July 12, 1992
When we’re satisfied with ourselves and lazy in our spiritual condition, it’s time for a wake-up call. Paul lovingly confronted the Corinthian believers about their preoccupation with status, reputation, and popularity while they ignored serious issues of moral laxity. Alistair Begg warns that this kind of smugness can quickly lead to the demise of an effective church.
Sermon Transcript: Print
Father, as we worship your great name, we come to these holy moments when we expect that you, the great and mighty God, will speak to us through your Word—will speak to us because your Word is sharp as a two-edged sword;[1] because we really need to hear you speak far and beyond the voice of a man; and because as a church, we need to know your Word and your direction; and because as individuals, we need to see our lives as we really are. And so we pray that you will match our variegated need with the great, manifold gift of your grace and mercy, so that none of us will be bystanders as we take our Bibles and look to you. And we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We resume our studies this morning in 1 Corinthians 4:8. It is some weeks since we were at verses 6 and 7, but you may recall that essentially, in verses 6 and 7, Paul is pointing out to the Corinthian church the absolute foolishness of boasting. It is really ridiculous for people to boast when they owe everything to the grace of God—for them to boast in who they are or what they are or what they have. And especially in the context of the totality of the church, for a church to become a boastful church is really crazy. Not only is it crazy, but it’s wrong, and it is also harmful.
Despite that fact, as we see in these verses before us this morning, the Corinthian believers had a blind spot. We ought not to quickly chide them for that, for which of us do not have a blind spot, something that we just miss and yet is so apparent to others? It can be true for us as a church family, even as it was for the church in Corinth. Their blind spot was largely this: that they were very satisfied. You could almost say that they were a smug congregation. They were satisfied with their level of spirituality. They were very keen on their leaders, albeit there was a discrepancy in terms of their allegiance one to another. But nevertheless, if you asked them, they were proud of the quality of their leadership. And indeed, in totality, the general quality of their life as a church was something which they really relished.
In fact, if they had been writing an advertisement for the yellow pages in Corinth at that time, they may well have described themselves as successful, lively, mature, and effective. And for all those who like a kind of positive sounding come-on, then this would have been a great place to go. Unfortunately, while one might have entered and found a measure of that, that would not have been all that one would have found in entering upon the worship of the Corinthian believers. Their preoccupation with their own status, with their reputation, with their popularity was blinding them to some of the harsh realities which were actually going on simultaneously. They had a blind spot.
Turn forward one page in your Bible to chapter 5, and let me illustrate this for you without expounding it. We’re going to come to these sorry events, but for now, we just need to understand that they’re there so that we can understand what Paul is doing in these concluding verses of chapter 4. Here is the church that is stuck on itself, regards itself as lively, mature, effective, and successful. The first eight verses of chapter 5 have to deal with the problem of incest, which was taking place in that church. Verses 9–13, concluding chapter 5, have to do with the dreadful issues of moral laxity. When you go into chapter 6 and the first eight verses, Paul has to deal with the problem of lawsuits being conducted against one another. And then in verses 9 through to the end of chapter 6, dealing again with the problem of sexual immorality and the dreadful need for purity within the church.
So, when we look at these verses before us this morning, we need to understand what is about to follow, and we need to understand what has preceded it. Indeed, that is the only way we can ever understand our Bibles properly in any case. Otherwise, all we do is we just drop down into them, and we pick something out, and we talk about it. No, all that has gone before has led to this point, and all that follows emerges from it.
The condition of the Corinthian church was akin to the church at Laodicea, to whom God spoke in Revelation 3, and he said this to them: “You say, ‘I am rich; I have acquired wealth and do not need a thing.’ But you do not realize that you are wretched, pitiful, poor, blind and naked.”[2] They had a blind spot. A major blind spot!
And our study this morning is essentially—indeed, we may summarize it under the heading “A Warning to the Church.” “A Warning to the Church.” It was not that the Corinthians had come to grasp the sufficiency which was theirs in Christ so much as the fact that they had come to be grasped by a sad sense of self-sufficiency. And so they stand, as it were, at the entryway to the history of the church, and they stand there as a reminder to us of how easy it is to regard ourselves in a particular way as a church and yet to miss what may be actually true of us and in need of correction. They are a group of people from whose example we can learn—both their good example, of which there is much, and also their bad. Any church, whether it be the church in Corinth in the first century or any church in Cleveland in the twentieth century, that is foolish enough to boast in this way will do great harm. It will harm itself, it will harm others, and it will harm a generation yet to come.
