Splits and Quarrels in the Church
1 Corinthians 1:10-17
If you'll take your Bible and turn to 1 Corinthians Chapter 1, we'll look at verse 10 as a starting point. We have just begun for our visitors' sake, we'll say this, we've just begun a study in 1 Corinthians in the last couple of weeks having finished the book of Acts after 104 messages. And no telling how long we're going to be in 1 Corinthians. That doesn't really matter any way, it's all God's truth. We're having a great time. But this will be message number 3 and we're at verse 10.
We'll take verses 10-17 as a unit, and this section could easily be title Splits and Quarrels in the Church. And that makes it a very practical passage, because that's just about what all of us can related to. I wouldn't do it because I couldn't stand the pain, but if I were to ask all of you who ever been in a church where there was a split or a quarrel, probably 75% of you'd raise your hands. That's just part of what tragically occurs in the church. And it occurred from the very beginning in the church. It's really no different today, it just seems to be magnified because of the abundance of different local assemblies that exist. But it's a common problem and it's one that needs to be dealt with.
And apparently the apostle Paul felt that it was the primary problem in Corinth, because that's how he begins his exhortations. The first nine verses of Chapter 1, he states the identity of the Corinthians in Christ. It's positional truth. He identifies them as those that are saints, those who have been redeemed by Jesus Christ. Those who have been granted all of the benefits of sainthood and he thanks God in Chapter 1:1-9 not for what the Corinthians have done, but for what God has done in them. And having stated their position, he begins then in Chapter 1, verse 10 to beseech them to behave in accordance with their position. That's who you are, now I beseech you.
And from 10 all the way to the end of the book it's exhortation to alter their behavior. There really is nothing to thank them for. They haven't done anything thank worthy. It is only something to thank God for and he has done that and now he begins to try to change their behavior. And the first thing that he deals with is this whole idea of unity in the church. Now let me back up a little bit and just try to get a running start on the concept.
I think we all would agree, who understand the scripture, that people are basically self-centered and that's part of depravity, selfish, dominated by their own egos, their own fancies, their own goals, their own ideals. All of us, I mean even those of us who are sanctified in Christ and set apart to justification still have problems with sin. And at the very heart of sin is the capital I, ego. And so when you get to the church, you have a lot of sinners in the church. They happened to be justified sinners, but they're sinners as yet and so you have conflict because you have people with desires and goals and purposes and ideals that are generated by their own ego.
In James, for example, I think we get as apt an explanation of this as anywhere in scripture in Chapter 4, verse 1. "From where come wars and fightings among you?" Why do you quarrel and ultimately, why is there war? "Come they not even of your lusts that war in your members." It is because that within you there are strong desires and those strong desires run in opposition to the strong desires of other people. You lust or you have a strong desire for and you don't have. So you kill. And then you desire to have and you can't obtain, so you fight and make war. And he goes on to say what you really ought to do is ask God who will give it to you if you ask properly.
But the point that James is making is that the reason there is war and the reason there is quarreling and the reason there is fighting is because all of us have selfish, independent desires. Quarrels are a part of life. We grow up understanding them. We're competitive. We're even taught to be competitive. Little children fight from the very beginning of their lives. You take a baby's bottle away, you get two little babies together and they're fighting over the bottle. The kids fight over the toys. They go to school and they fight over the games and the playground. They go to high school and they fight over the girls or the boys or the football. They go to college and they fight over the campus policies. They grow up and the fight over their business dealings. Then they become politicians and fight over policies of a government. Married people fight over whatever. And governments fight over land and economics. And that's war.
And James says it's because you have strong desires. And those strong desires are generated by yourself. You see man, because he is depraved, is selfish and egoistic. And that problem finds its way into the church and so we have fights in the church. Tragically, though they are forbidden by God, though they are totally out of character for transformed people, though they are in absolute opposition to everything our Lord prayed for and intended for His church, still they exist. And Satan eats it up, because it fosters his attempt to break down and destroy and degrade the testimony of the church.
And I couldn't even begin to recite to you all of the stories of conflict and trouble and fights and feuds that I hear constantly from other sources in other churches. Selfishness is a problem in the body of Christ because sin is a problem. And of course, the fractured kind of fellowship not only wipes out the joy of the believer, but it sucks the foundation from out from under the testimony of the church. God is dishonored. Christ is disgraced. Christians are discredited. And it isn't anything new. You're going to go all the way back to the beginning and you're going to find it there, because the church has always been made up sinners and Satan has always been active in it.
And so the problem as we come to Chapter 1 of 1 Corinthians is this problem, disharmony and division in the church. They were split. That's the word division in verse 10. And you'll notice in verse 11 the word contention. That is the word in the Greek that means quarrels. There were splits and quarrels in the church. And Paul begins his 16 chapters of exhortation by starting with this issue. And you know, that gives me some idea of how important this is to God.
