Good morning. We're privileged to be here today, God's given us another day of grace, and He's given us one another's company, He's given us a story, and preserved it in writing, and a lot of sub-stories unfolding that for us. We're going to look at something today from 1 Corinthians 6 that connects to Christ and the beautiful things that He has done for us. And so as we prepare to read for 1 Corinthians 6, I just want you to be quietly in your heart thinking about your own relationship with God and your own relationship with the people around you and praying quietly that God would keep those relationships beautiful and lovely and every way. Having said that, stand as we read from the Word of God. Hear the Word of the Lord. Paul writes to the Corinthians having difficulties in their community. Scripture says, through St. Paul to the Corinthians, quote, when one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial or minor cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more than matters pertaining to this life? So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle disputes between the brothers and sisters? But brother goes to law against brother and that before unbelievers to have lawsuits at all with one another is already to feet for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud. And your own brothers, or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkers, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. And such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God. Amen. May the Word of God rest in our hearts this morning, please be seated. How do we go about settling our disputes when we have something unsettling about one another in a relationship? More broadly, how do we keep a church community looking healthy and beautiful? Because that's what the world needs to see. The Corinthians were sick, spiritually, in the verse 8. Some believers were wronging and defrauding other believers. They were taking advantage. One person would take advantage of another. It's not laid out how here, but there was something that wasn't right between the two and one had done something to the other and the other was hurt. Now when you're sick, hopefully you find a way to get better. Well, the Corinthians, a number of them were sick individually, which collectively set a tone of sickness in the community because of the defrauding and cheating that was going on. And so they tried to fix their own problem, their own sickness, and you can do that, you know, you can provide your own self-remedy. And so what they did, they basically went into what's virtually small claims court. They just went right to it. I passed every other alternative that God apparently had for them and suing one another. And can you imagine, if you're not feeling well, and you go into the pharmacy and you see a whole rack of medicines, and there's a lot of good stuff with a cure, a lot of good and a good way, a lot of difficulty sicknesses you're having. And you go into, imagine going into the doctor's office and he has a closet full of samples and you're waiting, you're not feeling well and you not really want to wait for him and so you just reach in the cabinet there and you say, oh, that's a good one, and you grab it off the shelf. Virtually that's what we have here, trying to cure themselves in their own way. Now they have two problems, one, they got the defrauding, the wrong that's actually done, and on top of that, now they have the method for solving it is going to be pretty ugly and create some side effects that maybe they hadn't counted on because they thought, perhaps they knew a little bit more than God. You know, you get hurt sometimes and you just don't really aren't thinking about how God might want you to respond. And so you just say, this is what I'll do and sometimes those feelings rush over you and you decide, I don't care, I'll just do this on my own, settle this one way or the other. And so they rush out into this court system and then don't get the Bible wrong or God wrong, God has established the court system in Romans chapter 13. In fact, they're described in very startling language that these are ministers of God, the secular world and many non-Christians and some judges you wonder, how did he even get a degree or did he even go to law school or she, and yet they are called servants of God to underline the good and to punish the wrong. But they're not talking here, I don't believe in the tone of this text about losing your house or you know, talking about huge things that perhaps can only be settled in the court system because of perhaps legal ramifications and other things that are going on within the state that we're bound by. But you have disputes among believers and it can get to look a lot like this presidential race. In fact, I hear that there may even be some people who are getting together, families for Thanksgiving this year because things that may have been said or how they voted or how could you possibly vote that way? How could you not vote that way? Why didn't you vote at all, surely? And with all the mud-slinging that's going on and setting the tone in our society seems like many of us have even lost all faith altogether in any candidate serving in any way. But in our context, more specifically, it's more like watching Judge Judy or Judge Brown. And you know that really after a while gets entertaining, doesn't it? And you see some of those comments and bickering and you think, how in the world, why would she say that to that person? And they put it in writing. They sent an email and they said that. And it provides a lot of money for people who run TV, entertainment for the world. So the world can watch us and watch the Corinthians in the quote-unquote, small claims courts. They thought to themselves, hmm, that's an interesting bunch of people over there that call themselves Christian. And verse 7, Paul says, why don't you just rather suffer wrong rather than putting on a public display of some of the lower