So, we need to understand that the words of Paul here are ironic. They are, to some degree, sarcastic. And the reason he writes as he does is because he recognizes the gravity of the situation they’re facing and because he has an intense love for these people. And so he fires, as it were, a warning shot across the bows of the vessel of the Corinthian church—firing a warning shot to prevent them from drifting further into peril and perhaps even into ultimate destruction.
Church history is replete with illustrations of churches that were once profoundly effective and do not even exist today. You may search in Ephesus in vain for the great, glorious church to whom Paul wrote those amazing six chapters. You can drive down Euclid Avenue and see the buildings that were once marked by the proclamation of God’s Word and by the praising of God’s name, and they are now closed.
It came home to me forcefully three weeks ago this evening, when I went to worship in the evening in the church of St. Leonard, which is in Bridgnorth in Shropshire. I went there because my sister was singing in a choir that was singing there, and so I went to worship. I wasn’t prepared for what I discovered. I found out that I was going to worship in this church for the only forty-five minutes in a year that it is open for worship. One evening a year it opens for worship! And the totality of it—and I’ll say more about this tonight—but the totality of it amounted to a discussion as to whether it should be used as historical building or a dramatic building or a comical building—who knows what kind of building! Any kind of building except a biblical building.
Now, the interesting thing—at least an interesting thing to a student of church history—is that this was the church in which Richard Baxter was the curate in the seventeenth century. And across a tiny street is a little cottage which says, “In here lived the godly Richard Baxter between sixteen-something and sixteen-something.” If I was a real student of church history, I’d be able to tell you that. But anyway. He lived in there a long time ago. His ministry was profoundly effective, and the man with whom he served was committedly evangelical and strong in his convictions concerning Christ.
Do you think for one minute that when they built that church, they ever thought that we would sit there for forty-five minutes out of a totality of 365 days for worship? Do you think when they set the chancel in place, and they put those lovely stained-glass windows in, and they expended all that effort, and they looked forward to that great day, and finally the congregation walked in, and they began their praise—do you think they ever planned that it would come to such a sorry pass as this? Never! But it did!
And I want to say to you this morning as I take it to my own heart, as we anticipate all that we’re doing—loved ones, listen, and listen carefully: it may take only one generation for the demise of the effectiveness of any church. It can be history in a moment. And one of the great impetuses for the destruction of a church is the existence of a people who are proud of what they have, who would describe themselves as successful, effective, mature, and lively.
So don’t let us look here at 1 Corinthians 4 and say, “My, my, my! I wonder what that meant in Corinth?” Let’s look at 1 Corinthians 4 and say, “My, my! I wonder what this means in Cleveland?”
Three things to notice. Number one: the tension he addresses. The tension he addresses. This is essentially in verses 8–13.
The issue is the vivid contrast between the unrealistic affirmations of the Corinthians and the realistic assessment of the apostle. What the Corinthians are claiming and boasting for themselves is at the other end of the extreme of what the apostle and his colleagues are actually facing. And so Paul says to them, “Already you’ve got all you want? Already you have become rich?” It’s hard for us, with the English, to catch the ironic force of this. What he would be saying to them in common parlance is “Hey, you all think you’ve arrived? You think you’ve arrived? You think you’re already kings? You’re already rich? You already have all that you want?”
Now, immediately, some of us will be beginning to say to ourselves, “Well, you know, perhaps, in defense of the Corinthians, they have some justification for that.” Because after all, Paul has already written to them between verses 4 and 9 of chapter 1 and reminded them that in Christ they’ve “been enriched in every way—in all [their] speaking and in all [their] knowledge.” They “do[n’t] lack any spiritual gift” as they wait for the Lord. He’ll keep them “strong to the end, so that [they] will be blameless.”[3] And furthermore, when you add to that the expression of Paul to the Ephesian church, where he reminds them that they have already been raised and are seated in the heavenly places in Christ,[4] isn’t it just sensible for the Corinthians to say, “We’re already rich; we already have all that we want”?
