One in Faith

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1 Corinthians chapter 11. We started looking at this passage last Sunday night, and I told you that today, both messages, and last Sunday night and next Sunday night, four messages, we’re going to talk about the Lord’s Supper. Because we are observing the Lord’s Supper as members of Eastside Missionary Baptist Church, a week from tonight, we’ll be sitting down together at what the Bible calls the Lord’s Table.

Even if we don’t have a physical table here, we’ll be sitting down and observing the ordinance of the Lord’s Supper. And there are some instructions that have been given to churches in order to do this the right way. The Bible never told us just to come and sit down willy-nilly and observe the Lord’s Supper.

As a matter of fact, the church at Corinth that we’re going to talk about this morning got in trouble for doing just that. There were no standards. There was no thought behind it.

They just all got together and did whatever they felt like. And Paul ended up saying, you know, there’s nothing good about what you’re doing. and there’s nothing good about what you’re doing, and it ended up not even being the Lord’s Supper, what they were doing.

They were coming together and basically having a party, Paul, for all the spiritual value it had, according to Paul. And so he writes them with instructions about how they’re to conduct themselves, what they’re to do, what importance they’re supposed to place on this, and it all comes back, I think, to this idea of coming to the Lord’s table as one. If you look at all the instructions, all the things he talks about, It comes down to not being divided when they come to the Lord’s table.

And there are four different things that he talks about being one in. You say, why are you talking to us? Why are you spending so much time about this?

Couldn’t we just talk about this right before the Lord’s Supper? We’re talking about these things because I want us to have some time to think about it. I don’t want to just preach for a few minutes before we have the Lord’s Supper and then say, okay, we’re going to have an invitation.

You have two or three minutes to deal with God and deal with each other and make things right and examine yourself and all these things. I want us to really take some time and examine ourselves, examine our church, and make sure that we go into this Lord’s Supper with the right attitude. As a matter of fact, for that matter, the instructions that he gives us on being one as we go into the Lord’s Supper are important to the church at all times of the year, not just when we’re observing the Lord’s Supper.

Amen? They’re important at all times. Paul does not say anywhere in his letters.

For that matter, it doesn’t say anywhere in the Bible, doesn’t hint anywhere in the Bible, that he gives us these instructions, gives us any kind of godly instruction, and says, y’all be good little boys and girls as you go into worship, and then just run wild the rest of the time. No, he gives us godly principles that we’re to live by, and if they’re good principles for us to live by in our acts of worship, then they’re good principles for us to live by as individuals and collectively as a church at all times. And so the instruction he gives us here about being one as a church are good, whether we’re going through the Lord’s Supper or not.

So it’s important that we take some time and examine ourselves and be in the right spirit as we go into the Lord’s Supper. But it’s also instructive to us for just being a church at regular times. Let’s start, and we’re going to read through the passage again, 1 Corinthians, starting in chapter 11, verse 16.

It says, But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither the churches of God. Now in this that I declare unto you, I praise you not that you come together, not for the better, but for the worse. And we talked about this last Sunday night, about he instructs us first to be one in spirit.

Just to catch you up if you weren’t here. He talks about being one in spirit, basically, in this passage. And the fact was that when they came together as a church, there was contention, there was division.

He says in verse 18, For first of all, when you come together in the church, I hear that there be divisions among you, and I partly believe it. And this divisions he talked about, as I said last week, comes from the word where we get our word schism. There were factions.

There were sides to take. And it wasn’t necessarily doctrinal issues. it was personality conflicts and people saying, well, I’m a follower of Paul.

Well, I’m a follower of Apollos. And somebody standing in the middle saying, can’t we all just be followers of Christ? And they were fighting and picking at each other.

And there were divisions. And he said, and I partly believe it. And as a result, he said, when you come together, it’s not for the better, it’s for the worse.

