Good morning, everyone. Thank you for coming out this morning, and thank you, especially those of you who are visiting with us today. The scripture passage this morning is from the book of 1 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians, and chapter 4. And while you're turning to that passage, let me just say that, believe it or not, we have been in a series of sermons. I know they've been scattered about because I haven't been here every week in a row. But basically what we've been talking about is mediocre Christians, mediocre people, and how we can transition from being mediocre people and mediocre Christians to people who have outstanding faith. How this church can be a church about outstanding faith. And we're looking at the book of 1 Corinthians because in this church, way back in the 1st century, they had already drifted into mediocrity. They had already drifted into being ordinary. And yet the Apostle Paul reaches into their lives with this letter and calls them to outstanding faith. Here now the Word of God, as we read from 1 Corinthians chapter 4 beginning in verse 7, for who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you did not? Already you have all you want. Already you have become rich. You have become kings and that without us, how I wish that you really had become kings so that we might be kings with you. For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made as spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men. We are fools for Christ but you are so wise in Christ. We are weak but you are strong. You are honored and we are dishonored. To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty. We are in rags. We are brutally be treated. We are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed we bless and when we are persecuted we endure. When we are slandered we answer kindly. Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world. I am not writing this to shame you but to warn you as my dear children. Even though you have 10,000 guardians in Christ you do not have many fathers. For in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. Therefore I urge you to imitate me. May God at his rich blessing to this the reading of his word. Let's pray together. Lord Jesus these are words that your apostles spoke straight from his heart to these wayward Christians living so long ago. But now we who are living today look to you. To use the words of your apostle to speak into our lives. To change us but we know this cannot be done unless you send Holy Spirit to us and so now we earnestly pray that you will send Holy Spirit to fill each person in this room. That we may hear you speak and know that it is true and that our hearts may be softened to love you all the more for it and to serve you all the more faithfully because of what you teach us today. Amen. I am sure everybody knows the little kids game called Follow the Leader. And you know children love it. I don't know what the big deal is but they just love it. Especially when they are about 4 or 5 years old. Because basically all it amounts to is somebody is picked to be the leader and that person starts walking in a circle or waving their arms like this and you know how the rules are. Whatever the person at the front of the line does that is what you are supposed to do. So they just go around the classroom or out in the playground playing follow the leader. But I don't know if you have noticed it or not but around the age of 6 or 7 when boys are starting to distinguish themselves with all their macho. Sometimes when boys become the leader of follow the leader what they do is they do things that are too hard for the girls to do. In other words do things like climb to the top of the jungle gym or you have to run inside the tires and things like that are run really fast and things like that. And it is very frustrating for the little children and for the little girls in the group when a big boy makes it hard to follow. See follow the leader is fun so long as the leader is not doing much so long as it is fun is fine but when it becomes hard then all of a sudden it is not so much fun anymore. We just read a passage where the Apostle Paul called upon the Corinthians as he calls upon us to follow the leader himself as the leader. And that sounds perfectly fine if it is easy but I am afraid we are going to discover that it may be a little more trouble than we are used to. In this passage the Apostle begins by talking to these early Christians about their lives and about the test of their success. Look again at verse 8 and here what he says there he says already you have all you want already you have become rich. You have become kings and that without us the Corinthians had lots of things going in their favor. As you read this entire epistle you discover that some of them were very gifted in matters of religion and philosophy and things like that. Others of them had these supernatural gifts where they were able to work great miracles all the time. Others of them had money and status but for whatever reason they had come to the point that they decided they had all they needed. They were successful enough that they really didn't need anything at all anymore. I don't know about you but I think it is true that across the board for human beings not just for people of faith but just human beings that basically we judge how our life is going based upon how successful. If you are here today without following Christ then you know what I am talking about. It is just the reality of everything is going okay if your job is going well, if you are making money, if you are doing well in school. Those kinds of things you are able to make things happen in the world. Well you don't need anything, everything is going just fine. The strange thing about it is that that is what happens to Christians too. Even though followers of Christ may have once thought that way they come to some point in their lives where they realize all this success is not working. All the things I have been investing my life in just isn't working for me anymore and they hear about Jesus and the way of salvation in Him and they put their faith in Him and their lives turn around and they become new creatures. Just