What God Has Against the Church #10 - Free and Bought
Message Description
Senior Pastor, Dr. Kurt Bjorklund, concludes the message series "What God Has Against The Church" teaching from 1 Corinthians. Far too often we try to find fulfillment in addictive agents instead of finding fulfillment in Christ.
Message Transcript
Let's take a moment and pray. Father, as we're gathered here today, we come from a lot of different places. And, God, I pray that you would speak and my words would reflect your word in content, tone, and emphasis. And we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
So, we've been in this series that we've called What God Has Against the Church. And we've been working through the first several chapters of First Corinthians. And today we come to the end of this series and we will return to First Corinthians after Easter. But we're going to take the next several weeks to look at some of the narratives around the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as we lead up to what's known as Holy Week, Good Friday, Easter. And when we come back to First Corinthians, we'll retitle the series something else, but we'll continue working our way consecutively through the book of First Corinthians. And today we've come to this passage in First Corinthians, chapter six verses 12 through 20. And as was true last week, the nature of this passage has some mature themes. So, if you have young children here, this may be a good week to take advantage of our Kidzburgh program as well as there are some of the themes just by nature of what's in this text that will raise conversations that you may or may not be ready to have.
Now, what happens in chapter six, verse 12, and this is a really deep thought I want to start with, is verse 12 follows verse 11. Do you like that?! That's really, really deep. And here's why that's important because verse 11, verses nine through 11, we looked at them last week, are a list of things that you would say are our sins in the Bible because he says those who do these things will not inherit the Kingdom of God. He lists things like drunkenness and slander. He has some sexual things in here. And what he's doing when he comes to verse 12 is he then says that although I have the right to do anything, and if you look at most English Bibles, this is in quotes. And the reason it's in quotes is that the author here presumes, that most people presume, the translators presume, that this was a way of saying this is a common way of thinking.
And so, what was probably happening in the Corinthian Church is that people were saying, well, since Jesus died for my sins, since I've been saved, since Jesus has made it so that I don't have to keep the law any more in order to have eternity made right with God, I can do anything. And so, what was happening and again, in this context where he's talking about sin now, he wants to say, even though there are some parts of these things that clearly go across the line, most of them start with good desires and the desire for intimacy is a good desire. The desire for connection or different things can be good desires, but they end up in a not-so-good place. And so, he comes and he says, this thing, I have the right to do anything, he says, but not everything is beneficial. Not everything is beneficial.
And so, the idea here that Paul wants to start with is even if something is okay, it's not sinful, it may not be beneficial. You understand this in just our way of thinking in life. In general, if you're a runner and you run a race, there aren't rules that are specific for running most races about what you can and can't carry. They may not let you go off the track or something, but if you want to carry a mini-fridge in a track race, you can do it. Now, that's not really smart, but if you said, you know what, I love my mini-fridge, I like having the accessibility of the Gatorade. It's right here. I got this little portable generator, so I’ll just carry the mini-fridge whenever I go for a run. You would look at that and you would say, that's just stupid. You're creating a lot of extra weight or work in your life.
And what Paul is doing here is he's saying, although some things are okay, they're not always beneficial. And you understand this in the spiritual realm or in the realm of addiction as well. And then he says this, he repeats it again in quotes, I have the right to do anything but I will not be mastered by anything. And what he's doing here is he's pointing to the fact that sometimes you may have the right to do something, but it can lead you somewhere that it becomes controlling, addictive in your life.
And one of the manuals about 12 Steps, lists these as addictive agents, alcohol or drugs. That’s what we typically associate with it. Then work, achievement, and success. Some of us have an addictive agency toward these things. Toward money addiction such as overspending, gambling, or hoarding. Control addictions, especially if they surface in personal, sexual, family, and business relationships. Food addictions, sexual addictions, approval dependency which is the need to please people where we always say yes because we don't want to let anybody down or rescue patterns toward other people. Dependency on toxic relationships, relationships that are damaging or hurtful.