They weren’t getting the benefit that they were supposed to get. They weren’t getting the encouragement and the challenge that they were supposed to get out of coming together as a church. They were coming together as a church and leaving with nothing but drama and stress.

And most of us have probably been in churches at one point or another where you just walked out feeling weary from the things that were going on in there. That’s where they were. And he said, I praise you not that you come together not for the better but for the worst. And he tells them, if any man seemed to be contentious, that word contentious meaning loving strife or maybe even taking it a step further, loving victory, loving to win, loving to fight and win.

If any man seem to be that way, there’s no such custom. We have no such custom, neither the churches of God. Says that kind of attitude is not fitting in the local church.

And we’re told to be one in spirit, that we are to love one another. We’re to be reconciled. We’re to be unified.

The whole body. And that if there’s division, if there’s personality conflict between any two members of the church, it affects the whole church. And we’re to remain firm against those things.

And we’re to seek reconciliation with one another. and we’re to forgive one another, and we’re to love one another. And if we go into the Lord’s Supper, and we’re not one in spirit, that’s pretty well strike one against us.

It’s not going to be what it’s supposed to be. If we as a church are fighting, if there’s personality conflict, if there’s somebody in the church that, and I just can’t pick on Brother Phil because he’s not here today, so I can’t name names. If I look out there and I think, I just can’t stand that person.

Folks, the Lord’s Supper is not going to be what it’s supposed to be. We as a church, at other times, besides the Lord’s Supper, are not going to be what we’re supposed to be. If there’s that kind of conflict and division in the local church, it just doesn’t work.

And he says there’s no such custom. We have no such custom, neither the churches of God. Then he moves on.

You know, most church splits, unfortunately. It’s unfortunate that there are church splits anyway. But unfortunately, most church splits are not the result of doctrinal issues.

They’re the result of these personality conflicts. They’re the result of this anger and this hatred that we sometimes have, this unforgiving spirit and bitterness that can eat us up if we don’t deal with it, if we don’t keep a short list of accounts with one another, forgive one another, seek reconciliation. But a lot of times these divisions, as Paul calls them, are tied to what he calls heresies.

These things are tied to an improper understanding of God. Sometimes these things are tied to sin, which is what we’re going to talk about tonight. We’re going to talk tonight about being one in holiness, But this morning we need to talk about being one in faith, because that’s the next stop in chapter 11.

That as we come together at the Lord’s Supper, we’re to be one in faith. He says, starting in verse 19, For there must also be heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you. When ye come together therefore into one place, this is not to eat the Lord’s Supper.

For in eating, everyone taketh before another his own supper, and one is hungry, and another is drunken. What? Have ye not houses to eat and to drink in, or despise ye the church of God, and shame them which have not.

What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you in this? And he says, I praise you not.

It’s the second time Paul has said in this passage about their disunity and their division at the Lord’s Supper, I praise you not. And as I mentioned last Sunday night, lest it sound that Paul is just harsh and judgmental, he does earlier in chapter 11 talk about the things that they are doing right and says, I praise you in this. Verse 2, now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things and keep the ordinances as I delivered them to you.

But when it comes to this disunity, when it comes to this fighting, this division, when it comes to the false teaching that they brought in, when it comes to the sin that’s in the church, when it comes to all these things that are dividing the church, he says, in these things I praise you not. There was nothing beneficial, nothing praiseworthy about the way they were conducting themselves in the church. Verse 23 says, For I have received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you, that the Lord Jesus, the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread, And when he had given thanks, he break it and said, Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you, this do in remembrance of me.

After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying, This cup is the New Testament in my blood. This do ye as oft as ye drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as ye eat this bread and drink this cup, ye do show the Lord’s death until he come.

Folks, ultimately, that’s what the Lord’s Supper is about. It’s about us coming together and giving this picture of the death and burial and resurrection of Christ. We do show the Lord’s death until he come. Wherefore, whosoever shall eat this bread and drink this cup of the Lord unworthily shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord.