like you can if you don't follow Him today. But then a strange thing happens to Christians after a little while they sort of drift back into the old way of thinking. They sort of drift back into the idea you know. If I am successful it must mean that God really approves of me. If I have the money well he wouldn't get that to somebody he doesn't like so everything must be fine. And if he teaches me things like deep theology well man that really proves that he likes me a lot. And if I were given some great gift of some sort or another that I could use well then that really proves that God just approves of my lifestyle and everything that I could possibly dream of. When you have success that's the normal tendency isn't it? To approve the idea of success by saying that it must mean that God really likes us and doesn't have any problem with us. And let me say something there's nothing wrong with success, nothing wrong with money, nothing wrong with knowledge, nothing thing wrong with having great gifts of different sorts. In fact that's what we're all going for. Do you ever wonder why deep down inside of you there's this yearning for some kind of significance or some kind of success? Why the things of this world appeal to you so much? It's because ultimately when Jesus comes back again you are going to be made successful. You're going to be made wealthy. You're going to be made healthy. You're going to have all things the whole new creation said at your feet if you are in Christ. That's why the Apostle says at the end of verse 8 he says how I wish you really had become kings so that we might be kings with you. Oh if only Jesus had come back so that we really could be kings needing nothing so that all of our successes demonstrate that God does approve of us. But here's the reality before Jesus returns in glory. Success is not necessarily approval. It can be but is not necessarily so. But I can tell you one thing it is necessarily. It's a test of who you are. God gives things to people even to the followers of Jesus to test them to see what kind of person they are to understand and to demonstrate by the way they handle the things they have whether it's money or knowledge or status or whatever it may be to see how they handle these things. To prove what's deep down inside of them and you see what the Corinthians had done they had failed the test. Because God gives them the success and then looks to see what will happen to them. Will they fall into self assurance? Will they fall into pride? Will they fall into presumption that God is really on their side and they need nothing never to reexamine anything in their lives? Or will the gifts that God has given them make them more self aware of how little they are and how much they have dependence upon God? Will the success they have in life humble them? Will the success in life they have turned them into faithful stewards of the gifts that God has given them? That's the test. And those are the options. One of the greatest things about being a minister is that you get to go to the hospital a lot, not for personal reasons but to be with people who are in the hospital. And you can learn a lot. If you don't visit people in hospitals or nursing homes very often you need to do it because you can learn a lot about yourself. And I've seen lots of Christian people lying in hospital beds unable to do anything for themselves. I mean literally at that moment because of injury or because of illness unable to sit up unable to grab things unable to do anything for themselves. And you know people have different reactions to that. Some people become so angry they just can't stand it. Why would God do this to me? Other people get very depressed giving up. Some people still have faith through such things and they're able to hold on. But I'll tell you one thing. I have never seen a person lying in a bed unable to do anything. Who looks up at me and says, don't worry about it. I can take care of this because when you're lying in bed unable to move you know just how impotent you are. You know how much you depend on the circumstances around you. You know whether you believe in God or not that you are depending upon something outside of you to make this thing happen. You don't lie there unable to move and say, I can take care of this. Yet what happens in the hospital is actually not unique to the hospital experience. It's something that goes on in our lives every single moment. Have you ever wondered why you have had the great successes in life that you have? You know a lot of that is not because of your efforts. A lot of it is not because you have been disciplined or you have worked hard. A lot of it is simply the fact that you were born in this country. A lot of it is simply the fact that you heard about the Christian faith and you developed a work ethic out of that morality. A lot of it is because you live in a place that has a fairly good legal system. A lot of it is because you live in a country that has not experienced a major war in over a century. And these things are not in your control. You have nothing to do with those things. And you are utterly dependent on those kinds of human circumstances but even more upon the circumstance of God's will over you. That's why the apostle begins this passage in verse 7 this way, for who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive and if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you did not? That's the remedy. The remedy to dealing with the successes that we have in this church and do we have successes? We have so much money, we have so much understanding of the Christian faith, we have so much status in society here in East Memphis. That the great temptation is to see that as God's hand of approval on us, rather than seeing it as God's test of us to see what kind of people we actually are. But what do you have as a church? What do you have as a family that has not been given to you? And do you not realize that the God of heaven and earth is looking to see what you as individuals and as families and what this church is going to do with the success that it has had? Success is by no means the demonstration that God is just perfectly happy with us. Success means new opportunities