South City Baptist Church: Tauranga 16.08.15
1 Corinthians no 7 Sexual immorality
Aim
To talk about the way we are seen
Introduction
The Lifeboat Station
On a dangerous seacoast where shipwrecks often occur, there was once a crude little lifeboat station. The building was no more than a hut, and there was only one boat; but the few devoted members kept a constant watch over the sea. With no thought for themselves, they went out day and night, tirelessly searching for the lost. Some of those who were saved, and various others in the surrounding area, wanted to be associated with the station and give their time, money, and effort to support the work. New boats were bought and new crews trained. The little lifeboat station grew.
Some of these new members of the lifeboat station were unhappy that the building was so crude and poorly equipped. They felt that a more comfortable place should be provided as the first refuge of those who were saved from the sea. They replaced the emergency cots with beds and put better furniture in the enlarged building. Now the lifeboat station became a popular gathering place for its members, and they decorated it beautifully and furnished it exquisitely because they used it as sort of a club. Fewer members were now interested in going to sea on lifesaving missions, so they hired lifeboat crews to do this work. The lifesaving motif still prevailed in this club’s decoration, and there was a memorial lifeboat in the room where the club initiations were held.
About this time a large ship was wrecked off the coast, and the hired crews brought in boatloads of cold, wet, half-drowned people. They were dirty and sick, and some of them were foreigners. The beautiful new club was in chaos. Immediately, the property committee hired someone to rig up a shower house outside the club, where victims of shipwrecks could be cleaned up before coming inside.
At the next meeting, there was a split in the club membership. Most of the members wanted to stop the club’s lifesaving activities because they felt they were unpleasant and a hindrance to the normal social life of the club. A small number of members insisted upon lifesaving as their primary purpose and pointed out that they were still called a lifesaving station. The small group’s members were voted down and told that if they wanted to save lives, they could begin their own lifeboat station down the coast.
They did.
As the years went by, however, the new station experienced the same changes that had occurred in the old station. It evolved into a club, and yet another lifesaving station was founded. History continued to repeat itself, and if you visit that seacoast today, you will find a number of exclusive clubs along that shore.
Shipwrecks are frequent in those waters, but most of the passengers drown.
As disciples of Jesus, our primary task is to go and make disciples. (See Matthew 28:19.) To put it another way, we are to go and save lives. Unfortunately, we sometimes forget our purpose. We need to recover our passion for lifesaving. We need to be doers of the Word and not just hearers. (See James 1:22).
In the newsletter pastor’s comment I have made the comment that a hospital is not a safe place to be, because it is full of sick people.
But that is what a hospital is for and if it were not for sick people a hospital would cease to have reason to exist. If everyone was well they would just close it down. What is the primary purpose of hospitals? Put simply: to help sick people get better. Therefore, the most important measure of a hospital is not its beauty, the friendliness of the staff, or its sophisticated equipment. The measure of a hospital is its ability to make hurting people better. If a hospital doesn’t do that, everything else is a waste of time.
So it is with the church (the body of Christ). We do not exist for the sake of the spiritually complete and mature, we exist for all of us who are ona journey from brokenness to recovery.
We need to be like the old style life boat station; here to help without the fancy clothes and buildings. We are here for a cause.
Sadly, like the life boat station, our churches can morph into a “club for the saved” that is classy and doesn’t want to deal with the people that it was really put there for. But like the life boat station when it is doing what it is intended for there will be mud and blood and broken people.
There is a verse in the scripture Proverbs 14:4 (KJV) 4 Where no oxen are, the crib is clean:
In other words without dung in the stable there are no oxen.
Church, any life boat station that is doing the right thing, any hospital that is fulfilling its purpose, will have people whoare incomplete and not whole. There will be mess about.
As you think about the local hospital it has the greatest concentration of sick people of any organization in town but that’s what it is there for. There is that mixture of health and hygiene and medicines mixed with people who are sick and even at times messy and bloody.
Any church that fulfills it call needs to be a safe place that is home to people who are mature Christians who love God and seek to serve him but it’s got also to be home to people who are needy and at times not the classy.