Physical illness. For some people, the idea of always having an ailment so somebody has to take care of them, whether they're real or sometimes maybe exaggerated, tends to become an addiction. Or exercise and physical conditioning, cosmetics, clothes, cosmetic surgery, trying to look good on the outside, academic pursuits, and excessive intellectualizing can be an addictive agent. Religiosity or religious legalism, which is a preoccupation with the form of the rules and regulations of religion rather than benefiting from the real spiritual message. A general perfectionism, cleaning and avoiding contamination, and other obsessive-compulsive symptoms. Organizing, structuring a need to have everything in its place, and materialism. This is a list from the 12 Steps, one of the 12 Step programs that say these are typical addictive agencies.
So, let me just ask you, how many of you have zero of those? Okay. My guess is almost none of us have zero of those because it's a pattern that we look for something to help us. And here's how this works. This is a chart that shows the pathway to addiction. This isn't unique to me or new to me, but the way it happens is it starts with pain and boredom. So, you feel a little pain, a little bit of boredom in your life. And so, you look for a pain-numbing activity. That's the list that we just work through. It might be drinking, it might be a sexual activity, it might be shopping, it might be exercise, you might throw yourself into work. But there's something that you say when I don't feel good, this is what I like to do because it makes me feel better. Okay, that's an addictive agent.
And then we get a little bit of temporary relief. So, you don't feel great, you choose something, you do something, you feel a little bit of temporary relief. And depending on what it is, sometimes it has negative consequences. Like let's say that you drink too much and after you drink too much, you realize that you didn't function for the night, you weren't relationally present, you had a little hangover the next day. Maybe you feel some shame and guilt and the cycle comes back around again. Or maybe after your temporary relief, you feel good. Maybe it's trying to look good or exercise or work and so you throw yourself into work or you exercise, or you buy some new clothes and you feel better about yourself, and then you feel a sense of pride.
But what happens is shortly after you feel better, you don't feel better. And so, the cycle comes back around and you say, well, if I worked harder and I achieve more, if I looked better, if I did something, then I should do it, even more, the next day. This is why when you go shopping if you ever don't feel great, and you go shopping because it feels good to buy something and you buy something, the feeling doesn't last. Any of you ever do this where you go out, you say, I'm going to get something and you go buy it, and when you get it, you're like, this is awesome. And then two days later you say, wow, I need another shirt because the last shirt didn't actually make me happy. It didn't last.
And so, what we do is we're constantly in this cycle of saying, I'm looking for something to numb the pain. And however it works, it leaves us wanting more. So, a little bit like the warning light in your car. You know how you can sometimes get a warning light in the engine of your car and it says service engine soon. And when you get it, there are two kinds of people, those who run to the mechanic or to the store to plug it in and those who are like, it's probably nothing, we'll deal with it later. There’s an inspection coming 11 months from now. I'll do it then. And what happens when that's the case is you very quickly say, either I do something with this or I don't.
When you recognize a pattern of using a numbing agency to deal with pain and boredom, it's a little bit like a warning light. So again, the flow here, he lists these sins in verses 9 through 11, these activities. And now he says, listen, even if you say, I'm free to do anything, Jesus has paid for my sin, so I'm free, not everything is beneficial and I won't be mastered by anything. And then notice what he does in verse 13 and following, and this is, I believe, where he uses an example of sexual immorality. And the reason I believe this in the flow that he's not just simply saying this is the problem, but he's using it as an example of being mastered by something or of something that may not be beneficial is because of where this sits, and it'll become obvious in a moment.
Verse 13, “You say, “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food, and God will destroy them both.” This is probably a saying in Corinth, maybe in the church, that people would say food, it's for the stomach and the stomach is for food, but God is going to destroy them both, i.e. do whatever you want. Live and let live. Today is the only day you're guaranteed. You might as well make today count. Enjoy your one and only life. YOLO. Well, whatever it was, this was their way of saying just enjoy yourself.
