1 Cor No.39 Final directives

After I go through Macedonia, I will come to you, for I will be going through Macedonia. Perhaps I will stay with you a while, or even spend the winter, so that you can help me on my journey wherever I go. I do not want to see you now and make only a passing visit.

I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits. But I will stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost, because a great door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many who oppose me. If Timothy comes, see to it that he has nothing to fear while he is with you, for he is carrying on the work of the Lord just as I am.

No one, then, should refuse to accept him. Send him on his way in peace, so that he may return to me. I am expecting him along with the brothers.

And now about our brother Apollos. I strongly urged him to go to you with the brothers. He was quite unwilling to go now, but he will go when he has the opportunity.

Be on your guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be men of courage.

Be strong. Do everything in love. Now I would be glad if you would turn with me again to Paul's first letter to the Corinthians and the 16th chapter.

And as I reminded you in our reading earlier, in this particular passage the great apostle dashes off, so to speak, with his pen, although possibly he uses a secretary, certain personal comments that at first reading seem to have little in the way of significance, but when you come to read them through with a measure of depth and care, you discover that there are fathomless depths to what he has to say. Now last week we were looking at that particular piece of writing when in the 8th verse he explains to the Corinthians why it is that he has been delayed and has not been immediately able to fulfil his promise made earlier in the epistle to come to Corinth and to spend a further period pastoring and teaching the church. He says, I will stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost because a great door for effective work has opened to me and there are many who oppose me.

And then I will return to that verse in a moment or so. You remember how I said last week that in one sense you contest your Christian maturity and your discipleship by this one maxim. Have you an open door? Is there somewhere where you are labouring for the Lord? We should all be members of the open door mission, so to speak.

Well the apostle then continues and he makes reference to Timothy, his companion and also another great preacher, Apollos, verse 12. He speaks of their plans and the possibilities of Timothy most certainly and Apollos, well, in God's timing to come to Corinth and to share ministry. And then, and this is particular for our consideration this morning, he makes his comments very personal.

When reflecting the final verse of the previous chapter, in verse 13, he addresses some remarks to the readers in the church at Corinth. Be on your guard. Stand firm in the faith.

Be men of courage. Be strong. Do everything in love.

Now let's go back to my comment I made earlier from that 8th verse. I said to you from verses 8 and 9 that it is necessary for you to apply this test. Have you an open door ministry? You see, when the apostle writes in the 13th verse to the Corinthians, reflecting, as I say, what he has said in the last verse of the 15th chapter, he is suggesting that they are not passive, they are not spectators in this total work of evangelism.

There is something that they have to do. Paul may be removed from them in the city of Ephesus. He may be engaged in a mighty ministry, which perhaps commands the word revival to describe it.

But those people in Corinth are not to be asleep while he is active in Ephesus. They are all to be involved in this great ministry of the advancement of the kingdom of God. Well, let me try to bring these things ahead to you as I make two or three suggestions in respect to verse 13 of this chapter and verse 58 of the previous chapter.

Can I argue with you that here, when the apostle speaks personally to the Corinthians, there is a bit of personal biography? In other words, the very injunctions in the 13th verse anticipated in that 58th verse in the previous chapter are injunctions that Paul himself illustrates in the way that he lives his life. And what is more, here in these verses is a practical summary of all that Paul has been teaching in the chapters that have preceded him penning these five injunctions. And then, just for final consideration, I shall argue that this 13th verse has a perpetual policy that stands for the Christian church throughout the centuries.

In other words, here is something by which you ought to be living your life. Well, those little headings were quite snappy and they'll come back to your mind as I try to work through what I believe God has imprinted on my heart to share with you this morning. Here I say, in this verse, is personal biography.

Be on your guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be men of courage.

Be strong. Do everything in love. I was offered a book to read just yesterday on the life of Mahatma Gandhi.

