Forbidden Lawsuits
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Forbidden Lawsuits

 (ID: 1628)

Paul admonished believers for filing lawsuits against one another rather than settling matters privately and biblically. Alistair Begg explains that preoccupation with our rights can diminish our sense of responsibility as Christians to exemplify wisdom, righteousness, and brotherly love before the watching world. It is “far better to live as though eternity were a reality and now was just a breath, than to live as if now were a reality and eternity was a myth.”

Series Containing This Sermon

A Study in 1 Corinthians, Volume 2

License and Litigation 1 Corinthians 5:1–6:18 Series ID: 14602


Sermon Transcript: Print

“If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints? Do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if you are to judge the world, are you not competent to judge trivial cases? Do you not know that we will judge angels? How much more the things of this life! Therefore, if you have disputes about such matters, appoint as judges even men of little account in the church! I say this to shame you. Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? But instead, one brother goes to law against another—and this in front of unbelievers!

“The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means [that] you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? Instead, you yourselves cheat and do wrong, and you do this to your brothers.”

This is the Word of God. Let us pray together before we study it:

Our God and our Father, we wait upon the Spirit of God to be our teacher from your Word, so that we do not feel ourselves to be simply influenced by the voice of a man but that we find ourselves to be spoken to by the very voice of God.

As we’ve worshipped you, so we come to this moment, when we expect you to speak to us through the pages of the Bible. Help us to hear, enable us to understand, and give us the grace to do what your Word says so that we might be your people in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation.[1] For Jesus’ sake we ask it. Amen.

The longer I continue in pastoral ministry and the longer I go simply endeavoring to expound the Word of God verse by verse and book by book, the more committed I am to this as an approach to ministry, so that the body of Christ may be built up and people may come to maturity and be involved in ministry, so that we might not skip things that we may be tempted to or become preoccupied with that which may be our hobbyhorses. Certainly, in these studies in 1 Corinthians, one would have to be a fairly brave person to launch in a vacuum into some of the areas of study with which we are being confronted. And so I’m glad this morning that those of us who are regular understand that what we’re dealing with here is not, as it were, taking target areas and trying to address them, but simply, we’re coming to verses of Scripture as we unfold them, believing that God not only ordered his Word in the writing but also is ordering our study of the Word. And it’s already become apparent that God is doing things in our church family as a result of these intensely practical areas of study.

The issue to which we come in 6:1 may appear upon first glance to be divergent from what has been being dealt with in chapter 5 and what he’s about to consider once again in the second half of chapter 6—namely, the whole matter of sexual immorality. The more I read and thought about it, I determined that I don’t think this is the case, but rather, Paul may in actual fact be dealing with an outworking of a situation which the believers in Corinth had chosen not to tackle in a biblical way. It may even be that the specific issue mentioned at the beginning of chapter 5, in terms of the wrong, the illicit relationship between a man and a woman, having been completely disregarded on an internal basis in the framework of the church, it may well be that that had now been bounced out into the public arena and become the subject of an external lawsuit. So the church had then failed on two levels: one, it had failed to deal with matters internally as it should, and then it was now failing in making external what should have been internal and private.

Most of us know of churches where this has actually taken place—where a matter of immorality, as in chapter 5, to one degree or another has become apparent amongst the believers in a church. Either as a result of disobedience or because they’d been misguided in some way, they have determined that they will not deal with the matter in the way that the Bible outlines, either because they believe it to be the approach of tolerance or whatever it may be, thinking that as a result of covering it up, they will be able to absorb it and go forward in a stronger fashion, only to discover that they have been unable to cover it up and that in endeavoring to do so, they have in fact made it far more public and far more disastrous than it ever would have been if they’d only been prepared to exercise biblical church discipline. And so, out into the public arena go the affairs of the church, and the watching world looks on and wonders why it should be so. And the aftershock of that kind of activity can go for many and a long day. And some of us have lived in the awareness of that in the years of our lives.