Well, this, again, is where we always need to interpret Scripture with Scripture. And as we’ve said so many times, in order to live a balanced Christian life, we need to recognize—the Corinthians did—that not only were they in Christ and many things were true of them because of that, but they were also in Corinth. And while living in Christ, in Corinth, the in Christ dimension impinged upon their Corinthian experience, but the realities of life in Corinth impinged upon what it meant to be in Christ. And so much of what was potentially theirs was yet to be realized when one day they went to heaven—and that is true of us. Therefore, it was silly of them to act as though they were already in heaven. Oh, they were definitely going, but they weren’t there. And so what they’d done was they had taken a truth, and they’d pushed it to an extreme, and having pushed it out to an extreme, they were now embracing a kind of triumphalist approach to Christian living—an approach to Christian living that was all glory and had very little to do with what you were considering last Sunday: with the fact that we still face our sin, we still face ourselves, and we still face our suffering. The Corinthians were living as though that wasn’t the case, and that set up a tension. In fact, it set up multiple tensions for them, because there was an illusory element to their lives. They knew that things were not as good as they said, but they had a blind spot to what was actually happening.
Now, the irony of Paul’s treatment is very, very clear. Look at what he says back in verse [8]: he says, “How I wish that you really had become kings so that we might be kings with you!” He starts it by saying, “You have [already] become kings—and that without us!”[5] “Hey, congratulations!” he says. “Well done! If only we could have been where you are, then although you were without us, if we could only be with you, then we’d be kings as well. But as it is,” he says, “we’re not even close to kings. What we’re going through doesn’t have much to do with being kings.”
And verses 9 and 10 and 11, and verse 12—indeed, right through 13—really ring with another statement that Paul makes when he writes in 2 Corinthians 6. You’ll find it in verse 8 and following, but I want to read it to you from Phillips’s paraphrase. When he writes the second letter to the church at Corinth, he says something very similar. He says,
Our sole defence … is a life of integrity, whether we meet honour or dishonour, praise or blame. [We’re] called “impostors” [and yet] we must be true. [We’re] called “nobodies” [and yet] we must be in the public eye. Never far from death, yet here we are alive, always “going through it” yet never “going under”. We know sorrow, yet our joy is inextinguishable. We have “nothing to bless ourselves with” yet we bless many others with true riches. We are penniless, and yet in reality we have everything worth having.[6]
This paradox of Christian living which Paul understood perfectly and which, patently, the Corinthians were missing.
Now, for those of you who like war stories and who like Roman history, you will like the illustration which he uses here in verse 9. For when he says, “It seems to me that God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession,” he is using a descriptive mode which would be readily understood by his readers. When a Roman general won a great victory, he would be brought back into town not simply through the main gate but having another gate broken down and reconstructed in the wall and garlanded and surrounded by singers and musicians as they heralded the triumphant general. When he came, he marched first with his own troops, his crack infantry, his chariots and all the resplendent indications of his power; and then followed soldiers carrying the spoils of war; and, following the spoils of war, prisoners in chains; and finally, at the end of the prisoners in chains, the most sorry spectacle of all the prisoners. And everybody knew without it ever being stated that this poor lot were destined not for jail but for the arena. They were marched straight into the Olympic stadium, and they were then placed to wrestle with the lions and with all the fierce atrocities of the Roman culture of the time—so that those who were captured and taken in that position, in that line of the Roman triumph, knew exactly where they were heading.
Paul applies this to his apostleship. Look: “For it seems to me,” he says, “far from us being able to say we’ve got everything we want, we’re already kings, we’re top of the pile,” he says, “instead of that, we are at the end of the procession. We are like men condemned to die in the arena. We’ve been made a spectacle to the whole universe, to angels as well as to men.” In other words, “The whole of creation looks down upon us, and they see the predicament that we face.”
And then, sarcastically, in verse 10 he says, “We are fools for Christ, but [you,] you are so wise in Christ! We are weak, but [you], you[’re] strong! You are honored, we are dishonored!” And then in verse 11, he sets up this great tension between what they had been saying of themselves in verse 8, “We’ve got everything”—indeed, the Greek in verse 8 has to do with eating a lot of food. The word is essentially satiated: “We are absolutely jammed full of stuff.” Paul says, “Well, hey, that’s interesting, because,” verse 11, “to this very hour, right up until as I’m writing to you, we go hungry, and we’re thirsty. You’ve everything you want? We’re in rags. You’re already in a palace? We’re constantly getting beaten by people’s fists. We are homeless. We work hard with our own hands. We get cursed.”
