Lessons from the Corinthian Church Part 2

The speaker is continuing their series on lessons from the Corinthian Church. They emphasize the importance of being empowered by the Holy Spirit and following the instructions for church service. They discuss the need to be open to the Holy Spirit's teachings and not approach scripture with preconceived ideas. The speaker shares a personal experience of someone being transformed by the Holy Spirit's revelation. They provide some background on the city of Corinth and its religious culture. The Corinthians had a lack of understanding and maturity in how to love one another. The speaker emphasizes that if actions are not done in love, they are worthless. They acknowledge that it takes time for new believers to grow and mature in their faith. They then proceed to delve into the first verse of chapter 11. Open your Bibles. The first Corinthians eleven. There we go. Alright. Praise God. As Adriana said, we're in our series on lessons from the Corinthian Church. This is part two. I had asked the worship team if they would, during this series, allow me a little more time to preach so that we can go into this in the depth that we need to. At the same time, I had mentioned about, you know, I didn't want to take the 30,000 foot view. I don't want to take the 100 foot view. I kind of want to stay at the 15,000 foot view where you can see some detail, but you can't see every detail. But in this first section of chapter 11, I feel like because it is a section where a lot of people will probably just kind of read past it because we don't fully understand it. I think it merits us coming down a little lower to spend a little bit more time being able to see the detail of this section. So I had basically been praying about this all week, thinking about it all week, studying about it all week, trying to discern from the Lord where he wants us to be in this and what understanding, and came to that realization today that this is one of the parts of these four chapters that maybe we want to be a little lower in our altitude on so we can fully understand what God is saying through these instructions. Now, remember that the purpose of this series, I had talked about it being that we want to be able to get to the place where we see the importance of us as believers being empowered by the Holy Spirit and be being used by the Holy Spirit. And these four chapters culminate in what we would see basically as instructions, the most detailed instructions, I guess you could say, on what the church celebration or church service would look like. It's really the only instructions that we have, and what it shows is that the Holy Spirit moving within the congregation and through the congregation was a very important part. It was the most important part of the church service in the first church. Now, people always say, well, you know, we need to get back to the basics. We need to get back to the first church and how they did everything. Well, the first church was full of the Spirit and full of the gifts of the Spirit and operating in signs and wonders and miracles. And if you're talking about we want to get back to the part in Acts chapter two where everybody's sharing everything, then that's one thing. But if we want to be like the first church, it encompasses more than just let's share things. It includes being available to the Holy Spirit to be used in a mighty way for the purpose of advancing God's kingdom. In first Corinthians two fourteen, and this is our theme verse throughout this series, it says, But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. Why is this our theme verse? Because we read through Scripture sometimes and we read through it with prejudice. We read through it with preconceived ideas. We read through it based on what we already believe, and we tend not to allow the Holy Spirit to correct us. Because we get to very familiar verses and we say, Oh, well, that says that. I know what it says. We read through it faster or we get to a place where we are challenged by something and we don't want to take the time to allow the Holy Spirit to teach us something. We just blow through it. We were in fellowship group one time and the topic of first Corinthians fourteen came up and we had, as CCI fellowship has always been, a multi-denominational church. We had some very different beliefs represented in that fellowship group. We were talking about first Corinthians fourteen and the statement came up that prophecy is better than speaking in tongues, so we should prophesy. The interesting thing is that people that bring up that point don't necessarily believe in prophecy anyway. They just really don't like the whole speaking in tongues thing. Well, first Corinthians fourteen says, that verse specifically says prophecy is better than speaking in tongues unless there is interpretation. And there was one guy in our group that night, he said, I have sat here, he was adamant that tongues was not of God. I have sat here and I have read through this three times in the course of our conversation, he says, and I have not found it say that anywhere. And I said, like, I'm sorry, I'm about to embarrass you. And I said, well, here's the verse. Prophecy is better in tongues unless there is interpretation. And he goes, I have never seen that before in my life. I have never seen that before in my life, he says. From that point on, his wife said, he's a Holy Spirit man now. His whole personality became so much more joyful. It was so obvious in his character that the Holy Spirit became an important part of his life. But it was because he allowed the Spirit to show him something he had not seen before. So this is our theme verse, because even though we are not natural people, we are spiritual people if we are in Christ, but we can still look at Scripture in natural ways. We can still look at Scripture in ways that the Holy Spirit isn't able to teach us anything new because we're closed off. And so the challenge to us throughout these next four chapters, throughout this series, is