for you to prove where your heart really is. Now the Apostle Paul does something in this passage that's really unusual in the Bible. He becomes terribly sarcastic. Did you notice it? I mean just so sarcastic that we'd all like to be able to do that, wouldn't we? Because he talks to them about their success and how they feel like they're already kings and they don't need anything, everything's just fine. And that had led them to the point that in their church they began to feel superior to other Christians. Oh I've got knowledge that fits me up above you. Oh I've got money that puts me up above you. Oh I have social status that puts me up above you. Oh I can do a miracle that puts me up above you. And the Apostle Paul looks at them and says you think you're all that. It's a strange thing that you've already arrived and me I'm just an Apostle and me the other Apostles we haven't arrived yet. And so he goes to this litany, it's a sort of ironic sarcastic litany comparing himself and the other Apostles with the Corinthians. Now you need to remember something that when the Bible gives us pictures of what heaven is like and what the new world will be like, at the center of this is Jesus himself seated on his throne. But surrounding Jesus are 24 thrones smaller but nevertheless right there front row. And those 24 thrones represent the 12 patriarchs of Israel and probably the 12 Apostles of Jesus. Now these are people who will one day be right on the front row of the heavenly court in the new creation. They are people whom we admire and whom we adore. But the Apostle Paul says things are different for us than they are for you Corinthians. Think about it for just a minute. Why do people admire the Apostle Paul? I mean why are so many cathedrals in the world named Saint Paul? Why are there even Presbyterian churches named Saint Paul? Why would we do this? I mean what do we like so much about him? Oh I suppose if we were to list off some things we'd say things like well he was a deep thinker. Oh he was so intellectual. He knew philosophy. He could handle himself right there in Athens. Nobody could get the best of him. He was a great traveler and he had great gusto and fire. He was the one who wrote most of the New Testament in fact. I mean you know you've got to admire somebody that can do that yes. That he went as a Christian right to Rome and that's really something.
Now those are good reasons to admire the Apostle Paul. But when you think about all the Apostles various Apostles went different ways and did different things. Some of them wrote some of them didn't as far as we know. Some of them had great successes. Some didn't have great successes. Some we know about and some we don't. But we do know one thing about most if not all of the Apostles of Jesus Christ who will one day be on those twelve thrones. Do you know what we know about them? They all experienced trouble. They had troubled lives. And isn't that true of the man who sits in the middle of them? Jesus himself who voluntarily put himself into trouble to the point of dying on a cross and is up there now waiting to come back down here because he was so faithful in all of his sufferings well the same was true of the twelve as well. And so the Apostle Paul goes through this litany. Listen again to what he says to these people who thought they had it all together and who therefore were blessed by God and approved of by God. Listen to what he says beginning in verse 9. For it seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession like men condemned to die in the arena. We have been made as spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men. We are fools for Christ but you are so wise in Christ. We are weak but you are strong. You are honored and we are dishonored to this very hour. We apostles go hungry and thirsty. We are in rags. We are brutally treated. We are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. When we are cursed we bless. When we are persecuted we endure it. When we are slandered we answer kindly. Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world. If such people walked in here today you would not admire them. You know what label we put on them. A bunch of losers. If they really knew what they would do. If they really understand what it meant to be an apostle they would be as successful as we are. Wouldn't we? When you think about churches today and you think about even the way Christians, well meaning Christians, envision the movement of the Holy Spirit in a church. These are the kinds of things you normally get. These are the churches where the Holy Spirit is really doing something. They would be churches that promise people health and wealth. That if you just come to our church and pray this prayer, make an offering, those kinds of things that will make you healthy. We will heal your diseases and we will even make sure that God is going to give you lots of money because everybody ought to be rich. That is one kind of church in our country today where people think the Holy Spirit is moving. Not here of course. There is another kind of church where people would say the Holy Spirit is moving and that would be a church where theology is taught. I mean really serious theology. You know where they talk about catechisms and creeds and systematic theologies and this doctrine and that doctrine. They line them all up and they feel like yeah this is what the Holy Spirit does. He teaches us lots of good things. We are deep thinkers. And then there are those churches that believe that where the Holy Spirit is working in the church, that church will necessarily just be gigantic. