Stop Acting Like the World

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Well, a lot of us get stuck on autopilot at times. I say a lot of us. It may just be me.

I tell you, my truck, I have to be careful going down Cache Road, which is good advice for anybody. But I have to be particularly careful going down Cache Road. My truck does not like to go past about 44th Street.

It will always try to get in that, if I’m not careful, it will try to get in that left turn lane to go into Lowe’s. And it doesn’t matter where I’m, because I’ve driven that path so many times, it doesn’t matter where I’m trying to go. I’ve caught myself more than once trying to get in that lane and turn, and that’s not where I’m going.

And I’m bad about doing that a lot of times. If I get in, well, Charles will say, how’d you end up at Sonic again? My truck just went there, you know.

Sort of like the Israelites. Moses said, where did the golden calf come from? Aaron said, I just threw in gold to the fire and I’ll pop this calf.

You know, sometimes my truck just ends up places. I can’t help it. But it reminds me of what the Apostle Paul is talking about in the passage we’re going to look at today in 1 Corinthians 6, about this tendency we have to revert to things we’ve done before and directions we’ve gone before.

That a lot of times our human nature is like my truck. It just, it’s gone this way so many times, it just thinks this is the way that we’re supposed to go. And as we are in our study of 1 Corinthians, Paul talks about this.

It, it’s a little, it can be a little challenging to, to figure out exactly how he’s getting there, but we’re going to work through that this morning. And, and again, the disclaimer I give every week, if you’re a guest with us, first of all, we’re glad you’re here. If this is your first time with us and you find yourself thinking, what’s going on at this church?

What have I gotten myself into? I’m not preaching any of this because of things going on that I’m aware of at our church, but we’re studying our way piece by piece through the book of 1 Corinthians and this is just where we are and this is what God says and so we’re going to use it as an opportunity to prepare ourselves before things become an issue. And so we’re going to be in 1 Corinthians chapter 6 this morning looking at where Paul starts out by talking about the court system, but ultimately he’s dealing with something deeper.

And so once you turn there with me, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, and if you can’t find 1 Corinthians 6 in your Bibles or you don’t have your Bible today, that’s all right. It’ll be on the screen for you up here. We’re going to look at the first 11 verses of 1 Corinthians 6.

So Paul says, does any one of you, when he has a case against his neighbor, dare to go to law before the unrighteous and not before the saints? And I want to point something out really quickly. In Greek, the whole sentence starts with the word dare.

Dare you to do this. Paul is very upset when we get to chapter 6 about the way that the Corinthians are treating one another. And he says, Do any of you dare to go to law before the unrighteous and not before the saints?

Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? If the world is judged by you, are you not competent to constitute the smallest law courts? Do you not know that we will judge angels?

How much more matters of this life? So if you have law courts dealing with the matters of this life, do you appoint them as judges who are of no account in the church? I say this to your shame.

Is it so that there is not among you one wise man who would be able to decide between his brethren, but brother goes to law with brother, and that before unbelievers? Actually then, it is already a defeat for you that you have lawsuits with one another. Why not rather be wronged?

Why not rather be defrauded? On the contrary, you yourselves wrong and defraud. You do this even to your brethren.

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Such were some of you, but you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the spirit of our God.

And you may be seated. Now, this is a challenging passage. I think I’ve said that a few times going through 1 Corinthians.

When you teach, as I’ve done in the past, passages from 1 Corinthians, and you take a piece here, and you take a piece there, and you kind of pick and choose and teach what you want, 1 Corinthians is a really easy book. But when you go through the whole thing and say, well, I can’t skip anything here, there are some challenging pieces. I was even explaining this to my son, we were talking about 1 Corinthians at breakfast one day this week, and I said, this is a, I don’t mean this in a way that’s any way disrespectful, I said, but this is a really weird passage from a modern standpoint.

Not being there in Corinth, not experiencing the things that they were doing, and not experiencing the things that Paul’s talking about. I was telling Benjamin, Paul spends the first, what, nine verses, eight or nine verses, talking about lawsuits, and then boom, suddenly he’s talking about sexual immorality. And the way it reads, you can tell he’s not switching gears.

It’s all part of one argument. You know, Paul, we’ve seen this already through 1 Corinthians. Paul will frequently finish up one subject and then go immediately to the next as he’s making different arguments and addressing different things that are going on in the church.