It’s simply a reminder of the fact that the “solid rock” experience which Jesus described in Matthew chapter 7, whereby our houses could be built in a way that would not topple in the midst of the storm, was going to be the experience, said Jesus, of those who heard his words and put them into practice,[2] unlike those who heard his words and decided not to put them into practice. Those people would look very much the same for most of the time, but eventually, when the storm hit, their house would fall.[3] And loved ones, this morning, when churches become adept at simply hearing the Word of God—paying lip service to it, acknowledging it in some kind of superficial way—but refuse to be serious about it, especially in relationship to sin, then not only will we have to face that issue, but we will have to face the kind of issue that then emerges in the public arena.

The church in Corinth was, as Jesus said it should be, “in the world,”[4] and clearly so. But it had failed insofar as the world was also in it. You remember in John 17, Jesus said, as he prays for church, he says, “I pray not that you will take them out of the world, but that you will keep them in the world and protect them from the Evil One.”[5] And the church in Corinth was finding itself in a situation whereby not only, as we’ve said before, was the boat in the water, but the water was in the boat. And the two areas in which the water had badly got into the boat of the Corinthian church was, one, in the area of sexual immorality and, two, in the area of forbidden lawsuits—failing to deal internally with sin as the Bible said it should and failing to distance itself from the public display of sin in the way the Bible counseled it to.

The New Testament commentator, the late Willie Barclay, who was professor of New Testament at Glasgow University and whose historical and grammatical comments are usually very helpful but whose theological comments are very often dangerous (and I say that for those of you who use his commentaries), he points out helpfully that for Greeks, the law courts were one of their favorite and chief entertainments. If you were living in Greek civilization in Athens or in Corinth and you had a day on your hands, one of the things you may choose to do is just go and sit in on one of the courts. That actually is something that I like to do, not for entertainment, but I’m just fascinated by it. But I don’t think the average citizen wants to go and sit in a municipal court or in some other arena like that. But if we’d lived in the Greek culture, it’s one of the things that we would have often done.

The situation in Corinth was largely akin to that in Athens, and in Athens, lawsuits were everywhere. The Greek civilization was highly litigated. I’m not sure if it was as litigated as American society, but it was right up there. Lawsuits could take place, could be heard in private arbitration. They had juries of forty that would hear suits, and in certain cases they had juries that would be as large as anywhere between a thousand and six thousand people would hear a case. Can you imagine when they said, “Would the gentlemen of the jury please stand. Have you reached your verdict?” Can you imagine how long they went out for deliberation? What kind of Holiday Inn did they stay in, six thousand of them?

People would assemble in the mornings in much the same way that they do in Mexico City, where you have workers who assemble at building sites in the city in the morning, and then they are hired on a per-hour or per-day basis to work on that building site. They may have a job for the day and may have no job tomorrow. In the same way, in Athens or in Corinth, you would find these hundreds of people milling around early in the morning, and people would come along and say, “I’ll take you, you, you, you, and you, and you,” and finally, you discover that you were going to spend the day as members of the jury.

So, says Barclay, “It is plain to see that, in a Greek city, every man was [more or less] a lawyer and spent a very great part of his time either deciding or listening to law [suits]. The Greeks were … notorious … for their love of going to law.”[6] So it was just built right into their culture. Hardly surprising, then, that for the church to live distinctively in a highly litigated society, one of the temptations that the church would face would be to absorb that approach to settling disputes. And instead of doing what the Bible said in terms of confronting one another and reckoning with one another in relationship to these things, in failing to do what it might, it then found itself doing what it shouldn’t.

And loved ones, you don’t have to be too smart this morning to realize that there is a certain correlation between the church in Corinth and the church in Cleveland. And already many of us can think of situations that we have encountered in the past that have come perilously close to this and in certain cases have sadly been just like it.

So, the problem was creeping into the church, Paul was shocked by it, but the Corinthians were blasé about it. It was so much a part of their lives, as was this problem with morality, that it took someone like the apostle Paul to confront them with the incongruity of what was going on.

