AS WE have seen, Paul aims for the Corinthians to make sure that neither fellowship nor evangelism is hindered. And, if we use our gifts as they were meant to be used, that will happen.

Did you know that what we just read was a vital passage in the Reformation? It was important for the Corinthians. It touched Luther and Cranmer, too.
Are your hearts already protesting? “The Corinthians used tongues,” you think; “And the Pentecostals, too. But who did in between!”
What about Latin in the Catholic Church?
At a baptism, the priest declared,
Ego te baptizo in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, Amen.
When the service ended, he said,
Dominus vobiscum — the Lord be with you.
It was still that way in the Catholic Church until recently. It only ended in the 1960s.

The Reformers said, “You must only speak in tongues if someone can interpret. Otherwise, who gets built up in their faith? No one!”

When Luke first played the organ for us here, he was very enthusiastic for baroque religious music, and sometimes played it for the collection. We would all wait politely until he finished, but it wasn’t our kind of music, One or two of us understood that kind of music, but most of us were better with rock music or folk music, or country gospel.
After a while, Luke realised that he was playing in tongues, because what he played didn’t speak to people, so he changed, even though what most of us like wasn’t his favourite kind of music.
I still see his notes in the music books, things like, “This is a nice one.” or “Good harmonies!”. He was looking for music that was our kind of music, but that he could enjoy too.

That is how Paul wants us to think about how to use the spiritual gifts God has given us. How do our gifts build people up, and whom do they build up?

Of course we must build each other up. You might not be sure how to use your gifts to build other Christians up, but you know you should.
As good Baptists, you also know that we should build up unbelievers to help them become believers. They have to be confonted with the choice of following Jesus or of siding with those who crucified him. But they need to experience love and friendship and care from Christian people, so that they will be disposed to listen to the gospel message.

But you may be surprised that Paul also recognises that we need to build ourselves up, and has some surprising suggestions about how that works.

Building yourself up
The unusual bit is building yourself up. Let’s start there.
Paul writes,
2 For anyone who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God. Indeed, no one understands him; he utters mysteries with his spirit. 3 But everyone who prophesies speaks to men for their strengthening, encouragement and comfort. 4 He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself, but he who prophesies edifies the church. 5 I would like every one of you to speak in tongues, but I would rather have you prophesy. He who prophesies is greater than one who speaks in tongues, unless he interprets, so that the church may be edified.
The key verse is verse 4:
4 He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself…
That word, edifies, just means, builds up.

We saw last week that speaking in tongues can cover both natural human languages and unknown language–like sounds, glossolalia is the technical term. Paul won’t argue about whether this means people who can speak Greek, Aramaic, Latin, or one of the Celtic or Germanic languages common in parts of Europe. And he won’t debate about whether people speak some angelic language, or even something that just comes from our natural abilities when the Spirit powerfully touches us.

It doesn’t matter.

If others don’t understand the language of your worship, you are the only person who is built up.

Many years ago, for nearly a year I only read the German Bible in my daily Bible reading. In fact, I read the very old-fashioned German of the revised Luther Bible.
I understood it, but it would have done you no good at all if I had quoted it to you. I got built up, but it would never have helped you.

Did you know that Christians are not the only ones who speak in tongues?

Some Buddhists, some Mormons, some unbelievers and followers of pagan religions speak in tongues.

I sometimes speak in tongues, though I make it a rule never to do it in church.
I was praying one day — alone in the church before a youth night.
I really wanted the Holy Spirit to fill me.
I believed God’s command in Ephesians to
…be filled with the Spirit.
If God commands it, it is possible and it is desirable.
I claimed the protection of Jesus’ blood so that Satan could not slip in and wreak havoc.
I remembered Jesus’ teaching,
If you, being evil, know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?

I trusted that promise, and I asked, and God in his grace did fill me with his Spirit.

It was a dramatic release and relief for me, because I had been searching for a long time.
I began thanking and praising God, and when I ran out of English, I continued in tongues. I had never done that before.

I am convinced that tongues, for me, came from within my own human capability. It was my response to speechlessness in face of the Spirit’s goodness to me.
I am not very confident. I have often struggled with doubts. I have asked myself, “Was your belief genuine when you believed?” “How do you know you really are saved?”
…and all those kinds of questions.

So, for me, speaking in tongues was very important, because it reminded me, every time I did it, that a very definite change had come into my life on that hot Sunday afternoon.

You don’t have to follow my path. God gave me what I needed to build me up. It was a kind of building up that no one else could give me.
One reason that speaking in tongues has become less important to me over the past 40–odd years is that I have grown more, I have seen more clearly how God has gifted me through his Spirit in several respects, and I don’t have the same need for reassurance and a reminder that God dealt with me in that way on that day.
If you are a true Christian believer, you will be growing. You will be changing. You will have experiences of different kinds that speak to you of Jesus our Lord.

They will add up. You will not need to look at one or two big events as time goes on, because you will have hundreds, even thousands of events to remind you that God loves you, to remind you that Jesus died for you, to remind you that he is alive today and indwells you by his Spirit, to remind you that his life is in you and will manifest itself through you if you allow him to use you.

We all need building up, and we all need experiences which speak to us of the work of Christ in our hearts. It’s great if you speak in tongues and are built up by it, but there is so much more that God hopes for us.

Building up the believers
One of the most selfish things I know of is Christians who  just focus on their own abilities, and think how wonderful they are, and have no interest in what others need. We are called to build up our fellow believers.
There are many ways we can build each other up.

When I was on beach mission, there was a girl on the team who was a little older than some of us boys. She drove us all to some meeting. When we got back, we all sat in her car and talked. She listened empathetically, understanding and reflecting our feelings.
That half hour with six or seven of us packed into an old Holden was a truly magic occasion! She really listened, but she also gently challenged us about our hopes, our plans, our views on putting our faith to work.
It was a real building up session.

That kind of thing is vital, but it is only one of the ways that God builds us up in our faith.

Paul sees prophecy as a key factor in building up believers.
He doesn’t expect a smelly old chap who lives on grasshoppers and honey to turn up in a half–rotten camel skin and tell us to repent or God will send bubonic plague on us all.
Prophecy is an important spiritual gift to the church. Once again, it comes about through a marriage of natural human abilities into a spiritual powerhouse when the Holy Spirit takes what you have and uses it to the glory of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

When the Church almost decided to ban prophecy because of the excesses of some prophetic movements, Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyon in France, argued that that must not happen, because he had several men in his church who prophesied every Sunday, and he didn’t think it right to stop them.

Generally prophets have a corrective role in a church.

For example, when our Baptist Churches were facing a big controversy about the training of pastors, the elected leaders started giving way under pressure from some people who wanted to gain power.
The General Superintendent of the Union came to our College Retreat that year, and led us College students in a time of letting the Holy Spirit speak to us.
I went to a quiet place, and three times my Bible opened at an unfamiliar place, a few verses in the book of Jeremiah. Afterwards, I tried opening it at random again, and it never opened at that passage. But three times in a row — there has to be something in it!
I read, but it didn’t mean much to me.
Suddenly, I understood. It was a warning to our leaders, including the General Superintendant, that, if they didn’t hold their ground, we would all suffer.
I shook as I told everyone what I had seen. I didn’t want to deliver that message to the man who was as close as we Baptists get to having an archbishop!