But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. He says, For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.

When I first started, I’ve heard this verse for many, many years. But when I was a teenager and started really paying attention to this verse as it was taught in church, and I do, if you haven’t noticed, I do believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible. I believe it’s to be interpreted literally unless it’s very clear from the context that it means something else.

You know, when the Bible says that Jesus would have gathered Jerusalem, the people of Jerusalem under his wings, that’s not to be taken literally. Jesus doesn’t have feathers and wings. It was a metaphor.

But unless there’s a literary reason not to take it literally, I believe in a literal rendering of Scripture. And when it says here that many are weak and sick among you and many sleep, which means many had died, and when Paul says many are sick and weak and many have died as a result of taking the Lord’s Supper unworthily, folks, that scared me. And it still rattles me a little bit today to think this is a powerful, there’s nothing magical that we’re doing, but there’s something powerful about coming together and representing the death of Christ in this way.

And it’s not something that we’re to take lightly. For if we would judge ourselves, verse 31, we should not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened or corrected of the Lord, that we should not be condemned with the world.

Wherefore, my brethren, when ye come together to eat, tarry or wait one for another. And if any man hunger, let him eat at home, that ye not come together unto condemnation, and the rest will I set in order when I come. What they’ve basically done here, the church at Corinth, is a deeply divided church has come together in a physical sense.

They’ve come together in one place, but they haven’t really come together. Because the church at Corinth is divided by these personality conflicts, this bitterness, the infighting, the things that we talked about last Sunday night. They’ve also come together and they have come together divided in the faith.

When you look at Corinth and when you look at the other churches that Paul wrote to and that John wrote to, there were a lot of false teachings that were going on in the churches in that day. And there are still divisions in churches to this day as a result of being divided in the faith, being divided in what we believe. You used to hear stories in the newspaper.

It’s a pretty big deal when, I mean, churches split all the time. So it’s a pretty big deal if a church split makes the newspaper. And we were, I used to follow at home, there would be stories about some of the Anglican churches in Oklahoma City that were fighting with one another.

As a matter of fact, the Anglican church as a whole, I think, is fighting one another right now, and some other denominations as well, are fighting over issues of faith. They’re not really over social issues that they’re divided over. It’s not really over gay rights and abortion.

It’s over the authority of the Word of God that it’s supposed to have in the church. That’s what they’re really fighting about when you get right down to it. And there were arguments and infighting among some of the Anglican churches, congregations in Oklahoma City, to where it was being followed in the newspaper, and they were fighting over these issues, and it ended up one of the big Anglican congregations in Oklahoma City split in half.

And one half said, we’re going to be over here with the Episcopal Church, the national American body. And another side said, we can’t be with you people because you don’t believe the same thing. And so they ended up joining up with the Anglican church in Argentina.

Now, they’re located in Oklahoma City, and they’re part of the Argentina church, whatever they call it, the Church of the Southern Cone, I think, something like that. And it wasn’t a personality conflict. Thank goodness there are enough splits over that as it is.

But it was a division over doctrine. And I don’t agree with the doctrine of the Anglican church, but if I was one of them, I would have gone with the one that split off and joined up with Argentina because it was a debate over is the Word of God authoritative or not? Is this just a book that we read and it gives us some thoughts to feel better?

Or is it the actual Word of God where He gives us instruction about how we’re to live, how we’re to worship, how we’re to serve Him? And that’s what the debate was over. And these people got to the point where just saying, oh, can’t we love each other and get along, didn’t cut it anymore.

And they were divided. You know what? It shouldn’t be that way.

It shouldn’t be that way. The answer, however, is not to say, well, let’s just pretend the truth doesn’t matter. As a matter of fact, that’s what has gotten so many churches into trouble like that in the first place, is 40 years ago, 50 years ago, whenever it happened, saying, well, the truth doesn’t really matter as long as we can just all love Jesus.

