1 Corinthians 6
Riley1 Corinthians 6:9-11
THE OF THE 1 Corinthians 6:9-11THIS theme is appropriate to the company of Corinthians described in this text. It is a remarkable passage and involves the miracle of the centuries. If one reads the ninth and tenth verses of this chapter he is ready to describe the condition of these men in one word, “Lost!” and to regard their estate as hopeless as is hell itself; but when one finishes with the eleventh verse he finds that they are more than saved; they are cleansed and sanctified and justified. How can it be accomplished and how was it done? Those are questions to which we address ourselves tonight; and yet, in order to understand them one must give attention to some other things that include, and seem to preclude them as well.THE RACE TO HELL It is a remarkable fact that there is a harmony in Scripture, study it from whatever standpoint you will. All through the Old Testament there is a threefold temptation for man. When Christ comes He is subjected to the same—the threefold temptation, and the record of it is in Matthew 4:5-12. John, in his First Epistle (1 John 2:16), tells us what that threefold temptation is—“the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life”. It is claimed by naturalists that a scorpion will never use its sting—of which he is always careful—unless he can find a spot on the body of his victim which promises to yield to its insertion. If he finds it not, as is sometimes the case, he will release his intended victim at once.
But if it be found, then he will drive his venom to the very vitals. Satan is an expert in searching for the vulnerable points of life, and it would seem, upon the testimony of Scripture, and by observation and experience alike, that he finds them in “the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life”.The lust of the flesh.
Paul here mentions some of its outbreaks—“fornication”, “adultery”, “idolatry”, “effeminacy”, “Sodomy”. It is an incomplete and yet a black catalogue. It sounds almost strange in these days of soft and sentimental theology. We have fallen upon the times when our pulpiteers are telling us about the natural good in man; that his heart is right, and all he requires is a little culture. How strangely apart from the sayings of Jesus, who knew man and what was in him. He said, “For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man” (Matthew 15:19-20).
How strangely unlike the catalogue Paul makes as the works of the flesh, which he declares are manifest, and which are these: “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the Kingdom of God” (Galatians 5:19-21).And yet we have said there is a harmony in Scripture. Go back as far as the Book of Genesis (Genesis 8:21), and hear declared the state of the human heart.
Jehovah is the spokesman; the antedeluvian period is the occasion; the judgment which had fallen upon all save Noah and his household was the immediate basis of the words, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21). Out of the heart proceed the issues of life.Who can tell what are the lusts of the flesh? Who can keep them from trampling over the law of the Lord, ending in consuming life itself? You remember in Felix Holt, George Eliot says, regarding Mr. Jermyn, “He had not especially intended to wrong people; he thought he might be able to refund, to make restoration”; and she likens him to the German poet who was entrusted with a particularly fine sausage which he was to convey to a friend in Paris. In the course of his long journey he smelled the sausage; he got hungry and desired to taste it; he pared a morsel off, then another, and another, in successive moments of temptation, till at last the sauage was, humanly speaking, at an end.
The offense had not been premeditated. The poet had never loved meanness, but he loved sausage, and the result was both disastrous and distressing.
It is a parable of life at the point of the lust of the flesh.The lust of the eyes. Oh, how many men are smitten here! You take the words that are employed in this text, and how many of them are temptations through the eyes—“fornication”, “idolatry,” “covetousness,” “drunkenness?” The lust of the eyes! You remember Achan’s confession. He declared to Joshua, “I have sinned against the Lord God of Israel, * * When I saw among the spoils a goodly Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels of silver, and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight, then I coveted them, and took them; and, behold, they are hid in the earth in the midst of my tent, and the silver under it” (Joshua 7:20-21). Mark the phraseology—“When I saw among the spoils”, then I “coveted”, and then I “took”. That is the law of the lust of the eyes!“Vice is a monster of such hideous mien That to be hated needs but to be seen; But seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace” Read the fifty-first Psalm and see the brokenhearted saint, the man of God, and a minister of His Gospel, as well as a king from his throne, stained, undone, and in his palace crying to be delivered from blood-guiltiness, and ask yourself how this fall occurred. There is but one answer—the lust of the eyes. The sight of Bathsheba was David’s undoing, and to God’s dishonor.The great Tolstoi, who lately passed away, in his book on, “What is Art?” mercilessly arraigns the most of its schools for their pandering to the lusts of the eye; and his language is as just as it is merciless. I candidly believe that the nude in art has caused more harm to the morals of men than the beauty of the same has ever accomplished for their culture. The hungriest part of the human body is the eye. If it feeds on beauty of the real sort, which not only compasses the delights of color and figure, but involves high morals, it becomes indeed a window of the soul through which it looks out into a world of culture, and up into a heaven studded with the stars of God, and even unto the throne of God Himself, and sees Him as clearly as the great Prophet saw him, “high and lifted up”, His train filling the heavens.
