For Whom Are You Working?
Paul gets
really blunt here in this chapter. If we
look at his opening section, he basically levels two significant booms upon the
people in Corinth and the people who have come to fill the void once he left
Corinth. He claims that there are people
that are proclaiming a different Gospel than Jesus Christ crucified. Then, he makes sure that the Corinthians
understand that such people are the agents of Satan, who “even disguises
himself as an angel of light.”
I’m going
to get up on my soap box today, and I’m doing it unapologetically. I am so tired of people who want to make
religion difficult. There are all kinds
of people in the word who live and breathe that church has to be “done their
way.” I do think it is good to have
places of worship and even different varieties of it. I don’t mind the fact that we have
contemporary services, traditional services, liturgical services, prayer
services, healing services, whatever. Do
you know what I am tired of doing? I am
tired of defending the work that God is doing within me because it doesn’t fit
“someone else’s expectations.” Is faith
about meeting my expectations or is faith about my willingness to give up my
expectations and being where God needs me to be?
What does
Paul say in the opening verses of this chapter?
“But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your
thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes and proclaims another
Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the
one you received, or if you accept a different gospel from the one you
accepted, you put up with it readily enough.” (ESV, 2 Corinthians 11:3-4)
We are
saved by one thing and one thing only: Jesus’ death on the cross. We are to be purely devoted to Christ. Of course there are many ways to worship God! What makes a place of worship right or wrong
is not the means of practice but the preaching and teaching done within!
Does
anyone tell you that you need anything besides the cross of Christ to be
saved? Run away! Nothing we do – prayer, baptism, worship,
tithing, etc – can earn salvation from God.
Yes, we should absolutely do those things as a response to our salvation
as Christ has commanded us to do them.
But nothing I do can cause me to be saved. God gave me salvation as a free gift. I can only respond.
I feel
Paul’s pain as he writes here. There
were people coming into Corinth and telling them that if they were really going
to be Christians they had to be circumcised.
There were people coming in and saying they had to be baptized by
emersion according to John’s baptism. There
were people coming in and telling them that they had to follow the kosher rules
for eating or all sorts of other things.
Paul’s pain comes because the Corinthians were believing them. They were listening! The Corinthians believed these other people
and they were trading in the free gift of grace from God for some compromise. They were accepting a compromise that boils
down to the claim that the cross must not be enough. That is a dangerous place to be.
Now, please
don’t hear me preaching universalism, either.
There are truths out there, and we must stand up strong for God’s
truth. But whether I take communion once
a month or every week or every quarter is of no impact upon salvation and as
such it is no reason to not associate with people who may practice differently
in that matter. The same goes for
whether a church uses grape juice or wine,
leavened or unleavened bread, practice baptism by sprinkling or by
emersion, use some version of the Bible other than the KJV or the NRSV, worship
on Saturday night or Sunday morning, or … well, you get the idea.
Is the
means of baptism more important than the baptism being done in God’s name and
by His power? Is the type of bread more
important than the promise that Jesus will make Himself known to us through
it? Is the name on the Sunday School
curriculum more important than whether or not people are coming into a
relationship with Jesus Christ in the first place?
Agents of the Devil
At the end
of this introductory section, Paul is bold and harsh to denounce people who
would desire to make such distinctions. People
who preach any gospel other than the cross of Christ being the only means to
justification are “false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as
apostles of Christ.” He goes all the way
to remind us that even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.
We must be
careful when we draw lines in the sand.
When we draw a line in the sand that is not appropriate and actually
drawn by God, we might just end up doing the work of Satan rather than doing
the work of the Lord.
Wrapping Up the Chapter
In the
end, what will save me is Christ’s death on the cross. Whether I drink grape juice or wine will not
save me. Whether I lift up my hands as I
praise God or not will not save me.
Whether I speak in tongues or not will not save me. It is the cross of Christ to which I must
cling. It is the cross of Christ of
which I must boast. Yes, Christ does
expect me to respond and to let the Holy Spirit work within me and make me a
new creation. But it is the cross of
Christ that has justified me. It is time
that we start taking that point seriously and only allow divisions among us
when people proclaim that salvation is through some other means or even some
other additional means.
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Amen and fully agree john.
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