Have you ever been to a wedding service where the unity candle would not light? It’s a little awkward isn’t it….
Which of the following statements best describes your feelings during that moment. We’ll take a little poll at the end of this.
a. I feel an overwhelming desire to make a smart comment to my neighbors like, “oh boy, that’s not a good sign.
b. I feel embarrassed for the couple….I usually turn red myself.
c. I shrug it off as a mistake.
d. I’m too busy crying at weddings….I can’t even see the unity candle from where I sit.
e. This would never happen to me because I usually skip the ceremony and go straight to the free dinner.
Paul starts out chapter 3 of I Corinthians by addressing head on the issue he’s been eluding to the past 2 chapters….the issue of unity in the church. Paul makes some startling claims that the churches ability to shine in the community is directly linked to their ability to be unified. Here are some of the words that Paul uses to describe this church: quarreling, division, jealousy, fighting amongst you. So, this churches unity candle, the light coming from this church, is about out.
In Corinth a major pursuit of the people was wisdom (you see this a lot in the first four chapters, Paul will talk about division in the church and will follow it with a discussion on wisdom, so division and wisdom become linked in the first four chapters) The people in Corinth would study and debate who the best wisdom teachers were, and there was something in the wisdom teaching that was causing the church to fight….
A popular teaching of the day, and this day, for that matter was that some people are simply superior to other people. The wise are superior to the foolish….strong superior to the weak…..rich superior to the poor. Listen to what Plato says, “the well born have a title to rule the worse born and the stronger should rule the weaker. It is for the ignorant to follow and for the wise men to take over the lead and to rule.”
So, with this teaching it’s not difficult to see why this church became so divided. This teaching affected the church in Corinth in a couple of ways. One was that the poor were routinely neglected in the church….Paul deals with this later, but they would have church meals together and the rich were seated first and the people needed the food were given the scraps, and they were going hungry.
Let’s look at another way this affected the church. Because wisdom was such a dominant conversational pull, and because the wise were considered superior to the foolish wisdom became a major hot topic to debate, and everybody wanted to be considered the wisest person in the room. One of the ways this comes out in Corinth is this idea of I follow Paul or I follow Apollos. In arguing who was the best teacher of wisdom and who they followed they were really arguing who was the wisest person in the room, who was superior. I follow Apollos, so I must be superior or I follow Paul so I must be superior. It created in the church a sense of jealousy, and discord, and quarreling. So, you can see that this church was divided all over the place.
If Meridian is your first church experience, you may be surprised to learn that church conflict really isn’t that rare. I grew up in a church that had a lot of conflict, as a matter of fact that church is no longer in existence, partly because of that conflict. At a different church, I saw a bad church fight break out over the issue of a $250.00 printer. This issue arises in me a lot of passion (the issue of unity, not printers), because I think I’ve seen enough church conflict. I know that if we follow the ideas found in I Corinthians 3 then our church and our relationships will live in health and harmony.
Let’s jump into I Corinthians 3:1 (read)
You may remember from last week that Rick spoke to us about what it means to be a spiritual person…. what it looks like to be led by the Spirit. Look at what Paul says, “I could not address you as spiritual, but worldly.” Ouch, but one of the very first things Paul identifies is that the issue of unity is a spiritual one. So, to deal with a spiritual problem you have to deal with spiritual solutions. Paul paints a picture of unity and he uses three images.
The first imagery is that of a garden in verses 5-8. Paul says that in a garden everyone has a different job, but everyone has the same job as well. I remember helping my grandpa with his garden and it became obvious that my jobs were kind of lackluster….weeding and watering. My grandpa had some cool jobs like shooting groundhogs that were trying to get in the garden and picking the vegetables that were ripe. We had very different jobs, but the same purpose….to make sure we had a quality garden growing.
Paul says the church is the same way. He says I planted some seeds, Apollos watered some seeds, but look at what Paul says in verse 5. Paul says that he and Apollos did different work in the church, but they had the same job. “Only servants through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task.”