But if it feed, as the carrion crows do, upon embodied immoralities, upon scenes that are as devilish as sensual, then the eye becomes a window through which the soul looks into depths too dark for words, and through which it will be destined eventually to see the burning caldron of hell itself.One who has read Hypatia is not likely to forget Charles Kingsley’s wonderful putting of the lust of the eyes. He is speaking of Philammon, the young monk, who was waging that battle of which Paul speaks in the seventh of Romans—longing to be a holy man, and in order so to live, seeking the cloister; but who, by the law of the flesh was greatly tempted by the outside world.
In his walks to bring fuel to the fires before which they were accustomed to sit, he approached the heathen temple, against the entrance of which, or even the look upon of its idols, the abbot, his spiritual father, had strictly forbidden. And yet, Kingsley says, “Down he went, hardly daring to raise his eyes to the alluring iniquities of the painted imagery which, gaudy in crimson and blue, still blazed out upon the desolate solitude, uninjured by that rainless air. But he was young, and youth is curious; and the devil, at least in the fifth century, was busy with young brains. Now Philammon believed most utterly in the devil, and night and day devoutly prayed to be delivered from him; so he crossed himself, and ejaculated, honestly enough, “Lord, turn away mine eyes, lest they behold vanity!” * * and looked nevertheless. How many like him are praying to have their eyes turned away, and yet at the same moment they are turning their eyes upon the evil things that are undoing the soul.The vain glory of life. Two words here look especially in that direction—“revilers” and “extortioners.” The men or the women who seek to raise themselves in the eyes of their fellows by reviling their equals, or even their superiors, and to advance themselves by taking every possible advantage of their equals and inferiors, are here described.
The more one knows of the honors and the riches of this world, the less respect he has for most of the people who possess them. Too many politicians have come into office by reviling their equals and their betters; and too many fortunes have been made by extortion and excess and all cheating, chicanery, and conscienceless conduct.
One was invited to dine in a home and thought himself honored by the invitation, for he knew it represented millions. He went and was charmingly entertained in the palace on the hill. Two days later he fell in with a man—a clean, wholesome, Christian man—who knew this fellow intimately, and at the mention of his name the Christian man shook his head. “Tell me about him; he seems to be a financial genius!” He answered sadly, “Yes, so the world would pronounce, but I have lived here through the years in which his fortune has been made, and know the methods by which it has been accumulated. There are literally hundreds of wrecked men in his path. He has been a promoter of schemes and he cares not a whit for the fact that in order to accomplish riches he has taken advantage of the confidence of his intimates, and has made his riches out of their ruin.”If there is not a hell for such, God would either have to create one or abdicate His throne. Justice is a Judge who cannot be set aside; nor can his pronouncements be despised, or disregarded.Alexander Maclaren reminds us that there is an old story in the book of Ezekiel about how the Prophet once was led to a place where, through a hole in a broken wall, there was showed him an inner chamber, on the walls of which were painted the hideous idols of the heathen.
And there in the presence of the foul shapes stood venerable priests and official dignitaries of Israel, with their censers in their hands, and their backs to the oracles of God. And he adds, “There is a chamber like that in our hearts; and it would be a great deal better that you and I should go down, through the hole in the wall and see it, than that we should live, as so many of us do, in this fool’s paradise of ignorance of our own sin.” The pirates on the stormy coast begin their operations by taking the tongue out of the bell that hangs on the buoy, and extinguishing the light that beams from the beacon.