You know, we can ignore these other things. When you’ve got a battle between truth and falsehood, it doesn’t go away just because we ignore it. It festers, and it gets worse, and it leads to resentments and divisions, and it needs to be dealt with.

The answer is not just to ignore it. Because we can say, oh, all the people who say we love Jesus, can’t we all just be together? Folks, as a local church, we ought to be united around the person and work of Jesus Christ. However, if we’re saying things like, can’t we all, if we love Jesus, can’t we all just get along and forget about all these other things?

My question then is, which Jesus? That sounds crazy, doesn’t it? The Bible makes it clear there’s more than one Jesus.

Not in the Bible. But it talks about that there would be false Christ. It talks about even in His day, There were people putting forward false ideas about who Jesus is. And my question is, if we’re all supposed to get together and just love Jesus and ignore everybody else, not everybody else, everything else, then which Jesus is it that we’re supposed to be loving and united around?

Is it the Jesus who’s crucified week after week on the altar, or is it the Jesus who shed his blood once for all, according to the scriptures? Is it the Jesus who is our spirit brother, and the spirit brother of numerous gods throughout numerous worlds, or is it the only begotten son of the Father? Is it Jesus, the wise moral teacher?

Or is it Jesus who Colossians calls the image of the invisible God and who Paul says, in whom dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily? Which Jesus is it that we’re talking about? See, folks, truth matters.

We hear all the time. We shouldn’t worry about these secondary issues. And there are some, everything in the Bible is important, but there are some things that are vitally important and there are some things that are just important.

There are some secondary issues. But to say, let’s just ignore everything else and let’s just all love Jesus, Well, folks, there are a lot of people who say they love Jesus. There are a lot of churches that claim they’re preaching Jesus, but it’s not the same Jesus of the Bible.

And there is a time when we can become divided in the faith. And folks, if we as a local church aren’t together on who Jesus is, if we’re not together on what He did on the cross, if we’re not together on how you get saved, if we’re not together on who God is, if we’re not together on what the Bible is, if we’re not together on so many of these important issues, we are never going to be able to overlook everything else. It will become an issue.

We won’t be able to get along. We will have confusion in what we’re teaching, confusion in what we’re preaching, confusion in the gospel that we’re telling the world, and we won’t accomplish anything. Folks, we’ve got to be one in faith as a church.

Paul says that these divisions that he’s talked about, he ties them in to what he calls these heresies. He says in verse 18, there be divisions among you, and I partly believe it. Verse 19, for there must also be heresies among you.

Now, some people have written that that means, well, God set it up that way. If you read the whole verse, it says, there must also be heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you. It says here there must be heresies also, that those who are approved, those who have been tested, who have been tried, and shown to have the true faith, may be made evident, so that you can tell the truth from falsehood.

Well, it was necessary that there be heresies. That would mean that God decreed that some people would be lying in the churches. And as we studied with the series on God’s will, God allows sin, but God does not decree sin.

So when it says there must be heresies, It’s not saying God decreed, God said there must be, it’s necessary that there be heresies so that the true people will be evident. What it’s saying here is there are divisions, so there must be heresies. There must be divisions in faith because there are divisions in personality.

And folks, if we were all united around Jesus, and when I say Jesus, I mean the Jesus of the Bible, not just whatever we think Jesus is. If we were united around the person of the unique, only begotten Son of God, God in the flesh, the image of the invisible God in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwelt bodily, who came and was born of a virgin and lived a sinless life and was crucified to provide the payment for our sins and shed his blood to do that, and was crucified once for all, rose again from the dead bodily, not just an illusion, not just a hologram, but bodily rose from the dead, walked among his disciples, was seen by witnesses, and was seen ascending to the right hand of God the Father, now sits at His right hand making intercession for us and is still able to save to the uttermost. Folks, if we can’t be united around that, there’s a problem.

