We're going to worship now through the Word, through listening to the Scriptures and before we do, let me lead us in a time of prayer. Father, no doubt many of us came into this place today, harried, harried by the week we've just had, or the morning we've just had. We asked that you would set aside every barrier, every frustration, everything that would keep us from hearing the Word that you speak. For we know that your Word, these are the words of eternal life, may we hear them, may we be able to shut out the things that would draw us away from you, the changing words, help us to hear the unchanging Word, and to respond to you as we ought to with faith, understanding, and obedience. We ask this in Jesus' name, Amen. Amen. I have loved you even as the Father has blessed me. Remain in my love, when you obey me, you remain in my love, just as I obey my Father, and remain in his love. I have told you this so that you will be filled with my joy. Yes, your joy will overflow. I command you to love each other in the same way that I love you. And here is how to measure the greatest love is shown when people lay down their lives for their friends. You are my friends if you obey me. I no longer call you servants because a master doesn't confide in his servants. Now, you are my friends. Since I have told you everything the Father told me, you didn't choose me. I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask for using my name. I command you to love each other. The Word of the Lord. And then our second reading, from the letter of First Corinthians, you'll find this text printed inside your bulletin on one of the sheets there. If you'd like to follow along, if you do not have a Bible nearby, we're going back now in this letter to the first chapter, a reading beginning in verse 26, in a series, a study we've been doing called Life in the Church, Mystery and Mess. St. Paul writes and he says this, Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were influential. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the wise. God chose the weak things of this world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are so that no one may most before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God, who has become, that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, let him who boasts, boasts in the Lord. When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God where I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power. This is the word of the Lord. Now, what we are doing in looking at the letter of 1 Corinthians, as I was saying earlier, is looking at life in a church to get a perspective on what it means to have life in the church, and the great paradoxes of Christianity is this, and it is very basic to any real perspective of Christianity. It is this. On the one hand, Jesus Christ says, if you would know me, if you are going to know my life, you are going to have to do that in community. I call you together to love one another. So the only way the Bible teaches this, and we assert this, you are never going to know the life of God or the power of God outside of this church, outside of community, with others who believe and follow Jesus. That is just one of the things Jesus says, but at the same time, in other words, this is the place where you will know me, where you will be shaped to experience my life and my love, and at the same time, this is going to be one of the most frustrating, difficult places you will ever be. All churches are messes, because they are full of people like us. And you may be new and idealistic, so think of me as, you know, someday the day will come when you will go, aha, you warned me about this. I didn't believe him. I thought he was becoming cynical. I am not cynical, I am biblical. The fact is churches are tough places. Ministers, leaders, fellow Christians are all going to do things that you are not going to like, they are going to frustrate you, and that is just the nature of human community. But the Apostle Paul writes to one of the earliest letters we have in the New Testament, he writes to this church, and absolutely no holds barred. Absolutely clearly says you are a mess. We have been looking over the last week, some of the basic things of the Christian life, understanding the gospel, the mission of the church, the meaning of the sacraments of baptism in the Lord's Supper. They are completely botching it, and yet the Apostle can speak to this botched job of a church and say that I am overwhelmingly confident of what God is going to do in and through you, because of what I know about Jesus, because of what Jesus has promised. That is really where we want to plan ourselves throughout the summer as we look at this letter. Now in this particular chat, and these two readings which are divided by a chapter, I think he gets sort of two perspectives in response to a problem. On the one hand, the Apostle Paul reminds them of what happened when these folks became Christians. That is, the circumstances around their conversion and the forming of this new, this nascent congregation, and then in the second phase, he reminds them of what it was he talked about. In other words, who you are, and then what he came to preach to them. And what I want us to look at parallels those two ideas, because what you see fundamentally here is this. A congregation