Now, again, he hasn't yet moved into the sexual immorality part. He's just talking generally, part of why I say I think this is an example because here he's choosing food and then he says this. He says, “The body, however, is not meant for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.” So now He moves into our sexuality and he says, your body wasn't made for this. It was made for the Lord. It was made for something more and he says, “By his power God raised the Lord from the dead, and he will raise us also.” You have a future. You have something that's more than this life. You have a resurrection, a time when everything will be seen and brought to account. Then he says this, verse 15, “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never!”
Now, a couple of things here. The word prostitute here is the same word that's used for sexual immorality and the translators probably translate it, prostitute, because they were trying to personalize it. But really you can read this as shall a member of Christ unite themselves with sexual immorality. It's the same Greek word. And the reason that I point this out is I think sometimes what happens when we read it in English all these years later, we read this and we say, If I didn't go to a brothel, I'm good on this one. But I don't think that's what Paul's saying here. He's talking about this idea of uniting ourselves to something other than God. And again, I think here he's using sexuality as an illustration, in part because this could have been in the Jewish thinking psyche.
If you were here a few weeks ago, we talked about God's good plan for sexuality, how he has a vision for the beauty of sex. It isn't always how we talk about it in church, but that is God's vision. And we talked about in Genesis two where it says a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife. And the word united in Hebrews, the word debauch, means to come together in such a way that it can't come apart. And what I said was that when you are united like that with somebody sexually, that when you come apart, it brings a little piece of you with you so that if you unite yourself with a bunch of people over time, you have less of yourself to give to the person ultimately that you want to spend your life with.
But here it's a little different. The Greek word that you use here, verse 16, is the same word unite or word that's equivalent to the Old Testament, word debauch. And here it means to glue together or to weld together, the same connotation. But what's different here is that it isn't talking about saving yourself for a person. But he's saying, saying, don't unite yourself with sexual immorality because you're united to Christ. What he's doing, I believe, is he's pointing to this reality that's saying, in essence, the hope that you have is by saying, instead of getting what I think I want and need from an addictive agent in this world in uniting myself to it, sex or anything else, food, whatever, drunkenness, whatever you want to see in this list, that you find your wholeness from being united to Christ.
In fact, this little phrase, never, where he says, shall we be united to a prostitute or to sexual immorality. He says never. In English, it almost feels like a throwaway phrase. In the original language, it's a subjunctive mood, and it has no let it be, so let it never be. And it's an emphatic phrase. I've actually thought about doing a series on this phrase because it appeared several times in Romans and First Corinthians, and it's the idea of what a ghastly thought. What a horrible thought. Never. No, never. I can't even fathom that this is what you choose to do. So, what Paul is doing here is he's saying, why would you who has a chance to be united with the God of the universe choose to unite yourself with something that's actually going to be less satisfying to you than the God of the universe?
Paul David Tripp put it like this. He says, “Addiction happens when we seek horizontally what is only found vertically. Earth's pleasures are brief and will not satisfy the heart.” Why do we get addicted? Because we seek horizontally things on this earth that can only be found vertically. We unite ourselves to something and say, this is where I'm going to find joy and satisfaction and pleasure and life. And it leaves us empty.
Again. Listen to Paul's words. “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ himself? Shall I then take the members of Christ and unite them with a prostitute? Never! Do you not know that he who unites himself with a prostitute is one with her in body? For it is said, “The two will become one flesh.” But whoever is united with the Lord is one with him in spirit.” So, there's something that you can unite yourself to that has a deeper, more lasting satisfaction. Verse 18, “Flee from sexual immorality.” Same word as prostitute back here. So, now he gives a command he says flees sexual immorality, and a lot of times, again, when churches, Christians talk about this, the idea is just run from it, run from the sexual immorality. But here what he does is he says, “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body.” So now, he's back to this theme of something not being beneficial. And so, he's saying when you give in to addiction or uniting yourself to things other than Christ, what you're doing in many ways is hurting yourself.