And we as a church cannot come to the Lord’s table divided about the truth. A church cannot be one in spirit if it is not also one in faith. If we find divisions like that, that we can’t agree on who Jesus is, if we can’t agree what the Word of God is, we can’t agree on the plan of salvation, we can’t agree on some of these vitally important things, then folks, it will manifest itself in division.

We can love one another. We can slop sugar on one another. But eventually, it’s going to come to a head where, well, I’m not going to have so-and-so teach that class because they believe this.

And that’s going to upset so-and-so if they’re teaching that. And folks, it leads to confusion and division. And the church cannot come together and be one.

We cannot be one in spirit like we talked about last week if we’re not one in faith. Because he says there are divisions, there must also be heresies. The division, the fighting, the personality conflicts were largely as a result, I won’t say it was the only cause, but were largely as a result of the fact that they could not agree on what they believed.

Could not agree on what they believed. There should not be argument in the church over teaching on the essentials. There should not be argument.

Now the answer to that, as I’ve said before, is not to say it doesn’t matter, and the answer to that is not just to listen to what the preacher tells you, but the answer to that is to study God’s Word, listen to the Holy Spirit, see what God’s Word says, and be unified around the truth. Because if we’re all following God’s Word, we’re all going to be on the same page. We’re all listening to the Holy Spirit.

We’re all going to be on the same page. And incidentally, there are things that we can disagree on and it not affect our fellowship. We talked about this a few weeks ago in Sunday school.

And Pete, I hope you don’t mind me telling this story, made an excellent point. You know, he talked about our tendency as missionary Baptists because we are so seemingly zealous for the truth. There’s a tendency that we have to divide over just about anything.

Not only the color of the carpet, but we divide over sometimes teaching issues that we may not need to divide over. There are things that we can disagree on. We can disagree on the timing of the end times.

We can disagree. You know what? There are, the church I came from in Oklahoma originally, we had some people, we had several preachers there.

We had some who had been leaders in the BMA for a long time. Those included people who were premillennial. That means that Christ was going to return to earth and have a literal millennial kingdom. We had people who were post-millennial, which I don’t understand, but I’m not going to argue with them about it.

Post-millennial who believed that the millennium was this earthly kingdom with Christ in the heavens, and then once we got things good down here, then he’d come back. There were amillennialists who believed we are in the millennium and it’s not a literal thing. Folks, we didn’t have to divide over it.

We can disagree over it and not have to divide because none of us know for sure. We can read the Bible and come to. .

. I finally told somebody last week, I’m just going to say I’m pro-millennial. Whatever God’s going to do, I’m for it. I’m in favor of it.

I don’t know. I’m pro-millennial. What we can unite around is the fact that Christ is coming back. He will return personally and powerfully and bodily.

He will return and we know it and we can unite around that fact. We don’t have to divide over the timing of it. We don’t have to divide over little things like, were there for sure three wise men, as tradition tells us, and there were three gifts, and that’s why people think there were three wise men, or do we really not know?

And I’ve heard people vigorously defend both points. I personally believe we don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. But I’ve heard people debate over these things.

Wouldn’t it be silly if we broke off and started our own denomination or split the church in half over the question of whether there were three wise men or whether we don’t know? That’d divisions don’t normally happen over things that small. But a lot of doctrinal splits happen over somebody taking one verse of scripture and interpreting it a different way over things that really aren’t that important.

There are things that are vitally important that we must be unified on. There are other things that they matter because all truth matters, but they’re not worth us fighting and dividing over. Incidentally, when he said that, you know, we have this tendency, and he’s absolutely right.

It’s a good point. When he said we have this tendency to divide over, you know, anything. I told him afterwards, I said, I didn’t particularly care for what you said about the BMA in Sunday school, and so I’m going to have to start my own class.

He told me I need to get a three-letter acronym, and I’d be ready to go. But there are things that we can disagree over, but there are some things that are so clear in Scripture that we can’t just pretend they don’t matter, that they don’t exist, and go on. Folks, if we do that, the church will be divided.

