's field, God's building. You are not basically to look at everything and say that there's somebody who makes something happen and they're the person who's worth following. As much as you're to say, God is the one who's in charge of the process. So, he moves from the nursery to the harvest. And the idea of the harvest here, when you look through the pages of the Bible, is the idea of helping people come to faith in Jesus Christ. And so, what he does is he says there are different roles, one waters, one plants, but all the time it's God who makes it grow. What this means ultimately is this. And that is that there's no room for pride. If you see God work in and through your life, in and through your ministry, there's no reason to ever be like, "Hey, look at what we're doing," because it's God's deal. And there's never a reason for pressure because if things aren't going well, you can say, "You know what, I'm watering or I'm planting. And God's the one who's making it grow."
But there's a focus here on this idea of harvest. And in Matthew chapter 9, we're told this. That the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. And so, Jesus says, "I want you to pray to the Lord of the harvest, that he would raise up workers." And the idea here is that the church isn't called just to be deep, but also to be wide and to say, all of us play a part in what God is doing somewhere.
I mentioned earlier, just about Dan Irvin coming to lead at our Strip District Campus. And I said just briefly that if you'd worked in student ministry, probably you would've years ago said, "I don't know if any of these kids are hearing anything." And yet here's one who's going to be leading a whole ton of adults in this city, pointing people to Jesus that somebody 20 years ago invested in. And what you don't know is how God is working in a Kidzburgh room, in KidsFest, in Christmas, or in any of the myriad of things that we do around here and how God is multiplying it.
I love the story of how Billy Graham came to be Billy Graham. If you don't know who Billy Graham is, Billy Graham was the person who most people say has spoken or preached the message of Jesus Christ to more people in person than anybody else in history. By some estimates, they've said 2.2 billion people have heard him preach. That's a pretty big impact. And here's what somebody once did, is they said, "Well, how did Billy Graham come to faith?" And here's what they found. They found that there was a Sunday school teacher named Edward Kimble who would teach Sunday school to a bunch of hyperactive boys. The kids would be kids that he would try to go and follow up with individually, and one of the students in his class was a man named D.L. Moody who came to faith there. D.L. Moody founded Moody Bible Institute, which had a well-known ministry.
And one of the people who came to faith in one of D.L. Moody's ministries was a man named Wilbur Chapman. Wilbur Chapman became a chaplain, and he would go around and talk about Jesus to professional baseball players. And one of those players was a man named Billy Sunday who came to faith under Wilbur Chapman's ministry. And he later, when he was done playing baseball, went into a kind of itinerary and go around and talk about Jesus. And from that came a man named Mordecai Ham, who came to know Jesus Christ. And it was Mordecai Ham, talking about Jesus in a context, that Billy Graham heard, and Billy Graham trusted Jesus Christ.
Now here's my point. You may know the name Billy Sunday or D.L. Moody. You may not, but probably few of us know the name Edward Kimble, Wilbur Chapman, or Mordecai Ham. You and I don't know the impact, but if we say I water, I plant, it doesn't matter. God's the one who gives the growth. Then every time that you say I'm showing up to a group and I'm investing, or I'm caring for the next generation, or I'm taking my resources and I'm giving money that I could use for something else, for some purpose of God, what you're doing is you're saying I'm participating in the breadth of the ministry of God.
And there is a natural tendency sometimes in the church world to turn inward. What I mean is, if you've been to our new members class, you've heard me talk about this, but some statistics say 80% of churches do 100% of their programming for the already convinced. And so, to turn inward means that what happens in a lot of churches is it becomes all about depth, all about how can we grow? And a healthy balanced Christian, a healthy balanced church says, yes, we want to grow in conformity to Christ, but we also want to continue to say, how can we reach people? How can we help more and more people come to know Jesus Christ? Because that is the hope that we have in this world.
One of the things that need to happen for that to be real is we need to step away from alignment and allegiance to personalities or our own credit and instead say, "You know what, I'm here to do God's bidding for a season," whatever that looks like.
Before I came to Orchard Hill, I was the pastor of a church in Michigan and the church that I pastored had a pretty small building. And so, we bought land, and we built a bigger building and did some things. And the church grew numerically in the time that I was able to be there. After I left, I came here, I moved here to Pittsburgh, came to Orchard Hill. I used to take my kids back every summer to a basketball camp in the area because I told them when we moved that I would take them back to this basketball camp. I guess it was a negotiating ploy at the time. Never negotiate with grade-schoolers, more free stuff here today. But anyway, I'd go back.
And so, after the first year, 12 months after I had left, I go and because I had hired a lot of the staff and people who were there, I decided I'd just go visit all these people that I knew. So I go, and I ring the doorbell at a security system where you had to ring the doorbell. They let me in. And the woman who was working at the reception desk when I came in said, "Can I help you?" Now, here's what was going on inside of me. I had this moment where I'm thinking, "Can you help me? Do you know that I actually literally bought the chair you're sitting on in the store and assembled it and put it together? And you don't know who I am."
Here's why I tell you this story. This was so good for me because sometimes we think, "You know what, I did a lot somewhere." And you know what that reminds me of? It's God who waters. It's God who makes it grow. And people rightly forget who you are within 12 months, or never knew you. And that's okay. And you know what'll happen here someday? I'll go, and five months, six months later, there will be a whole group of people who are like, "Who?" That's good and it's right because that means that what we're doing is we're saying this isn't about a person. This is about who God is and what God's doing. But as a church, as a person, our call is to always be deep, always be wide.