Alvin Plantinga writes about this. Because what we do is we deceive ourselves and say, this isn't going to matter. This is just me making myself feel better for right now. He says, “Self-deception is a shadowy phenomenon by which we pull the wool over some part of our own psyche. We put a move on ourselves. We deny, suppress, or minimize what we know to be true. We assert, adorn, and elevate what we know to be false. We prettify ugly realities and sell ourselves the prettified versions. Thus a liar might transform “I tell a lot of lies to shore up my pride” to “Occasionally I finesse the truth in order to spare other people’s feelings. We become our own dupes. Playing the role of both predator and victim. We know the truth, and yet we do not know it because we persuade ourselves of its opposite. We actually forget certain things are wrong and that we have done them.”
See, what we do is we say, this isn't going to hurt me if I work too much, drink too much, yell too much, control too much, not going to be problematic. And we forget what we read here. Verse 19, “Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.”
So, what he does here, is now, he turns and says, listen, I want you to know your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. There are two different words that can be used for Temple in the New Testament. One is a broad word that speaks of the whole Temple Mount and Jerusalem. One is a narrower word that speaks of the holy of Holies, where the priests would go to have their most intimate moments of worship and sacrifice before God. And this is the word that's the more intimate word. So, he says, you, your bodies, they are the most intimate place of fellowship with God. You were bought with a price, and this would have conjured up images for the people of the idea of God buying them in a slave auction in a place where maybe they weren't seen as being all that valuable and saying, now I have made you a temple, I have given you a grander purpose. You are bought with a price, therefore honor God with your bodies.
Do you see the connection? There's a book that Wendell Berry wrote a few years ago called Jayber Crow and in the book Jayber, the main character, is a barber in post-depression Kentucky in a rural, small town. In his early adulthood, he finds himself attracted to a young woman named Mattie Keith. He writes about an encounter with her. At one point, he says, “The brief laughing look that she gave me made me feel extraordinarily seen, as if after that I might be visible in the dark.” And so, the book makes you, at least at the beginning, think that maybe these two will have a future.
But she ends up, because of his inactivity at least, marrying Troy Chatham. And Troy Chatham is not a great guy. As he inherits her family farm, he, through mismanagement and laziness, runs it into the ground. He doesn't treat her very well. And Jayber Crow finds himself more and more attracted to Mattie and wants to reach out to her because he believes he can give her a better life than Troy. In fact, he says that he loves her to himself. And as he's struggling with it, at one point he says, “What business does an ineligible bachelor have to be in love with a married woman?” And what he does is he goes out in the woods and prays and basically in his mind makes a vow, a commitment to God, as if to say, if I were married to her, how would I treat her? And he never tells her of his love, but instead says, I've committed to love you as well as I can, for God's sake.
And the reason I think that this book has had an impact on many modern readers is because there's something in all of us that knows what it is to say, there's something that I want, but there's something else that's even greater than what it is that I want right now in our modern world. What we're told over and over is if you love something or want something, you should go get it. Now, whatever the cost, whatever it takes. But when we come across somebody like Jayber Crowe, who says, no, I'm not willing to violate what would be her honor in order to get something else, something I want. But instead, there's something greater, there's something admirable in it.
And what this passage is doing is it's saying you were bought with a price. You don't need to live from one numbing agent, one fix to another, one horizontal satisfaction search to another when vertical satisfaction is offered to you. And what we need to do is see that God has loved us so fully. That's what the story of the cross is about. Being bought, that Jesus paid the price for us. David Brennen says it this way, “Christians who assume that God is preoccupied with sin will adopt the same focus. They think they honor God by judging other people and by how seriously they treat sin. They become uncomfortable with divine love. But everything changes when we realize that God is preoccupied with loving us. It is His nature. God is love, and that love is perfect wreckless, deep, and extravagant.”
