Three Foolproof Ways to Wreck a Church

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Well, we all know about some of the negative uses of social media, but I found a really good use for it. I like to go on different social media sites, whether it’s YouTube or Instagram or even Facebook, and look at videos about chickens. Because I have learned all sorts of things.

People will put helpful tips about neat stuff they’ve done with their coop, or, hey, did you know chickens could eat this? And all kinds of stuff I have learned from these videos. And I’ll watch other things like how to do a better job of growing certain plants.

There are certain, I don’t know, for lack of a better word, crops that I’ve never been able to grow tomatoes. I just can’t. Some people are good at that.

I can’t make it happen. We always have an abundance of squash and cucumbers. But I’ll watch videos about how to grow tomatoes and how to make that work.

So I will go a few times a week on different social media sites and just basically scroll farming videos to try to learn some things. But one of these sites has decided, you know what you need to look at are these, what I assume are Chinese training videos for industrial settings. I can’t figure out what these things are or why they’re in my feed all of a sudden.

But there are these little animated videos about how easy it is to injure yourself in industrial work. And these little cartoon men, you know, one of them will carry a massive air conditioner component up a 30-foot ladder and get about 25 feet up and then fall and slide through the ladder as it, and the air conditioner falls on him and snaps him in half. Or people will fall off a girder up on a building they’re building because they decided to jump across without a safety harness.

I mean, there’s all these things. Why are these gruesome? And it’s all animated.

But why are these gruesome things coming up on my feed? I didn’t go looking for that. I didn’t ask for it.

But it’s just there. I don’t know. The Chinese government did something.

I don’t know. But I watch these because they’re there. and it’s almost like how-to videos.

Oh, and the reason I know they’re Chinese is because the posters in the factories have Chinese characters. I’m not just making stuff up. But I watched these and it’s like a how-to video on how to work badly in a factory, how to kill yourself, how to damage the machinery you’re working with.

It’s almost like you could take this and look at it as a video on how to do a bad job. Even sometimes the people who get hurt in these little films are not the ones who did something wrong. But somebody always does something wrong and it ends up with catastrophic consequences.

I bring that up because we could look at what Paul writes in 1 Corinthians chapter 11 as a how-to on how to wreck a church. If Paul were putting together Instagram videos 2,000 years later, it would show videos of how the Corinthians were running things, and these are what you don’t want to do because they’re going to mess up your church. We’ve been studying our way, if you’re new with us, we’ve been studying our way through the book of 1 Corinthians, and piece by piece we’ve come finally to chapter 11, and we’re near the end of chapter 11, and Paul starts talking again about some of the things that the church at Corinth was doing wrong.

Now, I don’t share these things with you this morning because there are things that I see necessarily going on in our church. But a lot of times the best time to deal with a problem is before it becomes one. And so we’re studying our way through God’s Word, and this is something that is brought up.

And I think it’s instructive for us to know what these ways are we can wreck a church so that we can avoid them. And so we want to look at this this morning in 1 Corinthians chapter 11, if you’ll turn there with me, and see what Paul says about some things that we can do to do church wrong or to be the church wrong so we can learn from their mistakes. 1 Corinthians chapter 11, we’re going to start in verse 17.

And once you find it, if you’ll stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, we’re going to look at verses 17 through 22 this morning. Paul says, but in giving this instruction, I do not praise you because you come together not for the better, but for the worse. For in the first place, When you come together as a church, I hear that divisions exist among you, and in part I believe it.

For there must also be factions among you, so that those who are approved may become evident among you. Therefore, when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper. For in your eating, each one takes his own supper first, and one is hungry and another is drunk.

What? Do you not have houses in which to eat and drink? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing?

What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? In this I will not praise you.

And you may be seated. I’ve taught this passage of Scripture numerous times throughout my ministry, and frequently I’ve taught it as a teaching about the Lord’s Supper. It does deal with the Lord’s Supper, as does the next part that we’ll come to, Lord willing, next week, but that’s really not the point of the passage.

You know, there are times that we can have a lesson about the Lord’s Supper, how it works, and that’s really our focus. I’ve sat down with our older two kids as the time became appropriate and explained to them what the Lord’s Supper is, why we take it, how we take it, what the purpose is. That’s not really Paul’s focus here.

The Lord’s Supper is an example of what’s going wrong. Paul is really wanting to address the underlying problems that are the reason why things are going awry at the Lord’s Supper and elsewhere, and the Lord’s Supper just happens to be an example of that. He began chapter 11 that we looked at a couple weeks ago talking about some things that were praiseworthy at the church in Corinth, about the areas where they had remembered what they had been taught, and they were walking in that example.

