Cultural Chaos in the Church

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We are all influenced by somebody, whether we want to admit it or not. It’s part of our nature to be influenced by other people and other things. And it starts at a very early age because we’ve just been talking the last couple days about Abigail and some of the words that she has picked up that we have to, and so far nothing bad, but we have to wonder who taught her that.

and she’ll look at us and if we tell her something she doesn’t want to hear she’ll look at us and say uh-uh-uh coming to find out I think somebody taught her that in nursery here there’s not you here I don’t think she learned this one from nursery but in the last few days we’ve started to get you’re mean but we’re not teaching her that one day this week she was running through the house carrying her blanket she tripped she fell she said some things I mean they weren’t curse words, but they’re not things I want to say from here either. And we’re going, who is teaching our child these things? And odds are she heard it.

She overheard it in a restaurant somewhere, but they’re just like little sponges. Charlie started learning all sorts of colorful vocabulary when he started school. They’re just like little sponges.

And we all are to an extent. We’re all, maybe not to the extent that they are. You’re not going to pick up every little thing you hear your friends say and do, but we’re influenced by things around us.

As a matter of fact, it’s much harder to avoid being influenced by things around us than it is to just sit back and let it happen. And yet as Christians, we can’t just sit back and let everything in our world influence us. As believers, as individuals, as a church, we can’t just sit back and passively take all the influences that the world wants to throw at us.

That’s one of the things that Paul is dealing with as we get to 1 Corinthians chapter 11 this morning. If you’re new with us, we’re glad you’re here. We’ve been studying our way through 1 Corinthians since last year.

So if this is your first Sunday and you’re thinking this is an odd text to preach on, it would be if we weren’t just working our way through the book. But 1 Corinthians chapter 11, if you turn there with me this morning, We’re going to look at some things that Paul addresses that really are kind of unique to his time and place in one sense. And so don’t directly apply to us in most situations.

Like last week when I was talking about meat sacrifice to idols, that’s not a problem most of us are running into on a daily basis. Although I did try to buy some immune supplements this week from Walmart and saw on the app they were marked halal. And I had told you all about that last week. And I told Charlie, these elderberries have been sacrificed to Allah.

I need to buy something else. This is not a, what Paul’s addressing is not a problem that we face specifically, but there are still principles that are going to apply to us as we try to do the same things that Corinthians did, and that’s to navigate a pagan world in a Christian way. And so we’re in 1 Corinthians chapter 11.

Once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together. 1 Corinthians chapter 11, verses 1 through 16. If you don’t have your Bible or can’t find 1 Corinthians 11, that’s fine.

It’ll be on the screen for you this morning. Here’s what Paul says to the church at Corinth. Be imitators of me just as I also am of Christ. And this is another one of those places where people will say Paul is being egotistical. But you notice he doesn’t say pattern your life after me.

He says, follow my example as I’m following Christ. I want you to walk with Christ the way I’m doing. So Paul is never the pattern. Jesus is the pattern.

Now, I praise you because you remember me in everything and hold firmly to the traditions just as I delivered them to you. And when he says, I praise you for remembering me, he’s not saying because you sit there and think about me all the time. He’s saying you remember me being there and what I taught you and what I invested in you.

He says you remember the traditions. These are not just whatever traditions people wanted to be. These are not church traditions.

When he refers to the traditions, he’s talking about what the apostles taught, what we now have handed down to us in God’s word. And he says, you remember these things. So he wants to praise them that to an extent, they’re remembering what scripture teaches, and they’re trying to abide by it.

But in 1 Corinthians, there’s always a but. There’s always something coming, because he has to straighten out a lot of problems in this church. He says, but I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of the woman, and God is the head of Christ. Now, if some of you are already ready to check out, just hang with me.

We’re going to see what Paul’s talking about here. Every man who has something on his head while praying or prophesying disgraces his head. But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying disgraces her head.

for she is one and the same woman, excuse me, for she is one and the same as the woman whose head is shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, let her also have her hair cut off. But if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, let her cover her head.

For a man ought not to have his head covered since he is the image and glory of God. But the woman is the glory of man. For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man.

For indeed, man was not created for the woman’s sake, but the woman for the man’s sake. Therefore, the woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head because of the angels. However, in the Lord, neither is woman independent of man, nor is man independent of woman.

For as the woman originates from the man, so also the man has his birth through the woman, and all things originate from God. Judge for yourselves. Is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head uncovered?

Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him? But if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her, for her hair is given to her for a covering. But if one is inclined to be contentious, we have no other practice, nor have the churches of God.

And you may be seated. Again, probably a strange passage, if this was just a one-off to pick to preach. But we have to look at it in the context of what we’ve studied already throughout 1 Corinthians, that Paul is dealing with a church that’s trying to have its foot really in two worlds.

It’s trying to straddle this line, or at least some of the members are trying to straddle this line between the pagan world that they were saved out of and what God has taught and revealed in the Scriptures, what the apostles have made plain. We’ve seen that with some of the issues that they’ve dealt with about buying meat sacrifice to idols in the market. Some of the issues that they’ve dealt with regarding sexual immorality, with regarding attending services at the pagan temples, all sorts of things.

They’re wanting to walk with Christ and take the easy route that the culture around them embraces. They’re wanting to be influenced by the culture and still try to walk with Christ. And that’s where he comes to this issue of the head coverings. And by the way, it’s really not about the head coverings.

The head coverings are an example that Paul uses to deal with the deeper principle here. And ultimately what we see in all of this is that the church is supposed to submit to Jesus Christ in all things. That’s where he starts here.

Before he ever gets into the discussion about the things going on at Corinth, before he ever gets into any discussions about hair and head covering, he’s talking about praising them for the times when they are faithful to Scripture, saying, I’m thankful for you remembering my example and walking in it as you’re able, and calling them to be an imitator of me as I imitate Christ. Paul’s point to the church at Corinth in all of this is that in everything we do, big or small, we should be walking in submission to Jesus Christ. That should be the goal of the church and the individuals of the church, is to be in submission to Jesus Christ in all things. That word submission gets a negative connotation in our world. We don’t like to be in submission.

We don’t like to submit to things around us. At least most of us don’t. Part of that is our human nature.

Part of that is our American pioneer spirit. I mean, I get it. Start telling me what I have to do.

In my soul, I start flying the rattlesnake flag, right? It’s 1776. I’m an American.

You don’t tell me. We don’t like the idea of submitting, but as believers, we are supposed to submit to Christ. And when we do that, we recognize that there’s actually freedom in submitting to Christ because of how he guides us, because of how he watches over us, because of how he provides for us, because he enables us for the first time to actually choose freely to serve him and live out the calling that God has given us. We’re never more free than when we have submitted to Jesus Christ. And yet so often in our world, this idea of submission is treated as a negative thing.

And it’s certainly treated as a negative thing in our culture, where over the last couple of generations, the idea of any kind of moral absolute, the idea of any kind of objective truth, really, has been obliterated. Generations ago, the Western world was known for the search for truth. Whether you call that the Enlightenment, whether you call that the results of the Protestant Reformation, the idea was we were on this search for truth, and we wanted to know what was true.

Then a few generations ago, we embraced postmodernism. and it became, well, can we even know, is there a truth? I love what Frank Turek addresses on his radio show a lot, that the postmodern will say, there’s no such thing as truth, and he’ll ask, is that true?

You’re making a truth claim saying there is no truth. So we’ve embraced a postmodernism that says, we can’t even know that there’s a truth. Now we’ve moved beyond that into not even caring whether something’s true or not, but caring about how things feel.

And that’s the direction our culture has gone. And unfortunately, many segments of the church are following the lead of the culture. And this whole discussion about the head coverings and the hair and all of that is really dealing with the idea that the culture was seeping in, the pagan culture of Corinth was seeping in and influencing the church rather than the church influencing the culture.

When the church influences the culture, it does so for the better in general. What about the Crusades? Okay, what about the Crusades? Yes, there have been negative examples.

We’ve got the Salem witch trials. We’ve got the Crusades. There are things that Christians have gotten wrong in history.

It does not hurt us to acknowledge that. But it was Christianity that ended the practice of women being treated like cattle in the Roman Empire. It was Christianity that brought about the end of slavery in the Roman Empire, in the British Empire, in the American Empire.

It was Christianity that ended the practice of taking unwanted babies and leaving them on mountainsides to be taken by the elements. It was Christianity that led to the beginnings of universities and hospitals and orphanages and all manner of social services while the governments were leading people to go out and slaughter each other in the name of this guy’s empire or that guy’s empire. It was Christianity.

Christianity has on the balance been a force for good when the church has influenced the world. But when the world influences the church, it just brings chaos into the church. And Paul was addressing this.

