The cross is the brand (1 Cor. 1-4)

We were handing out some Christian magazines in the area around our church building in Limerick when a woman invited me into her home.  She claimed to be a Christian and she said that she was into ‘the deeper things’ of God.  I am not sure what she meant by deeper things, but I suspect it centered around speculations concerning the end times.  She then told me that she couldn’t find a church that taught these deeper things.  She had visited one church, but they didn’t go into the deep things that she knew about.  So, she went to no church.  She thought that she was on a higher spiritual plane than other Christians.

But I noticed something strange, that I did not ask her about.  It seemed that she did not take the Bible’s teaching on sexual morality very seriously.  She seemed to make up her own rules for living.

That woman makes me think of the super-spiritual Christians in Corinth.  They too were obsessed with deeper things.  They too had a loose relationship with sexual morals.  They too thought that they were too spiritual for other Christians.

I love the way that the apostle Paul opens the letter that we call First Corinthians.  He calls them the sanctified in Christ Jesus (1 Cor. 1:2).  Yet this is the most messed up and immoral church that we read of in the New Testament.  There were men sleeping with prostitutes in this congregation.  They boasted about their Christian freedom and so they didn’t confront a man who was sleeping with his mother-in-law.  The rich gorged loads of food at their community meals and left nothing for the poor.  Yet Paul calls them saints.  Unlike, the super-spirituals of our day, he does not quickly write off the church.

Vaughan Roberts points out that there are four buzz words that are found in the letter that we refer to as 1 Corinthians: ‘power’, ‘wisdom’, ‘knowledge’ and ‘spiritual’.  In fact, the word translated spiritual occurs more in this letter than in all the rest of the New Testament combined.  They thought that they were spiritual, but the apostle Paul did not.  They really showed evidence of super-spirituality.  As the apostle tackles this immaturity, we get to see what true spirituality looks like.

Corinth was a major port and commercial centre in what is now modern Greece.  God had used Paul to establish the church there during his second missionary journey in the early 50s A.D. (Acts 18:1-17).  He had stayed there for around eighteen months.  When he moved on, Apollos became their leader. 

Two are three years have passed since Paul had been in Corinth, and Paul has heard that things are not going well.  People associated with a woman called Chloe had told him that there were divisions in Corinth (1 Cor. 1:11).  The Corinthian Christians had divided around who their favorite leader was.  The apostle Paul had planted the church, so some liked him.  Apollos had taken over from Paul, and he was a more impressive communicator (Acts 18:24), so some favored him.  There were those who looked to Peter (or Cephas), who after all was the great leader who had spoken on the day of Pentecost.  Then there were those who simply said ‘I follow Christ’.  I wonder if they were the most super-spiritual of all, thinking that they were uniquely following Jesus. 

‘Our group is the best because we follow the founder of the church in Corinth, the apostle Paul’.  ‘Our group is the best because we follow Apollos, who as you know is a far more dynamic preacher than Paul was.’  ‘Our group is the best because we follow Peter, who was the apostle who speak on the day of Pentecost’.  ‘No, you are all wrong, our group needs no leader, we are the true church of Christ.’

I am not entirely sure why people are drawn to celebrity preachers, but it can be in a desire to be better than other people.  That certainly seems to have been the case in Corinth (1 Cor. 4:6).  But we need to remember that there was not problem between Paul, Apollos and Peter.  People who claimed to follow of them may have had an attitude of rivalry, but they did not.  Paul points out that himself and Apollos were only servants of Christ.  Their work complimented each other.  ‘I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow.  So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow’ (1 Cor. 3:7). 

Paul wants to downplay his importance.  He doesn’t want to be centre-stage.  That is so different from our obsession with celebrity preachers.  There was a celebrity Christian whose character and style got him into a lot of trouble.  One of the things that he did wrong was to centre his church around himself.  On one occasion he told the other leaders that ‘I am the brand.’  What he meant is that he was that church’s unique selling point.  Their job was to get people into the building.  His job was to present the gospel to those people.  It was his responsibility to do the speaking, because he was better than it than any of the rest of them.

In our day, it is not just leaders that we gather around but local churches.  We have all seen churches spring up and attract Christians to it.  I remember one church that seemed to think that they had discovered what every other church had was doing wrong.  There members would meet you and spend all their time telling you how great their church was.  But that church soon fell apart, leaving a lot of disillusioned people in its wake.  There was something wrong in their spiritual foundations. 

One of the key ways that we build the foundations of a church with the wrong material is to build with anything other than Jesus (1 Cor. 3:11).  We might be attracted to a church because that is where the crowd is going.  We may be promised some new spiritual experience.  The praise might be spectacular.  The preacher might be a gifted communicator.  Yet if the foundation is not being laid on teaching the cross of Christ, then its ministry will not be commended by God on the last day (1 Cor. 3:13-15).  The brand must be Jesus, and Him crucified.  Paul can sum up all he teaches by simply saying, ‘I preach Christ crucified’ (1 Cor. 1:23).