The way this is written, it’s all one argument. But there around, what is it, verse 9, you’d almost get whiplash because he changes direction so quickly. And so I’m looking at that realizing, okay, he’s talking about the courts, he’s talking about sexual immorality, but it’s all one argument.

There’s a bigger point that he’s trying to make here, and he’s using these things as examples. And so you have to look at what is the point that he’s trying to make. And the point that he’s trying to make, first of all, I think it helps us if we work backwards from the conclusion there in verses 9 through 11, then we can kind of see what the beginning part is about.

When we look at verses 9 through 11, we see the point of this passage is that he starts out by telling us that those who trust in Jesus Christ are transformed by him. Part of the gospel is our transformation. Now, the gospel isn’t there because we have to get better in order to be saved, that’s not the gospel.

The gospel is the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus, because that’s the only way we could be saved. The gospel starts with our sin. The gospel starts with our unworthiness before God, and the fact that you and I could do nothing to remedy that.

Going to church every Sunday your entire life would never fix that. Giving a massive percentage of your income to good works would never fix that. All the religious activities that you could ever dream up, could never fix that.

It was necessary for Jesus Christ to come take responsibility for our sins and be punished in our place so that our slate could be wiped clean so that we could go free. And that’s the gospel in a nutshell, that we sinned. Jesus died to pay for that sin.

He was buried. He rose again three days later to prove that he could forgive that sin. And then he offers that forgiveness to those who will believe in him.

But the gospel doesn’t stop there. Because of Christ, we are cleansed and we are transformed from the inside out. And there’s a part of that process that is instantaneous.

From the moment you believe in Jesus Christ, something changes. And yet there’s a part of that that is ongoing because as long as we remain here on this earth, he continues to work in us and continues to change us as we grow closer to what he intends us to be, never quite getting there all the way in this life. But the Corinthians needed this reminder that the gospel leads to their transformation.

And if they belong to Jesus Christ, they were going to be different as a result. And that’s why he gets into this list. It’s not just sexual sin, although that’s a part of it. He talks about some of the things that he dealt with back in chapter 5 being revilers or swindlers or drunkards or covetous and all these sexual sins as well.

And he says, this is who you used to be. Before Jesus Christ, this is who you used to be. And for the Corinthians, that was not true of anybody more than the Corinthians.

As I’ve mentioned before, in ancient society, they had used the name of the Corinthians in the ancient world to coin a new phrase for acting just as depraved as you possibly could. There was nobody, there was nobody that was more sinful than the Corinthians. Maybe some were as sinful as the Corinthians, but there was nobody out there living worse.

There was no other town they could point to, no other community, no other culture they could point to and say, yeah, they’re worse than the Corinthians. And yet Paul says to them, such were some of you, the people in the church. The people in the church at Corinth, as we’ve seen over and over, had a big head of thinking that they were so righteous, they were so much better than the pagan culture they had come out of.

And this is a reminder from Paul that you were in the same boat that they were. And that’s true of all of us. Now, it doesn’t mean that we’ve all done the things the Corinthians did.

I had to spend some time thinking about this this week because most of you have heard my testimony. You know that I was saved at an early age. You know that I had appropriately strict Christian parents, and I did not like to step out of line and disappoint them.

And so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity, if you want to put it that way, for going out and sowing wild oats and living like the world before I came to Christ. And so can I really say this is who we really are? Human nature is human nature. And just because I’ve been a Christian for the vast majority of my life doesn’t mean that I don’t have human nature.

It doesn’t mean that I don’t struggle with attitudes and thoughts and things that are not honoring to God. Sometimes my attitude is the the attitude of my heart is a much bigger problem than some of these outward things that the Corinthians were putting on display. And so human nature is human nature.

Maybe you lived a rough life before you came to Christ. This certainly applies to you, that you were once as they are. Maybe you’re like me, that you lived a boring life. I don’t mean that in a bad way.

You just didn’t get up to much mischief. The human nature is human nature. And whether you went out and lived it out, you still have that same sin nature that’s what he’s describing here.

He’s saying, this is what you were. And that sin separates us from God, because God is absolutely holy. And our sin is doing what is the opposite of what God’s nature leads us to do.