And he even said, I praise you, not in a way like they’re God and we’re praising God, but just that their behavior was pointed that out and says, but I’m not praising you about this. It’s like Paul has to squeeze in there, here’s a few good things that you’ve done. Now, back to the reason for my letter, because we saw at the beginning of 1 Corinthians that the church at Corinth was really struggling, and all throughout the letter we see that they were really struggling with the idea of living for Christ in a world that was pagan and hostile, which is the reason why we embarked on this study of 1 Corinthians, because even though the world has changed in 2,000 years, the world really hasn’t changed that much in 2,000 years, and we still face some of the same issues and challenges in a world that is pagan and hostile toward God.

So for these Corinthians, we want to understand what they were doing with the Lord’s Supper and what some of these problems were. And the commentaries and historical records that I’ve looked at indicate that the early churches, they would come together and they would have community meals, sort of like a potluck. And I’ve heard people say potlucks in all these fellowships, things.

They’re not biblical. That’s just a tradition. No, there’s evidence here that they, these were Baptists, right? They were getting together and eating.

When he’s talking about coming together for a meal, it’s not just the Lord’s Supper, but they would come together as a fellowship time, and they would eat together. He even says you come together in the church. Now, we know that early on they met in houses, and they had groups every day that were meeting house to house, but there seems to be some indication that when they would get together for things like this, they may gather in one place that was set aside for that purpose.

You know, we have some members that have rooms in their homes that are large enough for them to have big church events, and we’ve done that. We’ve gathered at our house once for church on the lawn when we were trying to move in, and it was on a Wednesday. We just had church out there.

They would go to somebody’s house that had a room big enough to accommodate the whole church, or sometimes they might even rent a facility. And so they would come together and they would have this big feast, this big fellowship meal. And I’m sure there was some singing involved. There may have been some teaching involved.

And they would cap it all off with an observance of the Lord’s Supper, where they would pour the wine and they would break the bread in remembrance of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. And there was not a thing wrong with doing that. Paul doesn’t even complain about them eating and their fellowship meal. The complaint was in the way they were doing it.

Because they would come together, and what seems to have happened at Corinth was that groups of people would separate themselves off. And they would say, well, I’m bringing food for my group. And there’s a time and a place for that.

You know, maybe some of you have food allergies, and so you bring something to the potluck that you can eat. I know once or twice, Charla and I with our Weight Watchers, we brought a container of black beans or something so we could sit there and eat. But it’s not a showy thing, it’s just we’re dealing with needs.

But these people were bringing food, these big feasts, so that they and their circle of friends could partake of the feast, and it was kind of a show-off, look-at-me sort of thing, while there were others within the church who didn’t have as much, and they weren’t able to participate, they weren’t sharing with them. And so there’s this weird dynamic in the church of division and some people having too much and flaunting it in front of those who didn’t have enough and of people saying, well, you’re not part of our group, you’re part of that group, and of making it into a big party and a big spectacle where more than coming together as the church and more than look at Jesus, it became look at me and look at us. And we’ve seen already through 1 Corinthians that the folks at Corinth really struggled with the idea of wealth and prestige of trying to one-up one another.

They brought that part of the Corinthian pagan culture with them into the church, and it was something Paul’s already had to address a few times. So that’s what was going on in the Lord’s Supper and in these fellowship meals at Corinth. And that’s why Paul writes to them the things that he does.

And he outlines here three things that they were doing wrong. I’m sure there were more things that they were doing wrong. As a matter of fact, that’s why 1 Corinthians is so long.

There are so many things that they were doing wrong. I would not want to be on the receiving end of a 1 Corinthians type letter. I’d much rather be the people at Philippi.

But this was a long letter because they were doing so many things wrong. But in this observance, there were three things that popped out at Paul that he points out that they’re doing wrong that were wrecking the church. So this morning, I want to look at three foolproof ways we can wreck a church.

Don’t take this as a challenge and say, well, I’ll do this. No, so we can avoid these things. But first of all, we can wreck a church by embracing divisions.

The word here is factionalism. Verse 17 says, but in giving this instruction, I do not praise you. And this passage is one that stands out at me in terms of some of the other versions versus the King James that I grew up with.

I love some of the phrasing of the King James in this particular passage. You know, here we read, I do not praise you. I love the force of the way I learned it where Paul says, I praise you not.

He’s just so emphatic about it. No. But in giving this instruction, he says, I do not praise you or I praise you not because you come together not for the better but for the worse.

