According to the Scriptures

Guest (Male): Pastor Damian Kyle has this to say about who is so very often behind the contentions and divisions of the church.

Damian Kyle: When you think about Satan, Satan loves nothing more than to have Christians, of course, fighting with one another, and especially from within a church. To watch a church effectively destroy itself without any of his involvement. He just gets to sit, sit on his hands, and he can then direct all of his diabolical attention someplace else because he can look at it and say, "Those Christians are doing a fine job of destroying that church. I think I'll let them eat themselves alive, and I won't even get involved. I'll go begin to destabilize some other church."

Guest (Male): Today on According to the Scriptures, we're going to take a look at the damage on the other end of contentions and divisions that are birthed out of our flesh. In the church of Corinth, the number of cliques that formed around their favorite leader—things got so bad they were on the verge of a church split. That is when the Apostle Paul stepped in with these words we find in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. Here's Pastor Damian Kyle pointing out what went wrong so we don't repeat the same mistake.

Damian Kyle: 1 Corinthians chapter 1. We'll pick things up in verse 10, having introduced the book last time. Paul writes and he said, "Now I plead with you." Now that's a very strong word, isn't it? I don't know when the last time—just try and stop and think—when's the last time somebody used that word in your life? It's a pretty strong word.

It's my impression in the country that we live in right now, that quite a few decades ago, strong words are anathema. People don't like strong words. They don't like words that have strength and clarity. So a person who is a liar is someone who has trouble with the truth, or you never call anybody directly what they are or the use of language. Everybody is so concerned that the language will be too strong for everyone.

I'm glad the Bible's not like that. So this is a pretty big deal. I don't know when the last time you had somebody plead with you. Here we have the Apostle Paul pleading with us and the Holy Spirit behind the Apostle Paul pleading with us. So it's got to be a pretty big issue. "Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment."

"For it has been declared to me concerning you, my brethren, by those of Chloe's household, that there are contentions among you. Now this I say this, that each of you says, 'I am of Paul,' 'I am of Apollos,' or 'I am of Cephas' (that is Peter), or 'I am of Christ.' Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?"

He said, "I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, lest anyone should say that I had baptized in my own name," just to bring people under a special group within Christianity to myself. "Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanas. Besides, I do not know whether I baptized any other. For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel, not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ be made of no effect."

And so here we come, returning here to Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth. This epistle is known as a corrective epistle. Now most of the letters that he wrote in the New Testament, not all of them, but most of them were written to correct some issue that they were mishandling or misunderstanding, some sin that was in the camp or something in the church that needed to be addressed.

So we see that some kind of a contention was occurring even in a letter as filled with joy as the one he wrote to the church at Philippi. The interesting thing about his letter to the church at Corinth is it is corrective from the beginning to the end. This was a tough church to minister to and to lead, and a tough church to belong to if you were serious about the Lord.

One of the nice things about—and maybe the only nice thing we can say about the fact that the church in Corinth was so messed up—is that it produced a letter by the Apostle Paul through the Holy Spirit to be written to them so that all of these things could then be corrected there and then serve as a correction to churches all the way until the Lord returns again. We're in heaven and then there won't be a need for individual churches. We'll all be the church up in glory, all of us together.

So Paul here addresses the beginning problem. Now when you look at something where this church—he addresses problems from chapter 1 all the way through chapter 15. He's going to deal with sexual immorality that they're boasting in, in the church, false doctrine concerning the resurrection, all kinds of things. So you ask yourself, where in the world does Paul begin in correcting these problems?

What is priority one? What is priority one related to the Holy Spirit who wrote through him? It's interesting that the first thing that the Holy Spirit felt compelled to address first was a contention and division that marked the church. Whenever you have division or end division that is then escalated to contention within a church, it speaks to the danger that that is to the health and the future of any local church.

As important as all of the other doctrine that he's going to get to and correction he's going to get to in this letter, none of it would be meaningful at all if the church blew up and disintegrated and split and ceased to exist. So he begins to plug the holes here related to this, the survival of the church, to then address the other problems and to head off this disintegration of the church as a result of contention and divisions within it.