When there are disputes amongst those who are in Christ, we are to settle the matter amongst ourselves.

Now, it’s important for us to set as a backdrop to this that Paul’s outburst against the Corinthians taking their disputes into the law courts should not be misconstrued as a denigration of the law courts, either then or today—shouldn’t be understood as a mistrust in the integrity or the propriety of the position of law in Paul’s day or in our own. Because after all, Paul himself appealed to the judicial system on a number of occasions—you can find it in Acts chapter 28—and he upheld the judicial system in Romans chapter 13.

However, when you find Paul appealing to the external courts for a situation, you will notice that it is never in matters between brother and brother, nor is it ever with the purpose of accusing a fellow believer. What Paul is saying is that there is a time and a place for everything, but as a general principle, as far as Paul is concerned, there is no time that is right for Christians to go to court against one another. This is the principle: there is no time when it is right for Christians to go to court against one another.

Now, immediately your mind starts to think of exceptions, right? So let’s acknowledge that when you have a principle, there will always be exceptions. Let me, for example, give you an exception. If you find yourself, as a believer, on the receiving end of a divorce decree—something that you have not initiated, something that you have no desire for but that you cannot now gainsay—you will inevitably be taken out into the judicial system, because the law demands that for there to be any dissolution of that marriage, it has to take place in that public arena. Or there may be times when in order to protect the well-being of our children who would be the recipients of the beatings of someone who ought to love them rather than beat them, we may have to go into the public arena of law in order to protect our children by getting a restraining order from that individual so that the police, who are appointed for our protection, may be able to do their job.

But the exceptions which exist—and there are exceptions—do not overturn the general principle which Paul is laying down, which is this: when there are disputes amongst those who are in Christ, we are to settle the matter amongst ourselves. And it was failure to do that which led to their disgrace.

Their Disgrace

If you’re taking notes, you may like to write the word disgrace down. It’s the first of four words that I want to give you this morning: their disgrace. Their disgrace lay in the fact that they were washing their dirty linen in public. Matters which were for their private deliberation, for their private resolution, were now being paraded out in the streets of Corinth.

So, verse 1, quoting Phillips: “When any of you has a grievance against another, aren’t you ashamed to bring the matter to be settled before a pagan court instead of before the church?” “Aren’t you ashamed of doing that?” says Paul. Verse 6: “Must one brother resort to law against another and that before those who have no faith in Christ!” Verse 8: “When you go to law against your brother you … do him wrong.”

Now, this is their disgrace. They have problems amongst themselves which, frankly, they can settle amongst themselves, but by being unprepared to apply the biblical principles of church discipline, they lead inevitably to more sin and to more chaos. And it will always be so. Every time that we attempt to cover up sin internally, we will create a situation that will get out. And when it gets out, it will be far worse than what it would have been if it had been dealt while in. And some of you know that from firsthand experience. Because, you see, the watching world is quick to identify and magnify any inconsistencies in a Christian or in the church. That’s why it makes such good copy in the newspaper: “Pastor does this,” or “Local church member does that,” or “Elder does this.” It is immediately a tag which can magnify and sensationalize the issue. Why? Because the watching world expects that the church would march to a different drummer, would order itself in a different way. At least, historically it has. Not so much in our day, and sadly.

Now, I think it’s important for us to understand as well, as we think of the practicality of this, that we’re not suggesting for a moment that in trying to endeavor not to make things public, that we should be sweeping matters under the carpet—that’s not it—but rather that we should have a due sense of shame and that we should exercise godly discretion in dealing with these kind of matters.

For example, let me give you an illustration.

Somebody comes to you at the office and says, “Isn’t Mr. X or Miss X a member of your church?”

“Yes. Yeah, they are.”

“Did you notice that Mr. X or Miss X did such and such?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Tell me, is that not inconsistent with what it means to be a Christian?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Then what has your church done about it?”

Now, if the answer to that is “Absolutely nothing,” which in the majority of cases it will be, then the watching world looks on and says, “These people are clearly no different from the rest of us.”