I'm very interested in that man. I admire him and his life immensely. I'm not so much attracted to his philosophy of religion, because he denied the exclusive claims of the Christian gospel, but I am attracted to the philosophy of life that he represented.

He preached simplicity and he lived simply. He was a man, as far as I can test him, of his word. And the thing that makes the apostle Paul very, very irresistible when you read him is that what he tells others to do, he's been doing himself.

Here in Ephesus is a great effective ministry. A door has swung open. You remember I took you through that door and we saw something of the life and the day-by-day happenings in the experience of Paul.

How then, with Acts 19 at the back of your mind, would you give a little cameo, a little picture of the apostle at work for Jesus? I suggest to you that it's here, in this 13th verse. He's a man who's on guard. He's a man who stands firm in the faith.

He's a man of courage. He's a man who's strong. He's a man who does everything in love.

This is not so much an injunction to others. It's an insight into the way that Paul lives his life as an evangelist in the service of God. Let's go back to the fourth chapter, shall we, for a moment of this epistle.

And here, sustaining the point that Paul lived out what he was teaching others, we find him saying to the Corinthians, reminding them of the reason why he wants to send Timothy to minister to them afresh, in the 16th verse and onwards. Therefore I urge you to imitate me for this reason. I am sending to you Timothy, my son, whom I love, who is faithful in the Lord.

He will remind you of my way of life in Christ Jesus, which agrees with what I teach everywhere, in every church. You see the point. When in this 13th verse of the last chapter he sets up certain controlling maxims, principles, which should govern the lives of the people at Corinth.

He does so having in mind his own advent in that city in Corinth. He says, remember what I was, remember how I lived. And as I have participated in the life of Christ, so you imitate me.

Now I find that an astonishing piece of reasoning. And I say so because there are very few of us here, and I most certainly include myself, who would like to make our lives, our attitudes, our lifestyle, the controlling factor for everyone else. The plague of this pulpit, my friend, is that I find it much more easy to preach than what I do to practice.

But here is the Apostle Paul living that much more close to our Lord Jesus than ever I have. And when he gives his final comments to the church at Corinth, he dares to unveil his own life again. And as he puts down those imperatives, he does so with a reminder that he has already said to the Corinthians, live like I lived.

Now you remember where he is. He's in Ephesus. This great effective ministry that's opened up for him, that's the reason why he's not come back to Corinth.

Not because he's refusing to keep his word, as he has promised that he would return to the Corinthians, but the whole of his plan, the whole of his journeyings around Asia Minor and the known Roman world are controlled within the will of God. He will do so and so, he tells us in verse 7, if the Lord permits. Well, here he is in Ephesus.

And I say, how do you describe this ministry? Well, he is a man who is standing firm in the faith. Or if you like, in the 58th verse of the previous chapter, he's a man who's allowing nothing to move him. He is standing firm.

Do you remember when he got to Ephesus, how although he calls it a great and effective ministry, into which he's gone as the door has opened, as a result of God's sovereign dictate, far from being a welcomed visitor, he runs into great hostility. Here in this capital of the Roman administration in Asia Minor, it seems as though all hell is let loose against the apostle. Ephesus, with its gigantic temple, the seventh wonder of the world.

Ephesus, which has an image of a God called Diana, or Artemis, depending which version of the Bible you're studying from. And this God becomes a cult throughout the whole of Asia Minor. To live in Ephesus was a notable thing.

To be in Ephesian meant that you were near Diana, you were near Artemis. Throughout Ephesus were the sorcerers and the astrologers. Witchcraft saturated the place.

There was immorality. And throughout the whole of Asia Minor, from Ephesus as its headquarters, this most diabolical pagan superstition was permeating. But the apostle Paul moves into Ephesus in the name of God and he establishes a center for evangelism for the Lord Jesus Christ.

And when that happens, there is a hostile reaction. You remember how on one occasion, 25,000 people rush into the amphitheater and they chant for four hours, Great is Artemis of the Ephesians. You remember how the silversmiths come together and they argue for the eviction of Paul because their effigies of the idol, their images of Diana, are no longer commanding the sales that they ought.

