Mindset For A Ministry Of Love Series

Most of you are likely familiar with the novel Pride and Prejudice and the movie that resulted from it. I don't know much about it other than that has been on my TV more than any other single movie; it's my wife's favorite movie and it probably qualifies as a chick flick. I believe the major story line is not guy gets girl, but girl gets guy, so that's understandable. The theme is how pride and prejudice nearly destroyed the heroine's opportunity to find true love, and it was only when she rejected her own pride and resulting prejudice that she found true love.

Pride and Prejudice could also be a title for the book that we're currently studying, I Corinthians. For these two qualities were major characteristics of the Christians, of all people, who made up the Church at Corinth. and these were also the attitudes that were preventing the Christians in Corinth from experiencing the love of Christ among themselves. Because of their pride and prejudice, the church at Corinth was fragmenting and jealousy and strife characterized their relationships rather than the self-sacrificing love of Jes8us. .

As the Apostle Paul has diagnosed the problem it seems that the sinful nature of the Christians at Corinth had actual hijacked the character of the church. What Jesus Christ intended as a place that would be characterized by His Spirit, a spirit of humble, self-sacrificing love intended to build up one another had instead become a place in which people acted like mere men, as he put if, like non-Christians, because instead of being empowered and influenced by the Spirit of Christ, they were under the control of their sinful natures, and did the stuff that unfortunately comes naturally and is in accord with typical human nature.

Now, as we've mentioned in earlier messages on this letter of Paul to the Church at Corinth. the particular form that pride and prejudice had taken in the church at Corinth is that cliques or divisions of the church had begun to take pride in their preferred spiritual leaders in the church over against the cliques or groups of people who took pride in and identified with other leaders in their church. It was a petty childish sort of thing—the sort of thing I did as a boy with my friends, when we said to each other "Well, my dad can beat up your dad." Only it took the form of "My guy's better than your guy," "My spiritual leader is superior to your spiritual leader," and "my clique is better than you clique." The result is that there was on-going jealousy and strife in the church, a clear sign that the deeds of the flesh, rather than the fruit of the Spirit had taken over.

But before we go further, if you're with us for the first time, let me review the salient facts about I Corinthians that will give you a context for what we're talking about here. First, the Apostle Paul who wrote this letter is the great Apostle to the Gentiles, who had once been a Jewish Pharisee who persecuted the church of Jesus Christ with great zeal, but was converted to Christianity when he met the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus. He had come to Corinth, Greece, preaching the Good News of Jesus Christ, the Gospel, that men could be assured of eternal life through faith in the Jewish Messiah in about 50 A.D. He won thousands of converts and thus a large and influential Gentile Church was born in the midst of an extremely pagan and idolatrous culture. It's now about six or seven years later, 56 or 57 A.D., the Apostle Paul is in Ephesus on the western coast of what is now called Turkey, and he's heard there are problems in the Church at Corinth. So, he writes this letter and another one that have ended up in the New Testament in an effort to correct the problems. In our section this morning, chapter 4, he will mention another very influential Christian preacher and teacher by the name of Apollos, who was a very powerful preacher and mighty in the Scriptures who had come and taught at Corinth and had a major impact for good among the Corinthians. Although Paul and Apollos were not among the teachers who were responsible for the divisions at Corinth, Paul uses himself and Apollos to figuratively apply to the circumstances the Corinthians were facing, perhaps in an attempt not to embarrass the spiritual leaders in Corinth who were the objects of devotion among those who were part of the contentious cliques that had developed in the church.

So, Paul has been addressing this problem for most of the first three chapters, among the many problems that existed in the church at Corinth. The real bottom line was the need for love, the love of Christ to be expressed in the church at Corinth, and this love was being undermined by the pride and prejudice that were characteristic of the sinful natures being manifested in the lives of the believers there. And his focus in chapter four at the outset is going to be the proper attitude toward spiritual leaders, ministers, pastors or teachers. And the message is going to be that they should respect faithful spiritual leaders, but reject the pride and prejudice that results in quarrels and conflicts. Respect faithful spiritual leaders, but reject the pride and prejudice that results in jealousy and strife.