of people who have gone off course. And what you will see, by the way, is that congregations, just like individuals, pathologically, go off course. They get off, their frequency gets goofed up. They seek to tune in the basics, and so they go off course, and he reminds them of who they are, and what the gospel is in order to get them back on course. So that's what we are going to do, is we are trying to look at this text. Now let's talk about going off course. One of the things you have to understand coming into a church, coming into the Christian faith, is the human condition, is such that we pathologically go off course. Martin Luther had a wonderful phrase. He said that human beings are, he gave a definition of us. We are homo in say, in kurbatas, which means, man turned in on himself. The shape of our heart is inward. We are always wrapped up with our own pain, and our own need, and our own story. And we do that as individuals. That's really at the root of a lot of our sin, is our self-absorption, and we do that as communities. We are, we are just turned in on ourselves. And that's what you see happening here. Now, there's a very specific circumstance, but this could be any number of applications for how this could happen in a Christian congregation. In their case, it's this. They live in a city current, it's driven by being important. It's driven by mattering. By the way, if that is not, you know, I did ministry in New York City, which it was kind of saw itself as the center of the universe, and I had come to another place that is just as convinced, that we are the center of the universe. Now, we're not, by the way, I don't know if you know that, but we're not. But a city that's just driven by, hey, you know, what was the Olympics all about? Hey, we matter. Hey, attention to us. We pay the big road, and what do we call it? International Boulevard, why? We're saying to the world, hey, come here. This is the place to make money. We matter. We're important. You're not listening. We matter. That's really a lot of what drives our lives. Our life is a city. Corinth was the same way. Hey, Rome, you're not paying attention. We're Corinth. We matter. And that had a trickle-down effect into their congregation. Where one day you, from the letter that Chloe sent to Paul describing the pathologies of their church, we talked about that in the earlier series, we begin to realize that this is exactly what's happening in their congregation. People are looking around and saying, you know, we've got a problem. What's our problem? I'll tell you our problem. Look at who's here. That's our problem. Look around you. How depressing. Look at who's here. We don't matter. Nobody is ever going to take us seriously. And through this self-absorption, the church, you could say, is one of the roots of why the church begins to go off course. And that's why Paul writes, if you will, and affirms what he's heard in the 26th verse here, where he does in fact remind them of who they are. And he says, quite honestly, what about them to remember what? When you were called, not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were influential, and not many were of noble birth. He basically agrees with them. He goes, you know, you're right. You don't really matter. I've been there. I remember. Absolutely. Couldn't be more accurate about what your local congregation is like. Now, the letter does point out. In fact, there were a handful of influential people. They're mentioned, actually. But in many ways, when you went to the current church, you looked around and you just weren't impressed. And remember, this is a religion that is driven by the unimportant. These are people who believe that this galley and peasant name Jesus, who went down and claimed. You know, in a death, a shameful death of a criminal, that supposedly this is the centerpiece of history. And we're still part of a movement where when we try to guide ourselves at congregations, we go back to letters that are written to churches that many of us wouldn't even think of attending. I mean, current was not. Nobody in leadership of that church could be invited to a church growth seminar. They would be the people you would expect to be attending the seminar. And yet, here we are looking at their instruction as the guide as a congregation. It's rather interesting, isn't it? The degree to which the non-influential becomes influential. Here's a congregation. We know from Corinthian architecture, and I think I mentioned it a few weeks ago, but essentially they meet in a house of a wealthy person. And for what we've seen in this city, there's not a single house there where between the dining room area and the atrium, the more opening area, there's really not one of them where you could have gotten more than 60 people into the church. So this is a small church. It's not a Corinth, it's not a mega church by today's standards. It's very small struggling congregation. And you can imagine why they'd look around and go, we just can't get anything off the ground around here. This movement is not significant. We don't matter. We're just a rag tag bunch of insignificant people, and we need a matter. I just read a story this week by one of my favorite writers, a man named Eugene Peterson. It tells the story of going to speak to a group of military chaplains during peace time. And he