The Jesus who walked the dusty roads of Palestinewith no worldlypossessionswas not the same as the well dressedreligious leaders who taught the law and frequented the temples of the Jewish faith with standing and status.
We want the church to be a safe place that heals people. That helps travelers on the journey.
As we have looked at the church of Corinth we have been looking at a group of people whoare called the body/people of Christ and surprise, surprise there are the things that aren’t nice!
Let’ssee what 1 Cor 5 says
1 Corinthians 5:1-13 (NIV) 1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that does not occur even among pagans: A man has his father's wife.
In talking about the Corinthian church we have said it was a church with problems but theywere still the body of Christ, His people, His base in the city, and we have tended to concentrate on the body of Christ (the people) rather than the problems.
And here another problem has been brought toPaul’s attention
There is this man who is inrelationship with a person who is not his wife in fact it is the wife of his father and the bible word would indicate that is his stepmother rather than his natural mother. We don’t know if her husband is still in the picture. From a Jewish Perspective, a relationship with your stepmother was specifically banned in Lev 18 : 6 – 8. The tense of the text indicates an ongoing and sexual relationship.
And that does not seem to be an isolated case. There are other cases of immortality in the church and they are so extreme that Paul says it made even the hair on the back of the necks the pagan Greeks stand up.
Now that is a big enough problem but in verse two Paul says
2 And you are proud! Shouldn't you rather have been filled with grief and have put out of your fellowship the man who did this?
5 amplified It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, impurity of a sort that is condemned and does not occur even among the heathen; for a man has [his own] father’s wife.
2 And you are proud and arrogant! And you ought rather to mourn (bow in sorrow and in shame) until the person who has done this [shameful] thing is removed from your fellowship and your midst!About the condition of your church] your boasting is not good [indeed, it is most unseemly and entirely out of place].
Rather than boasting (or as Paul calls it glorifying) the situation they shouldbe grieving about it Glorifying is not good and brings a sense of pride 1 Cor 5.6
1 Cor 5 2 And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned,
What is also clear is that the believers in the church in Corinth were not grieved or bothered by this sin. They had become arrogant and had not addressed it.
Now here is the real problem, instead of the church trying to help those people on their journey to wholeness and get them into a better place they were proud of having the couple there. They are shouting it from the roof tops “Look at us, at how liberal and accepting we are! Look what’s happening in our church and we are proud of it”.
When youare running alife boat station hospital or church you will have people who are early on the journey and they may not be where they should be but theyare on a journey. And you concentrate on your core business of saving people not on how nearly drowned the latest victim is.
In our Baptist family of churches same sex marriage is looming as an issue that may be a stumbling point for our family of churches in time to come. The issue was raised at our assembly in November 2013 and a working party was tasked with the job of bringing a paper to state our position on it for discussion at the Nov 2015 Assembly.
Our position here as pastors and leadership is: We see marriage as the union between one man and one woman full stop.
And of 240 churches we have a majority who are taking a stand against same sex marriage. We have a small margin of ultra conservatives and we have a small margin at the other end that are open to the idea and of them an even smaller margin who are liberal and proud of it.
When we were in Wellington a couple of months ago we passed a church (Not Baptist) and therewere two sign boards on the front of the church adorned with rainbows. (You know that a 6 colour rainbow is new age). On the right it said “that this church is a nuclear free zone” and on the left it said “we are welcoming of all colour, races and sexualities. To me it gave the impression that they were proud of their openness.
Church we need to be a church that holds standards but from a point of helping people come right rather than on one hand taking their stance or on the other hand condemning them.
There are thousands of people in our city that are in incorrect relationships. In a living together sexual relationship with someone who is not their husband or wife in fact a vast majority of those in the 20 – 30 year bracket are living in ungodly relationships.Unfortunately this pervades the church as well and there are those who are attending church and are not in right relationships.
What Paul is saying doesn’t only belong with wrong relationships. In verse 11 it covers other sins as well “but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or a slanderer, a drunkard or a swindler.”