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people will be coming and if they are not then the Holy Spirit is not working. I want to tell you something on the basis of the model of the apostles. All those things might be true in churches and they can be the movement of Holy Spirit in churches that God does great things for people's personal lives. That he teaches in theology that he grows churches numerically but they do not mark off the church. They do not demonstrate that a church has the movement of Holy Spirit within it but I will tell you what does mark off a church like that. It is a church that knows trouble in this world. It is a church that knows suffering in this world. One time Jesus looked at his disciples and he said the world hates me. Do you think they are going to like you? Then why do they like us so much? Except that we have accepted their standards for what it means to be an approved, good person. And what is that? Be smart, be successful, have the right social status, get the right amount of money, and you are a good person. But not in Christianity. From the first century all the way up into our day, the number one thing that has characterized the church of Jesus Christ when Holy Spirit has been moving is that the church of Jesus Christ has suffered at the hands of the world. Even when they were growing numerically, even when they were seeing great miracles, even when they were learning true doctrine, even when they were making money, they were suffering at the hands of the world. Rather than thinking of the Apostle Paul as a person who wrote all these books and did all these traveling and was so smart. We all to admire him for what he tells us here, that he is like a soldier who had gone off to war and was wounded, not just once, not just twice, but over and over and left for dead, over and over, and mocked by his enemies, over and over, and spent his entire life in that kind of condition, never seeing much better than that at all. We should admire him for that, and we should ask ourselves the question, what has that got to do with us? The Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians what it has to do with us. Listen to what he says again beginning at verse 14, I am not writing this to shame you, I felt shamed, but he says I'm not writing it to shame you, but to warn you as my dear children. When do you warn your dear children, except when you see that they're in danger and they cannot see it? When you know if they touch that receptacle is going to hurt them, when you know that if they go into the street they are likely to be killed, that is when you warn your dear children. When you know they are in danger and they cannot even see it, and this is what he's saying to them, you feel like everything's okay because you have such success, and I'm warning you as my dear children that this is not so, and then he goes on. Even though you have 10,000 guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father, through the gospel, therefore I urge you to imitate me. By this time the Corinthians had had lots of pastors, they had had lots of preachers, and a lot of those pastors and preachers had fallen right into the trap that the congregation itself had fallen into. They had fallen into the trap of thinking I'm a successful leader, I make lots of money on this, I'm really worth something, and it's obvious because people like the way I talk and the way that I make a lot of money off of them, that God likes me too. So Paul says, you've got 10,000 of these guys running around doing their thing, but you only have one person who is your father, that's me, because I was the one who brought the gospel to you at current. I was the one who birthed you in Jesus, you are my child, you are my children, and I am your father. So those words, in many ways, altering true for us too, even today in the United States, in this day, thousands of years later, because the Apostle Paul, you know, was known as the Apostle to the Gentiles, and most of us in this room are Gentiles. There are people who do not belong to the family of Abraham except that Jesus has adopted us in. Well where does that message come from? How did we hear it? If you trace it back, most of us got the good news of Jesus from one man, one man who committed himself to bringing the good news of Christ to the Gentile nations, that one man, the Apostle Paul, he is your father too. You may have had many pastors, you may have had many Sunday school teachers, you may have had many mentors. They will fall this way, and they will fall that way into this extreme, and that extreme, and maybe even to the same extremes that you and I go into. But you have one father in the faith, one father, the Apostle Paul. I can remember as a young child sitting spellbound with my father, as he would tell me stories about World War II. He could go on and on with war stories, his involvement in the Atlantic theater, as a Navyman, and all the different events that took place on the boats, and how different airplanes crashed in the boats, and things like that, and I was just spellbound as a six or seven year old child, and I would ask him to do it, and then go away, and then come back, tell me again, tell me again. And you know what it would do to a little six, seven, eight year old boy like I was then? It made me so proud of my father. I mean, just so proud of him. This is my daddy. He rescued that pilot out of the water. This is my daddy. He rescued the sailor who was sucked out a hole that a torpedo made. This is my dad. Oh, this is so fantastic. I want to be like him. Now maybe some of you have fathers you don't want to be like, I understand, but imagine, imagine your father, and what he was like, and if he was a good model of the kinds of things that mean something in this world, then it inspires you to adopt those same values yourself. Well, what is it that inspires us about the soldiers of World War II? What is it? It's really very simple. They took the agendas of their lives, and they set them aside, and they took another agenda, and took it on themselves at the cost of their lives many of them. They didn't care anymore about their own personal success. They didn't care anymore about their own personal status. They didn't care anymore about those kinds of trivial things because they were concerned about something else, and do you know what they were concerned about? They were concerned about you and me. They were concerned about their children, and they were concerned about their grandchildren, and they were concerned about their great-grandchildren, and many of those had not even been born yet, and yet they took their lives, set it aside, and they brought another agenda and put it front and center, and went forward into that unbelievably horrible war. And that's why we admire them so