Just so you know, as I'm heading through in teaching this, I have no sense at all—but I don't know everything—but I have no sense at all, and I don't want you to get the sense, that we're dealing with some local situation here in this church. I think that probably when you think about Satan, Satan loves nothing more than to have Christians fighting with one another, and especially from within a church.

To watch a church effectively destroy itself without any of his involvement. He just gets to sit, sit on his hands, and he can then direct all of his diabolical attention someplace else because he can look at it and say, "Those Christians are doing a fine job of destroying that church. I think I'll let them eat themselves alive, and I won't even get involved. I'll go begin to destabilize some other church."

Now it's interesting to me as you look at this 1 Corinthians that Paul does not ascribe these contentions not once in the passage that we just read. He doesn't ascribe them not once to the devil. He doesn't make any direct reference to the devil in this epistle except in later on when he calls on the man who is committing sexual immorality within the church to be handed over to Satan.

To deal with that for him to be turned over to Satan for a time in chapter 5. I think that it indicates and certainly has the potential to be indicating to us that what was destroying this church had its origin not in anything demonic but in just plain old pride and the carnality of man and the divisiveness of carnal man from the fall.

There is that capacity to recognize in our own lives that we have the ability even apart from the devil. Our sin is so fallen and so rebellious that on our own, we're capable of destroying a church. That's a good thing to realize about our capacity, to warn us against our capacity related to all of this. I think the devil must laugh at how willing we are so often as Christians to contend and fight as they're doing here over absolutely inconsequential things.

He doesn't have to even lift a finger in the destruction of the church. So clearly, in light of this passage, the church in Corinth was a church that was filled with divisions and with contentions. You notice in verse 10, Paul's sense of urgency, as we've already noted concerning the danger of this divisions and contentions, revealed in the fact again that he pleaded with them.

What did he plead with them? He pleaded with them to take seriously the danger that this represented to the future and to the existence of the church and to take his instruction seriously here. I think it would be good for all of us to ask ourselves as Christians if we take, as Paul does here, the issue of unity in a church as seriously as he did.

Also, we should look closely at those who always in our Christian life, wherever we would run into them, to view with suspicion or certainly to view with reservation a person who is carnally divisive, carnally contentious, and thinks nothing of walking in that carnality and then introducing disunity within a church. By that I mean, here you have the urgency that Paul felt.

Paul felt this urgency related to the church at Corinth. You remember he spent 18 months of his life, his ministry life, 18 months. Second only to establishing the church of Ephesus in terms of length of time that he spent in establishing that church. He invested 18 months into the birth and the establishment of the church in Corinth, which makes me wonder if a casual attitude toward unity and division in a church, a willingness to divide a church, doesn't rise most often from those who are obviously carnal but also those who have really paid no real price in establishing the health or the existence or the continuance in the birth and the establishment of that church.

So anyone that would do that has a very low view of the church. Not just the church capital C, which refers to all Christians all over the world, but church lowercase c, which talks about a local church. I remember one time I was at a conference and I happened to be talking with Pastor Chuck Smith and a gentleman walked up and he was very, very excited. He interrupted us and then he let Pastor Chuck know that he was leaving his church as a pastor and he was going to go start a church someplace else.

The first words that just fairly exploded out of Chuck's mouth—Pastor Chuck's mouth—was, "Well, what about the church you're leaving?" That was his first concern is what's going to happen to the one you're leaving. Thankfully, this pastor was able to say, "No, there's a transition that's gone on, it's going to be in good hands, all that's been taken care of." Then Pastor Chuck let that go with that reassurance.

That's an example of someone who understands the value of the church, not only to God but also to God's people. I have found in the decades that I have pastored, by God's grace on a lot of levels, I have found that people can face all kinds of problems in their lives. Their whole world can be imploding, every kind of problem, trial, spiritual warfare going on in their life, getting fired from a job or laid off or whatever it might be. As long as the church they attend continues to be healthy and for them to attend, they will be okay.