For example, lying is wrong because God is by his very nature a God of truth. Adultery is wrong because God by his nature is faithful. All of our sins are sins because they’re the opposite of who God is.

And that’s why sin is such a big deal to God. The world likes to look at it and say, oh, it’s just different choices. Why can’t God let it go?

Why can’t God be easygoing about it? Because our sin is looking at God, whether we think of it in this way or not, our sin is looking at God and saying, I don’t want anything to do with the way you are. I want the opposite.

If one of your kids came to you and said that, that would be pretty offensive, right? If anybody said that to you, if anybody came to you and said, I hate everything about who you are, well, that would sting a little bit. God can’t just ignore this.

God can’t just let it go and be easygoing about it because God is holy. And for us to ask God to just let sin go, we’re asking him to be the opposite of who he is, and he can’t do that. And so this sin separates us from God, but this passage here shows us that that separation is not irreparable.

That that separation does not have to be forever. The church at Corinth was comprised of people who used to practice these things. The church at Corinth was comprised of people who used to live this way.

And yet Paul said, you were these things, but something else has happened. And what has happened is what he points out in verse 11. They were washed, they were sanctified, They were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

Now we take these three things and they’re all tied together, but they’re different concepts. We’re washed in the sense that we’re forgiven. We’re justified in the sense that God looks at us and declares us holy.

And we’re sanctified in the sense that God then begins to change us and help us to act like it. All three very different things, but all three very important and part of the gospel. And he says these things happened in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God.

That’s the transforming power of the gospel at work. The gospel totally transforms us. That recognition that we’ve sinned and that repentance that drives us to recognize that our sin is wrong and God is right and causes us to believe, to believe in Jesus as our one and only Savior, our one and only hope.

That transforms us from the inside out. And it’s the power of the gospel at work. And so I think it’s helpful to look at this ending part first and recognize that the point of this is about the change that is supposed to take place in us as believers.

The change that should have been evident among the people at Corinth, but wasn’t. And therein lies the problem. They weren’t showing the change they were supposed to show.

And by the way, it’s not something that you and I can, that we can make happen. Like, I’m just going to work harder to be a better person. It’s something the Lord does in us.

But it’s something that we need to try not to stand in the way of. There should not be heel marks on the carpet, right, as the Holy Spirit pulls us toward being more like Jesus. And if there are, it’s a sign that something is wrong.

Either you’re just not in a right place with God and you need a change of your perspective, or you’ve never belonged to Christ at all. And so Paul points out the change that’s supposed to take place. And the first eight verses here are him expressing his outrage over the fact that these believers who were supposed to be different and who made a big deal about being different from the culture around them really were falling back into their old ways.

They’re like in the car trying to turn into the place they always go. They’re falling back into the old ways of doing things and they’re okay with it. See, if they were lapsing into their old ways and then they were repentant about it, or it was one or people in the church was dealing with it, I don’t think Paul would have included it in the letter.

Just like in the previous weeks, the man involved in the affair with his stepmother. If the church had dealt with that, Paul would never have mentioned it. But he’s more upset with the church for letting it go than he is for the man that’s participating.

And so he’s writing to them because this change that was supposed to take place is not showing up and instead they’re going back into the old ways. And the argument he makes here shows us that we have to be on guard against reverting to our old ways. Because it’s easy.

It fits with our human nature. It fits with what the flesh wants. It’s much easier.

It’s much easier to run with the world than it is to walk with God. Now, don’t hear what I didn’t say. It’s not better to run with the world than to walk with God.

But in the short term, and from our short-sighted perspective this side of eternity, it is much easier to run with the world than to walk with God. Especially in a culture like Corinth, especially in a culture like ours. to walk with God, we are constantly going to be swimming upstream.

And I’m up here mixing metaphors, but you get the idea. We’re going against the grain of the culture. We’re going against the grain of our own human nature.

And if you’ve ever had that conversation within yourself where you know what the right thing is to do, but you know what you just want to do, and they’re not the same thing, then you know what I’m talking about. That’s the flesh. That thing that, oh, it would just feel so good to tell her exactly what I think.

And yet we don’t because we know it’s, sometimes we do, But when we don’t, it’s because we know it’s not right. It’s not going to honor Christ. It’s not going to help me be more like Christ. But there’s that pull that I really want to do this. That’s the flesh.