Sometimes God’s Spirit gives us a gift for a one–off occasion; other people can always hear a word from the Lord like that.

But prophecy can also be a word of encouragement, like the word of Jesus to Philadelphia in the Revelation of St John. John spoke the words of Jesus to a little struggling church which had not denied the name of Jesus despite many trials and fears.

Prophecy is sometimes even a word about things to come, like when Isaiah prophesied the coming of Jesus the Messiah, or when Jesus prophesied the destruction of the Temple, or even when men like the Catholic Reformer, Savonarola or the Reformer, John Knox, accurately prophesied what would happen to well–known leaders of their times.

These messages build up Christians.

As Paul wrote,
…prophecy, however, is for believers, not for unbelievers.
That is why Paul said that the one who speaks in a tongue should pray that he will be able to prophesy.

Building up unbelievers
Near our house in Ingleburn, there is an old fibro cottage for auction. It will probably be knocked down and replaced with a pair of townhouses, or a duplex. That‘s what they are building around that area.

Sometimes you can’t get a lot of building done before you do a bit of demolition, and Paul says,
But if an unbeliever or someone who does not understand comes in while everybody is prophesying, he will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will be judged by all, 25 and the secrets of his heart will be laid bare. So he will fall down and worship God, exclaiming, “God is really among you!”

The pride that keeps people from Christ must be torn down if anything good is to be built in their lives.

Tongues is a sign for unbelievers in the sense of that passage Paul quotes from Isaiah. Speaking in tongues of men or angels is a sign that God sends people of strange languages and foreigners to speak to people, yet they refuse to believe. It is a sign of God’s judgment, and the trustworthiness of his word. But it turns no one to Christ.

On the other hand, prophecy, when it is allowed to speak to hearts, convinces people and they declare that God is among us.

A young man came to a Bible Study I was leading, and didn’t have a Bible with him. So I lent him my pocket New Testament.
Later that evening, I asked if anyone would like to share how they became a Christian.
He said he had become a Christian that night. He had been under conviction about Christ for weeks, but did nothing.
When he opened my Bible, it was dog–eared, and the turned–down corner pointed to where Jesus says,
If you do not repent, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place.

Just like a word of prophecy, that word spoke to his heart and turned him to Jesus that very night.
Prophecy is when God’s word comes powerfully to people with the ability to change lives. Unbelievers need to hear that, and know it is real!

Conclusion
So we have seen that Spiritual gifts build up the person who uses them, they build up believers, and they even build up unbelievers.
The thing we have to remember is that, when we refuse to seek and to use the gifts which are ours through faith in Jesus, when we refuse to let the Spirit infill us and empower us, we rob our fellow believers of chances to grow, we rob the people of the world of exposure to Jesus our Lord, and we even rob ourselves of the experience of Jesus at work in us and through us, which means we, ourselves, do not get built up.

Can I urge you: if you don’t know Jesus through faith in his name, please turn to him and believe; and if you are not using the gifts he gives you, please repent and do the things you were called to do!

May God bless us all as we seek to live in obedience to him.
AMEN

Paul speaks to a church in trouble and tells them that he has a more excellent way for them. And it is the same message for all churches in trouble. There is a more excellent way.
I stopped at a service station one day, and a girl was serving. As I entered, the boss called her from out the back somewhere, so she leaned over, patted my arm and said, “I’m really sorry — I just have to see what my boss wants, and I will be right back.” It struck me that she had done an enormous lot of things in those simple words and actions.
That touch said, “I am on your side.” It said, “I recognise you.” She didn’t mean that she had seen me before, because she hadn’t. She knew I was there, she was thinking of me.
Her touch also meant,” I trust you. I feel I can touch you and you will not take it wrongly.”

As I said, she had never seen me before as far as I know. She could have decided to ignore me, to treat me as an outsider, to mistrust me.

And it is a choice. She could have gone either way, and some people would have gone the opposite way to her. But she chose to go the way of showing care. Even if she thought it was the most natural thing in the world, it was still a choice, because she could have gone another way.
Paul is talking about love, and he is not talking about the feelings which lead you and me to feel closer to one person than to another. He is talking about what we choose to do, how we choose to respond to a person.

It was a lesson I began learning when I began school. One of the kids always punched me or kicked me when I was near. One day I was putting things back into the cupboard, and he squatted down beside me.
He drew his arm back to punch me. I said, “Why do you always hit me? I never hit you. I don’t want to fight. Why can’t we be friends?”
He put his hand down, and shook hands, and we were friends for the rest of the year.
I made a choice, and it worked.

Paul is talking about choices in this chapter: choices of love.
He talks about the primacy of love in a world where love is often dismissed as unrealistic and too soft.
He talks about the nature of love in a world which confuses real love with the emotions of the moment.
He talks about the durability of love in a world which expects unimportant things to last and neglects what is vital.

The primacy of love
Paul tells us,
1COR 13:1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Some years ago, I attended a conference on healing at Randwick. I met a really nice Chinese girl there. She told me some of her story.
She was from a Christian family in Malaysia, and was in Australia to study.
“I never understood grace until I came here,” she said. “Because of the strong influence of Buddhism among the Malaysian Chinese, we find it very hard not to feel that we will be rewarded according to how well we perform. It transformed my life to realise that God loves me for Jesus’ sake, exactly as I am!”
If only we all understood things as clearly as she did! Every few days I come across someone seriously complaining that Christianity is all wrong because it gets people doing good out of a desire to be rewarded or a fear of punishment.

How far that is from the true Gospel! Yet it is deeply engrained in the Australian way of thinking. Even we

Christians can drift into such false thinking unless we are very careful.
The Corinthians had fallen into exactly the same trap.
What Paul is describing is Christians who don’t really understand grace. Grace is the active component of love.
If I speak in human or angelic languages, that does not make me more lovable. If I can communicate with God himself, there is no greater reward. Satan can communicate with humans and with angels and with God, but he will never inherit God’s kingdom.
Similarly, neither prophetic gifting nor understanding of deep spiritual truths nor knowledge of God’s ways, nor the greatest of miracle–working faith carries weight with God unless it arises from love and expresses love.

These Corinthians were so proud of their gifts, yet they were almost empty of true love.

I read a sad story, a disgusting story, that fundamentalist Christians have been abusing the naturalist, David Attenborough, because he doesn’t believe in six-day Creationism. They tell him to burn in hell!
Where is the love that Christians are supposed to display? What good is it to understand the secrets of the creation if you have no love, if you are filled with hatred of those you disagree with?
I want to make it entirely clear, that no one has to believe in any particular scheme of creation to be saved, because we are saved by Christ alone, and the proper response to that salvation is love, love to God, love to each other, love to the world.

If we don’t love, we don’t show ourselves to be children of God, our heavenly Father.

The nature of love
But what is love really like?

There was a discussion in a newspaper blog site. When it is appropriate for a woman to have sex — the first date or the third? TV depicts it as normal to begin a relationship with sex, so it’s a reasonable question. Many of the replies were from people who could not distinguish love from attraction, who could not distinguish love from sex, who could not distinguish love from affection.

