This is part one of the message I preached at the 55+ community on Sept 15. You can find part two here.
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“God is faithful, who
has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. I appeal to
you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of
you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among
you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought. My brothers and
sisters, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels
among you. What I mean is this: One of you says, “I follow Paul”; another, “I
follow Apollos”; another, “I follow Cephas”; still another, “I follow Christ.” Is
Christ divided?
(1 Corinthians 1:9-13)
Last week we looked at the first clause
in verse 9: God is faithful. Today we turn our attention to the rest of this
text, through verse 13. Let’s begin with the last part of verse nine: “[God]
has called us into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ.”
The word Paul uses here and translated
into the English, ‘fellowship’ is the Greek word, koinonia. First century Greek
speakers understood koinonia to not simply mean ‘fellowship’ or
friendship as 21st century speakers might understand the word, but koinonia can
also mean by context a joint participation in some activity, an intimacy in an
interaction and communion with each other.
In other words, Paul tells us that God
has called us into an intimate, joint participation with Jesus in His work on
planet earth. And we should spend time with this point because the New
Testament Scriptures repeatedly tell us Koinonia, an intimate joint
participation with Jesus, will cost us something.
That something is called, “obedience” –
to go and to do and to be whatever it is that Jesus commands. What do I mean by
that?
As always, let’s let Scripture define
and clarify Scripture. Here is what the apostle Paul writes in his letter to
the Christians at Philippi about true discipleship: “But whatever things
were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ. More
than that, I count all things to be loss in view of the surpassing value of
knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things,
and count them but rubbish so that I may gain Christ, and may be found in Him,
not having a righteousness of my own derived from the Law, but that which is
through faith in Christ, the righteousness which comes from God on the basis of
faith, that I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship
of His sufferings, being conformed to His death; in order that I may attain to
the resurrection from the dead. (Philippians 2:7-11)
I hope you caught a sense of Paul’s
emotion when he implores God to permit him to share in the koinonia – the
fellowship, the intimacy, the joint participation – in Christ’s ongoing
suffering?
Paul understood, as every Christian should understand, the privilege we have of koinonia with Christ and His
work on earth must and will cost us something.
It cost Paul his well-respected position
in his Jewish community. He further describes his own cross when he writes his
second letter to the church at Corinth: “Five times I received from the Jews
thirty-nine lashes. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned,
three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep. I’ve
been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers,
dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city,
dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren; I
have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and
thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure . . . .” (2 Corinthians
12:24-27)
Pope Francis recently
said there are more martyrs in the church today than there were in the first
centuries. According to Prisoner Alert, a ministry
of The Voice of the Martyrs, Christians are being persecuted for their faith in
more than 40 nations around the world today. In many of these nations it is
illegal to own a Bible, to share their faith in Christ, change their faith, or
teach their children about Jesus. Those who commit such ‘crimes’ as they are
called, face arrest, torture, and even death.
Which brings us to what the Lord Jesus
Himself said of fellowship with Him.
You’ll find this in Luke’s gospel 14:26-28 -- “If anyone comes to Me,
and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers
and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple. Whoever does
not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. For which one
of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate
the cost to see if he has enough to complete it?”
What does the Lord mean by ‘hating’ his
parents, his wife, children, and so on? Jesus is NOT contradicting the rest of
Scripture. So, as always, we will let Scripture clarify Scripture. As early as
Genesis, God tells us a man shall leave his father and mother and cling to his
wife, and the two shall become one flesh (Genesis 2:24).
In the New Testament, Paul compares the
relationship of a husband and wife to that of Jesus and His Bride, the
Church. One of the Ten Commandments
requires us to “honor thy father and thy mother.” The Psalmist tells us, “Children are a
gift from the Lord” (Psalm 127:3)
and Jesus said, “Permit the children to come to me, for of such is
the kingdom of heaven,” (Mark 10:14) and, “If anyone causes one of these little
ones to stumble, it would be better for him if a millstone were tied around his
neck and he be tossed into the sea.” (Mark 9:42)
So, what is Jesus saying about hating
one’s family? It's this: “Unless your love for Me is so great that even your love for the
closest members of your family is like hatred by comparison, you cannot be my
disciple.”
Jesus is God almighty in the flesh of a
man. And God has the absolute right to demand that his creatures honor Him
above all else. Why? Not because He is an egotistical, arrogant self-centered
bully. Those evils belong exclusively to the devil and his children. It’s
because our Father in heaven desperately loves us, and He knows – because He
created us, He should know – He knows that only by loving Him above all else can
we experience the freedom that comes with being His child by faith and
obedience to His commandment to love Him above all else.
That’s why the Lord also said in that
Luke passage, “Count the cost of discipleship.” Are we willing to put
Jesus above our wealth, our freedoms, and above the approval of our spouse, our
parents, our children, our friends, or anything and anyone else?
You may recall Jesus’ warned His
disciples to “Remember Lot’s wife.” (Luke 17). He was referring to the
story of Lot’s escape from Sodom before God destroyed it. As Lot, his wife and
their two daughters left the town, Lot’s wife looked back toward the city and
was turned into a pillar of salt.
What is implied in that text in Genesis
– and seems confirmed in the context of Jesus’ words in Luke 17:32, Mrs. Lot
looked back longingly toward her home, her family, her friends, her neighbors.
She wanted them more than she wanted what God wanted for their lives.
We should be careful to remember her judgment. Before the Trumpet echoes throughout the halls of eternity,
calling God’s children home, we must prepare ourselves NOW to NOT look back at
what -- or who -- we leave behind. Koinonia with Christ costs us something. Sometimes it
costs us our friends. Sometimes even members of our family.
Which brings us to the next part of Paul’s
message to the church at Corinth in which he addresses the sin of division in
the family of God. We will look at that subject in part two here.
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