said, you have never seen a more depressed group of people in the world. He said, because during the war, he said the chaplains become essential. There's no commander of any regimen who would be dead without a series of chaplains because of the life and death they face. And so there in the teeth of death, the chaplain becomes the central part of the life of the unit. But in peace time, basically they were all doing marriage and Richmond seminars and trying to justify their existence. And they called him to Washington DC to speak to the group. And he said it was the most depressed group of people because the government was slashing their funding because they were just saying you don't matter. And as they were wrestling with the degree of their insignificance, Peterson says, one of the chaplains stands up and blurt out to everybody. And he says, as they go through all these ideas, you know, how we can make ourselves matter. And finally, one of the chaplains stands up and says, you know what we need? We need a war. And others, we need something that's going to make us matter. And that's current. We need something that will put us on the map so that the people out there who are looking for wisdom, the people who are looking for the cutting edge, everything about us will communicate the cutting edge. That's what we need. You can look at the study of Protestantism in this last century. And I would say both mainline Protestantism and now more and more evangelical Protestantism and it is a study of people who fudge what matters, what really matters, is it to the Christian faith in order to snuggle up to whatever anybody else thinks matters. There's not an ism Protestantism has snuggled in the last 100 years, whether that's evangelical snuggling up to consumerism or the mainlines snuggling up to feminism or socialism or any of the other isms that go around. Why do we do that pathologically? Because we want the world to applaud. We want the great institutions and the important people to go, yes, you matter. And yet Paul comes back to them and says, that's just not what matters friends and what he points out to them is this. What does he say over and over again? What matters? Verse 27. But God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the lies. God chose the weak things of this world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of the world. What is he saying? God chose. God chose. He chose. And then he continues here in the 30th verse and what he says is this, it is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus who has become for us wisdom from God that is our righteousness, holiness and redemption. What is he saying to them? The only reason you are here, the only reason you are part of this gospel, it's all because of God's grace and mercy and if you would just skip to the end of what he read because of this, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom. That is so that the house of our faith would not be built on what the world thinks matters. That's not where we build the house. We don't build our church on the fact that our image is the sharpest and the best and our technologies, the sharpest and our organizational chart and presses all the business people, they will just have to come in. You don't build the house on that because the house can't rest on man's wisdom. It can't rest on what the culture says is important. The house rests on one thing and this one thing is the only thing that will ever center your life and the life of God. And that is the power of God revealed in the cross of Christ. Let me tell you a little story about myself. See, I had my moment in the sign when I was a child. No, I wasn't a child actor or child star but it was close. You see, I grew up over near six flags in the middle of nowhere. Now, it's kind of becoming a somewhere now that is their building houses but when I grew up there, it started out on a little dirt road. We lived in woods, miles and miles of woods in the middle of nowhere and then the hour of glory came. You know what it was? Six flags. Oh, the glory of it. Six flags was coming to my backyard. It just, it, my childhood, blossomed with the thoughts of glory that were going to be a half a mile down the road for my home, my little dirt road. Now, in our little church, a little tiny, little, not the healthiest church in the world by any means. There was a guy who had retired from Southern Railroad, Mr. Moats, and he had had a long and distinguished career as an engineer and he was the founding engineer of the six flags railroad. And when they built that great park, the first thing they laid was the track of the railroad and on opening day for the railroad because that's all there was. This is in the late 1960s. It was a child bin, mental note. The congregation of Victory Baptist Church was invited for the inaugural ride on the Chuchu train of six flags over Georgia. I was a chubby little Leonardo DiCaprio standing in that train. I'm the king of the world! You see, I, I matter, you see. Our little group. We have been catapulted in the glory. Why? Why? Was it because the developer said, oh, we've got to give Victory Baptist over here. Give us some press. No. Everything we had was because of our relationship to Mr. Moats. It was one of us. And that is the whole point of the Christian church is that the ride, the whole thing, the