Paul’s view of life and love is quite different.
As I said before, love in a choice, and Paul sets out some of the directions of that choice.
1COR 13:4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
We all understand what patience and kindness are, but what about putting them into practice? Hard, isn’t it?

As a kid, I was not good at fighting. I learnt to fight with words. If I was impatient, I would snap at people. If I was irritated, I hit out with sarcasm.
I still tend to sarcasm, though I try to keep out of practice.

We have different ways of being unkind. Some people withdraw when things get tense — that’s another of my failings — and rob people of the opportunity to sort out a difficulty.
That can be self–seeking, too. “I will look after me, and I can’t care about you!”

There’s a discussion in The Herald at the moment where one of the journalists talks about how you see married couples who snipe at each other all the time, even when they are out. The journalist wonders how well their marriages stand up under such abrasion.

And what about not keeping a record of wrongs? How many people do you know who say, “Let bygones be bygones?”
But when these same people get into a conflict, how many will then say, “You always do this! You never do that!”? It doesn’t matter if it is true or not. I heard someone say to a partner recently, “You never listen!” From what I had heard of the prior conversation, he’d been listening rather carefully, but maybe just not to the bit that she thought was important.

People hang onto past hurts for two reasons. One is because it’s a way of protecting themselves against being hurt again. These are the people who are into avoidance. The other reason is because it is a way of winning, and these are the people who are into aggression.

There are times when we do have to protect ourselves. There are times when we do need to confront someone with the truth. Love rejoices in the truth. But anyone who hangs onto wrongs as a weapon or as armour doesn’t comprehend love.
What is the nature of love? We all know what it is like, once we sit down and reflect. What is love like? Filter out Hollywod’s messages. Remember the things that really said to you, “You are loved!”
Who stood up for you when you needed an advocate? Who trusted you to do well, trusted you to do even better next time? Who hoped in you when no one else seemed to?

Do we understand the nature of love? Of course we do! We just have to be discerning. Scoop out the dross and you will see the purity of real love.
And that is the kind of love which hangs in there when others desert you.
What kind of love have we received? What kind of love do we give?

The endurance of love
Paul’s final point is that love is lasting.
1COR 13:8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. 12 Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
1COR 13:13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

They say that young people feel they are immortal. When I was in my 20s, death seemed far away; now I often think of people who were my age when I met them and are now long gone. It gives you perspective on life.
Gradually you begin to see life, not as what you have acheived, but as what relationships have you been part of, and how have you dealt with them.

I sometimes read articles about the high achievers, the people who have made it in business with empires built under their expert direction. Only this week there was an obituary of a man who was a leader in the automotive industry. He had been married at one time, had a child, but the marriage broke up.
He said that he was better at business than at being married.
Some others have been through multiple relationships, leaving a trail of wrecked lives behind them.

At the end of life, surely you begin to see that none of these things is as important as relationships.

I conducted a funeral some years ago for a chap who, it turned out, was an extremely unpleasant and difficult man.
His ex-wife and children breathed a sigh of relief when he was gone. His sons spoke of beatings and abuse; his daughter may have been talking about rape.
The funeral was difficult because of the person he was, but it was well attended. One of his former work colleagues had also known my father, so we got talking. This man told me that he hadn’t liked the bloke who had died, but he came to support the family. It seemed that that was why most of the people were there.

Talk about gaining the world and losing your soul! He may have been good at his work, but he lost everyone.

And that’s what Paul is telling the Corinthians. They need to put away their childish boasting about what they have achieve. They need to forget about emphasising their gifts, the frequency with which they speak in tongues, the number they have won to faith, the power of their preaching. They need to move on from being mere doers and become lovers through and through.

Don’t make the mistake that some do, of trying to use this passage to prove that tongues and prophecy have ceased. The New Testament is not the perfect thing that is to come. Paul is talking about heaven, about the age to come. Paul is talking about the full revelation of the Kingdom, when we are forever in the King’s presence!

Then there will be no need for tongues, because we shall praise God with the angels as our backing chorus.
Then there will be no need for prophecy, because the King will tell us directly what his will is.
Then there will be no place for hope, because what we hope for will have come.
And then there will not even be a place for faith, because
faith is the substance of things unseen,
and we will already see face to face!
But love — love endures forever.

Conclusion
Paul wants these Corinthians to build their fellowship and to ensure that the gospel is not hindered by how they behave.
What better way is there, than the way of love? God is love, and his children must display love.
Conflict burns its way through a fellowship, and it could all be solved in a moment by an outbreak of love.

Churches split, and the reason is that people pursue power and control rather than love.

Some blame divisions on doctrine, but differences in doctrine are only ever a problem if people fail to love.
If we want to build fellowship, we will do it through love; if we want to build strength, it will come through being known for our love; if we aim to touch our world, we will do it best through love.
The world around us doesn’t have a lot of experience of love. It understands affection, it is good on lust, but enduring love, love for the unlovely, love that lasts to the coming age — it needs to see that. It needs to see that it is real among God’s people, and then it will trust that we tell the truth when we offer it to them. Let’s choose to love!
AMEN

BRACE YOURSELVES for this news: if you are a Christian, you are charismatic. If you are not charismatic, you are not a Christian, because Christians are gifted by the Holy Spirit.

Charismatic
Some Church–goers would have walked out by now, because “Charismatic” has become a dirty word.
But we are governed by the Bible, not by the customs and prejudices of a few troubled people. And God”s Word declares it. It tells us without a shadow of doubt:
…no one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” except by the Holy Spirit.
12:4 There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. 6 There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.
12:7 Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.
If you declare that Jesus is Lord, and if you believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you shall be saved. Isn’t that true? Can you say, “Amen!” to that?
So, how do you get to saying, “Jesus is Lord!”? Isn’t it the work of the Holy Spirit?
And this is the same Spirit who distributes different kinds of gifts, as we just heard. Gifts is the English word which translates the Greek, charismata. We get the word, charismatic, from the same root.
We also read that each one, each person who declares, “Jesus is Lord!” has received a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

Look closely at that sentence again.

To each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given…

There it is again. Gifts. A different word, the same idea. God, by the Holy Spirit, gifts and empowers his people for the common good. Here are the charismata at work, and we are the charismatics who use those gifts for the common good.

I am not telling you that you have to speak in tongues — we will look at that in a couple of weeks.
And I am not telling you that you must not speak in tongues, either, because that is not Biblical.
I am telling you that you are gifted, you are empowered, and the main reason we don’t know it is because we never try it.

Do you remember when Jesus sent the 72 out to prepare the way for him in the villages he was to go to?
When they came back, they were excited because demons obeyed their commands. Jesus hadn’t told them that they had that authority, but they discovered it when they tried.

I know a chap who loves evangelism, and has a clear gift for evangelism, but he spent nine years in one church without winning more than one or two. But, over those nine years, he healed a split which was over a century old and released the bulk of the members into their own ministries. I think that’s an apostolic kind of ministry, but he wouldn’t have known he had the gift of an apostle if he hadn’t just gotten into ministry and found out what he could do.

Sometimes that sense of your gifting comes suddenly and without warning, but even so, it’s usually just something to get you kick started.

That’s where I think the Pentecostals had something right. Everyone who speaks in tongues knows she or he has at least one spiritual gift, and that is a start.
Years ago, I handed out a Spiritual Gifts Inventory — a checklist where you could work out more clearly what your gifts might be. And it was all about what do you think you have, what do others think you have, and what have you seen working in your own ministry. In other words, it comes out of your experiences and the experiences of others as they work with you.