And it’s easier to give in to that than to fight against it. And so we have to do the challenging thing. We have to be willing to take the hard stand even with ourselves of saying, I’m not going to give in to this.

And they were still being prideful because they were in this old mindset and they were still looking at the world like Corinthians instead of like Christians. And you and I, we all have different identities that are different labels and name tags that make up part of who we are. But first and foremost should be Christian.

If we’re looking at the world primarily as, well, this is what I want, or I’m looking at the world as I’m rich, I’m poor, I’m Democrat, I’m Republican, I’m this, I’m that. If we’re looking at the world through that lens, we’ve missed it. we need to see the world as Christians first. We need to see ourselves as Christians first. And so they were looking at the world like Corinthians.

And so that’s why we have all of this talk about the court system. And I’m going to go through this quickly, because I think there is some practical application here about how we should not be litigious with each other. We should, as Christians, as brothers and sisters, particularly in the same church, we shouldn’t be filing civil suits against each other all the time.

We should be able to settle our disputes with one another in-house. But I think this goes deeper into the way that they were looking at themselves as Corinthians instead of Christians. They were looking at themselves according to the old way they’d always done things, as opposed to who they were transformed into being in Christ. And so verses 1 through 8, he says, Are you really fighting with each other in court?

You’re a believer. You belong to Jesus. This person over here that you’ve got the dispute with, they belong to Jesus as well.

And you’re taking this to figure out what the right answer is here, what the just answer is here. Instead of dealing with it together or going to other people who know Jesus and have been given the mind of Christ that he talked about earlier in the book, you’re going out there to people who don’t know Jesus, who don’t care about God’s truth, and you’re asking them to help you come up with the right answer. And when we think about it in those terms, we start to realize that is kind of silly.

He says, do you not know that the saints will judge the world? If the world is to be judged by you, are you not competent to constitute the smallest law courts? He points to something that’s going to happen in the future.

When believers reign with Christ and he says, you’re going to judge over nations. You’re going to judge over angels. You’re going to reign with him.

Surely you can settle some little small claims matter instead of fighting with each other about it. So if you have the law courts dealing with matters of this life, do you appoint them as judges who are of no account? There’s some debate over how this is best translated because of the way the words fall.

And it seems like what he’s saying there, I could be wrong because there are different people who view that verse in particular, verse 4, in different ways. But it seems like he’s saying even the most despised from the world’s perspective in the church are more capable of handling disputes between brothers and sisters in Christ than having to go to courts composed of people who don’t know Christ. But so many of the people in Corinth, especially if they came from wealthy or influential backgrounds, it was part of their culture, they were quick to drag each other into court. If you had a rivalry with somebody, you’d drag them into court, you’d sue them over some little thing, just so you could win and you could one-up them.

And people would be dragged into court, and part of the testimony, it’s stuff that doesn’t happen usually nowadays. There’d be a lot of character defamation. Well, he deserves to lose in this business dispute because he’s ugly and his mom addresses him funny.

You know, they’d badmouth each other. And it just became so nasty. And it didn’t help that Roman law was really confusing at this point in time.

Until the Emperor Justinian came along about 400 years later, as a matter of fact, there were competing codes of law. And so whoever got in there with the lawyer that knew the most, or whoever had the meanest lawyer, or whoever had the most money to bribe the judge, or whatever, they could pull out competing laws and they could fight it out. And it was just a really corrupt system that they were using to try to destroy each other and trying to one-up each other, or sometimes when they were dealing with the poor or the less influential in society, they would try to extract whatever they could out of them just because they could.

And suddenly we see how it leaves a bad taste in Paul’s mouth that they’re treating each other this way. He said, I say this to your shame in verse 5. Sometimes you’ll talk to somebody and I don’t mean to shame them by saying that, no, Paul totally meant to shame these people and they deserved it.

Is it so that there is not among you one wise man who will be able to decide between his brethren? In previous chapters, we’ve seen how they bragged about their wisdom and their knowledge and how wise and how close to God they were. And Paul says in verse 5, evidently there’s not one of you who knows enough to be able to solve these disputes, and that’s why you have to go to the pagan judges.