They're okay. That's what a local church means to a congregation. So to play fast and loose with that as they were doing in Corinth is to play a very, very dangerous game. It is a failure on the part of whoever is doing it. One of the greatest lacks that they have in their life is they have a low view of the church. They need to go back into the Bible and read about what the local church means to God and what it means to His people.

Then if I understand that, I will be very, very careful in how I influence that local church. That's why so often when you have a church split, as this church was in clearly in danger of, you will see somebody who will break away. If they break away under carnal motivations and selfish motivations, they will break away and then typically in the same town, they will start another church. It's almost gone, always gone, within two years, three years at the most, at least the initial leadership.

Why is that? Because why would God hand over a church to someone who has already shown they have a low view of a church and how they've conducted themselves? So Paul has this wonderful high view of it. It's important in leaders and it's very important for leaders to understand. So often a church can come to mean something different to them than it can sometimes mean to the congregation. It doesn't to me, but to stop and to realize what is at stake here when we deal with the church, and especially if we're going to introduce contention and division into a church.

You notice that he pleads with them by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. So he calls for unity within the church at Corinth or within any church, within this church. He calls for unity with the full authority of Jesus's teaching. He does it in His name and that is invoking Jesus's name, that unity within the church is consistent with Jesus's nature. It's what He wants.

Jesus when He prayed on the night before His crucifixion in John chapter 17, prayed to the Father and He said, one of the prayers that He lifted up there was very much in this vein: "Father, that they may be one as we are one." Then further into that prayer in John 17:20-23, in verse 21, "That they may also be one in us, that the world may believe that You sent Me, and the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one."

Jesus prohibited vain repetition in our prayers being offered up to God, empty meaningless repetition, repetition for the sake of repetition. So He would never, ever engage in vain repetition, and yet He repeats this thing over and over again because it so fills His heart, "that they may be made perfect in one and that the world may know that You have sent Me."

So the church here in Corinth, the reason that these divisions and contentions that were occurring specifically here were occurring is because the people that were causing these contentions did not have the mind of Christ, didn't understand the mind of Christ toward the church. If everybody possessed the mind of Christ, it would have brought everyone into harmony. So you go to see an orchestra or a band or whatever it is and think—I forget what the—is it the oboe? I don't know, that the rest of the orchestra tunes off of. So we'll say a tuning fork for a novice like me. But everybody tunes off of the same thing so that we can be in tune with one another.

So this kind of contention occurs because somebody has gotten out of tune with the heart of God and the mind of Christ. Paul brings it out there in verse 10 again. "I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together—and there it is—in the same mind (the mind of Christ) and in the same judgment."

So he mentions divisions there in verse 10, and the word division there in the original language, it means schisms or splits or tears. So dividing, what some were doing was dividing the church into various camps and into various factions. Then notice he goes from divisions to talking about contentions. Now here you've got a progression that occurs. Contentions are mentioned in verse 11, and the factions within the church now had become so hostile toward one another that it had resulted now in open disputes and open arguing within the church.

So if you were to think of the church at Corinth as a piece of cloth, a tear had already begun, but it wasn't yet torn all the way in half. So this church, Paul is saying, "You are on your way to a church split. You are not there yet. That's what we're trying to avoid," he says here and in his instruction. The Greek word for contentions that Paul uses here is the same Greek word that he uses to describe one of the works of the flesh in Galatians chapter 5 verse 20: "idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions," and so forth.

In other words, these divisions and contentions were not occurring because people were deeply spiritual or being led of the Spirit, though they will contend to their final breath that they are. These divisions and contentions, Paul said, had their origin in the flesh and just selfishness and in carnality. So we ask ourselves this evening, am I a contentious and divisive Christian? They exist; they're always stirring the pot, always stirring the pot. "You know, that's a good church, but..." Have you ever noticed? "And that's a good Christian, but..." or "That's a good home fellowship, but..." and they're always stirring things up. So to ask ourselves whether we're the source of that kind of division or that kind of contention within the church that we attend.

Guest (Male): A good question to ask ourselves as we close out another edition of According to the Scriptures. Pastor Damian Kyle has been addressing the damage of contentions and divisions through a study in 1 Corinthians chapter 1.

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