It creates chaos and it creates disunity when the culture impacts the church instead of the other way around. So Paul was addressing a cultural issue at Corinth about head coverings. But that whole issue reflects a deeper issue.

And he does talk to men and women about their role and their submission to God. We might look at it and say, well, why does he spend so much time talking about the women? Is Paul anti-women?

Is this passage anti-women? I think the reason Paul spends so much time talking to the women is they were the ones he was having trouble with at Corinth. There were other times he got on to men and called them by name and was pretty harsh with them.

So Paul is just putting out fires here. And this happened to be the fire that popped up. But this in particular had become an issue, this issue of head coverings that we’ll get into in just a second.

And it was causing division in the church. That’s why he ends this section of the text in verse 16 by saying we don’t have other practices or contentiousness. We’re not here to be contentious within the church.

If you’re trying to do something else that creates contention, that creates chaos and division, he’s telling them to knock it off. All right, before we go too much further, and by the way, I want to apologize because this is one of those passages that I needed the whole week to prepare for. And I’ll usually start looking ahead to the passage on Monday and start step-by-step working things out.

All week long, flu B was acting out the Normandy invasion on my immune system. And I kept thinking, I’ve got to feel better. Sunday’s coming.

Sunday’s always coming. I’ve got a message to prepare for. I’ve got to feel better maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow.

It was finally Friday night when I actually got out of bed for any length of time. and I opened my Bible and said, where are we? We’re starting 1 Corinthians chapter 11.

Oh, this is great. So I’ve done my best, and in the preparation time I had available to me, you’re going to kind of get the 30,000 foot view. So if you have additional questions, bring them tonight when we do our deep dive and we’ll try to address them there.

But I want to try to explain to you what the issue was with the head coverings. And if you’re worried, Oh, wait, are we going to have to start wearing veils to church? You notice my wife is not wearing a veil.

Okay, that’s not what this is about. The fact is we don’t know exactly what was going on. We know some denominations have taken this to mean that he was talking about needing to wear a veil, and they practiced that, and if that’s what they want to do, God bless them, y’all enjoy that.

The fact is, though, there’s very little evidence from history that would indicate that there was any kind of widespread practice of women in Corinth or anywhere really in the Greco-Roman culture at that time who were wearing veils to church or otherwise. There are some people that have speculated that, and this makes a lot of sense to me, that he’s talking about hairstyles because there were certain very elaborate hairstyles that were worn by married women in Corinth and the surrounding areas to show off their extreme wealth and that they were respectable people. And some of the women reacting against that because Paul does talk about simplicity and not making an outward spectacle of yourself, not that he was against doing your hair, but just that’s not what we need to focus on because that’s not where our worth comes from.

And so they would go the complete opposite direction and they ended up looking like women of a certain vocation. who would wear their hair down and loose and wild and all sorts of things. And so some of them even would shave their heads, particularly if they were involved in temple prostitution.

So it’s very unlikely here that, just based on the historical evidence, that Paul is talking about any kind of veil. Probably has more to do with the cultural standards of what was expected of a respectable woman at that time, and whether they should participate in those standards, whether they should flout those standards, whether they should ignore those standards, what should they do? And that leads to a few different ideas of what was actually going on in the church at Corinth.

What is it that they were actually doing, these women that Paul was dealing with? And three major schools of thought about what might have been going on, and honestly it could have been a combination of any of the three of them, that some of these women were so embracing their idea of freedom in Christ that they were in their way of dress and preparation and carrying themselves that they were imitating the pagan priestesses and the temple prostitutes. That they were just looking at the idea of freedom in Christ and going whole hog and saying, well, I can be like those women over there, which said something very negative about or would reflect negatively on their character to the people at Corinth, to the pagans.

There’s another school of thought that says maybe they were trying to imitate men. Maybe they were taking Galatians. Is it Galatians 3.

28? there’s neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, for you’re all one in Christ Jesus, that they were taking that to some sort of extra biblical extreme and saying, then let’s just all look like men. And it appears that there were some of the men who were trying to look like women, because Paul talks about their hair as well.

It’s another school of thought that says they were downplaying the significance of marriage by imitating single women. It’s hard to say for sure, because I wasn’t there. And there have been all sorts of commentaries written about these verses, And one of the weaknesses of a lot of those commentaries is that they’ll try to explain it by what these phrases mean to us today.