And he’s pointing out here that while the church is supposed to strengthen believers, that’s a big part of why we’re here. It’s to make and strengthen disciples. That includes bringing the lost to Christ, but it also includes taking those who know Christ and helping them along with their walk with Him.

That’s part of our job is to strengthen one another. Why is the church still relevant? Because now just as much as ever, we still need each other to encourage and strengthen one another in our walk.

So when they came together, it was supposed to be for the better, but he says you don’t come together for the better, you come together for the worse. So the church was supposed to strengthen the Corinthian believers, but it was having the opposite effect. Because of these divisions in the church, with the church running away from its calling, it can actually leave us worse off.

And many of us probably know people who’ve experienced a church that was not doing what it was supposed to do, and their faith actually ended up worse off as a result than if they’d never been in that church. That’s what was going on with Corinth. And he says in verse 18, for in the first place, when you come together as a church, I hear that divisions exist among you, and in part I believe it.

The church was divided into factions. We need to understand what he’s saying here because just the English can give us the impression that, oh, there were some differences, there were some divisions, differences of opinion. That’s going to happen anytime you’ve got a group of more than one, right?

My wife and I don’t agree on everything. We make it work. Sometimes, you know what, I don’t even agree with myself.

But in a group this size, we’re going to have differences of opinion, and that’s okay. As long as we agree about the important things, that’s what matters. But we’re going to have differences of opinion.

That’s okay. If we keep them in the right perspective, they don’t have to grow into divisions. But the word he uses here is schismata, which means ripping something.

As a matter of fact, when churches split, they call it a schism. When the Catholic and Orthodox churches broke apart in the 11th century, they called that the great schism. It was a word that you would use for tearing a garment.

It’s a word at the root of schizophrenia, the word schizophrenia, because there’s an idea of the personality being torn apart. This is a violent word. And it doesn’t mean that the church had broken out into violence.

It just means there had been a tearing asunder within the church to where you have these factions that don’t work well together and don’t cooperate, and they’re no longer being the church. They’re just a group of warring factions. I have been in that church.

I have pastored that church and trying to bring those factions back together, and it was miserable. I’ve told you about the church that had the two sections in the center aisle, and the auditorium was divided north and south, and they referred to themselves as the northern and southern Baptists. It had nothing to do with denominations.

It was which side of the room they sat on, and this side didn’t talk to this side, unless it was to be at each other’s throats making accusations at business meeting. And God helped the visitor who came in, and people would grab hold of them and say, come sit with us, because let me tell you about those northern Baptists. Or sometimes the Northern Baptists would get them first. Oh my goodness, it was nasty.

There’s no place for it. This church was divided into factions. They had schismata’d all over the place.

And these people were letting personality conflicts and cliques divide the church. And this doesn’t mean we have to all equally be close to one another. As you look across this room, there are people that just by the way things play out, you have a closer relationship with than others.

That’s natural. One of the worst pieces of advice I ever received as a pastor was from one of the men I still respect more than just about anybody, but he said, don’t become friends with anybody in your church. And I figured out pretty quickly that was a lonely way to live. But at the same time, I need friends in the church, but I’ll go with whoever invites me.

You know, it’s not going to be, I like this person better than this person. But also just by the fact of you working together with people and you spending time with them or you being in a small group with them, you’re going to develop a relationship. As you look across this room, the people that you’ve worked with in ministry are probably going to be closer to you than some others in this room.

The people you’ve been in a small group or a Sunday school class with are probably going to be closer to you than some others in this room. That’s not a bad thing until we start treating the people outside of our circle like they matter less. and that’s where the factions raise their ugly heads.

So it’s okay to have relationships and different relationships with different people in the church, but it’s when we start excluding people because they’re not part of our group that that becomes dangerous. When we embrace divisions like that, when we say you’re not part of my circle so you don’t matter, when we say you’re not part of my group so sit down and be quiet, that will wreck a church faster than just about anything. And so Paul warns him.

He says, first of all. This reminds me of my grandmother, because she could walk into a room and start a conversation with first of all, and that’s what he does here, and I notice there’s no second of all. He just stays on first the whole time.

He never comes back to, and then, and no, it’s first of all, and he just stays there. In the first place, you come together as a church. I hear that there are divisions among you, and in part, I believe it.

We’re going to have differences of opinion. We’re going to have some people that get along better than others. But the important thing is we think of ourselves as one church, one body, not a collection of little groups that buy with one another for control.