Because from 1:10 to the 9th verse of the 16th Chapter, he just talks about the errors in the church. And some of them are really gross. For example, in the first section from 1:10 to 4:21 it's errors regarding division. From 5:1 to 6:20 errors regarding immorality. From 7:1 to the end of the chapter errors regarding marriage. From Chapter 8 to the 1st verse of Chapter 11, errors regarding Christian liberty. From Chapter 11, verse 2 to the end of the Chapter errors regarding the Lord's table. Chapter 12-14, errors regarding spiritual gifts. Chapter 15, errors regarding the resurrection. Chapter 16, errors regarding money. Now of all of those errors, immorality, marriage, Christian liberty, the Lord's table, spiritual gifts, resurrection, and money, the one that he puts at the very beginning, and those seem like bad enough areas to goof up in, the number one area is the area of unity in the church. That's the concern, because therein lies the credibility of our testimony and therein lies the joy of our ministry together.
Paul begins with this. Our Lord prayed to the Father in John 17 that the church would be one. He told the disciples to love one another that the world might know who they were. And a loving caring community of believers has a tremendous and profound impact on the world. In fact, it tells us in Acts Chapter 2 that when those people had singleness of heart and one mind and met together daily and shared in common love they had favor with all the people and the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.
So Corinth's first need was harmony, unity in the church, and I see that as our first need in the modern church today and the first need here. Paul then begins this Epistle, really, in its exhortation aspect by calling for unity in the church and the end of all splits and all quarrels. And I'm not going to be able in the time we have this morning to cover everything. I wish we had time for a question a question and answer period. But if there's anything that's unanswered in what I say in any particular dimension that you quite resolve in your mind, you pursue the study further in the word of God. You've got the same textbook I have and the same resident truth teacher. So if you really want the answer to the question, pursue it further than I'm able to this morning. And then if you get some answers that I didn't give, come and share them with me because maybe I didn't figure them out either.
All right, there are four basic emphases in the passage from 10-17. We'll use them as hooks to hang your thoughts on, the plea, the parties, the principle, and the priority. All right, point number is the plea. And Paul begins with a plea to the Corinthians. Verse 10, "Now I beseech you," the word now is a transition dat, it's just getting him from the previous thought to this one and "I beseech you," beseech is really a word that comes from parakaleo, which is the word that is the verb form parakletos, which is paraklet translated comforter in the gospel of John. It means to come along side and help. It's translated advocate other places. And what he's doing here is coming along side them. It's not a coming down with a club. He's saying now I come along side to encourage you brethren along this line.
And in Philemon there's a very interesting passage, verse 8 and 9 in that little one chapter letter of Philemon where Paul says, I could really come down on you hard Philemon. I could lower the old legalistic club and you know, sort of beat in your spiritual brains with this thing, but rather than that I am going to beseech you. And that was always the character of Paul, because law demands and love and grace beseeches. And so here he comes along and he even uses the word brethren, which in itself is a sermon because it moderates the harshness of the rebuke and it also reminds them that if they are brothers, they certainly ought to act in a brotherly fashion.
So he begins with a very coercive, a very comforting, a very exhorted kind of thing. "Now I beseech you brothers by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ that you all speak the same thing. That there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. Now there is the appeal that he begins in the passage. I want to just pull out one thought. It's amazing, of course, how some people study the Bible in disconnection. They pull a verse out of its context and use it almost as a pretext. Well, that is really in violation. Everything ties together. So to be fair with verse 10, we've got to read verse 9.
"God is faithful by whom you were called unto the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord." God sovereignly calls us to identify in the fellowship of Jesus Christ. The word fellowship talks about common life and that becomes the premise on which Paul makes his exhortation to unity. If we were called by God into one fellowship with Christ, then we ought to be one, right, in practice. That's the point. All right, what is he saying then? He's saying first of all, that "I am beseeching you on the basis of," watch this, "the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." Really important. "By our Lord Jesus Christ," the great and primary reason people for behavior in the church. For anything that is called on the Christian to do, it is the fact that this is what the Lord Jesus Christ desires.
Whenever you see the term name in relation to the Lord or to God, it means all that He is and all that He wills. When it says to pray in the name of Christ in John, it simply means pray consistent with who Christ is and what He wills. And so as we've said to you before when I pray in the name of Jesus, it doesn't mean I ask whatever I want and say in Jesus' name, Amen, and that guarantees it. It means that I say this I pray because this I believe is what Christ would want, because this is consistent with His will as I understand it.