And we live in a different culture than what they lived in 2,000 years ago and so many thousands of miles away. And so I want to look at the people that are saying, here’s the history of what was going on at Corinth. So we understand what they were dealing with and what Paul was talking about.

If you’ve been part of our Sunday night discussions, one of the things that I’ve told you frequently is that there are just some places, as much as I hate to admit it, there are some places in Scripture where we don’t know with 100% certainty exactly what was going on and what they’re talking about. That there may be one valid interpretation here, there may be another equally valid interpretation over here, and we just don’t know. And I’m talking about faithful biblical scholarship.

not, I mean, you can go online and find people that just explain away the scriptures to say whatever they want them to say, right? That’s not what I’m talking about. But responsible, faithful scholarship, there may be a couple of different interpretations and we don’t know which one it is.

And so what I’ve told you on our Sunday night studies is when we come to something like that and we’re not entirely sure what point the scriptures are trying to make, we look at this interpretation, we look at this one and say, what is true in both cases? What application do both of these share? Because then we know we’re going to be on the right track.

And so I can’t tell you specifically what the problem was at Corinth, what the issue was with the head coverings, but I know whether they were trying to imitate the pagan priestesses, whether they were trying to imitate men, whether they were trying to downplay the significance of marriage and be liberated and all of these things. What I do know is that in all three of these cases, they were trying to be more like the world than they were conforming to what Christ taught them to do. And so that’s where I want us to focus because we could easily make this passage into a just a fountain of pet doctrines that may or may not be what the scripture actually teaches.

So instead, we look at that deeper principle. There were people in the church who were trying to follow the lead of the world in determining what they ought to be, not only as church members, but as people in the community. And Paul told them they couldn’t do that.

Any of these issues reflected a willingness to follow the direction of the culture instead of demonstrating our allegiance to Christ. Paul said, if you’re going to do that, you might as well shave your head, which to us sounds like, okay, big deal. But to them, he’s saying, the ones with the shaved heads, the women with the shaved heads were the temple prostitutes. What Paul is saying there in verse 6 is if you’re going to try to just go along with whatever the world says and do that, just go all the way. Just commit.

Just be honest about what you’re trying to do. And part of what the world taught them, part of what the Corinthian culture taught them, part of what our culture teaches us today, things really haven’t changed all that much, is this idea that we’re all just free to do whatever we want. That’s where I say this word submission has a negative connotation.

We don’t like it. The scriptures teach that there’s a responsibility. Let me finish this.

There’s a responsibility for church to submit to the teaching and shepherding of church leadership. At the same time, there are responsibilities on church leadership that we’re answerable to God’s people and ultimately to God himself. And yet how many times, and I’ve not known it to happen here that I can think of, But how many times do we get upset over something that’s being taught, not because we disagree with it biblically, but because it’s not what we want to hear?

And when I say we, I mean out in the world. We don’t want to submit to anybody’s teaching. On the opposite side of that, how many men have we seen get themselves in trouble in church leadership because they don’t want to submit to accountability by anybody outside of themselves?

It’s never. . .

Anytime we try to say, in whatever capacity, Anytime you or I try to say, I’m not submitting to anybody, it’s a recipe for disaster. Oh, and I know, I know that it is a hot button issue. It is the third rail of everything right now.

What Paul says about wives submitting to their husbands. By the way, he also says the husband is not independent of the wife. The man is not independent of the woman.

We’ll come back and talk about that. But I haven’t said, how do I address that? I mean, I can tell you what it says, so you can be mad at Paul, not me.

And ultimately be mad at the Holy Spirit. it. He wrote it.

But at the same time, I’ve got to present it. And I asked my wife about it. I actually talked with, this sounds bad, I contacted some women.

My wife knew what was going on. But some friends of ours said, okay, to my wife and some of these other ladies, I know you’ve said you look to your husband as the leader in your family. Tell me how that works.

And so they began to talk about how it works. Do you feel like that makes you less? And in one case, it was no. I feel like it makes me worth more because he has this responsibility to take care of me.

I asked Charla, I said, do you feel there’s any benefit to this? And she said, it’s a relief. I kept hearing that word relief over and over from these ladies.

It’s a relief to know I don’t have to do this myself. That I don’t have to shoulder this whole burden myself. Because our culture tells the men just to check out, watch sports, let the women do everything.

That’s not good for the man, that’s not good for the woman. I asked a friend of ours the same question, and she said, I love it. She said, because realistically, if we disagree, somebody’s still got to make the decision.