And again, if you’re new with us, I’m not saying this because I see this as something that’s going on right now. This is where we are in 1 Corinthians. But second of all, we can wreck a church by promoting false teachings.

He says in verse 19, for there must also be factions among you, so that those who are approved may become evident among you. And you may say, wait, you just talked about factions. I honestly don’t know why they translated this word this way.

Because the Greek word there is hieresis, it means heresies. And that’s a place there, again, I think the King James gets it right. There must be heresies among you.

And I know heresy kind of harkens back to the Inquisition and kind of legalistic ideas, and so the word kind of scares people off. but heresy is a real thing. Heresy is real. Heresy is false teaching about the essentials.

Now, we can be wrong about some things and be open to correction, but there are some things that we dare not get wrong. When there’s a false teaching, you know, I mentioned this, I think, Wednesday night, that within our congregation, we may have some different views about the timing of the end times. We don’t fight about it.

We can discuss it. I know we can’t all be right. Maybe none of us have it exactly right, I don’t know.

But we study God’s Word and we do the best we can, but ultimately, it’s not that big of a worry if we have different understandings of the timing of how Jesus is going to return and all of that. But there are some things that we dare not get wrong. And if somebody’s teaching undermines the authority of Scripture and says, listen to me, or listen to something else, or puts something else on the level of Scripture with authority, that’s heresy.

And that will undermine our faith. If somebody’s teaching undermines the character or the nature of God, it’s heresy. If it changes God into somebody he’s not, if it tries to make more than one God, if it tries to make all the persons of God all the same person, if it changes who God is, if it makes Jesus less than the Father, if it makes the Holy Spirit not God as he’s revealed to be in Scripture, it’s heresy.

If it changes the character of God, if it makes God into somebody who suddenly is okay with sin and compromises with sin and understands sin, it’s fine. Then it’s heresy. And I don’t use that word lightly.

I’m not on the hunt for these people, but at the same time, we have to be careful to understand that false teaching can wreck a church. That church I mentioned just a moment ago with the divisions, got hit with a one-two punch when somebody came in and started teaching that we had to keep the Old Testament fasts and feasts and practices, started teaching that in one of the Sunday school classes, and suddenly I’m having to preach out of Galatians and half the church is getting up and walking out. I mean, that church was already struggling, and then you introduce false teaching.

The problem with that is they were changing the gospel, that you needed Jesus plus rituals. Now, if somebody wants to observe the Passover, that’s fine, they have every right to do that. But our salvation is not dependent on keeping the Passover or anything else.

Our salvation is dependent on what Jesus Christ finished and accomplished on the cross. And he says here that false teachings were so prevalent within the church that those who held to the truth kind of stood out. When he’s talking about those who are approved, that’s a way of pointing to those who hold to the truth.

Those that he’s referring to at the beginning of chapter 11, who stuck with what they’d been taught and been instructed in. He said, so that those who are approved may become evident among you. The heresies, the false teachings, were so rampant in this church that the few who still held firmly to the truth stuck out like a sore thumb.

They were the ones who didn’t fit there. But all these heresies running rampant, he said, you’ve got to get these things under control. We can disagree about some things in the church.

We cannot disagree about who Jesus is. Is he the only way to heaven or is he not? We can’t disagree about that and be the same church.

We can’t disagree about is Jesus Christ God the Son or is he just a regular human being, good teacher. We can’t disagree about that and still function as a church in any meaningful way. We can’t half of us say we recognize scripture as the written authority, God’s word to us that determines what we should believe and how we should practice.

And the other part of the church say, well, it’s just a set of good ideas that we can take or leave. We can’t function together as a church in any meaningful way, being divided over these things. Is salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, or is it not?

There are some things that we have to stand firm on, or it’ll destroy a church. And we see some churches and some denominations being hollowed out today as they’ve wandered away from some of those basic truths. Unless it sounds like I’m attacking somebody else, we could very easily go that same way if we’re not careful to maintain our ties to the truth of God’s Word.

And third of all, we can wreck a church by failing to deal graciously with each other. Because he says in verse 21, for in your eating, each one takes his own supper first. So these gatherings were segregated along social lines, what group you were part of. That goes back to the divisions we talked about.

But these groups showed no concern for one another. It was like releasing a pack of dogs to go at the food. Do they form an orderly line or do they just try to get in there and whoever’s left out, sorry, sad to be you.

The dogs just rush to the food. That’s kind of how the church at Corinth was doing, forget about you, I’m getting my part of this, and they were just showing no concern or regard for anybody else. And he says there in verse 21, and one is hungry and another is drunk.