And that was the kind of context that Paul is confronting here. It’s really very, very important, loved ones, in a society such as ours. And behind these disgraceful lawsuits, something that we can identify with also was there, and that was that Christians were preoccupied with their rights and had lost sight of their responsibilities.

When we focus on rights, lose sight of responsibilities, then we are only a stone’s throw away from absolute ruin.

Surely the New Testament lays it down as a biblical principle that when we focus on rights, lose sight of responsibilities, then we are only a stone’s throw away from absolute ruin. If you get up in the morning always thinking about what is your right, what is due to you, rather than what your responsibility is within your home, then you will bring to bear upon your home that which is detrimental to the cause. When we awake and think of what my responsibilities and opportunities are rather than what is due me from others, then it changes our whole approach. And the same way within the church. And so it would appear that the Corinthians were preoccupied with what their rights were. And so they had a right to this, and they had a right to that, and by the left, they were going to see that they got their rights!

Sounds kind of late twentieth-century Western culture, doesn’t it? As famous lawsuits are being tried right now to take a ten-year-old boy away from his maternal mother, irrespective of what the background to it is, it is being tried as a test case on the basis of the rights of the child—that in abstraction from what God has ordained, a ten-year-old boy will essentially be able to choose his familial destiny if the courts so determine. Why? Because everybody has their rights! And if I can’t get my rights in the church, then I’ll go get my rights out in the secular courts. Paul says it’s a disgrace. It’s a disgrace.

Their Destiny

And it is so disgraceful because—and this is the second word—they had lost sight of their destiny. They’d lost sight of who and what they were in Christ.

He introduces this in verse 2, the first of six rhetorical questions in chapter 6 that all begin in the same way, “Do you not know…” “Do you not know,” he said, “that the saints will judge the world?” What he means by that is the believers, those who are in Christ, not some rarefied little group of people with names that all sound somewhat similar—St. Michael and St. Andrew, etc.—but rather that those who are in Christ. He says, “If you have been raised with Christ to the heavenly places,”[7] as in Colossians 3, “then as you reign with the Lord Jesus Christ, you then will judge the world.” He says in verse 3, “Do you not know that we will judge angels?” One day, he says, we’re going to sit in God’s supreme court. One day, we’re going to be in the ultimate jury. If we’ve never done jury duty before then, when we get to heaven, we’re on jury duty, at least for part of the time. And we will be in charge of overseeing Christ’s authoritative rule over the nations, over the tribes, and even over the angels.

Now, presumably, Paul has in mind the kind of instruction that we find throughout the whole of the Bible. Let me just give you one or two references for your own personal study.

Matthew 19:28, a statement made by Jesus in response to a question by Peter. Peter has said to Jesus, “We[’ve] left everything to follow you! What … will there be for us?”[8] Jesus has just said that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for rich man to enter into heaven.[9] The disciples then say, “[This is unbelievable.] Who then can be saved?”[10] And then Jesus turns, and he says to them, “I tell you the truth, at the renewal of all things”—when Christ wraps up history as we know it now—“when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel”;[11] this great, amazing prerogative given to those who were the apostles in exercising this jurisdiction. Peter could never have bargained for such a question. “Hey, we’ve left a lot to follow you. We were fisherman. We had a pretty good job. What will we get?” I don’t know what he thought Jesus was going to say, but I bet he didn’t think he was going to say this: “You will sit up there with me, and you will exercise judgment.”

Revelation 3:21, as John on the island of Patmos looks into the future and anticipates the glorious reign of the people of God with Christ. Revelation 3:21: “To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne.”

Ephesians 1:20–23:

That power is like the working of his mighty strength, which he exerted in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, [and] power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age, but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under his feet and appointed him to be head over everything for the church.[12]

And he has raised us with Christ in the heavenly places,[13] and given us the opportunity to share in this exalted state. We look forward to it! So irrespective of our spiritual pilgrimage this morning, as we make our journey through life, whether we think we have status or lack of status, whether we think we are influential or not, we’re looking forward in Christ to a day when our destiny is such that we will rule at this kind of level.