life with Christ, the life in God, is the life together. It's all a gift that stands in the power of God that is demonstrated in the gift of Jesus to you simply because he loves you. And he's chosen you not because you bring something to him but because he wants to give it all to you. And that's how Paul begins to set them on course. You see, they're off course. But he then brings them on and says, here's the path. Here's the path to matter. Here's what you need to focus on. And that's where we begin to change gears, if you will, going into that last verse. Notice what he says in verse 31. This is the second part of our sermon now. Verse 31, he says, therefore, that is because everything you have, you have in Jesus. He's God's real wisdom. He's what really matters, what happened on the cross for you. He's your holiness, your righteousness, your redemption. Therefore, let him who boast, boast in the Lord. That word, boast, is a very interesting word. It's the great word, Calcema. She used just a few times in the New Testament. And boast really doesn't quite get at what it means. It's one of these great words. The King James Version, in fact, I think, does a better job with this. It translates the word glory. Let him who glories, glory in the Lord. And the title of our sermon is actually the word I would even take to take it a step further obsession. I was going to find out some of the nice things, you know, some of the phrases Calvin Count Klein uses for obsession. But when I went on the website and entered that word, I didn't want to go there. So unfortunately, I can't really tell you anything about that I have campaign. But let's just say the word obsession, all right, obsession. The idea is that there is something that is so beautiful and so true that it fills your horizons. There is something that is so beautiful and so true that it fills your mind. It fills your aspiration. It engrosses your attention. It dominates your mind. And for what the Apostle Paul is saying is that for the Christian church, for a Christian individual, what God has done for us in Jesus Christ is the obsession, the one and only obsession, that will keep you on track. Stay there. Plant yourself there. That's where you'll find him. That's where you'll find his life. Let me quote another place where Paul uses the same phrase in the book of Galatians chapter 6, verse 14, where he says, may I never boast. What does that mean? May I never glory. May I never obsess on anything, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom the world has been crucified me to me and I to the world. In that particular text, I think this really helps us get at his thought in Corinthians. He literally says, this is what always fills my mind. When it comes to living the Christian life, the thing you need to know, this is what fills my mind, and this needs to keep filling your mind what? Three crucifixions. My glory and what? Christ crucified, Christ on the cross. That's the first crucifixion. But there's another crucifixion. And the other crucifixion is this, by which I have been crucified to the world. And thirdly, the third crucifixion, the world has been crucified to me. What does it mean by that? It means that the gospel, if you get it, those things that supposedly matter out there, those idols, those things in our culture, you have to have the way your kids need to behave, all the things you've got to participate in, the track to success, all those things, if you get the gospel, the gospel will put a nail in them. Both their power over you and you're longing to be filled with them. He says, the three of us are crucified in the gospel. It becomes my glory. It becomes my compulsion. And it changes the way I see everything. And the way Paul, I love that beautiful phrase we just read, is he takes the things that are not, that is by the gospel he nullifies the things that are. In fact, this is so true for Paul, that it begins to get him in trouble. And this is why he talks about his preaching. And by the way, as a preacher, this is always a little frightening, because I hope this is true of me, or I'm failing. But basically, people start complaining about his preaching. I feel that if nobody ever complains about my preaching, I'm doing something wrong. And it's possible I have people complaining, and this was their complaint. Look at verse two. When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom, as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God, for I resolved to know nothing while I was with you, except Jesus Christ, and him crucified. Verse four, my message, am I preaching? We're not with wise and persuasive words. But with the demonstration of the Spirit's power. Now remember, what are they longing for? They were longing for wisdom. Things that we're going to help you can just hear them now. I hear this occasionally. Paul, could we just talk about some practical things that would help us, you know, get ahead in the world? We really need some teaching that will help us, you know, get ahead in life. We just need some practical wisdom. And I don't know if you can hear the gun going, but that is exactly what chapter two verses one to five is. The Apostle Paul going, you want some wisdom? I'll give you some wisdom. You want some practical application? Here's your practical application. You don't get the gospel. The