side of yourself, some of the ways you feel and we all feel from time to time, rather than putting those on public display, why don't we just like, oh well, it's only 200 bucks, let it slide. You know, sometimes it's just better to yield your rights. Like when you're playing golf, which I haven't done for about four months, I love to. And you're out on the course and you've got your little 400 pound green golf cart doing your buddy and you're waiting to cross a semi-major highway that runs right through the course. And you're thinking, I have the right way. And you see this two-ton vehicle coming down 40 or 50 miles an hour and you have to make a decision, you know, because you want to play golf, you don't want to be sitting there this traffic to go by. And you're thinking, shall I try to exercise my right way and take what's coming to me because indeed you may be taking what's coming to you, two tons of it. The problem with actually getting an exercise in your right is that it may be end up far worse, far more ugly, which apparently it was because Paul spent a lot of words just about avoiding litigation and yet that's what the people weren't doing. Bickery and fighting and finally took up legal action to one another. Again, there's a place and time for that when other things have been exhausted or tried or it's just inappropriate. This is not a 100% rule of thumb that you can never use in the legal system, of course not. But why not flip a coin sometimes, tails, you win, that's it, just go on to something else. Let's draw straws, do something, let's do what Southwest Airlines and Stevens Aviation did. Stevens Aviation had a slogan, plain right, they had it for years. Next thing we know, Southwest Airlines was using a slogan, just plain right, hmm, that might be infringement. They might be stealing our slogan. And so Stevens Aviation CEO thought about it and he thought, going to court, lot of time, lot of energy, lot of money, a lot of headaches, a lot of wrangling, paying lawyers who deserve to be paid because sometimes you need them and sometimes they do a good job. So he wrote a note, Stevens Aviation, into a Southwest president of the CEO and he said, how about an arm wrestling contest? And so it came to pass, an arm wrestling contest, Southwest lost, so much younger CEO with Stevens Aviation, down he went, what they did two out of three to be sure, but you know what happened was chronic cold, because Stevens Aviation, the young CEO said, you can use the name anyway, even though we won. And Southwest said, here's $10,000, use it for your favorite charity, that's cool, that's really cool. We need more of that amy-bow reconciliation, especially when the world's watching. Or why not try the alternative, if you don't like arm wrestling? If you don't think that's fair or flipping coins, why not use the Pebble and the Pond method, which is really Jesus method that our intern Eric referred to last week? You have a dispute, it's in Matthew 18, you throw a Pebble and the Pond, what do you have a circle, right? You try to work it out quietly, silently, you don't correct people, you know, like and start arguing in the middle of the public and stuff like that, you don't start doing all that. Basically, I mean public offenses deserve to be addressed publicly, don't they? Private offenses, basically deserve to be addressed privately, that's the rule of thumb. So you pull somebody inside and you say, you know what, have we got an issue here, can we fix it? Hopefully it's fixed. The reputation of Christ has saved, your reputation saved, no one knows what you did wrong. If it doesn't work and you're still unhappy, you can't sleep at night and you've got to resolve it, because it's really a lot really on your mind, then you get another Christian or two. And I'm going to paraphrase in very, very, very, very knocking the words, Paul says, doesn't it? Isn't there one more Christian around you as a brain? Surely, there's a couple people with a brain around you that, you know, do we have to go to unbelievers and fix it that way? And that's what he basically says here in verse 5, can there be no one among you wise enough to settle, dispute? Surely there's somebody. In fact, then he uses this argument in verses 2 and 3, where it's still doing to the first section, which is most of the sermon by the way. But the last two sections will be a lot shorter. But in Luke 22, 30, Jesus said, well, we seeded on thrones, participated in the judgment. And here in the second and third verses, Paul says, you somehow are going to be judging in the world. And you and I, who believe in Christ, will be judging angels. And I'll be frank with you, I don't know a thing about that. I don't know how it's going to work. I just know that's what he said. And if he said, if we're going to be engaged in making these decisions for more and high, surely, we can make some seasons down here or on low. Do you understand? If we're going to participate in the final judgment somehow, and surely we can make decisions and think. I mean, we have a whole Bible. We have brains. And we have iron, sharpening iron, so one person sharpens another. And so he says, we ought to be doing more of that and do it, you know, probably 101 and maybe a couple more people. And hopefully, we resolve the issue. If not, then I guess we have to get the church involved in a formal way through the session or whatever the leadership rule is in that particular church, how they've set that up. And so, the point is that we have better ways of getting the sickness resolved. And the better ways are using the medicine that Christ chooses, this is not what we're going to choose in ourselves, and it has a lot to do with the reputation of Christ because really the side effect you see in verse 7, he says, the side effect of getting wrangling and trying to solve these issues our own ways, he says, first of all, it's to your shame. It's shameful for the watching world to be seeing us fixing our problems in front of