That’s what they were doing. There were people in this church who believed in Gnosticism, which means Jesus Christ didn’t really come in the flesh, or he didn’t die in the flesh anyway, that they believed that matter is evil and spirit is good, so anything physical was evil, and so therefore Jesus didn’t really die on the cross. It was just all an illusion.

And we see what trouble that gets us into here. We’re celebrating the death of Christ with this picture, and there are people here who don’t believe what the picture really represents. There were people who believed in what they called the Judaizers, that some people said you had to have the grace of Christ, plus follow the Old Testament law, and that made a mockery of the very blood they were celebrating.

Folks, there were serious divisions, serious false teachings in the church at Corinth. I’m here to tell you, a church cannot be one in spirit if we’re not one in faith. A church cannot be one in spirit if we’re not one in faith.

Secondly, there’s one true faith, one true faith that stands in stark contrast to all others. He tells them, in verse 19, he says, for there must also be heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you. That word approved doesn’t mean that God had a list there and was sitting there, okay, I’m God and I approve this message.

What he’s talking about, that word approved, as so many times in the King James Bible when it says proved or approved, it means that something had been tried. Something had been tested and shown to be either accurate or inaccurate, true or false, good or bad, similar to the phrase tried by the fire. These things that had had their true colors shown.

He said there are heresies that these people who are tried, They’ve been tested, and they’ve been shown to have the true faith may be made manifest among you. He said there were all, it talks about, and lends itself to the fact that there were all these heresies running around loose in Corinth, because Corinth was one of those centers of the ancient world where everybody came from everywhere and brought their ideas with them, and there were so many people from all these various different pagan backgrounds and Jewish backgrounds, and they all blended together, and sometimes they didn’t check their old beliefs at the door when they adopted the belief in Christ. They just kind of tried to smush them together.

And there were all these divisions, and it came to the point where there were all these beliefs, and yet those who had the true gospel, those who had the truth, stood, they were made manifest. They were shown. They stood out from the rest of these heresies. Folks, there is one truth.

There is one truth, and it stands in stark contrast to all other teachings. It stands in stark contrast to all other teachings. I’ve given you the example before of my dad working at the bank and talking about training tellers to recognize counterfeits.

And they don’t go through and look at all the counterfeits and memorize all their ways of counterfeiting because there are just too many. You can’t keep up with them. What they do is get them intimately familiar with the true, with the genuine U.

S. currency, and then they’ll recognize the fakes because the true ones stand out to them. Folks, there is a truth, and it stands out among the teachings of the world.

All religion, all religion in the world. There are two religions in the world. Did you know that?

There are only two religions in the world. Most of the teachings in the world center around what you can do to earn God’s acceptance. Christianity, the truth, the gospel, stands in stark contrast in saying there’s nothing you can do to earn God’s acceptance.

That Jesus Christ had to come and die because we could not earn God’s acceptance. And so he paid the penalty that we owed and purchased us a place in heaven and purchased peace with God for us so that we through him could have God’s acceptance as a free gift. Two religions.

And folks, it doesn’t matter if they were going into the pagan religions where they would sacrifice bulls and be covered in their blood or if they would keep the Old Testament feasts or what they were doing. All of these ideas boiled down to there was something you could do to earn God’s acceptance and it did stand in stark contrast to the truth because the gospel is so much different than anything man has ever come up with. There’s one true faith.

Now to hear some talk, we can’t know for sure what the truth is. We can’t know for sure what, you know, these things about the nature of God. We can’t for sure know this.

We can’t for sure know why Christ died. That’s baloney, because while they’re teaching that we can’t know for sure what the truth is, they have their teachings that they’re promoting as the truth. Doesn’t that strike anybody else’s on?

Folks, I believe there’s one truth. The Bible makes it clear. There’s one truth, and it is knowable

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