I want our church to be a charismatic church, a ”little c“ charismatic church, where we recognise and exercise spiritual gifts, because they are what the Holy Spirit has given us for ministry, and we are not about quenching the Spirit, we are not about putting out his fire.

Diverse
Some people are worried that the diversity of gifts, the variety found in a church which has room for gifts, is too much.
But our job is not to decide what the Holy Spirit can do and can’t do. Our job is to let him do his job and not get in his way.
Paul provides an enormous list of different things that the Holy Spirit might do in each one of us.

• the message of wisdom,
• the message of knowledge
• faith
• gifts of healing
• miraculous powers
• prophecy
• distinguishing between spirits
• speaking in different kinds of tongues
• the interpretation of tongues.
• apostleship
• prophecy
• helping others
• administration

In Ephesians, he talks about gifts like being

• Apostles
• Prophets
• Evangelists
• Pastor–teachers.

In Romans, he mentions

• prophesying
• faith
• serving
• teaching
• encouraging
• contributing to the needs of others
• leadership
• showing mercy

Martyrdom is another gift mentioned, and so is celibacy.
Not everyone is gifted in all of those ways, of course. Some have many gifts, some have few. Never envy those with many gifts: it can be a burden.

I have a friend, a very gifted — and enormously gifted — woman. I mean gifted in a natural sense. She does the work she does very well: she is truly skilled at it. Yet she is also very frustrated because she knows she could do much better than staying in that job. The problem is that she is too good at too many things, and too happy doing them all, and she just doesn’t know which one to jump into. Meanwhile, life drifts on, “like sands through an hourglass,” as they say.

That list I just gave you contains 22 or 23 items, depending on how far some of them overlap with each other.

I knew a man who, in his earlier days, was a really inspiring and challenging evangelistic preacher. People were won to faith most times that he preached. But he was not an outstanding personal worker.
On the other hand, some of you might remember an American chap named Fred Schaeffer who worked in Marrickville area and came here a couple of times before he moved into remote Northern Australia to work with Aboriginal people.
Fred was an entirely different kind of evangelist from the other one. He could sit down alongside someone and talk; and suddently that person would be under conviction about following Christ. He was a very good personal evangelist, and led a seminar here once on personal evangelism.

Both these men had the gift of evangelism, but the way it manifested in each of them was entirely different.

Look at the way John David was a gifted administrator, and we also must say that Bruce had administrative gifts, but each exercised that gift in an entirely different way.
So all these gifts are just broad categories. God’s people are a riot of colour, an orchestral symphony of harmonious tones, each individual bringing something different to the entire mix.

We can use the whole lot. We don’t need to fear diversity, because God made it. It is the Spirit’s gift to all humankind.

In fact, people who fear diversity are people who are insecure about their own identity.
When I edited The Australian Baptist, I was often aware of how many Baptists live in determination that everyone should be made to conform. Some worried about clothes, because they thought dress standards were slipping. Some worried about the songs we used, because Scripture in Song or Hillsong was too rhythmic, and rhythm, melody and harmony were all clearly something the Devil introduced to music. Some thought only the King James Version of the Bible should be used…
Whatever it was, someone was pushing it. And anyone who didn’t fit in had to be demonised or deluded.

How different from the variety of expression God has built into his church! How much we need to release into use, because all our gifts are tools for the good of God’s kingdom!
…to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.
For the common good — that’s God’s view of our diversity in the Spirit.

United
This passage talks about us as being charismatic, about us as being diverse, and about us as being united.
Some people just can’t see how any group can be both diverse and united.
If they read their Bibles more carefully, they would understand it.

Paul makes it very clear. What unites us is not our various gifts, but our shared experience of the Holy Spirit.
He writes clearly,
1COR 12:4 There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. 5 There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord. 6 There are different kinds of working, but the same God works all of them in all men.
There is one Holy Spirit, one Lord Jesus Christ, one God, the Father of all.

I feel sorry fo those poor little twins you see where their mother dresses them identically, and you wouldn’t know which one was which. They might look cute, but they are being robbed of their individuality.
Would you hate it if you met with your family at Christmas, and every single person there received exactly the same present?

God wouldn’t like it! He gives everyone something different, and enjoys seeing how each one does something different with it.

But he loves each one equally.
Paul also writes,

1COR 12:7 Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good.

The main point is not what gift we have, but what the aim was in giving it to us. What you have, what I have, is for the common good. That means that our spiritual gifts are, in the first place, for our fellow believers.
Paul takes it right back to our initiation into Christ. He says

1COR 12:12 The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ. 13 For we were all baptised by one Spirit into one body — whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free — and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.

In the Spirit, we might be very different from each other, but the experience of the Holy Spirit makes all the difference, and draws us together despite our differences.

But God has combined the members of the body and has given greater honour to the parts that lacked it, 25 so that there should be no division in the body, but that its parts should have equal concern for each other. 26 If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honoured, every part rejoices with it.
1COR 12:27 Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.

We are not made for division, but for unity, for a unity where each difference is important.

CONCLUSION
There are so many different things we could find in this passage, but I want to draw out some conclusions which you might not have thought of.
We have seen that we have to be charismatic, we have to be a church which allows the Spirit to express himself through us.
We have seen that this results quite properly in our being very different.
And we have seen that this difference does not mean we should be divided, but that we should, in fact, be more united.
And this means that we must not allow ourselves to be afraid of spiritual gifts, we should not allow ourselves to be squeezed into the world’s mould, and we must not let our differences cause any kind of division among us.

When we refuse to use spiritual gifts, it doesn’t matter how many good theological arguments we can devise to say that we shouldn’t use those gifts, the fact remains that we are putting out the Spirit’s fire, to use St Paul’s words, or you could say we are quenching him, as the old translation used to put it.
And that is sin.

We have to stop pussyfooting around these things, and tell it like it is. Any church which rejects spiritual gifts is sinning against the Holy Spirit, and in danger of disappearing.
What this also means is that our services should change in quite radical ways.
We are different — so what? It basically means that God has given us an enormous wealth of resources that we can build with. Every one of us has something different to keep us in balance.
I was talking to a young man who was amazed that, with 15 people, we weren’t turning Marrickville upside down and growing.like mad. “We started with seven,” he told me, “And now, only a few years later, we have over 100.”
As I said to him, it is a vastly different thing, turning the Titanic, from launching it in the first place.

But the fact is that Philip led a great movement of the Spirit by himself in Samaria; Paul and Barnabas, or Paul and Silas, worked  wonders using their very different gifts wherever they went in Jesus‘ name.

God does wonderful things when his people stop being afraid of their gifts, when they stop being afraid to try out what they have, and make mistakes, and look foolish.

You start in church, and what you learn there, you can use wherever you go.

Jan sometimes takes up the offering. I bet that seemed very wierd, praying aloud and getting up to walk around like that, but it becomes s skill, doesn‘t it?
So let”s be charismatic, diverse, united people, and let‘s expect God to do miracles in us and through us!

AMEN

PAUL HATED women. You’ve heard that said, I guess? Is this passage proof that he wished to suppress them? Remembering his comments about women being silent, is it possibly true?