And here he's saying brethren, I'm asking you this for the sake of the Lord Jesus Christ, because of who He is an what He wills. Listen, your behavior as a church, your behavior as a believer has its most direct relationship not to me and not to the elders and not the church as such, but to Jesus Christ Himself. For your life reflects more on Him than on anybody else. And you can go around and bellyache all you want about the church and it really won't reflect on your church. It'll reflect on Christ.
Some of us talk about the church in front of unbelievers and we run down the certain things that we may not like and we do it in front of unbelievers and we think that that has reference to the church when, in fact, in their minds that has reference to the Christ whom we really claim to love and adore. For the sake of Christ, speak the same things. It reflects on him. Everything you do in your life gets back to Him. That's the reason for everything. You know, I'll give you an illustration of it.
In Acts Chapter 20 where Paul calls from Ephesus to Miletus the Ephesian elders and he bids them that farewell and he says to them look, he says, "feed the flock of God over which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers giving you the oversight. The flock which He has purchased with His own blood." In other words, he says to those guys look, if you ever lose your perspective remember those people are precious. They were purchased with the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. That's how high they are in his estimation. That's their value. Now you take care of commensurate with how He values it.
Now your Christian life reflects on Jesus Christ. You take care of it in the relationship and your church people, this church, this local assembly right here reflects on the Lord Jesus Christ. And Paul calls for unity because he knows it reflects on Him. Now let me hasten to add this. The emphasis in this passage is on a local assembly. When I'm talking about unity here and when Paul is talking about it, he is not referring to unity in a mystical sense. The broad unity of the church. He is not talking about denominational unity. He is not talking about that we ought to be one with the Baptist church over here or the Presbyterian church over here or whatever else. He is simply saying that within the framework of a local assembly there should be unity.
This is what he's getting at. There are other passages that deal with a broader base of unity such as the book of Ephesians. But here we are looking at a local assembly in Corinth and he is demanding of them a unity. And the message is directly related to those of us who are apart of this local assembly. Now let's look and see how he begins the plea. That you all speak the same thing. Now my friends that is a fantastic thing. You know when I started to look at that and I thought there's no way that you're going to get everybody in the church to talk the same way. But, you know, just because we don't cut it doesn't mean the standard gets lower does it? Have you ever found God accommodating His standards to us? Well, I know you mess up, but don't worry. No, no, it's...that violates everything about His character.
God said in Matthew 5:48 through our Lord Jesus Christ, "Be ye perfect even as the Father in heaven is perfect." Left the standard there and never changed it. And Paul never changes at the end of the Corinthian letter, 2 Corinthians 13:11, he says to the Corinthians "be perfect." Sure, sure, sure. You say we can't. That doesn't matter. It doesn't change the standard any. God's standard for His church is that you speak the same thing. You say, but we don't do that. Then you don't make the standard. We all are to speak the same thing. All right, what are we talking about?
Well, there's a lot to say about this and we're only going to be able to cover some of it, so you're going to have to think on your own a little bit. Basically, we are to agree in vocalizing. We are to speak the same things. There's nothing more devastating to the church than somebody to say well I don't know what they say or what they teach, but I'm convinced of this. Well, I don't know what the church has decided to do, but I disagree. I think this is so and so on and you get a little group of people going and it just splits off of little faction.
We've got to say the same thing. We've got to agree on the same things. You say well, what does this agreement involve? Number one it involves doctrinal agreement. Within the framework of any local assembly, there must be doctrinal unity. There must be. You say, but isn't this...isn't it good to have oh one guy teaching one view and one guy teaching another view and another guy teaching another view. It's good if you want confusion. Because you see when you've got the experts who don't agree what do you think the rest of the people are going to do.
You know, there are seminaries like that and you have people come out of the seminaries and you say to them, what do you believe and they say we'll I'm not too sure, but I know all the options. Well, a lot of good that does. What you do when you have all different things being taught is all you do is confuse the people who are not in the position to really know. And friends, you hate to admit it, but if there are two disagreeing viewpoints, one or both are wrong because God doesn't disagree with Himself.
So Paul calls for doctrinal unity. You say where? Philippians 3:16 will be the first place to look. "Nevertheless as to that which we have already attained, let us walk by the same rule. Let us mind the same thing." In other words, walk means behavior, rule means the standard. What was the standard? The standard was the apostolic doctrine which he himself had related to them. He says to the Philippians, look you know the doctrine that you've been taught, now all of you need to behave yourselves consistently with that truth.
And usually what happens in a church where there isn't this is that there's nobody really who teaches much doctrine anyway. Of course, in the church there is to be doctrine and it is to be doctrine that is agreed upon. Now we find also in Romans 16:17 a verse that I think is perhaps more directly related to this issue, it says this. "Now I beseech brethren," there's Paul beseeching again, "mark them who cause divisions and offenses," listen, "contrary to the doctrine which you have learned and avoided them." They're not really serving the Lord Jesus, they're serving themselves.