So Satan, when he would utterly undo a man, extinguishes the warning voice of conscience and puts out the light of God’s truth. I have known a saint to be tortured with agonies of remorse for a slight sin, at the very mention of which many of your sleek, well-dressed and prosperous sinners would only laugh. This illustrates the fact that the closer to hell a man goes, through the lust of the eyes, the less fear of sin he has, and the less alarm he feels over his own soul. His mind is bribed, his conscience is darkened, and his heart is ossified, and hell is his portion.Now listen; Paul, writing to the Corinthians, a company who had been godless, lustful, greedy, thieving, murderers, says, “Such were some of you”.It is a past tense; it hints a change that has been accomplished; it tells the story of a turn in their practice.THE RETURN Now let us go back to our original proposition. How is it accomplished? As there is a threefold temptation, so there is a threefold redemption, “washing”, “sanctification”, “justification”.“Ye are washed”. How? On one occasion Jesus explained the “how.” Addressing His disciples, who had been recovered from the world of sin and Satan, He said, “Now ye are clean through the Word which I have spoken unto you”. On another occasion, the same marvelous Man said, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My Word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life”.
It was Jesus also who said of His disciples, “They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. Sanctify them through Thy truth: Thy Word is Truth” (John 17:16-17). And it was He who expressed the same thought on another occasion, “Ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free”, and the whole Church of God is an illustration. Do you remember what Paul wrote to the Ephesians,“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church, and gave Himself for it; “That He might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the Word, “That He might present it to Himself a glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should he holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:25-27). Ernest Gordon, in the “Life” of his father, tells the story of a Chinaman, Chin Tong, who came into the Gordon Training School. He was uncouth and irresponsive, and unlike most of his fellows, unclean and unsavory. For months the teacher was hopeless. One Sunday he gave to the Chinaman this text, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). When he turned up the following Sabbath he had read that verse so often as to almost wear out the leaf of the Bible. One word puzzled him—“cleanse”, but as he was a laundryman it was easy to make it plain.
When the next Sunday arrived and the teacher took his seat in the accustomed place a man in Occidental dress entered and sat down beside him. He seemed a stranger and the teacher asked his name.
He answered “Chin Tong.” His cue was off, his long finger-nails pared, his face clean, his clothes in perfect condition. The text had done its work. “You know a me not? Yesus Christ, He make a me clean, inside, outside!” Such is the washing of the water in the Word.“Sanctified”; by the same Truth. “Sanctify them through Thy Truth”. There is a vast deal of nonsense suggested regarding “sanctification.” There are people who do not want you to use the term at all, who think that no such an experience is possible to this life; that, struggle as we may, we will be a stained crowd to the end, and that while “holiness” is a Biblical term, it has no correspondence in human life. Let it be understood that such as believe after that manner know not the Word. There are others who say that “sanctification” means eradication—the old nature is killed at once and never revived, and that the struggle is at an end, and that sinlessness is the abiding estate of the sanctified.
They also are at fault in their reading of the Scriptures. “Sanctification” means “set apart” for holy uses, and is the experience of many of God’s people, and ought to be of them all. Sanctification is not a completed act, but a process in which the Spirit of God is perfecting that which He began in us, and the end of it is “holiness,” and no man or woman has the right to sit down content in conscious sin, nor has any man or woman a right to tramp the world around preaching holiness and practicing uncleanness.
There is a lot of hypocrisy in the world. Sam Jones said he knew a lot of people who were “sanctified”, but he did not know exactly what portion of them had been “set apart”; he did know that their pocket-books had escaped. They could talk eloquently on “sanctification”, but they took occasion either to be absent or to feel as poor as church mice when the collection plate came. “And, furthermore,” he said, “I know a lot of old sisters who kneel down and pray, ‘Oh, Lord, send the fire,’ and if God should drop a coal as big as your finger, not one of you but would cry, ‘Ouch; I can’t stand it!’ “ And it is fairly difficult to find a better illustration of what Sam really means than that which he gives, reciting the incident of what had occurred at a prayer meeting in Atlanta, saying that the church should be regarded as an engine, and every man be permitted to select the part of the work he would prefer to do. One fellow said he would like to be the drive-wheel, the secret of speed. Another said, “I would like to be the cowcatcher, and run ahead and keep the track clear.” Another wanted to be the “whistle”, and sound the praises of God all over the land; to which Sam replied, “Beloved, we have too many whistles now. We don’t want any more whistles.