What about the women Paul was quite positive about? What about his friends? There was Priscilla. He seemed closer to her than to her husband, Aquila. He spoke so highly of Phoebe, the deacon, and Junia, the apostle. Euodia and Syntyche, his fellow–labourers in the gospel — he seems quite fond of them. He might have been a man who seems to like women but, deep down, doesn’t. But his behaviour doesn’t suggest that.

So let’s rethink this passage. What is it about?

It’s simple, really. It is about whether women should speak in church, how they should speak in church and why it is this way.

WHETHER
You don’t have to be a Bible expert to work out whether women can speak in church. Yet it’s a big problem for too many people.

Soon after I came here, we had discussions and even ructions about whether women could be deacons. In some churches, you still can’t even get a woman on the nomination form.
I heard all the standard arguments. Women should keep silent in church. Women shouldn’t teach or lead men. None of the men appointed in Acts to look after welfare was a woman.

I did some hard talking and arguing. In the end, even the hardliners agreed that Joan and Gloria had both been doing everything a deacon would do, so we may as well recognise it.
Paul is quite clear here.
When he says,

…every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head

he clearly means that a woman can pray or prophesy in church. The question is how the woman dresses when she does these things.

You know your Bibles. Even if you don’t, you have enough common sense to know that God doesn’t worry all that much about how we dress when we talk to him. So there has to be something else at work here.
Let’s keep this clear. Later, Paul tells women to be silent in church, and this shows that he clearly doesn’t mean that they must not pray or prophesy. You have just seen that he specifically permits women to pray or prophesy.

So what does he mean?

As in all the congregations of the saints, 34 women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says. 35 If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

The word, “speak” can also mean, “chatter.” This passage is all about speaking so you can be understood, and not allowing disorder in the church. So it makes most sense to understand it as an instruction to women not to chatter, not even if they want an explanation of something.
So what we have here is something like this. It is fine for a woman to pray or prophesy in church. But it is not good for her to chatter to her neighbours or to call out and ask questions or otherwise be disruptive.
These were women whose main activity when they were outside the house was to chat to their friends. Most were illiterate, they got very little education, except in how to do housework and raise kids. The best thing they could do when they got together was to chat.

Paul says, “When you come to church, by all means pray or prophesy, but don’t disrupt other people. In the same way that a prophet should stop talking and give others their turn, so the women have to keep from interrupting all the time.”

Paul is not anti-women, he is anti-disruption.

So, ladies, if you are led to pray, pray with all your might, and may God bless us through it!
And, if you are led to prophesy, if God has a message through you to correct, to guide, to encourage, then, if it’s brief, share it in the sharing time; if it will take more than 2 or 3 minutes, see me so we can slot you into the program. And God will bless us through you.

I remember that, a good many years ago, a mother and son often attended the activities of this church. The mother had survived a difficult life by being tough and a bit outspoken. The son was into rules and regulations, though perhaps not when it came to himself. He liked to think he was a bit of a Bible teacher.
Once in a Bible study the son was going on about how women should be silent and not teach men, and how they should be submissive and learn.

His mother let him ramble on for a while, and then she fixed him with a stare.
“Didn’t God speak to Balaam through his donkey?” she demanded.
“That’s right,” said her son, not seeing what was coming.
“Well,“ said his mother, “If God can speak through a dumb donkey, he is able to speak through a woman. So I think you are talking nonsense, and you should be quiet.”

She had a point.

HOW
We have seen the answer to whether women should speak in church, and the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”
In the book of Acts, it says that the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost means that even slave girls — the lowest members of Israelite society — would now prophesy in the power of the Holy Spirit.
In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he says that, in Christ, divisions like male and female, slave and free, Jew and Gentile, all mean nothing when we are all made one in Christ.

It’s pretty plain.

So why does Paul teach that women should only do it with their heads covered?
His argument is complex, and that is why so many have stumbled over it. I admit that I struggle to understand his argument.
He begins with the everyday world as it existed in Corinth around 50 AD. But he puts it into a Christian context. Sometimes we need to look at our world, not to judge it, but to see how to live as believers within our culture.

He is particularly speaking to married women here, because different conditions applied to married women and unmarried girls.

In Corinth in that period, a married woman at the very least wore something like a pashmina around her shoulders, and covering her head.
They didn’t use wedding rings, but that was how a woman showed she was married when she went out in public.
Some married women went further and wore an all covering garment, like some very conservative Muslim women do today. It was like a bag with a window, that covered the head and went down to the ground.

An unmarried girl would wear the same all–covering clothes as her mother, except she could leave her head uncovered.

There were two kinds of prostitute in Corinth. One had very elaborate hairstyles, and wore see–through clothes. Women like this worked in the clubs of the city, where men went to eat, drink and have sex.
The other type of prostitute was a temple prostitute. There were hundreds of these in Corinth, and they shaved their hair. I couldn’t find out much about what they wore. Men had sex with them and paid them money which went for the upkeep of the Temple of Aphrodite, which was built on a high place just outside the city.

So Paul is saying that women in church basically should dress like a modest married woman does, and should not dress like a woman who is available either for sex or for marriage. They should be dressed decently.

He says that this shows their respect — respect for their husbands, respect for the other men in the church, and, above all, respect for Jesus and for God.

So it’s not that men are masters of women, that they are the bosses. After all, Jesus said that there is only one Master, and you can’t serve two masters. So Paul means that women and men are not independent of each other, and what one does will always affected the other. So we need to respect each other.

But then he turns it back on the men. “Stop focusing on the women and what they do! Your real role is to worship God through Jesus. Your job is to show respect by behaving like respectful men.”
Paul knew what was expected. Within the Roman Empire, a man with a covering over his head was a man with something to hide, like some criminal, lurking in dark places and keeping his face hidden.
“And,” Paul says, “If a woman thinks it is OK to look like a prostitute, then maybe she should look like a temple prostitute, and cut her hair right off.”

Paul’s next point has to do with God’s purposes in creation.

The thing is, it is not just a cultural issue, nor is it just about who is the head. It is almost as though Paul is saying, “OK, the man is the head, but don’t take this too far.”
If you look at the rest of the passage, what he says is, “Really, everyone is interdependent anyway, because women might originally have come from men, but men come from women, so everyone depends on everyone else, anyway. So don’t get too excited about this. Women were given long hair, and that’s good. Men generally have shorter hair, and that’s good.”

“Do what is decent in this society,” he says.

Finally, Paul takes up the practices of the other churches.

He says,

16 If anyone wants to be contentious about this, we have no other practice — nor do the churches of God.

In other words, this isn’t just a local matter. You have to think about the other churches.

Someone who used to come here once went to another church. While they were giving the announcements, he looked through the hymn book, and then got up and left.
He told me about this.
I said, “What made you leave?”
He replied, “Their hymns didn’t talk about Jesus. I don’t know much about Christianity, but I think that a church that doesn’t talk about Jesus has something wrong with it, doesn’t it?”

If a person who at the time made no profession of Christian faith could see problems in a church just from the hymns they sang, what of a Christian who comes in and sees a church of people with no respect for themselves, for each other, or for Jesus?