When somebody comes up with a different doctrine within the church, he is not serving Christ but himself. Now let me say this people, there are some basic cardinal, substantial, foundational doctrines in the church that must be agreed upon by everybody in that church. You must speak the same thing doctrinally. Now when it comes down to whether you want to be sub laps Arian or infer laps Arian or super laps Arian or a Labrador Retriever, it doesn't make a whole lot of difference. And whether you want to have the order of the decree inverted or whatever, diverted or whatever, that isn't an issue. Or whether you've got a little shade of distinction on a certain verse that could possibly have two or three interpretations because we don't have enough information to know which one was the one in the historical context. That isn't the issue.
But there are some basic cardinal truths that we must agree on. And I'd even go further than that to say that when there are some things that may be viewpoints that are agreed upon by the elders and that are taught in agreement by the elders, they should be agreed on as well or there will be confusion in the church. And people will line up with certain teachers. Do you see what happens? The elders agree on a certain thing. A guy comes along and teaches something opposite even though it isn't heresy, it's a differing viewpoint. Pretty soon he creates a group of followers. Maybe he's got another differing viewpoint and pretty soon you've got a little group over here that can only go to this guy. And a little group over here that are going over with this guy.
And then what you get is I am of Paul. I am of Apollos. I am of Cephus and so forth. You have to speak the same thing. There must be agreement doctrinally. Let me add another thing. I think there must agreement in the decision-making process of the leadership. I believe there must be agreement in the decision-making process of the leadership. Not just doctrinally and that is important. In fact, the last week, we sent out a questionnaire to every one of our teachers in the adult area, and that questionnaire is a lot of different pages. And I think there's 56 doctrinal questions. And we want to know from every teacher what they believe on everyone of those doctrinal issues. Now we believe we know, but we want to be sure because we want to be right according to the word of God. And it says that we're to all speak the same thing especially as teachers. And so we're concerned that all of our teachers state right in writing for us and for our elders to read and understand that we all agree to teach the basic cardinal truths of the word of God. And I'm excited about that kind of a commitment. We want that kind of agreement.
There are some churches where they don't care what the guy teaches as long as the class is big. We care. We are more concerned with the truth than anything else. But more than just that, I think that there is a responsibility for the church to agree with a policy or the activity of its leaders. There's a presupposition here. Number one, if you're not in a church where you have Godly leadership everything goes bananas. People say to me, well, what if you're in a liberal church. Well, if you're in a liberal church, you ought not to be in a liberal church.
Well, you say...somebody would say, well what if you're in a church where they don't believe in the Bible? Well, what are doing there? If you're in a church that don't believe in the Bible you're not going to church. No sense in hearing heresy all the time. I told you that I went to...our to Claremont Seminary. I had a year to finish a doctorate and the guy says your problem is you have too much Bible for a degree in Bible. He says, you need philosophy. He gave me 200 books of philosophy to read. Half of them were in English, the other half were in French and German. And I said to him, I said, thank you. I know the truth. I'm not going to spend the next three years learning error.
If you know the truth, error becomes obvious. You see if you're going to have a biblical pattern, then you've got to have the biblical pattern all the way. It doesn't function in a church that isn't following it. If you don't have a Godly plurality of men leading the church who represent Christ, Christ is the head of the church, He rules through Spirit filled Godly men, if you don't have those kind of men, then nothing else works. But if you have that then what happens is those men rule in the place of Christ as He rules through them and the congregation is called upon to agree with them in what they say. There is not to be a group of people saying well, I know they decided this, but I'm against it and we're going to do this. Or this is my view and then you get a little group having your view. That's in violation of the Spirit of 1 Corinthians 10 and also the direct statement of it, "you're to speak the same things."
You say well, where does it say we have to agree? Well, it says it 1 Thessalonians 5:12, there is not much scripture in terms of volume in the New Testament regarding the congregation's role. Most of it's regarding the leadership, because if the leadership's right, then the congregation knows what to do. And we're not perfect by any means. I know you think that, but it isn't true. 1 Thessalonians 5:14, 5...well, let's look at 12 first. You know, leadership is...we stumble and we fumble along endeavoring to be obedient to Christ and as I told you last Sunday night, you know, we're more amazed at what God's doing than you are as we see His Spirit work. But there is a responsibility of the congregation as well as the leaders. "We beseech brethren," 1 Thessalonians 5:12, "to know them who labor among you and are over you in the Lord," there are some people over you in the Lord. That means they have the right to make decisions that regard you. They are over you in the Lord. "And admonish you. You should