Paul recognized something very important in this teaching. A lot of conflict happens in the church and in relationships when one person approaches another person in a spirit of pride. Remember Corinth’s’ problem that some people believed that they were superior to others, and so as a result of that many in the church were trying to position themselves in places of power. Paul says, the only position we should be concerned about is the position of servant.
Healthy, unified churches, understand that no one is superior in the church except for Jesus Christ. Look at what Paul says in verse 8, “The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose….” As Christians we are united in our purpose for living, it’s something that we all have in common….that purpose is to serve Jesus Christ.
You see, God has uniquely gifted and given you special talents that can be used by God and for God in his garden. You see one of the great things this passage teaches us is that we are not required to make the garden grow…..we don’t grow others spiritually. God does that…..our mandate is to serve and work with God toward that purpose.
Here is one of the greatest questions you can ask: How has God gifted me for service in his kingdom? How can I use those gifts to work with God? I’m not a particularly talented person, but I’m big and I’m strong. So every year I go and help load the trucks at the clothing drive. Maybe you’re a mechanic and you could help others with auto repairs that can’t afford it. Maybe you’re a teacher, or you’re a listener. Maybe you’re a doctor or a lawyer and the question becomes….How can I serve God in my job?
My mother was the servant of servants. She loved to work behind the scenes, preparing food for people that had new babies or people that had lost loved ones. She would write lots of cards of encouragement to others. She’d invite people into her home and cook them meals. My dad is this charismatic leader type….people love my dad. My entire life growing up my dad was usually in leadership at the church. I remember so many conversations between my mom and my dad. She looked at my dad out front, and looked at herself behind the scenes and many times felt like her life was wasted. But I’ll tell you, over 500 people came to her funeral and my family received hundreds of cards and letters. You see, a life dedicated to serving God is never, ever a life wasted. It is a life used to it’s fullest potential.
Healthy churches are full of people who just want to serve. We are drawn together by a unity of purpose…..we are here and we exist to serve Jesus, and besides we’re too busy to fight and quarrel….that there is no better job or there is no worse job…there is just servant. We approach each other with an attitude of humility, and as God blesses this church and as new people come to Christ we say, “we are only servants through whom you came to believe.”
The second image is the image of the construction sight. (verses10-15). Paul says that if you are building a house it’s important to lay the foundation correctly. The church is the same way….Paul says that as an expert builder he built the only foundation that matters….he was trying to build the church on Jesus Christ. The main issue in Corinth was that people were trying to build the church on the philosophies of the wisdom teachers. Paul says someday that foundation will be exposed for what it is….when Jesus returns to earth to take his church to heaven. That foundation will be destroyed, and you’ll be saved, but nobody else will, because the foundation wasn’t Jesus.
Every once in a while I’m asked the question, “What makes Meridian work as a church?” Here’s what I think….you may not know this, but we have people at this church from every religious background you can think of. Catholic, Baptist, Charismatic, Non Denominational, and we gather every Sunday to celebrate and worship (not because we are united by philosophy or church doctrine, because quite frankly we’re not), but we united by the one thing that matters…. Our love for Jesus.
Meridian has always and will always have a desire to see Jesus at the center of everything we do. I know that many of you personally feel the same way about your marriages, relationships, business, home group….that you want Jesus to be at the center of your life. One of the problems with jealousy and conflict is that it moves Jesus out of the center and replaces him with the conflict. So, the conflict becomes the consuming discussion and focus of the church instead of Jesus.
So, any sort of conflict that we engage in that begins to distract from Jesus, we need to have the humility to just drop it. To steal a phrase from another part of the Scriptures, “I must become less so that Jesus can be come more. I must become smaller so that he can become bigger.” If I want Jesus at the center of my life and ministry then I must have the humility to drop arguments that are become a distraction from our chief purpose of celebrating Jesus.
I’m afraid that maybe it sounds like I don’t think you should ever have an opinion or make an opinion known, or that all conflict is wrong, and it’s not….if you know me you know I don’t subscribe to that teaching. But sometimes when we are engaging in arguments our desire to be right begins to override our desire to see Jesus celebrated and that’s when church conflicts become ugly.