gospel is everything. The gospel is what you need to change your life. I read this wonderful quote from this great minister from the 19th century, Charles Spurgeon, who while unconverted started going around to churches to listen to preaching, he was spiritually hungry, and nobody would talk about the cross. He kept going and looking to try to find the message, and he said this, he said, I went to one church, and I heard a practical sermon. It was like listening to a commanding officer giving marching orders to an army without any feet. You see, the cross, what does he mean by that? The message of the cross is the only power there is to grow in the life of Christ. It's the only power there is to grow in the Christian life. It's the whole thing. He looked through the whole Old Testament. We're told he took a walk with some guys, and he showed them how everything moses the prophets and the Psalms. The whole book was about what? His suffering and glory. There are all kinds of things you can sign up that supposedly will teach you the deep things of the Bible. You're going to get into Hebrew words and Greek words, and all sorts of things about the coinage and cultural practices. Those are not the deep things of the words. That is the food for the Pharisees. The deep things of the word are the things of the cross and the things of the gospel. If you don't get to the gospel when you open your Bible or when a sermon begins, you don't know what that text is about. You haven't heard the word of God. It is about Jesus and the cross, the only thing that will ever change or grow your life. Thank you, brother. Feel like I'm back in Victory Baptist Church. It's a child. I'm back on the train. I lost my place. A sermon without the cross. A message without the cross. My friend Tom Allen says, it's like a glue without the hardener. He doesn't get you anywhere. It doesn't move you anywhere because the gospel. Now let me try to explain to you what I mean by this. I'll close in just a moment. Parenting. I have young children, and I'm just beginning to discover what parenting is. Now you hear people clamor about parenting. Because it's one of the most frightening things you'll ever go through. You haven't done it yet or if you're not doing it, you don't know what I'm talking about. But please go with me. It is one of the most frightening things in the world. And when you begin to enter it, you want to get as much advice as you can. You start reading psychologists. You start reading psychiatrists. You start talking to your friends. You want this book. You get that book. You get another book. Seminar. Oh yes, a seminar, please. I don't care what it costs. I'll pay it. You start obsessing. You know what I'm finding is apparent? The hardest thing, and the only thing that is really the only thing that makes a difference in my children's hearts, is me teaching and showing them that they need Jesus. It's not my wisdom. You see, if the goal of your parenting is, I want to control my children. I want my children to be on the world's wise track. That is, I want my children in the best schools. I want them to be successful. My friends, if you're Christians, what good does that do you if you lose their soul? The most important thing that I do as a parent is the cross. The most important thing I ever show them is, you need a Savior. And there is one. Let me tell you about him. Let me tell you, I'm not a perfect daddy that you follow because he's perfect. I'm a sinner who's found the glory of the cross. Let me share it with you. That and that alone will change their hearts. Here's your practical sermon. What does it tell us? The gospel is the only thing that will change the human heart so that you can say, everything I build, whether it's my family or my career or my church, it is all built on the power of God which is found solely in the cross of Christ. Now, this is a powerful image to say that our life is found to be crucified with Christ. You know, if you walked around in the Roman world and somebody had been condemned to crucifixion, they would take the pantibulum, the bar of the cross. You've seen images maybe of Jesus and they'd make them march with the cross bar on their shoulders. So that if somebody was to be crucified, you saw them with that thing. You knew something about them. There was something about their core identity, their core destiny that affected everything in their life. Pretty much you're not thinking about what your favorite flavor of, I don't care what the commercial say, you are not thinking about your favorite kind of pizza if they just, if they strap you to the pantibulum. Crucifixion becomes the dominant motif of your life. And that is what the gospel is supposed to do. John Stott says many evangelical Christians are nothing but it's a thin layer of piety stretched very tightly over an otherwise obsessed secular life. Has the gospel penetrated your life and the life of your family in such a way that you can honestly say we are crucified? The reality of Jesus and what he calls us to is a community, ministry, service, love. These things are at the core of what he has called us to and it is at the core of what we are committed to being. Are you crucified with Christ? Is that where you find your glory? Listen. Are we close to this? There is no other glory. There is no other path. Follow Him. Let's pray.