In verse 7, we see that they’re trying to win. They’re trying to win some kind of advantage over each other, but he says it’s already a defeat for you. When you go out wearing the name of Christ, but acting like a Corinthian, and you go out and you try to destroy each other in court, or you try to oppress somebody in court, or you try to press these things to your advantage, some advantage you don’t deserve, it reflects poorly on Christ. It reflects poorly on the church.

He says when you drag that dirty laundry out there, instead of dealing with it, instead of the church dealing with business and you treating one another like brothers. When you do that, whether you win or lose, you’ve already lost because it’s a loss for the kingdom. He says, if you think you’ve been wronged, it would be better to be wronged.

If you feel like you’ve been defrauded, it would be better to be defrauded. But he says in verse 8, on the contrary, you yourselves wrong and defraud. You’re not even going to court because you feel like you’ve been wronged or defrauded.

You’re doing it to try to wrong and defraud each other. And we see why Paul was so upset. They were doing what they’d always done.

They’re out there claiming to be Christians, claiming to be part of the church, and they’re acting every bit as much like the old Corinthians they’ve always been. They were using the courts to defraud and defame and destroy one another. They were using the courts to oppress the poor and vulnerable among them.

But in their minds, they’re just doing what they’ve always done. They’re just doing normal things. And part of the lesson here for us, and I don’t know of anybody in the church suing anybody else, but part of the lesson for us goes beyond the issue of lawsuits to realizing that just because something is normal in our pagan culture doesn’t mean it ought to be normal in the church.

Even things that we used to do before Christ, they may seem normal. Just because it’s normal in the world doesn’t mean it needs to become normal in the church if it goes against God’s word. And as I’ve said earlier, it’s hard to stand with God’s word sometimes because we’re going against the culture from outside and we’re going against the sinful nature that’s still inside. We’re fighting a two-front war.

And we on our own are not strong enough to fight that two-front war on a continual basis. But we’re able to stand strong when we remember what Jesus has done, what Jesus is doing and what Jesus will do in us. And we go back to verses two and three.

We see this future promise where he says, he’s pointing out, if you belong to him, you’re going to reign with him. There’s a future hope that even when we think we’ve lost something, and usually the things that we give up for the sake of Christ, we get to the other side and we realize we haven’t lost anything. But even the things that we think we’ve lost, he more than makes up for.

Just having him, That more than makes up for what we think we’ve lost. We go back to verses 9 through 11 and we see what He has done, the change that He’s made in us, what He saved us from, that we couldn’t pull ourselves out of that pit, that He pulls us out of it and He cleans us up and He sends us down the road with Him. We see what He’s done and what He is doing. The gospel is the reason why we’re able to stand strong because the gospel gives us hope.

The gospel makes us realize, makes us remember the change He’s already made in us. If you find it hard sometimes to stand strong and do the right thing, to do the God-honoring thing, and you think, I can’t do this, maybe I can’t withstand this storm or this temptation, think about where you were when you started out before Christ. Think about where you are now. That difference isn’t because you got better.

That difference is because He’s done something amazing in you. It’s because He’s made a change in you. And if he’s already made that change in you, what can’t he do now?

What change can’t he make now? How can’t he? Why is he suddenly unable to give you the strength to walk with him now?

That was Paul’s message to the Corinthians. That the Lord has washed them and sanctified them and justified them. And if you belong to Jesus Christ, he’s done the same for you too.

And you may not be dealing with this now, but we need these reminders from time to time because the culture we live in is growing so hostile toward Christ on a daily basis. And the sinful nature within us isn’t giving up. And so we’re increasingly in this two-front war.

To be victorious in this two-front war, we have to look to Jesus. And some of you listening to me this morning may be in a place where you don’t have that relationship with Jesus. Maybe you’ve never trusted Him as your Savior.

This is not a message to you to, hey, do better, try harder, work more. It’s a message to realize that the change that we need is only possible because he does it. We can’t clean up our sin.

He can’t. We can’t earn our forgiveness. He did.

So all there is for you this morning to do is to recognize that Jesus Christ paid for that sin that separates you from God. And he paid for it in full when he died on the cross. And then he proved it by rising from the dead three days later in the same body he was crucified in.

And now if you’ll simply trust Him as your one and only Savior and ask His forgiveness, you’ll have it. And He’ll begin to make that change.