You see what will happen in my life, in your life, if we don't believe to the core of our being that that's how God loves us and that we're bought, that our bodies are temples, then what we'll do is we'll simply go from one fix to another. And they may be positive fixes. You may say, I work hard, I work out, I look good, I'm virtuous, I'm spiritual, I'm religious, I do all the right things. But it can still be addictive agents where we're looking for a horizontal fix but what we really need is a fresh encounter of God's love to say this is what will be most satisfying.
Now, let me just put this on an even more kind of close level. If you're like me and I don't assume you're like me, but for me, maybe for you, I can say this, but it doesn't actually help me not want to eat another chocolate bar when I'm feeling a little depressed. Anybody else in this same boat? So, for me, one of my numbing agents, if I'm honest with myself, is I like to eat when I feel pain or boredom or stress or joy or it's a holiday or it's a Monday. I mean, that's kind of what I like to do. And I have a particular weakness for chocolate especially if I'm not feeling particularly good.
Now, I eat too much chocolate. That's probably not altogether hard to figure out. And I do exercise, but what I know is I can't out-exercise my fork. You understand how this works. And so sometimes I eat too much. So, here's the question that I have. How does being united to Christ help me say no to chocolate? Does it need to? My point here is, okay, chocolate. I can eat chocolate. It's not sinful to eat chocolate, but what I can sometimes do is I can say I'm going to eat to numb the pain or the boredom or something in me that doesn't feel right. And then what I'll do is I'll get into a cycle and I'll have temporary relief. Then I'll feel bad. I'll feel kind of like that was gross. And then I repeat the cycle.
How is the cycle broken? Well, I don't know about diet stuff specifically, and obviously I don't have a lot of success with that particular one. But what I can say is that I know that when it comes to the weightier addictions of our heart, some of the things that maybe don't feel as trivial as a chocolate bar, that the only way that you or I will be able to say there's something better is to know in the core of our being that we've been bought and we're loved by the God of the universe. And that the horizontal fix that we're looking for is a shallow short-term fix compared to the joy of saying, God, you have loved me, and what I want is to be united to you, not to these things that master me, and don't give me the hope and the joy that you can give.
See if you are a follower of Jesus Christ you are free, but you're also bought. And if I were to say what God has against the church, meaning the people, I would say one of the things that God has against the church is that too often we lean into our freedom and we don't talk about what it means to be bought, what it means to have a God who says you are a temple of mine, and I want you for something better. And so, for many of us, we struggle with addictions, maybe their addictions to things that seem good, work, success, looking good, academic achievement, maybe spirituality, maybe virtue, maybe exercise, but all those things lead us to the same place of saying, now I need another fix until we realize that we can be united to and loved by God apart from what we do or don't do. And that is the beauty of what Jesus Christ has done on the cross, is it frees us.
God. I pray today that you would help me and each person who's gathered at Orchard Hill to be able to identify the numbing activities that we introduce into our lives. And God, we realize that this isn't a call to get rid of all numbing activities, but it's a call to name them and to search for deeper satisfaction. God, I pray that for those of us who have known your son Jesus Christ as our Savior for years, this idea of being free but bought would be compelling to say we want to relate to you in a deeper, fuller way.
And God for those who maybe are here or listening online today that have always seen salvation and you as somebody who just responds to our goodness, I pray even at this moment, there be a recognition that our addictive behaviors can lead us to a place that puts us in a place where we need a savior because our sin has not just separated us from you, but it's brought destructive patterns into our lives. And I pray that we would be able to recognize that and turn to your son as our savior.
And God, for those who are gathered here today and maybe have gone down a path of some addictive choices and feel as if their lives have been made a mess, and there's no point, that they're dirty and broken, I pray the words of the beautiful song that we heard would resonate that where we see brokenness, you see wholeness, and that you can make us clean in that part of being bought with the price means that you are buying low in terms of where we perceive our value. And you are infusing value back into our lives, back into our brokenness, and bringing hope where there's been pain. And God, I pray you would do that in some of our lives, all of our lives right now, and we pray this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