And then here's the other thing that we see, this is the third thing, and this is in verses 10 through 23. And that is we will be evaluated for how well we do both deep and wide. At first, when you read through chapter 3, you may say, "Well, this doesn't really follow." There's this stuff about being an infant and then the harvest and participating in the harvest, but here's what we see in verse 10. It says, "By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as a wise builder, and someone else is building on it. But each one should build with care. For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. If anyone builds on this foundation using gold, costly stones, wood, hay or straw, their work will be shown for what it is, because the Day will bring it to light. It will be revealed with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each person's work."
So, now we're reading about judgment. And often when you or I think about judgment, we think about God having this microscope to look at everything we ever did. It can be a little frightening, but it can also be incredibly liberating because what it means is that God actually sees the quality or the intent or the heart with which you and I do things. And so, what this is saying with being positioned right here is that there will come a day when God evaluates how well you, how well I have done both deep and wide in my own life. And what he says in verse 18 is because of this, there will be no more boasting. You and I will not know exactly how well we've done until that day, but he says no, that because of it, there's no reason for any kind of pride in our lives.
And then he says it this way, verse 15. He says, "If it's burned up, the builder will suffer loss yet will be saved - even though only as one escaping through the flames." Now, this verse is problematic for some because they don't like the idea of flames and escaping, but I believe this is metaphorical language here. I'm not saying that there isn't a literal language at times about flames, but here, this is metaphorically saying, metaphorically speaking, all of us are building something. And if you use poor materials, then one day it will be seen for what it is. But if you use good materials, they will also be seen for what it is.
And so, the encouragement is to say, even when it doesn't seem like what you're doing matters or is going well when you're investing in your kids, your own family, or you're doing something, and you're saying, "Does this make any difference?" To say, "If I'm building with the right materials, I know there will be a day when it will be seen for what it is." Because there are times... I know this just as a parent. There are times when you try to talk to your kids about something spiritual, or you try to maybe at bedtime, do prayers or read to them and you're just tired. And you just are like, "Does this matter? Is anything happening?" And to say, "No, I'm trying to point them in a direction. And one day it'll be seen, it'll be revealed." is actually the encouragement of this passage. You will be evaluated for how you have done both deep and wide in your life.
I love the pictures that are here. You have this idea of God's field, God's building. And then in verse 16, it says this, "Don't you know that you yourself are God's temple?" So, he uses three analogies here for people in general. He says your God's field, you're God's building. And then he says you're God's temple. "And that God's Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy that person; for God's temple is sacred and you together are that temple." So now what's he doing? He's saying together the church, you, plural, you all are God's temple.
Now, here's something cool in my mind. The word temple, two Greek words could refer to the temple. One is the word for the broader Temple Mount. If you've ever seen a picture of the temple in Jerusalem with the big mount around the whole thing, that's one word. Then there's another word for the inner sanctum. The Holy of Holies, if you will, if you know some Old Testament history. This is the word for the more intimate space. So, when he says you are God's temple, what he's doing is he's saying, "You, my people, the ones that I'm going to evaluate for being deep and wide, you together are the intimate assembly of my people. You are the people that reflect me in this world." Here's why I think that's so cool. He's just talked about this idea of judgment, being saved as through fire. And yet he says, "But you are like my inner center. You are the people that I care deeply about."
Now, this idea of being saved through fire points to what we often refer to as the gospel. And that's a word that can sometimes not feel like it has meaning to us today, because it feels maybe distant, but the gospel simply means the good news, the proclamation of God's love through Jesus Christ. And for something to be good news, there has to be bad news. And the bad news is that because of our sin, we all deserve eternal separation from God. We deserve eternal torment, but because of what Jesus Christ has done, we can say, "I have the good news of Jesus Christ. I can be saved as through fire so if my life doesn't reflect it, I still am going to experience the goodness of God."
But here's the motivation for this. When you read that, when you see that, part of what you realize is that God is not simply grading you and me with a "You should do this or else." He's saying, "I'm going to evaluate, it'll be seen, but either way, you are my people, and you are people if you've trusted in Jesus Christ who are loved and have a place of honor." And what that means is you don't have to say I'm going to do something to gain God's approval, but you can live from God's approval and say, "I want to share that with more and more people."
I mentioned just at the beginning how easy it is to be a critic. But one of the times it's hard to be a critic is when you're building something. When my wife and I were living in Michigan, in the church that grew there for a while, we actually built a house. We literally built a house. We had some friends who helped us know some things, but we built it, not just hired people to do it. It was the only way at the time that we could make it all work. And what was interesting to me is we'd have some people who would come and help us. And the people who would come and help us, our friends, whenever they would have a suggestion, it was so well received because they had a hand in it. But I still remember at one point, part of our extended family coming to visit who didn't participate in the project and were like staying and visiting, and then like came and gave some pointers. I remember not really wanting to hear the pointers from people who weren't involved in the project.
And here's my point of this. That is, it's easy to be a critic and to say the church should. It's a lot better to be a builder who says, "I personally am growing deeper and I'm reaching wider. How can I help make that the reality of what the church looks like in our world today?" The church might have some judgmental people. It might be irrelevant at times, but this is the collection of the people of God where the presence of God and his Spirit is seen most clearly on earth. And you can either help make that clear and appealing, or you can take away from that. I hope that we as a collection, here at Orchard Hill, of people, help reflect the temple, the beauty, the field, the building of God more clearly.
God, I ask today that you would help me help each person here to see how we can be deeper and wider. And at the same time, God, that the foundation that you've established in Jesus Christ would be the foundation that drives us. And God, I pray that you would help me and each person to be so moved by what your Son has done for us. That it doesn't feel like some have to or add on, but there's a sense of joy in saying I get to build and be part of your church, your building, your temple, your field. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