that we allow the Holy Spirit to show us things we may not have seen before, and to give us insight concerning what the Holy Spirit inspired Paul to write. Amen. Let's pray. Father, we glorify you and we magnify you. Holy Spirit, we invite you to teach us your... Jesus said that your job is to teach us, that you would guide us in all truth, that you would teach us, be our teacher, that you would show us things to come, that you would remind us of things that Jesus said, that you would cause this inspired word to come to life to us. So we ask you, Holy Spirit, to teach us. We open our hearts to you. We open our minds to you. Give us eyes to see and ears to hear. In Jesus' name, amen. So some context on Corinth. Corinth... Paul arrives at Corinth in Acts chapter eighteen. It would be a good idea this week, if you read through Acts chapter eighteen, seventeen and eighteen, and see the... how Paul was in Athens, then he moved over to Corinth, and the amount of time that he stayed there. Corinth is about an hour's journey from Athens to Corinth. Like I said before, Adrian and I, with the Raneris, we were there in Corinth. We had been to Athens, we had been to Thessalonica, we had been to Berea, we had been to Philippi. It was a fabulous journey to walk those steps that Paul had walked and see the places where we read about in Scripture. And in Corinth, in chapter eighteen of Acts, verse nine and ten, it says, Now the Lord spoke to Paul in the night by a vision, Do not be afraid, but speak, and do not keep silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to hurt you, for I have many people in this city. Although God had people in Corinth, they were by far not the majority. Corinth was a bustling city in Greece at that time. It's right on the coast, so it's a port city. It is a city that by that time, Rome had already been in control of that area for two hundred years. But because Rome's approach to conquering different places was to invite their religion into the Roman religion, the Roman religion was basically a mash-up of a bunch of other things, and so people still had their own roots in their own religion. So you have a city that is steeped in what we would call Greek mythology. You have a city where the influence for the past two hundred years was Roman mythology. You have all of the pagan shrines, the worshipping. It was in Athens, if you remember, that Paul said, I see that you are very religious by the amount of altars you have in this place. It says he was grieved by the amount of idolatry that was there in Athens. Well, the same idolatry would have been in place in Corinth, and so when the church was founded there, you have people who are steeped in idolatry, who are culturally religious, not just religious in their nature. They're culturally religious as a matter of a way of life. You have these people coming to Christ and coming into the church, doing church service in a way that is different than they've ever experienced before. And it's in that context that Paul is writing to them to bring them to a place of understanding and maturity. They had salvation. They had the Spirit. They had the gifts of the Spirit flowing. They had God's power at work in their service, but what they didn't have was a mature understanding of how to love each other. In all reality, these four verses, what we're going to see is that if it's not done in love, it's not worth doing. If we are praying for people and they're getting healed, if we're doing all of these different things and the gifts of the Spirit are flowing and prophecies flowing and all these different things are going, but yet it's not in love and it's not for the bettering of somebody else, if it's just, look at me, something to draw attention to myself, then chapter 13 says, well, it's worthless. Knowing this background gives us some understanding in how the Corinthian people would have thought. And it helps us understand how they acted. We can all agree on the fact that just because somebody gets saved doesn't mean they are immediately the best Christian in the world. We just have to look at ourselves to find that out. I think sometimes we expect that when somebody gets saved that all of a sudden they know everything and they're super mature and the old ways of life are gone. It takes some time to get the old out. It takes some time to be renewed by the transforming of our minds. It takes some time to go through that process of sanctification, of becoming more holy and becoming more and more like the image of Christ. And so with that under our belts here, let's start in chapter 11, verse 1. It says, imitate me just as I also imitate Christ. Now we can pretty much read that with certainty that that's a good thing. Well, if Paul said it, since Paul said it, we know that Paul imitated Christ. Have you ever heard another believer say that? Would you ever let another believer say that? I don't think we would. I think if we heard another believer say, imitate me just as I imitate Christ, we would say, aren't you arrogant? We wouldn't receive it. We'd turn everything off. Every bit of willingness to hear what that person is saying, we would shut them off completely. Because in our minds, we would think, man, that guy is so arrogant. Paul said it. What's the difference? What Paul is saying is, in the measure that I imitate Christ, follow me. Shouldn't that be all of our desires? Shouldn't that be what drives us? Shouldn't that be what is within our heart's desire is that we imitate Christ in such a way that other people would want to serve him as well. That we live our lives as a testimony in such a way that other people say, hey, why are you different? And we can say, well, this is why. Because I have Christ and because my desire is to imitate him, to live like him, to be like him. That's what I want to do. And then they say, that's really interesting. Tell me more. So Paul's not being arrogant here. He's just saying what we all should want to accomplish as well. Verse 2. Now I praise you, brethren, that you remember me in all