Now, the whole point of this was that it was very, very difficult for these Corinthians, who, having embraced a triumphalist perspective on Christian living, it was very difficult for them to accept, let alone adopt, a lifestyle that was authentically Christian. Now, let’s just pause there for a little minute, shall we, and think that statement out. Whenever a church—whether it is the totality, let’s say, of the church in the West or a local church within any context that is relatively affluent—whenever a church adopts, baptizes into orthodoxy, a triumphalist approach to Christian living, it becomes very, very difficult for it to accept or adopt a lifestyle of authentic Christian living which challenges the status quo in which it finds itself. Now, we only need to travel a little to understand this. And we ought not to chide ourselves, but we ought not either to evade the potential warning.
Imagine putting verse 13 in your church brochure—a little outreach piece to put through the letter boxes of Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights and through Beechwood and now through here to Solon. Put verse 13 in: “‘Up to this moment we have become the scum of the earth, the refuse of the world.’ And we invite you to join us at 10:45 next Sunday morning.” Now, the very fact that we think it’s funny illustrates the point, illustrates the tension. ’Cause I’m nowhere close to the scum of the earth, and neither are you! Now, the point is not that we all run out and try and become the scum of the earth. The fact is that we get a biblical understanding of what we really are.
Now, if you go into polite conversation as a scientist, which some of you are, and affirm your conviction about the plenary, verbal inspiration of this Bible, you will be regarded as the refuse of the world. So be prepared for it! If you go as a businessman into your environment and adopt a lifestyle which is monitored by the things of Jesus Christ, your friends may not say it to you directly, but they will regard you as, frankly, just scum—ridiculous, crazy people!
Now, where we come to a sane understanding of things is not simply by embracing how the world may look upon us or, either, how the Bible views us but holding the two things, once again, in tension. How the world views the Christian is one thing. How the Christian is viewed in God’s sight is very different. And it is within that combination that there is a basis for Christian sanity.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that all of joy is touched with pain recently. Have you thought about that recently? Do you ever hear the song by Roger Whittaker, the man with the beard? It starts like this:
When they begin the overture,
They start to end the show.
When you said you’d never leave me,
I knew you’d have to go.
And the refrain is “And the moment that we said hello began our last goodbye.”[7] Okay?
So some of you’ve been travelling to visit your family. For months, you’re excited about it. But the minute you give them a kiss and embrace them, you know that it’s only days now till you’re going to give them another kiss and another embrace, and it’s goodbye. No matter how exciting our career looks before us, we know that there is a day coming when somebody will take the keys from our door and say, “Thank you very much, and goodbye.” We know that no matter how vibrant and how powerful we are this morning in athletics, there’s going to be a day when we can’t run that fast, we can’t do those things. And there will come a day when we will have our obituary placed in the newspaper. Why is that? It is because of this glorious, amazing tension that we are not only redeemed in Christ, but we also live in a fallen world.
A lady called Adelaide Anne Procter grasped this with great power when she wrote the hymn:
My God, I thank thee, who hast made
The earth so bright,
So full of splendor and of joy,
Beauty and light;
So many glorious things are here,
Noble and right.I thank thee, too, that thou hast made
Joy to abound;
So many gentle thoughts and deeds
Circling us round,
That in the darkest spot of earth
Some love is found.I thank thee more that all our joy
Is touched with pain,
That shadows fall on brightest hours,
That thorns remain;
So that earth’s bliss may be our guide,
And not our chain.For thou who knowest, Lord, how soon
Our weak heart clings,
Hast given us joys, tender and true,
Yet all with wings;
So that we see gleaming on high
Diviner things.I thank thee, Lord, that thou hast kept
The best in store;
We have enough, [but] not too much
To long for more:
A yearning for a deeper peace
Not known before.I thank thee, Lord, that here our souls,
Though amply blessed,
Can never find, although they seek,
A perfect rest;
Nor ever shall, until they lean
On Jesus’ breast.[8]
And some of you have come to worship this morning, and you just came to a major junction in your life—touched by pain, touched by disappointment, covered in heartache. I want to remind you on the authority of God’s Word that God stands as much in that junction as he stands in all the joy that has preceded it.