much, that's why we call them the great generation is because of that kind of sacrifice that they made. That's what the Apostle Paul is telling the Corinthians. He's telling them, look, you need to take your agendas for your success and your sense of destiny, and your sense of, I've got it all together and put it aside, and take another set of agendas and put it front and center. And do you know what agenda that is? It's the agenda that Jesus has for you. Why don't we do that? Why aren't we eager to do that? It's because when you compare this agenda with that agenda, you notice something about the one that Jesus gives you. He expects you to be like him, and he expects you to be like the Apostle Paul. He expects you to realize that to be faithful to him means your life will be filled with trouble, problems, pain, given to you by the world. And you will be volunteering for it. No wonder we don't want it. But it's the way of eternal salvation. Most of us in this room are not being called upon to become the kinds of scum of the earth that the Apostle Paul had become. Most of us are never going to be beaten physically for our faith. Most of us are barely going to experience anything like that. And I doubt seriously that anyone in this room will be martyred. But I can guarantee you this. The reason God has given independent Presbyterian Church the success it has had over the last decades is for this purpose today to find out what kind of people we really are. Will we look at the success that you have had and treat it as blanket approval? No need to do anything different. Just keep it going like the Corinthians were. I need nothing. Or will we take the successes that he's given to us personally and as families and as a church and ask the question, how will we leverage them as resources for the kingdom of God? How are we willing to experience trouble and suffering and inconvenience for the sake of the kingdom of God right here at independent Presbyterian Church? I want to point you in just one direction that I really do believe we need to start thinking about and moving in yesterday.
One of the great things about this church is that it began in the time when if you had a halfway decent building and you had a halfway decent preacher and you opened the doors at 11 o'clock, people would come in. Some of you can remember those days, can't you? You can remember when Christianity was acceptable in this part of Memphis and it's the kind of thing that people would do. Oh okay, you've got a church, you've got a good preacher, sure, we'll come and you know what would happen in situations like that. You could come here great preaching from up here and it was fantastic preaching no doubt about that at all and you could sit in these pews and you could stay very safe and very sterile and never be infected by anyone around you, never talk to anyone around you, never be concerned about anyone around you, just walk in, see the show and walk out feeling like you went to church and people would do that by the hundreds and by the thousands in those decades. Those decades are gone. If you think that this church will experience the movement of Holy Spirit within it and the success that God wants His church in this place to have by simply opening the doors and making it possible for someone to come in and hear some good preaching, then you have missed where we are today. Opening the doors will do nothing. The only thing, the only thing that will work today is for you to open your life, to give of yourself to other people, to allow other people into your life, like your unbelieving neighbors, like your wayward children, like your fellow employees and your employer, to open your life to them. But do you know what's going to happen when you do trouble, trouble and sacrifice and inconvenience? You're not going to be able to come to church anymore and sit there and watch the show and go home and feel good about yourself. You're going to have to talk to people who are in here. You're going to have to actually get to know them and they're going to get to know you and when you get to know people and you interact with people and you reach out to people in genuine love and concern, then you will know the meaning of the word suffer. Why did Jesus suffer so much? It was because he opened his life to people and they abused him. Why did the Apostle Paul suffer so much that he would say the whole universe mocks me? It's because he cared enough about people that he opened his life to them and they abused him. Now, here what the Apostle Paul is saying, I am your daddy. Inventate me. Otherwise, Holy Spirit will not move. You're going to have a chance to practice that today, you know, at the picnic. We're having a picnic afterwards. If you didn't bring any food, don't worry, they got lots of fried chicken out there. Please come. Don't stay out because you didn't think about it or something like that. You can take your coat off and your ties off or whatever and be just fine. But do you know what's going to happen out there? If we go our normal way, we're all going to find the people that we already have a little circle with and we're going to stick with them. We're going to be very safe and not give ourselves to anybody. And the stranger among us will be standing there all alone. I've watched it happen here but not today. Not today because you know what your father did. You know what the Apostle Paul did and we will do the same. You see, playing follow the leader is okay. As long as the leader doesn't do something that's hard to do, but the true test of character for an individual, for a family and for a church like this one, is to follow the leader when he does troubling things. May God give us the strength and the will to do that. Let's pray together. Our Lord Jesus, we adore you because you were willing to endure much trouble for us. And we confess to you that we have taken our success as blanket approval. And we don't want to be like that. We don't want to be a normal church. We don't want to be normal mediocre Christians. We want to be people of outstanding faith. And so Holy Spirit give it to us that we may follow our leader, the Apostle Paul, that we may follow our King, King Jesus into the trouble. Amen.