them. It's not right. And he says, also, it's a no-win situation in verse 7, you've already been defeated. The very fact that you're doing it, it's no win, it's a no win. The world doesn't need to know our business, we're sinners, they're sinners, we have more insight into God than they do. We have the Holy Spirit, we have the love of God, we've got the gospel of Christ, we've got one another, and yes, there are times when you would like to take someone and like shake some sense into her, or me, why doesn't that guy think before he speaks? Well, I wasn't thinking, or I would have thought before I was speaking. Well, the side effect, of course, is giving Christ a bad reputation, the world looks, and they say, well, I thought they believed in Christmas when God said to Son into the world doing peace on earth and goodwill toward man. I don't see much peace in that community, I don't see much goodwill toward man or women. This is what I thought they believed in Easter over there. Don't they believe in a resurrected Christ? Make sure they don't look like they're living resurrected lives and solving their problems and as they begin to just discuss how to work things out and everyone, we all have the work things out, and we're not going to see eye to eye on whether it's committee work or whether it's a marital relationship, and I guess it's one thing if you go and get some counsel somewhere from a non-believer, but even that has to be done with the great discretion. Because when we ask for counsel, it means we better come with also a sense of humility and not a sense of hugging this and tattletailing on your spouse or pointing fingers in the spirit of the light that says, I'm not really here to fix anything, I'm just here to put blame on them and say, how good I am. So Jesus said, we're salt and light, you are the soul of the earth, you know that, don't you? If you're in Christ, you are the light of the world, he's the big light, the big soul, but you are really what the world needs, and yet sometimes the world says, it's more like a sniff of pepper, or it's more like, hey, you know it's a broken light bulb over there, and that's why some people don't want to go to church. Not interested because the way maybe they're dead or they're cousin or they're uncle or someone who professed to be Christ has, you know, and it's got the words of light, but they look at the light and you said, not much light there, you know, why would I want to walk down that path. And that's really what you have here, which brings us to, the verses 8 to 10, this is the last next section and verse 9, and this is just a short section here, but important for me to comment, regarding verse 8, 8 to 10, what's going to happen to those who return to a life of defrauding and stealing and swindling, you know, the people do that, we all have these propensities to sin and to do things, and for some it's like, they know really good at how to manipulate and then taking advantage of others, and so now they're in the community, Christian community, they professed Christ, and now it's like they're starting to do that again, okay, and so that's why some of these lawsuits are coming up. That's going to happen to those who fall back into cheating and so forth. He says, on verse 8, you yourselves wrong and defraud, that's what was happening among people who are believing, who are saying they believe, even your own brothers defrauding them, and do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God, don't be deceived neither the sexually immoral nor adulterers, or adulterers, or man who practice homosexuality, thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. People who defraud others won't be entering the kingdom of God, and he lists a bunch of other things here, it's a terrible, terrible list, isn't it? Now what does he say, and is he saying, this particular list are the ones who will basically, there's so much worse than the others, that these are the ones that will keep you from entering the kingdom? He has other lists in the Bibles, you know, that God has other lists in the Bible, that will also keep you from the kingdom. Listen to this, in Galatians 5, 1921, Paul adds a longer list, he said, I quote, the acts of the sinful nature are obvious, sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, and their Paul also adds to the list, witchcraft, hatred, just cord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, doesn't seem that bad, selfish ambition, factions and envy, drunkenness, and on and the like, and I warn you as I did before, and I'm still quoting from Galatians 5, I warn you as I did before, says Paul, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God, end quote. What is Paul telling us here? He's saying, I believe, that there were Christians who defrauded in the past, and they'd fallen back into it. There were others, there he mentioned, who struggled with sexual sins and so forth, who attempted to fall back there, we saw from last week sermon, one man sleeping with his own stepmother, and I believe what we have is in Luke 9662, where Jesus says, whoever puts his hand to the plow and looks back is not fit for the kingdom of God, falling back into a lifestyle. You know, here's the analogy, you're driving a car, okay, Christ has put you in an automobile, you're driving on the way to heaven, okay, you're driving down the road, and all of a sudden you decide, you know, you're going to drive by looking back, back behind you, from where you came from, folks, if you're driving that way, you are going to crash, you're going to crash. He's talking about in Proverbs 26-11 as a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool, an unbeliever returns to his foolishness, that's what a fool is in the Bible, someone is not listening to God at all, a Proverbs 24-13, the one who endures to the end will be saved. We just can't come to Christ, and then to say, okay, I'm forgiven, now I'm just going to go back and go, was, cheating and so forth. We must endure, what