Last reference that I want to give you is in the book of Daniel in the Old Testament, in Daniel chapter 7. And perhaps this more than any other influences the thought of Paul at this point. Daniel chapter 7. It’s important that we have this background, because it’s on the basis of this destiny that he then makes the point, as we’re going to see. Daniel 7:9. We can’t read it all. Daniel says,

As I looked, thrones were set in place, and the Ancient of Days took his seat. His clothing was as white as snow; [and] the hair of his head was white like wool. His throne was flaming with fire, and its wheels were all ablaze. A river of fire was flowing, coming out from before him. Thousands upon thousands attended him; ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him. The court was seated, and the books were opened.

“The court was seated, and the books were opened.” And who will preside in this court but those who are the saints in the Lord Jesus Christ?

So, Paul writes to these believers and he says, “What an unbelievable disgraceful situation you’ve got yourself into. You are looking forward to the day when you will judge the cosmos. You are looking forward to the day when with Christ you will share in the judgment of angels. Don’t you think, then, that you can settle some of these comparatively trivial matters which are arising amongst you?” That’s verse 2: “If you are to judge the world, aren’t you competent to judge trivial cases?”

Well, the answer to that is clearly yes, of course we are. If we’re going to share in the judgment of the entire cosmos, don’t you think we can sort out disputes amongst ourselves? Yes, of course we can. Why don’t we? Because it’s painful. Because it’s difficult. Because it’s unpalatable. Because it’s unacceptable. Because we’ve so been coerced by the thinking of our world that we have no right to interfere in anybody else’s life that we fail to do what the Bible says we must do if our house is to be built on a solid rock. And then, failing to do that, where do we find ourselves? We find ourselves out in the public arena, like every other Tom, Dick, and Harry, trying cases in front of pagan judges. It’s a disgrace! It is a disgrace posited on a loss of destiny.

Verse 5, look at it: “Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute [among] believers?” He says, “I mean, don’t you have one person in your church that’s smart enough to handle this? Don’t you have somebody that is submissive enough to the Bible and to the teaching of the Spirit of God to be able to tackle it?” Indeed, he says somewhat ironically, in a very difficult verse, “If you have disputes,” verse 4, “about such matters, appoint as judges even men of little account in the church!” What does he mean by that? My best shot at it is this: what he’s saying is, the people of “little account”—even people of apparently little account—who seek the counsel of God’s Word and God’s Spirit, they’re much more competent to judge these matters among believers than is the most brilliant unbelieving judge who is devoid of divine truth.

You remember when they brought the issues before the Roman authorities, even the Roman authorities understood this. When they found that the Jews were disputing about things, the Roman authorities would often say, “This is not for us to judge. This is an internal matter. Why are you bringing it to me?” And Judaism took very, very few things, if any, beyond the orb of its own environment. It was the Greeks who were guilty of this. And the Greek influence on the church was so vast that the church had just been sucked into it. Therefore, they thought nothing of it, in the same way that many of us here this morning think nothing of it. But if we’re going to be true to the Scripture, we’ll be thinking something of it as a result of looking at 1 Corinthians 6:1–9.

Do you have any pending lawsuits against a believer in Christ? What happened? Did somebody borrow your car and take the wheels off and give you it back with no wheels? Well, what are you going to do? Go to the Cuyahoga court and let the watching world see the nonsense of “How do I get my four wheels back?” “No wheels on my Chevy, and I’m not rolling along”?[14] A kind of de-Hollywood version of Wapner. You say, “Well, it’s not for anything trivial like that.” Well, what’s it for? Do you have it in your drawer? Are you planning to execute a writ against a believer? Well, what does 1 Corinthians 6 say? It says it shouldn’t be done. Actually, it says it needn’t be done.

You see, lawsuits have as their focus securing the verdict in our favor, right? It’s the whole point of a lawsuit. You seek to gain a verdict in your favor. And so these believers in Corinth were preoccupied with getting victories over those who were their brothers and sisters in Christ.