At my first church I served, the senior minister had made kind of a controversial statement in one of his sermons, ironically about church unity. To be honest the comment came across as harsh and insensitive, and some people were offended. The next week in Sunday school someone brought up the sermon and the Sunday School class began to discuss the issues. The beginning of the class began in a healthy way….a simple discussion about the passage and what the pastor said. It ended up with the class spending an entire hour devoted to bible study and prayer criticizing the pastors of the church for what a horrible job they were doing. The desire to win the argument, began to override their mandate to love. That teaching is not only true in the church it is true in every relationship that we have. Our desire to be right, must never override our mandate to love.
Healthy churches are unified by the person they serve….Jesus. They understand that it is better to lose an argument and celebrate Jesus then to win an argument and to celebrate nothing.
The third image Paul talks about is the image of the temple. And the image of the temple teaches us what happens when the church lives out the principles we’ve talked about so far. What happens when we live in unity of purpose and we work together and serve God together? What happens when we live with unity of person and we’re all about Jesus in our lives.
Let’s read I Corinthians 3:16-17
Paul says that we become the temple of God. I love this that in the OT the temple was basically the dwelling of God. That you could walk through the community and see the temple and know that’s where God is. Paul makes this amazing claim that now the church is God’s temple….we’re not talking about church buildings or services we are talking about the community of people. That anytime a group of people act like the church….God shows up.
Let me give you a Bible example of this idea. Jesus says in Matthew 18 that sometimes a brother or sister in Christ sins against you, and it becomes necessary to confront him in a loving way. The Bible says go alone first and then take 2 or three witnesses, and then take him to the entire church. So, Jesus says, restoring a brother is a good thing and then he says, “where 2 or 3 come together in my name, there I am with them.” So, we see that 2 or 3 people could be alone in a room working together to restore a brother and God says, “I show up to that meeting.”
Some of you work at the same school or office and maybe you say, “we want to work together to better understand God’s word and to pray.” You get together with unity and a purpose and I want you to know that anytime the church is the church God’s spirit shows up.
Some of you go to the same Jr and Sr High School. Maybe you could get together and say, who at the school needs a friend. And you all get together at lunch time and just hang out. That is the church being the church and I want you to know that God shows up. When God shows up there aren’t words to describe it. People are changed, communities are transformed, and those that walk by and see the church can say,” I know that God is there.” I don’t know much about God, but I know that when they eat lunch, when they meet at 6:30 to pray, when they get together on Sunday mornings….God is over there.
The down side of this passage is that it says it is possible to destroy that temple….it is possible to like evict God from his home. When the church quarrels, fights, when jealousy runs rampant God’s spirit is driven out of the room. So, today we come together and draw a line in the sand and say we are going to be a church that is unified in purpose that is unified in the person of JC and a church that God feels comfortable showing up to, and living in our midst.
Relationships can be be difficult can’t they. We sometimes have conflict going back 5, 10, or 15 years and it’s as real today as it was then. I’m not going to pretend that unifying with someone that has hurt us is easy, but here are three commitments you may want to make today.
A commitment to unity says:
1. I’m committed to my one purpose in life…serving God. I understand that quarreling, fighting, and jealousy are a waste of time, and I will use my time in service to God. Today I forgive and unify so that God can call me and use to my fullest potential.
2. I renew my commitment to Jesus Christ. I understand that he can’t be at the center of my life when I’m preoccupied with conflict. I’m not going to spend one day with Jesus on the spiritual sidelines, today I give him full access to every area of my life. I’m going to forgive and unify, so that my life can be fully devoted to Jesus.
3. My relationships have been centered and harmonious…today I renew my commitment to unity, and promise that by God’s grace I will continue to serve and have Jesus as the center of my life.
Today, we have a special communion time planned for you. Before we commune with God we want to make a pledge to God that we will be unified as a church body. We want to make a public stand that we believe these commitments are important. So, today we are going to ask you to come forward and light a candle as a symbol of unity…a commitment to God that we will begin or continue to live in peace and harmony with those around us. We’d like to ask you to pray for a few moments silently and make your way to the front, where you can light a candle. Communion will be available as you exit the stage area to take back to your seat, to spend some time with God.