Pretty soon you’d have people saying, “Don’t go to that church in Corinth — they are definitely wierd in there!”
So we have seen that women are perfectly free to pray and to prophesy in church, but it is important for them to still observe appropriate dress standards, and not to leave the impression that they are no different from prostitutes.
If angels are watching, then so are people from every part of society.

WHY
And that brings us to why Paul has these restrictions.
You probably know already.
We have seen that it is fine for women to pray and prophesy in public.
We have seen that they need to dress decently if they are going to do it.
We have seen that a big part of that has to do with showing respect for God, for husbands, for the church, and for other churches you are in fellowship with.

The Corinthians were very proud of themselves. It seems that they tended to imagine that they knew more than anyone else, and that they were free to do things other people were too stuffy and old–fashioned to do.
That can be good, if people are prepared to move on as God leads them, but it is not so good if it is just a matter of being arrogant and doing things just because you can.

There was a story in The Herald a day or two back under the heading, Girl power turning violent. It reported on a growing trend for girls to commit violent crime. It said that they are starting to smoke, drink, swear and have sex like men. The statistics have dramatically changed over a few years.
The writer said that it seems to go back to a distorted idea of women’s liberation. They have the idea, “If I am not tied down by the old conventions, anything goes.”

This is like what the Corinthians were doing. The women were liberated, but they were pushing their freedom into wrong areas.

We need to go back to Paul’s two major concerns. Preserve fellowship, and don’t hinder the gospel.

A friend of mine went to Kings Cross as part of her University course. It was getting dark when she was coming back, walking with a young man doing the same course.
They realised that the prostitutes were out, and Thao told her fellow student to take her arm and walk with her as though they were boyfriend and girlfriend, or husband and wife, so the girls would leave him alone.
They didn’t need a photo and descriptive notes to help them identify prostitutes.

And you and I might need no help if one came to church dressed for work.

I might have trouble concentrating on my sermon. You might not be sure how best to welcome her and help her to feel at home.
It wouldn’t matter what you tried to do, you would probably over–react. We would possibly even argue among ourselves over how we should have handled the situation.

And, if that was a common standard, people would probably think that Christians have church prostitutes just like the pagan temples used to have temple prostitutes. And I am sure that there would be unnecessary arguments.

CONCLUSION
When you boil it down, Paul has a quite liberal attitude to the ministry of women. He would probably be considered a bit radical in many Sydney churches.
But he also has a very firm commitment to fellowship and gospel preaching, and, if any of us has to pull our horns in so that fellowship is preserved, and Jesus is preached as Lord and Christ, then we have to pull those horns in.

People are dying around us without Christ.

It is all very well for you and me to say, “I am free to eat or drink what I like,” but if my freedom turns my brother or sister away in some way, or if it keeps someone from hearing the gospel, then we have to rethink our freedoms.

When some Muslim and Hindu young men came to a fellowship night here, we were careful that we had sandwiches without ham or beef on them. Each of us should ask ourselves, “Am I permitting myself a freedom when we meet together, which hurts my fellow Christians, or hinders the Gospel?”

It all boils down to putting love into action. Let’s do it!

AMEN

WE HAVE spent a lot of time in 1 Corinthians looking at Paul’s twin concerns: that the Christians in Corinth should do nothing to break down fellowship and nothing to hinder evangelism.

There are many challenges to fellowship. Chapter 10 focuses on that single question: how can the Corinthians keep together in a world where the tendency is to split?

I said a couple of weeks ago that small can be good, that our real aim has to be the kind of unity of purpose that brings about fruitfulness.
In other words, go for effectiveness, and size can look after itself.
Paul’s wants the Corinthians united, so that the gospel will go out in its full power. Effective unity is rooted in grace, peace and holiness.
So he begins with Israel’s experience under Moses. He says,

1COR 10:1 For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers, that our forefathers were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. 2 They were all baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. 3 They all ate the same spiritual food 4 and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ

Look at all the alls in that paragraph!
They were all under the cloud.
They all passed through the sea.
They were all baptised into Moses
They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink.

The first thing Paul wants them to focus on is that shared experience as God’s people.

What do we have in common that makes us one?
Have we all trusted in Christ? Have we all — those of us who are ready for it — have we all been baptised into Christ? Do we all recognise a single community as our spiritual home base? Do we all expect the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth? Do we all recognise the Bible’s authority?
Then we have all the makings of the kind of unity that Paul wants the Corinthians to have.

One of the greatest factors in the development of community is shared experiences. These are the stuff of understanding.

I work with a some North Americans. Richard had a problem with buying Pizza when he first came to Australia. He ordered two pies at a take–away shop. They didn’t know what he was talking about. In the US, pizzas are pies.
So Richard was thinking about pizzas, and the shop assistant was thinking of beef pies with mashed potato, gravy and peas on top.
Richard was confused. He didn’t know what to say. The assistant was confused. He didn’t know what to do.
They had no shared experience. In the US, pie means pizza, in Australia, pie means pie.

That’s one strength of shared experiences. You all understand what you are talking about.

But Paul goes right on to warn,
5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them; their bodies were scattered over the desert.
6 Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did.

It is all very well to have shared experiences. But where is our heart?

I worked with a young woman who had lunched with the team, who had learnt the skills, who had been included in everything.
We all had a lot of shared experiences.
One day she went off her brain, called the manager abusive, said she couldn’t work with people like him, resigned, and stormed out.

The manager concerned was a bit abrupt at times, but everyone knew he was fair and tried to encourage people, not put them down. We couldn’t understand what it was all about.
To this day, no one knows what she was complaining about, but one thing is certain. She shared in the experiences of the team, but she was not part of the team. Was it based on reality? Was it just something going on in her head? Whatever, the fact is that her heart was not with the rest of the team.

And that is exactly what Paul warns about. All the Israelites had shared the same experiences as they wandered across the Sinai peninsula, as they crossed the Gulf of Aqaba, as they poured into Midian and finally reached Mt Sinai, yet some were only there for the ride.
Do you remember that, when Moses came down from the mountain, with the stone tablets of the law in his hands, he heard singing and shouting in the camp, and the people had made a golden calf to the moon god? That was the beginning of woes. There was idolatry, there was grumbling, they tested God, they committed sexual immorality. Just about anything the Commandments forbade, they did.

And judgment fell on them.

I don’t want to harp on judgment. It is not a Christian way. But let’s be realistic about our options.
During the week the major outdoor advertising company decided not to accept atheist advertisements for buses, advertisements saying that there is probably no God, so people can stop worrying and take life easily, or words to that effect.

Someone wrote to The Herald and said,

“The fear which underpins all religions has now led to an advertising agency’s refusal to accept atheistic advertising.”

I have knocked off a response suggesting that fear does not underpin all religions. I said that neither Buddhism nor Evangelical Christianity is fear based. I don’t know if it will be published.
But you can be sure that I am not wanting to terrify you into doing something you would not do.
What I am saying is, are you sure, am I sure, that our hearts are in our faith, or are we just tagging along with the others?

Paul says,

1COR 10:6 Now these things occurred as examples to keep us from setting our hearts on evil things as they did. 7 Do not be idolaters, as some of them were; as it is written: “The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in pagan revelry.” 8 We should not commit sexual immorality, as some of them did — and in one day twenty-three thousand of them died. 9 We should not test the Lord, as some of them did — and were killed by snakes. 10 And do not grumble, as some of them did — and were killed by the destroying angel.