She said, I’m able to look to him as the leader of the family, because I know he’s got our best interest at heart, and it’s so freeing to realize that if he’s wrong, he’s the one got to deal with God about it, not me. Well, okay, tell me how you really feel. I also recognize that whether we’re talking about wives submitting to husbands, whether we’re talking about submitting in the church, all of these things can be misused, right?

And we’ve heard of cases where some of you have maybe experienced cases where these teachings were misused and misapplied. But just because a teaching of God’s Word is twisted and misused doesn’t mean we don’t follow it. It means we try to teach it the right way.

And so I will say, and by the way, he talks about the man not being independent of the woman. Men, there’s a high burden on us. The Bible doesn’t use the word submission in the same way, but there’s an incredibly high responsibility.

Don’t think that your role is to say, well, I call the shots. Your call is to die to yourself every day for that wife and those children. To love as Christ loved the church.

It’s a sacrificial thing that we’re called to do every day. And so in terms of this being misused, let me just say, men, and I would not suspect that anybody in here is, but men, if you’re mistreating your wife, repent. Women, if you’re disrespecting your husband, repent.

We’re all called to be in submission to someone. Because that’s how he wraps this up, talking about the role of the men and the women together. See, the people at Corinth were following the lead of the culture and they all wanted to be their own king and their own priest. They all wanted to be their own leader and not follow anybody.

They didn’t want to follow church leadership. The women didn’t want to listen to their husbands. The husbands didn’t want to take care of their wives.

Nobody wanted to do what they were supposed to do. They all just wanted to do what they wanted to do. And that sounds very much like the culture we live in today, doesn’t it?

So it’s a very different example. It’s a very different example, the head coverings, and not something that I’m encouraging us to start practicing. That was a cultural thing at Corinth.

What we do need to understand is that for the church to follow the culture doesn’t get us anywhere good. Instead, we’re called to follow Jesus Christ. Is that always fun? No, he didn’t promise us a life of fun.

Does it mean we always get to do what we want? It does not. Again, this idea of submission is not always enjoyable.

But our submission to God’s design reflects our submission to Jesus as Lord. And so when we look at the way God has created this to be, when we look at the way our relationships are supposed to work with one another in church, that we’re supposed to put one another’s needs ahead of our own, when we look at how this is supposed to work in marriage, that both sides are supposed to put the other’s needs ahead of our own. When we look at where this goes down the line that we as Christians are called every day to sacrifice for the good of others, what we’re doing is reflecting the fact that Jesus is Lord, that he is the one that calls the shots in our lives and that we’re following his example because he’s the one who laid down his life for us.

All of this is tied back to Jesus Christ. He talks about the relationship of the man to the woman, the woman to the man, and all of it, he says, comes from Christ. Because Jesus, there’s never been and never will be a greater example of sacrifice for the good of the other than Jesus Christ. When you think about what he deserved, When you think about the glory and the splendor of heaven, that Jesus deserved to be seated at the right hand of God the Father for eternity, being praised and worshipped and served and glorified by the angels that he created for that purpose. He deserved to have human beings serving him and obeying his every word on earth. And yet he knew that we were not going to do that.

He knew that we were going to have to be saved and redeemed, and he created us anyway because he loved us before we were ever created. and he stepped out of what he deserved. He walked away from the glories of heaven and came to earth as a tiny baby to be born and laid in an animal’s feeding trough instead of even being born among the royal palaces of the world.

He came in the lowliest form he could. He spent 30 years living as we do and experiencing everything that we experience but without sin. So that when the time came, there would be nothing that he was responsible for paying for of his own.

And he could take responsibility for my sins and yours. And he was nailed to the cross and shed his blood and died in the most excruciating, agonizing way possible so that everything you and I have ever done to disobey God would be paid for in full. And that slate would be wiped clean.

He sacrificed everything he deserved to pay for our sins. And then three days later, he rose again to prove it. And now to us, he offers a clean slate that you and I can be forgiven.

Those sins can be forgiven. It will simply believe what he did for us and ask for that forgiveness. And once we have it, you and I have a responsibility.

We don’t do this to earn our salvation. We do it out of gratitude because we have it. But you and I have a small way.

By the way, we relate to one another in the church, in the home, wherever we are to live that out. And yes, it’s hard to do. As I tell you this this morning, I am imminently aware of my own failings in this.

And yet this is what we’ve been called to do because it reflects what our Savior has done for us. Don’t follow the culture. Follow Christ.

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