The church reminds me of a steamboat with a little engine about four feet long, and every time the whistle blows the boat stops.” Another got up and told Jones he would like to be the “throttle lever”, so that he could make things move. Then a young merchant, a truly noble man, got up and said, “Brother Jones, I would prefer to be the coal and then I can be consumed in God’s service.” Jones looked at him and said, “Yes, sir, there is a man who means something.
Although he is worth only about $20,000, when the offering for foreign missions was made he put down $500; and last year he gave $1,500 to God’s cause, while the big old rich fellows, who had $100,000 and $150,000 were lying about their poverty and were making donations of $10 and $15 apiece.” Sanctification is not so much a theory, a term; it is being “set apart”, and your very life being consumed on the altar of God.“Justification” by the same Word. No man has ever been justified by his own merit. It is only because God has pronounced him justified that any man can ever stand at all. Not because we were well born from a social or political standpoint; not because we were well dressed; not because we were the children of noble fathers and mothers—“that which is born of the flesh is flesh”. We are justified by the will of God and that alone. But so gracious is that will, and so mighty is that word, if a man has sunk to the depths of hell itself, God’s will will lift him out and His Word will set his feet upon a rock, and then the angels of heaven will look upon him who but yesterday was stained and soiled.
They will see him clothed in garments of light and righteousness.When Mr. Martin and I were in a Southern city we met a minister at our boarding house table.
He was a great and mighty man, and his fame was in all the churches. One day he opened his heart to me, and taking me aside told me the story of his boy. He had reached the point where liquor no longer satisfied his appetite and he had resorted to stronger drugs. His father said, “I want you to meet him; and I want you to pray for him, and I want you to preach to him.” The boy was brought. “Boy”, did I say? He was thirty years of age. He was fine looking except for the marks of dissipation on his face—intelligent, clean. I took him aside and talked with him. He said to me, “I would like to be a man, but I can’t.” I said, “Will you come to church to-night?” He walked in that night, and that night the Word did its work.
When the invitation was given he came to the front seat, looking to heaven with strong crying and tears. Two nights later he was bearing his testimony— “washed”, “sanctified”, “justified.” Months later I passed through that city again and met the same minister and asked after the boy. He said, “He is doing well, Mr. Riley, and is living a beautiful life.” Praise God for such a Gospel!In the past ye were fornicators, adulterers, effeminate, Sodomites, thieving, covetous, drunkards, revilers, extortioners—hell-doomed souls every one. To-night you may be “washed”, “sanctified”, “justified”.THE WONDER First “in the Name of the Lord Jesus,” and second, “by the Spirit of our God.” If you will run the Scriptures through you will find that everything worth the Christian’s while comes to him “in the Name of Jesus Christ”, and then power, making victory possible, is bestowed “by the Spirit of God.” In these two we have our sanctification and our justification. “In His Name” and by “His Spirit” we are lifted out of hell and into Heaven, and our lost estate gives place to salvation.Father Ryan, a Catholic priest, knew much precious truth, and he understood this. His poem entitled, “Out of the Depths”, is a voicing of it. It is the soul’s passage not from life to death, but from death to life instead; it is the sinner’s salvation of which he speaks:“Lost! Lost! Lost! The cry went up from a sea— The waves were wild with an awful wrath, Not a light shone down off the lone ship’s path; The clouds hung low: Lost! Lost! Lost! Rose wild from the hearts of the tempest-tossed. “Lost! Lost! Lost! The cry floated over the waves— Far over the pitiless waves; It smote on the dark and it rended the clouds: The billows below them were weaving white shrouds Out of the foam of the surge, And the wind-voices chanted a dirge: Lost! Lost! Lost! Wailed wilder the lips of the tempest-tossed. “Lost! Lost! Lost! Not the sign of a hope was nigh, In the sea, in the air or the sky; And the lifted faces were wan and white, There was nothing without them but storm and night, And nothing within but fear; But far to a Father’s ear, Lost! Lost! Lost! Floated the wail of the tempest-tossed. “Lost! Lost! Lost! Out of the depths of the sea— Out of the night and the sea; And the waves and the winds of the storm were hushed And the sky with the gleams of the stars was flushed. Saved! Saved! Saved! And a calm and a joyous cry Floated up through the starry sky, In the dark—in the storm—“Our Father’ is nigh.”