Their Defeat

That brings us to our third and penultimate word. It is the word defeat. There’s a disgrace in these lawsuits, they’ve forgotten their destiny, and while their preoccupation is with victory, they’re actually defeated. Verse 7: “The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means [that] you[’ve] been completed defeated already.”

Back in 1:30, Paul had made it clear that the believers in Corinth were supposed to be shaming the wise and the strong by the quality of their community life. “It is because of him”—1:30—“that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, [our] holiness and [our] redemption.” He had addressed them right in the opening section of it, that they had been “called to be saints”[15] together in God—1:2. In chapter 12, which we will eventually come to, and in verse 8, he points out to them that they are united with one another through the one Spirit and that in their union with one another, God’s grace and his power and his love is manifested.

And so they’re a sorry sight. Because just when they have a notion that they are supposed to be manifesting wisdom and righteousness and brotherly love and commitment to each other, they’re marching out before the watching world, they’re giving in to bitterness and to resentment and to pride. And sure, they’re winning their lawsuits! You can get the newspaper and look it up, and there it says, “Mr. X secured a verdict in his favor against Mr. Y.” “But,” says Paul, “whatever they wrote on the tablet in the public arena concerning your apparent victory, I want you to know that the very fact that you had a lawsuit means that you’re totally defeated. You may have won something for now, but you’ve lost something big for then. You may have secured a verdict before the world, but before the bar of God’s judgment, it registers defeat.”

Something is seriously wrong when the people of God will not sort out differences amongst themselves. Leon Morris says, “To go to law with a brother is already to incur defeat, whatever the result of the legal process.”[16] Whenever you or I engage in lawsuits against one another, who are in the body of Christ together, we engage ourselves in defeat—no matter what appears in the Plain Dealer during the week.

A Brand-New Society

That brings me to my final word. There is disgrace because they’ve missed their destiny. There is a defeat that they don’t even see. And what lies behind it all? They have forgotten the recurring theme that has been in these past verses: that the church of Jesus Christ is not a patched-up society, but it’s a brand-new society. When the believers in Corinth tolerated wrongdoing and cheating, as in verse 8, they simply acted like everyone else acted. Indeed, he says, they were violating even the normal standards of business and social ethics. Isn’t that the truth? That there are some unbelievers who, out of a sense simply of propriety, out of a desire for normal ethics, out of a desire for things to be done decently and in order, those unbelieving people will put the believing world to shame, because they are able to settle things in a way that we choose not to. These people prided themselves on being kings. Back in 4:8, he says, “Hey, already you’ve become kings.”[17] The fact was that they refused to live by the rules of the kingdom.

It would be far better to lose financially than to lose spiritually, far better to lose emotionally than to lose spiritually, far better to live as though eternity were a reality and now was just a breath.

“Well then,” says somebody, “what are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to just take it? Am I supposed to let somebody go away with my produce, or whatever it might be?” Well, no. What he’s saying is we’re supposed to settle it within the body of Christ. It’s a family matter. Somebody took something out of one of the kid’s bedrooms and didn’t tell them, then we’ll get the children together, we’ll find out who took it, and whose bedroom it’s in, and we’ll put it back together. I’m not going out in my street, setting up a platform, calling in a council of forty of my neighbors to introduce them to the fact that something is missing from one bedroom. Because they would say, one, “He has taken leave of his mind,” and two, “Why does he involve us in these things? We don’t even do that. We can settle the matters.” So when the church takes its dirty linen out into the public arena, the people are saying, “Can’t these people settle this?” You see how important it is that you exercise church discipline. Because if you don’t exercise church discipline, you won’t settle it. And that’s why we have such confusion at the 1 Corinthians 6 level, because we’ve got such dissipation at the 1 Corinthians 5 level. Well, it’s exactly what he says.

“You[’ve] been completely defeated”—verse 7. “Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?”