Incidentally, that 23000 is almost certainly a mistranslation, because probably only about that many actually left Egypt. The same word means thousand or means tribe or even military unit. Maybe 150 or 200 died in that event. Regardless, Paul wants us to look at ourselves, and not try to bat for both teams. We can’t serve God and idols at the same time, nor can we focus on ourselves and reject God’s way.
So the passage definitely contains a warning. Our God is a God of love, but he can’t tolerate it forever when we decide to play games instead of follow the fiery, cloudy pillar as it leads us in the straight paths.

However, as I said, Evangelical Christianity, gospel Christianity, is not underpinned by fear, but by hope and faith and confidence that the God who has brought us this far will see us through to the end.

And Paul follows up his warnings with a word of hope:

1COR 10:11 These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. 12 So, if you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall! 13 No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

In other words, don’t be overly confident. It is one thing to trust in God; it is another thing to test him.
The Greeks had a term for it. The called it, hubris. It carries the idea of thinking you can get away with things. Originally it was used to talk about people who were over confident with the Greek gods, and thought they could do anything and not have to face consequences.

There was an old chap who attended this church a long time ago, and he popped in one day just after I had paid the car insurance. I remarked how expensive insurance was.

“I never insure my car!” he told me.

“You mean, you only have third party property damage insurance?” I said.

“No — only the compulsory insurance you have to get with the registration.”

“How can you not have insurance?” I asked. I was flabbergasted.

“I trust God to care for me,” he said. “You should, too.”

I tried to explain the difference between trusting God and presuming on him. I tried to tell him that we have to take responsibility for the things we can be responsible for, and trust God for the things we can’t be responsible for.

He looked at me as though I had just handed him a copy of Watchtower magazine.

On Friday he popped in to tell me how the Thursday night Bible study group went and to tell me he was getting insurance on his car. They had talked about the difference between faith and presumption.

“I’ve been presuming on God, haven’t I?” he said.

Faith acts on God’s promises; presumption expects God to pick up the mess we leave.
And that was the attitude of the Israelites.
It is also an attitude we can all fall into.

If you think you are standing firm, be careful that you don’t fall!

says Paul.

In my 25 years here at Marrickville, can tell you that there have been times when I have come close to a serious fall. You are human, and you have had your own temptations and tests, so you know what I mean.
One way or another, my temptations have usually been to do with giving up: giving up as a pastor, giving up on some of the more difficult relationships, giving up where the impact would be on far more than just this church.

I knew the kinds of thing Paul meant when he said that he had even despaired of life.

But at those worst crisis points, something happened that gave me a way out.
As Paul says,

God is faithful, and will not let you ber tempted beyond what you can bear.

And, as Paul also says,

When you are tempted, God will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.

One time, the phone rang when I was on the point of giving up. Where, moments before, I felt I had only one choice, I suddenly had two — keep going where I had been going, or answer that call.

On one of the worst days of my life, I was putting things in order so that I could jump ship, one of the nuns from around the corner arrived with a bottle of wine in her hand.

“I thought you might need encouragement today,” she said, “And I bought you this.”

She had some clues about what was happening, but she was also listening to the Spirit when she was praying, and her timing was exquisite. She moved on and never knew quite what a lifesaver she had been.

If you have the slightest intention of going wholeheartedly with Jesus and not just tagging along with the rest, God will watch over you at those points of testing and of temptation and give you a way out.

Paul lays it on the line for the Corinthians.

If they share in the experience of meeting with their brothers and sisters around the Lord’s table, if they eat the same bread and drink the same cup, how can they, in the very next breath, slide back into old ways?

1COR 10:14 Therefore, my dear friends, flee from idolatry. 15 I speak to sensible people; judge for yourselves what I say. 16 Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? 17 Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.
10:18 Consider the people of Israel: Do not those who eat the sacrifices participate in the altar? 19 Do I mean then that a sacrifice offered to an idol is anything, or that an idol is anything? 20 No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons. 21 You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons. 22 Are we trying to arouse the Lord’s jealousy? Are we stronger than he?

The things we do together as a church — the communion we symbolise by taking the bread and cup at the Lord’s supper, the experiences we talk to each other about in our sharing times — these things are not only shared experiences, they are also our declaration that we are committed to a shared life, that we are not wandering alone in the Arabian desert, but we are marching together under Christ our head to the land he promises us.

In our society, we are not directly tempted into pagan celebrations, but it can happen indirectly, and that’s sometimes more dangerous. We can talk about being Christian yet go along with the world’s pagan ideals.

Noam Chomsky, a brilliant anarchist Jew, made a documentary, The manufacture of consent, in which he argues that we in the west are more effectively manipulated to agree with the world around us than people in Communist Russia ever were, because in Russia they were constantly on the watch for anyone who stepped out of line, but in our world we barely worry, because people assume that consumerism and capitalism and so many aspects of our world are exactly the way they should be.

In effect, we eat the bread of demons every day and don’t even notice. Even when we do notice, like when we see how the world has stolen Christmas from Christians, when we see advertising on TV urging us to be more greedy and take more, even when all those things and more crowd around us until we feel trapped, we still don’t think it is bad enough for us to take action.

And here’s the point, the thing Paul was talking about right at the beginning.

If we claim to share an experience of Jesus, if we claim to be one in the Spirit and one in the Lord, then we have to build on that unity and ensure it remains strong, so that we can actively resist the demonic forces of our world.

We need to be bound together with strong chains of love and community, or we will find that we thought we were standing, but we fell with a crash.

Keep the unity, steer clear of the demons in our society, and God’s blessings will be abundently ours!
AMEN

IN 1971, I turned 25. I was married, we had a baby on the way. I was working in a Council’s Engineering department, and was doing a degree at night. I remember quite a bit of that year.

One thing stands out. A June issue of Time magazine was very eye–catching. The cover picture was a psychedelic image of Jesus. He was on the cover, because he was news.
In 1966, Time had an issue with a black cover, and the headline, Is God dead? Some theologians were saying that the concept of God was no longer useful. And, suddenly, in 1971, Jesus was the name on everyone’s lips: they called it The Jesus Revolution.

I am telling you about this because if you are too young to remember that, or if you didn’t really follow that kind of news, I want you to know that, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there was a great outbreak of gospel preaching. The Christian Church might have lived through some bleak years in the 20th Century, but it wasn’t all bad news.

Here are names and ideas from the time:
Jack Sparks
Christian World Liberation Front
Larry Norman
David “Mo” Berg
Arthur Blessitt
And, on the tail of this movement, John Wimber.

Jack Sparks had a doctorate and an academic career, but took a detour to lead a movement to proclaim the gospel at the University of Califormia. He and his team worked at the Berkeley campus, in the centre of the Hippy movement and of political radicalism.
The movement he led was known as The Christian World Liberation Front, and they published a newspaper named Right On! to help spread the Gospel.
Then there was Larry Norman, the son of a Pentecostal preacher, and the first person to combine rock ‘n roll music and the gospel message. He also invented the One Way – Jesus sign. Several of his songs became well–known, like Sing that sweet, sweet song of salvation and I wish we’d all been ready.

Larry Norman died last year, sadly.