And then Paul is evicted from the synagogue itself and he has to book another lecture hall owned by a man called Tyrannus. And there for four hours, during the heat of the midday sun, he ministers the gospel of Christ. He's got no one to send him money to sustain himself.

And so he gets up early in the morning and he engages in a tent-making ministry so that he has sufficient money to be able to sustain life in Ephesus. All these problems, they just fall in upon the apostle Paul one after another to the extent that when he describes them in the previous chapter, in the 15th chapter, writing to the Corinthians from Ephesus, he says in the 31st verse, I die every day. I mean that, brothers, just as surely as I glory over you in Christ Jesus our Lord, if I fought wild beasts in Ephesus, for merely human reasons, what have I gained if the dead are not raised? Do you see that personal comment? What is Paul saying? Well, he's teaching us that he, when he gives these imperatives to these Corinthians and tells them to stand firm, not letting anything move them, when he urges them in that 13th verse of the 16th chapter to be on their guard and to be men of courage, this is exactly what he has been.

Here is personal biography. Behave like me. Behavior beyond the open door.

I ask you, as I ask myself, when you go through your open door of service, how do you behave? Like the apostle Paul, who is participating in the life of Christ, is there firmness, is there consistency? This is what Paul is arguing for as he writes to these beloved Christians that he led to the Lord in Corinth. Look at him again in that 58th verse of the 15th chapter. He says, always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord.

The authorized version puts it beautifully. Always abound in the work of the Lord. Abounding and abounding.

Always at it and then coming back to it again. You get a lovely comment on what he means by that in an earlier passage, the 9th chapter. And here in the 20th verse, he speaks about the joy of communicating the gospel.

To the Jew I became like a Jew to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law. Verse 21, to those not having the law I became like one not having the law.

Verse 22, to the weak I became weak to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all means possible I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel that I may share in its blessings.

Always abounding. At it and at it again. Here you see his personal biography.

Be on your guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be men of courage.

Be strong. Be doing things and do them in an attitude of love. Paul is no academic in some cloistered cathedral.

Paul is no theologian tucked away in some university room writing hard directives for others to put into practice. Paul is there in Ephesus. He's gone through his open door.

It doesn't look very attractive. But when the opposition comes, he seizes the opportunity as a time when he can prove the power of the gospel in Christ. And just as though he's being mauled by wild beasts in the amphitheater.

So he's treated at Ephesus and he looks back behind his shoulders to the Corinthians and he says, Brothers, do what I'm doing because you've got a door that's effective for ministry in Corinth as I've got one here in Ephesus. Personal biography. But then it seems to me that those two verses, the 58th of chapter 15 and the 13th of chapter 16, in a very remarkable way become a practical summary of all that Paul has been teaching the Corinthians up to this point.

Why does he write this letter? Well, you remember, he writes it because it has to do for him coming personally. He can't go to Corinth for reasons I've reminded you of. So he gets his pen or his secretary gets his pen and starts to write to these people.

Why does he write? Well, he's heard that there are many things at Corinth that need to be put wrong. There are some good things. Sometimes I feel Bible commentators do the Corinthian Christians an injustice.

You can put all the negatives and make it sound a very bleak and a very sorry church. But there were many things also that were positive. But there we are.

Here is the apostle and he writes. He wants to correct what is wrong. He wants to strengthen the areas in which they are weak.

And so he tells them, Be on your guard. The first of the five imperatives, commands in chapter 16 and verse 13. And that really means not just looking and enabling or keeping yourself from sleep.

It's got the idea of activity. I would prefer the translation if I dare risk my own. Be alert.

Be alert. Why do the Christians at Corinth need to be alert? Well, because they have so often been led astray. They've often been led astray.

Look at the 33rd verse, will you please, of the 15th chapter. Here he's got this weakness of the Corinthians in mind. And so he says, Don't be misled.