When sinners sin, they are merely doing what they are supposed to do. Sin is a part of a sinner’s job description! The difference between a sinner and a saint is that a saint doesn’t have to sin anymore.
This means that our ministry is not to spend our time judging the world. That’s left to God. It’s none of our business. Too often we preach against the wrong sin. Don’t ever get mad at the world for acting like the world. What else are they going to do? We need to confront the sin that is within the walls of our churches, within the lives of our people. That is our ministry.
Many of us are trying to clean up the world’s fishbowl when all God asks us to do is fish. Jesus says, “Follow Me and I will make you fishers of men” (Matt 4:19). If you’ve been spending your time trying to scour the world, put down your scrubbing brush, pick up your fishing pole, and go for the fish!
And you may say: Does it matter? What is the problem? What is the effect of wrong relationships?
So today I want to give you four reasons why this doesn’t work
1. The body of Christ If you were to describe a friend so that someone could identify them you would talk about their looks,personality and other traits that would identify them. If I were to have asked you to identify Jesus back during His earthly ministry you would have talked about His looks His personality and His works.
If, when Jesus was being crucified, I were to try and identify Him I could have said if you want to see the body of Christ there is that beaten naked form of a man on a Roman cross.”
Or here is His body prepared for burial. After his resurrection “What is the body of Christ like?” “It is that human who is God and has the ability to walk through walls”.
And in the days of the Corinthians or now ask “What is the body of Christ like?” Answer: “Look at the church. It is the visual body of Christ in the world and each of us needs to becareful that the body, that one day will be withoutspot or wrinkle as the bride,is now a true representation of Christ Himself.
2. The trend spreads (especially if it is accepted and bragged about) and often starts small and ends large. Paul calls it like putting yeast in bread. You only put a small amount in but in time it has spread right through the whole batch of dough and it is all affected by the yeast. That is why Paul not only speaks about the man who is sinning but about the church which is proud of the sin and the chances are that their attitude will cause others to move down a similar line.
3. On an emotional levelrelationships form “Soul ties”. Now the words “soul tie” are not in the bible but we see that the act of the consummation of a marriage was designed by God to glue two people together as husband and wife in an “until death do us part relationship”
The problem is people form ties with this one and that one from one night stands, prostitute based relationships and brief relationships. They form a cord between so many people that they become entwined in a cobweb of soul ties where little bits of their heart is given to another and another.
It takes a desire by the person and the ministry of prayer for those ties to be broken. I believe many young people today are in an emotional mess because they are tied to so many others.
4. In our Walk with GodWrong relationships hinder our walk with God and forma divider between God and me. You say “how does that work?” The sin,the wrong relationship, the continual habit of sinning allows the devil to keep a finger,a hook, into my life and so I am never free to walk with God in fullness and so my prayer life is hindered.
My witnessing is hindered because I am still holding on to the old.
I am convinced that medicine will heal many people but there is another big factor in healing and that is the person’s heart and mind attitude towards being whole. Depending upon whether they want to hold onto the sickness theywill and if they want to move on to wholeness they will. Their mental and spiritual attitudes will help or harm their healing process.
If we hold a line back to the old God cannot fulfill the new and bring us to the place He wants us to be.
Conclusion
Church I have to ask myself as I ask each one of you - Is there some relationship, sin, attitude, unforgiveness that is holding back my walk with Christ and in turn giving the body of Christ a bad name?
On TV yesterday there was a stop smoking advert. The parents leave the children inside and go outside the ranch slider for a smoke.
And the children are taking their felt pens and pretending to smoke them with the comment that “one day we will be just like you.”
It made me think not only is my walk affecting my life and the world’s view of the body of Christ but some new christian may be looking at me and without me even knowing is setting me up as his model and when I fall his world is shaken.
Jesus said that Matthew 18:6 (NIV) 6 But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.
But you hear the cry “everyone around me is doing it”
The term partner is more common than husband or wife
Church Paul says it’s not your job to judge the world Verses 9 Those who indulge in sexual sin or are greedy or cheat people or worship idols and what they do but first look at the relationships in the church and get things right there and let God deal with the non Christian.