things and keep the traditions just as I delivered them to you. But I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God. Now this is where a lot of women will go, hey, whoa, whoa. What is this? I don't like this section of scripture. I don't need a man to be the head over me. All these different things. And by the grace of God, we'll get through this section. But there's a point that Paul's bringing out in this. He's not entering into this topic to demean anybody. He's not entering into this topic to enslave anybody. He's not entering into this topic to say one is greater than the other or one is better than the other or one is superior to another. He's entering into this topic of headship. He's entering into this topic of order. Remember, order is one of our five recurring themes. He enters into this topic to talk about order in the church, but not just order in the church, order in all of creation. And he says, I praise you because you remember the traditions that I have passed on to you. Do they? I mean, if they remembered what Paul had passed on to them, would he be writing them a letter of correction? I don't know. This may be one of those verses. I love how Paul is sarcastic sometimes. And in the next section on the Lord's Supper, he gets really sarcastic. I think it's just funny that the Holy Spirit understands sarcasm and put it in Scripture. And so Paul's saying to them, you know, I praise you in this, but there's something else that I don't praise you in. And that's what we're going to see as we continue to read. Verse three says, but I want you to know that the head of every man is Christ. The head of woman is man, the head of Christ is God. Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonors his head. But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered, dishonors her head. For that is one and the same as if her head were shaved. For if a woman is not covered, let her be shorn. But if it is shameful for a woman to be shorn or shaved, let her be covered. For a man, indeed, ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God. But woman is the image and glory of man. Let's stop there. What are you feeling? What's going on in your minds? What's going on in your thoughts? Does this make you uncomfortable? If not, that is fabulous. That's great. It means that we can move together in unity in this. What, God, are you saying about this? The head of every man is Christ. He is our head. He is the one to whom we submit. He is the one to whom we sacrifice our lives. He is the one under whose authority we place ourselves. He is the one that we spend our whole Christian walk dying to flesh so that we can submit to his authority. And then Paul says, the head of woman is man. Now he takes out one word from what he said in the previous phrase. He said, the head of every man is Christ. And then he says, the head of woman is man. What is not in that phrase is every. What is that supposed to say? What does that communicate to us? God's design is not that every woman be submitted to every man. Every man is submitted to Christ. He is our head. But Paul communicates here this headship or this structure of authority that is present within the kingdom of God. And the verse goes on to say, and the head of Christ is God. So if the Holy Spirit had had Paul write that in a different order, humanly speaking, it seems like it would be better if he wrote the head of Christ is God, the head of every man is Christ, and the head of woman is man. But he left it for last. Why? Remember that I said last week that Scripture is understandable from the most basic thing to the person that has every study tool available to them, because it's the Spirit that brings revelation. So in its most simplest form, how do we understand this verse? How do we understand headship? How do we understand authority? How do we understand what Christ is saying in this? Scripture is the best commentary on Scripture. So we have to balance things with the rest of Scripture. We cannot take one verse and then say, well, this verse over here sums it all up, and so let's just pay attention to this verse and forget about these ones over here. We can't do that. We have to take it all together and weigh it together, because in doing so it helps us to understand what's going on. Now in the rest of Scripture, we see, well, let's say, let's start here. In Jesus' time on the earth, what did he say? I don't do anything and I don't say anything unless I have seen my father do it or heard my father say it. submitted to God the Father. The head of Christ is God. Now, is God the Father greater than God the Son? Is God the Father more anything than God the Son? No. The Trinity is equal in substance, equal in authority, yet distinct in function. There is no discrimination between God the Father and God the Son in terms of authority and power. In fact, elsewhere in Scripture, it says that God has put all authority under Christ. And then Paul says, that's not to mean that God the Father is under Christ, but he has put all things under Christ. So Christ has authority over everything and everyone. So Paul's talking about headship and order in this. And then every man is subject to Christ. 