Bad company corrupts good character. What does he mean by that? Well, the Corinthians, very much like the new Ephesian Christians, were in a society that was hostile to the gospel. It is so difficult for us in the 20th century to realize the enormous problems that confronted these people as they stepped out of paganism into Christianity.

Here were these Corinthians. They too had got a temple. And in that temple, the most unsavory practices were to be seen.

1,000 or, I forget, maybe it was 3,000 temple prostitutes to welcome any of the soldiers who came in, or any of the sailors who came into that port that Corinth was. All the stagnation of immorality, it was there. And then you've got some pretty clever tricksters claiming to teach the Christian faith and yet they've manipulated it.

And there were some who'd come along and claimed to have a greater revelation of God than the apostle Paul had. And these poor, weak Corinthians, or some of the Christian community at Corinth, they were so easily dislodged from their first love. And there was a possibility of faction in the church.

You remember the disputes in the first chapter? I'm of Paul. I'm of Cephas. I'm of Apollos.

And then the really religious cult, I'm of Jesus. Oh, all these difficulties. They were hemming in at Corinth.

People were being misled. And so Paul says, stand on your guard. Be alert.

Be firm. Don't let anyone move you from the essence of the gospel as you heard it from my lips. Be on your guard.

Be alert. Stand firm in the faith. That was one of the great problems for these Corinthians, standing firm.

Look at the second verse of the 15th chapter. By this gospel you are saved if you hold firmly to the word I preach to you. Otherwise you have believed in vain.

Do you remember those instances? No time to cite them, but if your memory was good, then perhaps it will help you at this stage. In earlier passages, where we had the problems of the church being led astray by one issue and then another issue, the whole business of the Lord's Supper, it had got somehow out of hand. And even the use of spiritual gifts, they seemed not to be under proper control.

And so the apostle brings them back to their first principles, to his own teaching. This business of believers taking other believers to law and submitting to the authority of pagan magistrates, says Paul, no, that's wrong. Stand firm, my brothers.

Realize this, that one day you'll judge the world. So why can't you work out your own disputes amongst yourselves and not have any recourse to the pagan authorities? You see what he's doing? In this 13th verse of the last chapter, he's bringing all the practical implications together of what he's already conceded. Be on your guard.

Stand firm in the faith. Be men of courage. Oh, that's a marvelous word in the original.

It's very, very difficult to get it into the English. Maybe a clear expression or a clearer expression would be this. Play the man.

Play the man. Do you remember when a couple of our reformers were being sent to the stake in England two or three or four hundred years ago? One says to the other, Let's play the man, Master Ridley. And when they put a a flame to the faggot and when our bodies are incarcerated in the heat, let's play the man.

For we shall, by God's grace, set alight something in England that the devil himself shall never be able to extinguish. You Christians at Corinth, play the man. You see, it was the immaturity of the church in certain areas that caused Paul pain in Ephesus and he couldn't leave Ephesus to go and correct it.

And so he writes them a letter. Chapter 3, verse 1. Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual, but as worldly. Mere infants in Christ.

How do you feed an infant? Well, you don't give him steak. You give him milk. I gave you milk, not solid food.

Why not, Paul? Well, because you were not ready for it. You see, there was immaturity far from playing the man. They were playing like kids in a playground.

Just like children with their toys. Paul, you remember, has this metaphor of children playing very much in his mind when later on in the 13th chapter he speaks about his own movement to maturity from immaturity. When I was a child, I talked like a child.

I thought like a child. I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

Play the man, you people at Corinth. In understanding, don't be immature. In understanding, be men.

And control your relationships. And be disciplined in your evangelism and in your lifestyle. You see how I'm able to sustain my comment that verse 13 is a little cameo of, a little summation, a little prece of all that Paul before has been arguing.

Play the man. Be men of courage. Be strong.

And that actually, the verb is not in the active. It's in the passive move. Be made strong.