“What? You’ve got to be kidding, Paul! Do I hear what you’re saying? That I should just… If I cannot settle this in private and the only opportunity is in public, that I should swallow it? I should be wronged? I should actually be cheated?”

Paul says, “That’s right.” Where did he get that from?

Let’s turn to Matthew chapter 5 as we draw this study to a close. Let’s turn to the words of the King, who has the kingdom. Matthew 5:38:

You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you … do[n’t] turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

Luke 17:3: “So watch yourselves. If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. [And] if he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.”

Do you get this? Do you think this would make a revolutionary impact in as highly litigated a society as ours? I’m sorry, lawyers out there this morning. This is no diatribe against the legal profession. You understand that? I’m not trying to diminish your business in any way. But some of you who have attorneys are going to have to think this out. Are you going to take lawsuits from believers against other believers? And if so, how are you going to justify that in relation to 1 Corinthians 6? It would be far better to lose financially than to lose spiritually, far better to lose emotionally than to lose spiritually, far better to live as though eternity were a reality and now was just a breath than to live as if now were a reality and eternity was a myth. ’Cause that’s how the world lives. They don’t believe in eternity. They don’t believe in a throne. They don’t believe in a judgment. They don’t believe in a final verdict. They don’t believe in an ultimate assize. The believer does. That’s why we’re able to let go of things now, because we know on one day, all accounts will be settled. When I live as if I do not believe that accounts will be settled one day, I will be preoccupied with settling accounts in the immediacy, because I have no guarantee of what will happen then.

Jesus was reviled; he didn’t revile in return. He committed his cause to him who judges justly.[18] Our key concern ought not, then, to be to protect our rights but to preserve our relationship with the Lord Jesus and those who are his own.

The practical implications of this instruction are clear. It’s an opportunity for the church to shine in the midst of darkness. It involves you this morning, and it involves me. And don’t let anyone ever tell you that living for Jesus is easy or remote or uninvolved with the ebb and flow of life. It would be a strange congregation if our study this morning in 1 Corinthians 6 has not landed, at least on some of our desks, as a major crossroads in our standardized activities with one another.

Let’s bow for a moment in prayer:

Take your Word, O God, and write it in our hearts, as practical as it is. Help us to understand principle and its application. Save us from applying the Word of God in some kind of wooden way so that we tie ourselves up in worse complications. But while we recognize that in applying the principle, we will acknowledge that there are exceptional circumstances, help us not to employ exceptional circumstances to sidestep the clear instruction of the Word: “Don’t hang your dirty linen out in public. Settle the matters in the way the Bible said.” “Forgive one another, even as God in Christ has forgiven you.”[19] “What would it profit a man if he secured a verdict in his favor in every lawsuit and lost his own soul?”[20]

We come to you in Jesus’ name. Amen.


[1] See Philippians 2:15.

[2] See Matthew 7:24.

[3] See Matthew 7:26–27.

[4] John 17:11 (NIV 1984).

[5] John 17:15 (paraphrased).

[6] William Barclay, The Letters to the Corinthians, rev. ed., The Daily Study Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), 50.

[7] Colossians 3:1 (paraphrased).

[8] Matthew 19:27 (NIV 1984).

[9] See Matthew 19:24.

[10] Matthew 19:25 (NIV 1984).

[11] Matthew 19:28 (NIV 1984).

[12] Ephesians 1:19–22 (NIV 1984).

[13] See Ephesians 2:6.

[14] Bob Hilliard, “Three Wheels on My Wagon” (1961). Lyrics lightly altered.

[15] 1 Corinthians 1:2 (KJV).

[16] Leon Morris, The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians: An Introduction and Commentary, The Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Leicester: Inter-Varsity, 1983), 96.

[17] 1 Corinthians 4:8 (paraphrased).

[18] See 1 Peter 2:23.

[19] Ephesians 4:32 (paraphrased).

[20] Matthew 16:26; Mark 8:36; Luke 9:25 (paraphrased).

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.

Alistair Begg
Alistair Begg is Senior Pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bible teacher on Truth For Life, which is heard on the radio and online around the world.