Now Christ crucified was a fairly unimpressive message in the Roman world.  The Jews of that day wanted great displays of power (1 Cor. 1:22).  They wanted a powerful messiah who would overthrow the Roman empire.  The apostle Paul came telling them that their promised Messiah had been put to death by the Romans.  The non-Jews (from a Greek cultural background), wanted wisdom.  But what can be clever about a man being put to death with a form of execution that was so shameful it was not mentioned in polite company.  We can see how foolish the Roman world thought the cross of Christ was by seeing a piece of graffiti dating from around the year two hundred.  It has the inscription, ‘Alexamenos worships his god’, and shows a man with the head of a donkey being crucified, with a man before the cross with a hand raised in worship.  Alexamenos may have been a soldier, who was a Christian, and his fellow soldiers thought his message of the cross so foolish that they portray Jesus as having the head of a donkey.

But Paul tells the Corinthians that the message of the cross is the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor. 2:4-5).  It is the power of God because it changes lives.  Paul will be able to point to his own life as one that his been turned upside down by the gospel.  He went from being a persecutor of the church to someone to loved the church of Christ with all its imperfections.  The cross is also so amazingly wise.

Think of the wisdom of the cross.  In Islam, Allah may choose to forgive you, but he can only do so by ignoring his justice.  If you were in a court and the judge said that you were guilty but then said that he was not going to punish you then the victims of your injustice would have reason to accuse the judge of not caring about right and wrong.  But through the cross God is both just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:26).  He does not turn a blind eye to our sin, but takes the punishment of our sin upon his own shoulders.  God’s love and mercy meet.  On the cross the love of God is magnified as the wrath of God is satisfied.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus was the archangel Michael, but then it wouldn’t be God who is saying us but one of His angels.  Jesus means Yahweh Saves.  Think of the value of God’s ransom price for sin.  The only person who was sinless, and so qualified to be an unblemished offering.  Perfectly human to stand as our mediator (1 Tim. 2:5).  God the Son, and so an offering of infinite value.  When you wonder if God can take away your sin, remember that the price He paid to redeem you is greater than you sin ever could be!

The factions and their desire for deeper wisdom revealed the pride of the Corinthians Christians.  They wanted to be better than each other.  But their attitude shows that they are out of touch with God.  They need to just need to think of who they were when God chose them.  ‘Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth’ (1 Cor. 1:26).  God choses the weak to shame the strong, and the foolish to shame the worldly wise, so when we try to go out of our way to show the world that we are a trendy crowd, with impressive speakers and a cool show, we may be robbing ourselves of the real power of God.

The apostle Paul certainly didn’t rely on style.  He came to the Corinthians in weakness, fear and trembling (1 Cor. 2:3).  I am not sure that he would have been taken on to be the pastor of any of today’s mega-churches.  He didn’t rely on fine-sounding arguments.  He knew that the wisdom of God is the cross, and that the Holy Spirit reveals the truth of the cross deep into our lives (1 Cor. 2:12).  There is a good emphasis on the Holy Spirit in our churches today, but don’t think that the teaching of the church is spiritual if it is not leading us to Calvary.  Like so many of the prosperity gospel preachers that we see making their fortunes on religious television channels, the Corinthians were falling for the lie that we are supposed to have all the blessings of the kingdom in the now.  How unimpressive a man like Paul appears to those who say that there will be no sickness and suffering in this life.  Super-spiritual people always want to walk in triumph, but Paul pictures himself, along with the genuine apostles of Christ, being brought into an arena as condemned prisoners (1 Cor. 4:9).  The apostles hadn’t the message of simply your best life now, but experienced hunger, poverty and homelessness as they stood alongside a crucified Messiah (1 Cor. 4:12).  There is a great church in Denver called ‘Scum of the Earth Church’.  I have had little success in convincing our members’ meeting to adopt that name for our fellowship, but that is how the true apostles were considered (1 Cor. 4:12).  The apostles of the church were not like the flashy and impressive leaders we are so often drawn to.

In the second half of chapter two we see Paul use the sort of words that attract every super-spiritual person.  He talks of the hidden things of God (1 Cor. 2:7) and the deep things of God (1 Cor. 2:10).  However, the context of these verses shows us that the deep things are all centreed around the cross and how the message of the Christ is brought home to our hearts through the Holy Spirit and how spiritual people never move away from the cross, but deeper into the cross.  True spirituality is cross-centered.  Look at what Paul teaches the church at Ephesus on marriage and you will see that the husband is to give himself up for his wife like Christ gave himself up for us, when he died on the cross (Eph. 5:25).  Look at what he tells the Thessalonians regarding being prepared for the days of the final antichrist and he will tell them that standing firm is holding on to his teaching, which is summed up by the cross (2 Thess. 2:15).  Look at how the apostle John defines the love that we are to exercise towards each other and you will see that it is modeled on the cross (1 John 3:16).

Conclusion

There is a liberal super-spirituality that wants to move away from the cross.  I heard one outreach leader explain that he thought that the cross is bad public relations, and explaining that they deliberately omitted the cross from his organization’s logo.  A chaplain wrote in his university’s newspaper that the death and resurrection of Jesus are not the crux of Christianity.  But Paul sums up his whole message as being that of Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23) and says that the cross is both the power and wisdom of God (1 Cor. 1:24). 

Don’t get sidetracked with promises of great spiritual experiences, unless those great spiritual experiences point you to the cross of Christ.  Don’t be impressed when someone speaks of deeper truths, unless those deep truths are focused on how to model your life on the cross.  Don’t buy into the next thing for church growth if its confidence is not centred on Christ crucified.  Instead, grow spirituality as you grow deeper into the teaching of the cross.