Be being strong. As though your dependence for strength is on someone else outside of yourself. And that's pretty good theology, isn't it? How am I strong? Well, I'm strong in Jesus.

Says Paul, I can do all things. And then he says, through Christ who strengthens me. Ephesians 6, exactly the same.

Be strong in the Lord and in the power of his might. Play the man. And receive that dynamic that comes from God by the infilling of his spirit.

And then, he brings together the very atmospheres and sets the ethos for the church in Corinth. How is it to exist? Look at the 14th verse, the 5th command here. Do everything in love.

And I hardly need to direct you to 1 Corinthians 13, that great love poem. That stupendous hymn to love that speaks of the love of God and the love of Christ and says that we ourselves ought to be reproducing it. Do everything in love.

Notice that preposition. And there's hardly anything in Scripture. In fact, I would argue there is nothing that is not unimportant, that is not without significance.

Notice the preposition there in verse 14. That little connecting word between everything and love. It's in.

It's not with. You say, well, what's the difference there? Well, there's all the difference in the world. There's miles of difference.

Do everything with love. You know, you may have a little bit of love now and again. Do everything with love.

As though love itself is detached and can be attached from time to time. No. The apostle Paul says, you people in Corinth do everything in love.

Do you remember our glorious motto text for this year? Live a life of love. Do you remember the address I tried to preach on that at the beginning of the year? Do you remember the illustration I gave you from that great man of God, David Wilkerson, back in the States? How on one occasion, before he started his drug evangelism, his evangelism to addicts, he's confronted by a man in the street who flashes his life. His knife at Wilkerson.

And David says, look, Nicky, you can take your knife and you can cut me up into little pieces. And no matter how small you cut, each one will say, Nicky, I love you. I love you.

Be on your guard. Stand firm in the faith. Play the man.

Be strong. Do everything. Everything.

In. Not with. In.

Love. Personal biography, yes, it's there. There's also a practical summary of all that he's brought to their attention up to this point.

And then finally, in my last four minutes or so, here is a perpetual policy. You see, some people might think that this book is just a historical document addressed to the people at Corinth 2,000 years back. But you can't take it that way because Paul, by his own admission, is writing with a much wider perspective.

You say, what do you mean? Well, drop back to 1 Corinthians 1. And here Paul is indicating to whom he is addressing what he has to say. To the church, verse 2, to the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours. As though Paul was given some great panoramic view of the significance of this letter and the fact that it would transcend the mere locality of Corinth and have value for Christians who would live in centuries later, as well as in different geographical areas.

When Paul gives us a summation of life beyond the open door, he speaks not just to the 1st century church, he speaks to the 20th century church. That's why in my prayer I very carefully expressed before our Heavenly Father our thanks for the present reality of his word. Because the Bible, though historical, is also contemporary.

It's the word of God which lives and abides forever. There's nothing beyond this word that God has to reveal. He confirms the contents of this word to our hearts in the 20th century.

So here is the apostle and he puts down perpetual policy for the church. So what does that mean for you and me? Well, it's easy to make our deductions. We're almost home and dry.

What does it mean? Well, we have an open door here in Worthing. I'm back to where I arrived at last week. You see, there's something for you to do and there's something for me to do that in God's grace he has specifically put under our names.

As in Corinth, as in Ephesus, there's work for the Corinthians and for Paul, so here in Worthing there's work for you. So I come right back to the beginning of my address last Sunday repeated at the beginning of my address this Sunday. If you haven't got an open door then where are you as a Christian? Because by that test you really determine whether or not you're mature in Christ.

We've all got something that we can do. Now don't say, well, you know, I'm 70 years of age or I'm 80 years of age. There's nothing that I can do.

Oh yes, there is. There are so many aspects of ministry that you can be involved in, that holy ministry of prayer, that ministry of just communication to the people who happen to visit you from time to time. We would not expect a 70-year-old to be as energetic as a 17-year-old, although sometimes I discover that the 70-year-olds leave the 17s, looking as though they're in a state of perpetual paralysis.