1 Corinthians, I want to say 15, is talking about sexual purity and it says, you are not your own, you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. You are not your own. We are not our own. We belong to God and Christ is our head. And then he says, the head of woman is man. There are two institutions in Scripture that God points out the authority of man as the head. That's in the church and in the home. Please stay with me. Don't turn your ears off. Don't get offended. Don't go to sleep because this is more of a teaching than a preaching. Stay with me. We're going to understand this together. The home and the church. God has established that men would be in charge. In the home, the man is the head of the house. The husband is the priest of the home. The husband is the one that is in charge. But that doesn't mean that the wife has no opinion, that the wife is subservient, that the wife is less than a person. There is a companionship and a partnership in these relationships that God has developed. So if God uses Christ as the example, in this verse, Christ is under the headship of God, then we have to look at that relationship in all of its meaning. So if Christ, who is equal to God, is under God, then we see that is God's intention within the relationship between husband and wife. Did you ever think about it that way? Did you ever see it that way? You see, all of this battling. I don't know who's up there in the booth. I'm sorry, but you're just going to have to figure out where I am on my notes, my screens off. You know, it's just. All of this battle between men and women for authority and for, I can do it. I can do anything you can do, but I can do it better. Which was a song and a musical in the 1940s. Anything you can do, I can do better. It was this battle between men and women that has developed. Do you know where that came from? Do you know where that originated? Have you ever thought about it? Have you ever wondered where does this conflict come from? Genesis. It's a result of the curse. It's a punishment. It was part of what happened when God came and found that Adam and Eve had sinned. He, uh, where is it? Genesis three, sixteen. It says that a woman's desire will be for her husband, but he will rule over her. Now let's understand this. What was God's intention in the first place for man and woman? If you read before the fall in Genesis three, if you read in Genesis two, you find that God had created man and he brought all of the animals to Adam to name them, but there was not a suitable partner for Adam. And so God put him to sleep and out of his side made woman. Why out of his rib? What's symbolic about that? Well, let's look at it this way. If she came out of his side, rather than from his foot, she comes out of his equal. She comes out as his helper. In fact, Scripture explicitly says that Eve was created to be a helper to Adam. And later on, as we'll see, as we keep reading in this chapter, it says man was not created for woman, but woman was created for man. What do you mean I was created for a man? Well, I mean, that's what Scripture says. I didn't make it up. Nobody made it up. It's written in the inspired word of God that that's the intention. That's how it was meant to be. It says it in Genesis, in the account of creation, that God desired a helpmate for Adam. Somebody suitable to come alongside of him. So in the curse, in the punishment of the curse, this relationship got messed up and convoluted. But the original intention of God is what we need to get back to. You see, Christ came to redeem every aspect of creation. He came to restore everything that was messed up in Adam. And part of that is the relationship and the place of headship that is supposed to transpire between us and God, between us and each other. Adriana, before we met, I remember she told me afterwards that she had read a book called Me, Submit to Him. What do you mean, I have to submit? Me, submit to Him? I'll tell you what, if you ever have questions about submission, this woman knows a lot, because she allowed God to do something in her. Do I lord it over her? No, I don't have to. Because she understands it. And she has taught me more about my headship as the leader of the home, because she understands submission. But is she under my feet? No. She's at my side, because she's my helper. Does she have the vision for the family? No. God gives me the vision of the family, because I'm the head of the home. But she helps me walk that vision out. She helps me establish that vision in our home. We work together, because woman came out of the side of man to be his helper. She came out of the side of man to be his co-partner, to be co-equal, just as Christ is equal with God. We understand, we don't understand how it works, but we understand that it is, and we accept that it is, that Christ is equal to God. He's equal to the Father. He's equal to the Holy Spirit. We're okay with that. It's in that context that God is trying to get us to understand that that was His desire between man and woman. And so, by the help of the Holy Spirit, we'll get back to that. That doesn't mean it'll be easy. That's why we have to allow the Spirit to help us to understand spiritual things. The other institution, of course, is in the church. Does that mean women can't have a place in the church? Does that mean women can't preach or can't prophesy or give a word of encouragement or women, you know, can't do this or can't do that? What does the verse say? Do you remember? It says, every man praying or prophesying, and then it says, every woman who prays or prophesies. So to me, what this says in its most simple form is that in the church of Corinth, there were men that prayed and prophesied in front of people, and there were women that prayed and prophesied in front of people. But what Paul was trying to explain to them is that it must be done in order. So back to culture. Back to coming out of a pagan background. Coming out of a background where the only example that they had of women in ministry were the women who were in the pagan temples. What did women in the pagan temples do? We don't want to get into that. But in that culture, we can't read Scripture and erase everything simply because of culture. There are principles established in the Word of God that supersede culture. But within that culture, head covering was important. Within that culture, you had, whether Jewish, Roman, Greek, any other culture, for a woman to go out of the house, she went out with her head covered. That was just a way of life. That was an important thing to them. It's not so important in our life in today's world. So what do we take out of this? How do we understand this? Head coverings is not a big thing. You have churches in Honduras that women still have head coverings. In the missionary news that they showed in the Spanish services, they gave a report from the CCI churches in Nepal and Bhutan, and in the images you saw women with their head covered. It's important to them in their cultural context. But what does that communicate to us where now in our culture, head covering is not important? Well, the only women at that point in time that would go out in public without head coverings were prostitutes. And so Paul is communicating to them that you have been saved by Christ. You have been washed clean from your filthy lives. You have been made new. You have been brought out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God's dear Son, and you're acting like prostitutes. What does Paul say elsewhere in Romans? Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. We can bring it into today and bring it into a place where, I mean, don't dress like a woman of the street. Don't conduct yourself as a man that is subject to pagan idols and practices. We are supposed to look different. My dad is bald. For a while he had a toupee. My mom bought him a shirt. It was two bald eagles. And, of course, the bald eagles have white hair on their heads, you know. The one was there. The other bald eagle had a toupee on. And this one says, what are you doing? Don't you know we're supposed to be bald? In other words, don't you know we're supposed to look different? Don't you know that this is who we are? We are not to imitate the world. What was going on in the Corinthian church was that they were imitating the world. They had brought into the church things that belonged in the pagan temple and should not have been brought into the Christian assembly. And Paul is trying to get them to understand not just order, but headship. God moves in order, and His Spirit flows in order. And where there is disorder, it disrupts the flow of the Spirit. It disrupts how effective the Holy Spirit can do His job when there is disorder. And Paul is just bringing it into this place. Bringing it into this understanding there is order in the church. It's not to say that the Holy Spirit can't use women. It's not to say that women can't do this or that in the church. Now, where is the balance? Because in chapter fourteen, Paul says, I don't permit women to speak in the church. So, man has taken that and negated the verse in chapter eleven. By using the logic that Paul was painting a hypothetical situation in chapter eleven because, after all, in chapter fourteen he says women aren't allowed to speak in the church. Well, I think it's the other way around. I think there's something about what he says in chapter fourteen that we don't quite understand and that what we have in chapter eleven is that women were used by the Holy Spirit to give encouraging words, to prophesy, to pray. I mean, in all reality, go into different churches and look at the makeup of their intercessors team and the majority of the people in the intercessory room are women. And these women can pray. I would, hands down, prefer a room full of praying women who pray by faith and by the leading of the Holy Spirit than some guy that says to me, I'll pray for you. It's not that God hears men over women. God doesn't prefer men over women. God just created order. We also have that when Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the temple, Anna was there, said that she prayed daily, said that she prophesied. You have in the book of Acts where they went to and stayed at Philip's house whose daughters prophesied. So if we have an account of women in ministry in the Old Testament, you have multiple women who are prophetesses. So why, if throughout the Old Testament there were women who were prophets, did all of a sudden Christ come and now women can't do anything? That doesn't track with everything else about Scripture or everything else about God's plan. His plan was to make things better. So it's not logical to say that Paul's statement about women not speaking at all in church is a blanket statement, because we have too many examples to say that it's not. So what does it mean? That's for later. We're not in chapter fourteen, we're in chapter eleven, and it's five o'clock. So the simple explanation, obviously we didn't get all the way through these verses, and as we read more we're going to understand more. I would love to have had a whole hour to preach on this, to teach on this in one session, but that's not our makeup as far as our services are concerned. So please come back for the rest of it. Please stick around for the rest of it. The simple explanation in this section is to honor your head. Let your conduct display your heart of submission to authority. Let your conduct display your heart of submission to authority. It is through that, it's in that environment, it's in that condition that the Holy Spirit can move freely in our services. Amen? Let's stand together. To be continued. Adriana was reading my notes and she goes, where's your ending? I said, I don't know, we'll figure it out when we get there. So this is not the end, but let us have this heart. Let us have this desire that I shared at the beginning in our theme verse, that the Holy Spirit would teach us something new. In fact, this whole thing started because I prayed that prayer. Holy Spirit, teach me something new. Teach me something different. And here we are. And as I learn, you get to learn. And we all benefit. Amen? Let's pray. Father, we bless your name. We thank you for this time together. We thank you, Lord God, that you are teaching us, that you are instructing us. You're helping us to understand. We submit, Lord God, everything that we believe to you. For God, we do not want to hold on to anything that would prevent us from getting closer to you. We do not want to hold on to any, any principle that we say you are not allowed to correct us in this. You are not allowed to give us revelation in this. We then make that belief a God in itself. Father, may we hold nothing so dear that when you ask for it, we're not willing to let it go. Help us to understand your divine order that we may experience your miraculous power. In Jesus' name, Amen.