you have here I believe is, it's a way of life for you. You've done something wrong, you need to fix it, apologize, and in the process of trying to fix stuff, you need to do it in a way that's a way of integrity, to protecting one another's beauty in Christ, protecting their dignity, and doing it right, and it's a way of life that we fix things in a beautiful way, even though it's been kind of getting ugly. We tried to do it right and properly and decently in order, and we just can't settle in for something less. So it's interesting that on Jesus' total parable, the kingdom of heaven, Matthew 22, is parable over the wedding celebration. He says, the kingdom of heaven is like a king, you prepare a wedding banquet for his son, and so the servants went out into the streets, listened, and they gathered all the people they could from the best to the worst, and the wedding hall was filled, but when the king came to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not dressed properly for the wedding celebration. And he said, friend, how did you get in here without wearing the proper wedding clothes? The man had nothing to say, he had no excuse. Nothing good to say. Then the king told the attendants, tie him hand in foot and throw him out, throw him out into the darkness, where there were you weeping, a nation of teeth, for many are invited, but few are chosen. God is going to have an incredible wedding party. You know that folks kind of get an amen? He's going to have a wedding party, beautiful, which coming? It's going to be a huge celebration filled with joy. Many are invited. Whoever wants to come, but when you come, you better be wearing something really snazzy, something the proper wedding clothing. Some of them would wear in the kind of clothing that's not fit, a lifestyle that's not fit for any celebration whatsoever, just a lifestyle that should put doubts in your mind, but others will be knowing them. They'll come coming back to Jesus again, you know I'm putting his clothes on again, brand new every day, because that's the only way you're fit. I think that it gets to the 11th and last verse. I think the greatest news, the greatest verse to me, the most exciting verse is the 11th verse in this entire passage. The Christ has given us something very expensive and something very beautiful to wear for the great wedding celebration that's coming soon. In Christ you've been declared. If you know him, you've been declared a beautiful, beautiful person, it's a beautiful community. That's what we are. Look at what he says in this last verse. As such, some of you, he's just listed these terrible sins, stealing and sexual immorality and so forth, and some of you, but now you're washed, you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by the Spirit of our God. Now we may have a history of some terrible things, because now you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified. What I find especially encouraging in the great grammar, it's in the passive eras, it's the passive voice, which basically when he says, you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified, that's something that happened to you when you trust the Christ, that's not something you did for yourself, it's something that God acted upon you to wash you. You can imagine Jesus washing the disciples feet, they didn't wash their own feet, that's what he did for them, and that's what he's done for you in your hearts. It's a passive voice. It's also erased in English, it's past tense, it means it's a fact, what the disciples feet washed or not, that's a fact of history, it's in the book, so it is here, it's erased, you were washed, you're forgiven in Christ, you were sanctified, you're set apart, you know that, you were on the low road, and Christ has set you apart, that's what it means, I put you on the high road and you're headed to a beautiful place, you know that you ought to believe that with your whole arts, and then he says you were justified, that means you're morally upright, he put you up on your feet and you ought to stand tall every day and believe in yourself, and what I mean by that is the believe of God, you are a beautiful person, and God loves you an incredible way, and therefore what does he expect from us, we're on beautiful people, headed to a beautiful place with a beautiful Savior, we got some issues come up, hopefully we're not the cause, but if we are, we're going to try to fix that right away, and if we've been injured or something, somebody's done it's wrong, we're going to try to resolve it in a beautiful way, where Christ doesn't look bad, he only looks good because we have been declared morally beautiful, ready for a beautiful kingdom, can I get an amen? Amen. Let us pray. Dear Lord Jesus, we pray that you will let your beauty be upon us, let your beauty rest upon us, your moral character, your pure and lovely ways, may there be hours, let us not defraud or take advantage of one another, and if we are taking advantage of, we would pray that we would respond in ways more noteworthy, more praiseworthy, not like the world, or like we used to respond. Let us live in peace with each other as much as we possibly can, humanly speaking. And Lord thank you that you legally wash away all that is morally ugly in our lives through Christ. We especially thank you for gifty nuts with his beautiful life record and for his integrity which is ours through faith. Thank you that through faith in him we do stand upright and we can hold our heads high and we can know and believe that we have been set apart to bless our families and bless our communities and people around us as we rest upon your grace for that help. And Lord we make Christ beauty continue to rest on us that the world might see in us a bright and beautiful path that shines the way past God's judgment and safely leads the way into God's eternal kingdom. In the pure and precious name of Christ we pray, O Lord, let the beauty of the Lord our God rest upon us. Christ, name amen.