So some of them were participating in these elaborate feasts, they might have it catered in, and they’d have their servants come in and bring them these incredible feasts that they and their circle got to enjoy, and then there are others that are part of the church that maybe they’re poor, maybe they’re slaves. They have nothing like that to offer, and so they sit there and they’re starving while others are feasting in front of them to show their wealth and prestige. And so he says in verse 22, do you not have houses to eat and drink in, or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing?

And I’ve heard somebody make the case before that this is why we don’t have potlucks. He said you’ve got houses to eat in. He’s saying that’s not what he’s saying.

He’s looking at these people that just wanted to show off by their feasting and said, if that’s all you’re doing, you’ve got a house for that. You don’t have to bring that into the church. If you’re just here to have fun and show off and be noticed instead of being part of the church, he said, you’re bringing shame on the church.

And so if you want to go have an elaborate feast, you’ve got a house to do that in. Now, if you want to bring an elaborate feast for the whole church, that’s, I’m sure he’s okay with that. Because he’s talking about how some are starving and some are drunk, and that being the problem.

So he says, what shall I say to you in verse 22? Shall I praise you in this? In this I will not praise you.

Again, I praise you not. And so many of these people at Corinth, they were focused on showing off their wealth and their prestige. They wanted to show how great they were.

And Paul looks at them and says, this does not impress me. You want to come into the church, and you want to make it about you, and you want to make it about being noticed, and you want to make it about being important, that attitude does not impress me, and it doesn’t impress the Lord. They weren’t showing any grace to one another.

It was just all about me. And this is probably the easiest one to fall into. At least if I use my own experience as a guide in this, I learned a long time ago, you can’t play factions and favorites in the church.

That’s dangerous. And the way God has wired me, I am on guard about anything that even approaches false teaching. And I may get some things wrong, but if I think there’s a chance it’s wrong, I’m not going to teach it.

And yet it is so easy, it is so easy to forget to deal graciously with other people. For whatever reason, maybe you’re in a bad mood, maybe you’re busy, maybe any number of things can distract us from being gracious with other people, because it’s not how we’re wired, it goes against our fleshly nature. Our ability to deal graciously with one another the way we’re supposed to is something the Holy Spirit does within us.

But even at that, sometimes it’s a chore, isn’t it? Have you ever found it difficult to deal graciously with somebody else, or is it just me? Okay, I feel a little better that it’s not just me, but it’s so easy to do.

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in what we’re doing, and what we need, and what we feel that we begin to put ourselves ahead of others in the church. And he warns us that there’s a danger in that for the church. If we start trampling all over one another to get where we want to be.

The danger in each of these things is that these things all cause the church to stop functioning like a church. It becomes a political group. It becomes a social club.

It becomes an outlet for showing our own prestige or wealth or influence or what have you. It becomes an avenue to show off. It becomes anything other than what God designed it to be.

which is a body of believers that come together and help one another and strengthen one another so that we can make and strengthen disciples. And I didn’t skip verse 20. We’re just coming back to it.

He says, therefore, when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper. He says, you’re coming together and you’re claiming that you’re doing this worship thing. You’re claiming that you’re having this what they called love feast, this fellowship time.

It’s a time of worship. and then leading into one of the most solemn, sacred things that we do together, which is the observance of the Lord’s Supper. And you’re claiming that you’re coming together as the church for this worshipful time.

But he’s saying here, I don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s not that. It’s not what you claim it to be. You’re coming together and having a party.

You’re coming together and showing off. But what you’re not doing is having the Lord’s Supper. What you’re not doing is having a worship service.

What you’re not doing is coming together and doing what the church does. You’re being like the folks out at the market in Corinth. And that’s the danger in each of these things.

When we allow ourselves to be divided by personalities and groups, when we allow ourselves to be divided by false teachings, when we allow ourselves to be divided just by our own lack of graciousness at times, the church stops functioning the way the church should. And when the church stops functioning the way the church should, is it going to be able to be effective in its mission? No.

Now, that doesn’t mean that disciples can’t be made, even in a dysfunctional church, but it gets a whole lot harder. And so verse 20 here really is the key to this, I think, that they were letting all these other things happen, and the church had quit acting like a church. And they could say they came together for worship, but it was anything but.

And the job of the church, as we’ve been going over at length on Wednesday nights, is to make and strengthen disciples. It’s to help people become the followers of Jesus Christ that they ought to be. It is to proclaim to the world the message that we’ve sinned, as Miss Janie pointed out to the kids.

We have all sinned. We have all done things that disobey and displease God. And because of that, because God is holy, and be