It's an amazing thing. We've all got an open door. The man who says to me, I've got nothing to do, you know, reveals far more about himself than what he reveals about the negligence of any church situation that fails to incorporate him into that evangelism.

Nothing to do? My goodness gracious me, there will be, oh well, I'm hazarding a guess, 5% of worthing in church this morning. I guess that is a pretty high estimate. Nothing to do? We have a town here of 90,000 people.

Nothing to do? We will have a wimpy bar down on the seafront this afternoon that will be crammed with people coming in from the cold, assuming the wind starts to blow, and the majority of them won't know Jesus nor have an invitation to a gospel service. Nothing to do? Well, we've 1,001 things in connection with our tracks, in connection with the very domestic area of cleaning this church and keeping the whole of our premises ship-shaped. Nothing to do? We've got offices around here and shops around here and the majority of the people who man them, they know nothing of Jesus Christ.

Nothing to do? A plague on your nothings. We've got everything to do. God is the God of infinite permutation and he's got so many doors up his sleeve, if I might mix that metaphor, that it really does make us just stagger in absolute amazement.

And the amazing thing about the work that we can do for the Lord is it's the only thing that will last from time into eternity. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain. It's said of one of the Methodists of the early Methodist revival, describing the activities of their particular group.

We're at it, said the man, and we're always at it. Always abounding in the work of the Lord. Why? Well, you see, it's only that that's going to go through into eternity and bring heavenly interest.

If you've got eight pounds to spare or if you were thinking of spending eight pounds on something that was not essential, let me give you an investment that will pay you great dividends. Go down to the Christian bookshop and buy yourself a copy of the biography of Martin Lloyd-Jones. I have been moved to the very depths of my being, even to the extent of sometimes getting up at two o'clock in the morning to read that book this week, and I'm not telling you a lie.

I have been so moved by what I learned of that man's life that I didn't know that it's... In the middle of the night, I was crying to the Lord that I've done nothing for you. I've done nothing for you. Here is a man, you see, who was one of the greatest doctors in London, potentially an assistant to the doctor who was assigned to the king in those days.

He mixes with the top flight people in London. He's there. He's helping Lord Horda.

And what does he discover? These people are sinners. He's only 23 years of age, and he's got a destiny in medicine which is greater than perhaps anyone else at Barts Hospital. And then he comes to the sudden realisation, what's the point of getting these men and women well on the human level? They are sinners, and they are destined for hell.

And suddenly medicine took a second degree, category, in his whole estimation. He wanted to be a physician, but not just a medical physician. He wanted to be a physician of the souls.

Why? Because that work would go through from time and on into eternity. You read that book. I'll even guarantee to pay anyone who buys the book and says it wasn't worth reading at the end, they can put their hand over their heart and say so.

How to behave in an open door? Well, in an open door ministry, the Apostle Paul tells us in that particular verse, or two verses that we have been reading, I ask you, let them challenge you, let them challenge us afresh, and let us ensure that we move through our open door here in the tabernacle, here individually, and work in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ for his honor and for his glory. Amen. 378.

Let's conclude by singing the third and the fourth verses of Who Is on the Lord's Side? 378. Fierce may be the conflict, strong may be the foe, but the king's own army none can overthrow. 378.

Fierce may be the conflict, strong may be the foe, but the king's own army none can overthrow. 378. Now, Father, as you direct us through our open door into ministry this week, help us to stand firm.

Help us always to abound in the work of our God, knowing that our labor is not in vain, and we pray for that constant endowment of the power of the Spirit so that ultimately and astonishingly we come to realize that all the time it wasn't so much us who was working, we who were working, but rather the Spirit of God who was working in and through us. So bless us now, and those who must go at this juncture, may they know the benediction of the Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit resting and remaining with them. Amen.