This is a tension, you see, that every believer is going to have to face and every church is going to have to wrestle with. Sure, there’s glory, but it’s not all glory. We haven’t really entered into the fullness of all that is ours. We have a wee bit to help us to look forward.
Don’t you think that we need some of these sane people going around? Are you prepared to be one of those sane people for Jesus’ sake? Don’t be one of those people that someone’s going to meet you after worship this morning, and you give them that smug, self-satisfied, glib, standard, conservative evangelical answer about how everything’s going brilliant in your life. Why not just be honest for once? I mean, maybe we could have a service—you know, forty-five minutes a year—where everybody was just totally honest for forty-five minutes a year. I don’t think we would ever go home, do you? If we really turned to one another and said, “How is it?” there wouldn’t be time to go home. We’d really need just to stop and eat here so that we could continue to share the Scriptures together and to enter into one another’s joys and sorrows. So much of our twentieth-century world militates against what it really means to have fellowship—tin cans with four wheels, all the jazz—actually drives us away from the reality of what church is all about.
Well, that is the tension. I think we understand it. He goes on to affirm a truth, but I’m going to leave that. I mean, why don’t I do something really great the first Sunday back, and that is preach a short sermon. I’ve got enough here to keep you well past twelve o’clock. We can run right through the evening service, but I don’t want to go onto the next point until we get this point.
So we’re going to pause in just a moment of prayer and ask God to speak to us, to ask ourselves the question: Are we guilty of a triumphalist approach to Christian living that makes the poor and the downtrodden of our world believe that our Christianity is so phenomenally middle-class that it holds no hope for them? Are we proud as a church, even a wee bit?
Let’s pause in a moment of prayer, and then I’ll lead you in prayer:
Our God and our Father, we pray that you will save us from living in an illusion, from being the masters of unreality, and, by so doing, becoming proud and boastful, unwittingly making the very claims of Jesus Christ unattractive to those who need him. We ask that you will free us from an approach to Christian living that tries to suggest that there is very little struggle involved, very little sin or suffering, and so alienating from our company and from our counsel those who have come to worship painfully aware of sin and suffering and struggle. We’d like to think this morning that we are on the Pauline side of this tension—that we’re able to say that we are nobodies and that we’re in rags, that we have nothing. But in point of fact, we’re really far more on the Corinthian side.
We recognize your goodness to us in so many ways. We haven’t grasped after so much that you’ve given us. We have it as a gift from you. We pray that you will help us to hold it so that it won’t hold us, and that as we live with clean cuffs and clean fingernails and shined shoes in the midst of an environment such as ours, that you will show us what it means to be the church of Jesus Christ in our day. For surely there are many yet who, while attending churches, have never entered into the reality of a relationship with Jesus; who, while singing hymns, have never had their hearts changed by the truth of the song.
Father, we pray with thankful hearts this morning that you will so bring your Word to bear upon our lives in the hours of this day and in the days of this week that we might increasingly leave unreality and embrace the reality of following hard after Christ. Thank you that we don’t do this in our own strength—that your Spirit enables us so that all of our struggle is an enlivened struggle, it is an inspirited struggle, made possible because you work in our lives what you ask us to work out to your glory.
Hear our prayer, O God. May your grace and mercy and peace that comes from the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, triune God, rest upon and remain with each one of us, today and forevermore. Amen.
[1] See Hebrews 4:12.
[2] Revelation 3:17 (NIV 1984).
[3] 1 Corinthians 1:5–8 (NIV 1984).
[4] See Ephesians 2:6.
[5] 1 Corinthians 4:8 (NIV 1984).
[6] 2 Corinthians 6:7–10 (Phillips).
[7] Roger Whittaker, “The First Hello, the Last Goodbye” (1976). Lyrics lightly altered.
[8] Adelaide Anne Procter, “My God, I Thank Thee” (1858).
Copyright © 2025, Alistair Begg. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations for sermons preached on or after November 6, 2011 are taken from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
For sermons preached before November 6, 2011, unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®), copyright © 1973 1978 1984 by Biblica, Inc.TM Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.