Of course, every movement has its evil twin. Another prominent name from that time was David “Mo” Berg, who was disfellowshipped from several other ministries before he led his own group known as the Children of God or the Family of Love. This organisation combined some elements of the gospel with drugs and sexual and emotional abuse. They caused lots of problems for genuine gospel preachers.

Arthur Blessitt was an evangelist who walked around the US dragging a large wooden cross, which he stood up wherever he planned to preach. He was effective at getting people converted and sending them into Christian fellowships wherever he went to.

John Wimber, a rock musician with The Righteous Brothers, was converted, studied theology and led a movement which combined mainstream theology with an appreciation for the Holy Spirit’s power.
His movement eventually became the Vineyard churches. We sing some of their music.

I have told you about this, because I want us to understand how the power of the gospel breaks out when people are determined to make Jesus known. I want you to know that there is hope.

And Paul shows us some keys to how it is done.

Keep in mind what I said last week, specially about how I believe that megachurches are the wrong model. I would love us to be a big church, but I would be even happier if we were a really effective church, even if we didn’t grow much.
I want to tell you today about the Christian World Liberation Front.

Pat and Fred had been university friends. They were married to Carrie and Jane.
They were fairly new graduates.
Pat was politically conservative, and he was troubled by the radicalism on US campuses in the late 1960s. He talked to Fred about it. All four decided that they should bring a Christian voice into the mixture.
They didn’t know where to start, so they asked one of their University lecturers, Jack Sparks. Jack agreed that Christians should be involved.
“The unrest among students is there because things aren’t right,”
he said.
“That doesn”t mean they have the answer, but they know we’re in trouble.”
Sparks laid it on the line to his friends. He said,
“It looks to me as if we, who are Christians, have avoided being where things get violent, and have avoided interacting with people who are leaders in trying to make change happen. We really should be where the action is. *”

I want you to understand the times when these things were happening.
In 1963, President Kennedy was killed.
In 1967, The Six Day War between Israel and her Arab neighbours broke out.
In January 1968, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive against US and allied soldiers in Vietnam, killing hundreds, and beginning the end of the US involvement in Vietnam.
In April 1968, Martin Luther King was killed
In May 1968, there were such violent student demonstrations in France and Germany that the French Government collapsed.
In June 1968, Bobby Kennedy was killed
In March 1969, Nixon began the secret bombing campaign against Cambodia. Children in Cambodia and Laos are still maimed and killed daily by unexploded bombs and landmines, some of which are buried just below the surface.
The Hippy movement was in full swing. People were heading to Canada from the US to avoid conscription.

Here in Australia we had had conscription lotteries where your birthday was pulled out of a hat and you had to go into the army. When I was 20, not too many people thought that was a fair system.
I still don’t.

Because of the unrest, conservative people grew even more conservative.

It was a time when short back and sides was the mark of a good Christian. It was a time when men wore their suits to church every Sunday. It was a time when Christians deplored the war, but kept well away from protests in case someone might think they were allied with the Communists.
And business and Government loved the conservatives and supported them, because it was conservatives and Christians who would not rock the boat. That is always good for business.
That is the kind of society people in the US and Australia were protesting against.

And the problem that Pat, Carrie, Fred, Jane, Jack and Esther had to confront.

How would short back-and-sides Christians, how would Ned Flanders with a crew cut, say anything meaningful to people who would spit in the face of a Christian and say, “You are a representative of the people who oppress my nation. I hate you, and, when the revolution comes, we will kill you.” How do you bring the love of God into that situation?

Well, these six went to the rallies and listened. They talked to people, and began to understand them. They watched how different leftist groups operated. They also watched as they fought among themselves.
They learnt what the people they wanted to reach responded to. Did they read leaflets? Sometimes the Christian leaflet and the political leaflets had the same title, and pointed to the same problems in society, but the Christians had a different solution: not violence, but peaceful change.
The Christians saw how the students had questions and accusations, but few answers.
And they also began to see how some people were manipulating situations, not to get justice done, but to be able to claim numbers for their side.

All the time, they sought to understand.

But the time came when listening and asking questions and handing out a couple of thousand leaflets wasn’t enough.

And this was where this passage became dominant in their thinking.
They had rights. Jack Sparks had been a university lecturer. They all had respectable jobs, were all married, had homes and cars and everything you and I consider part of normal life.
What did Paul say about these things?

4 Don’t we have the right to food and drink? 5 Don’t we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord’s brothers and Cephas? 6 Or is it only I and Barnabas who must work for a living?
7 Who serves as a soldier at his own expense?

They had rights, but they decided to live like the students so that they could reach students.

It’s what Paul wrote,
I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. 20 To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. 21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. 23 I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

Pat, Fred, Jack and their wives became as students to the students so as to win the students. They left their jobs. They gave up their business suits. They let their hair grow. They even grew beards.
Did you know that my beard had its 41st birthday in December? I stopped shaving it off just before Christmas 1968, so that I had the Christmas holidays to get it established.
When I applied for a job in 1969 at Holroyd Council as an Engineering Surveyor, they were happy that I could do the job, but they debated for over an hour whether to employ someone who had a beard. They thought I might bring marijuana or heroin into the place.
Fred, Jack, Pat and their wives — and a growing band of supporters — faced exactly that kind of suspicion. It was even worse in the US. The people at the church I went to had no problems with my beard, but church people in California told them they were getting too close to the hippies, and stopped inviting them to speak at their services.

It shows you how superficial the churches had become, and it might help you understand why these students had no time for Christians. They wanted real depth, not surface stuff that meant nothing.

These six leaders ­— that’s all they were — called themselves the Christian World Liberation Front. They set out to be an answer to groups like the Third World Liberation Front.
They gave up their jobs and relied on donations to keep them going. They had to learn to pray for the finances they needed.
But they not only handed out leaflets by the thousands at rallies, they even began producing a free newspaper, Right On!

I have had experience with small publications, going back to our High School magazine. It was a hassle then. You didn’t have computerised desktop publishing. It was mostly letterpress. Every line of the page had to be cast in metal and clamped into a press. Every photograph had to be etched onto a metal plate with acids to make it printable.
It took days to get a newspaper ready for printing. But they found the money and they stayed up at nights and printed a newspaper with articles on your rights if you are arrested, and how to avoid injuries if there is a riot. There were stories on basic health care and first aid. There were articles about rallies and what the results were.

They became like those they wanted to reach, because that is always God’s way.
Jesus became like us to reach us.
Love means you don’t reject a person, even if you don’t participate in his sin. And rejecting a person’s interests and style is still rejection.

As I said, just like Paul, they had rights. They could have done what was comfortable to themselves. But they chose to do what was uncomfortable, because they were determined to reach people who had no hope apart from the good news of Jesus.

When I first attended church, I deliberately wore my loudest tie, my sharpest trousers — the green tartan with the slit pockets — and my luminous green socks. I was sure those Christians would send me packing and I’d never have to go again.
I got a surprise. They accepted me. They welcomed me. And they were my friends.
People often choose to look a certain way as a challenge to others: will you accept me as I am?
Paul accepted people.
The Christian World Liberation Front accepted people.

I hope we constantly check ourselves and make sure we accept people, too.

Paul wrote to the Philippians:
PHILIPPIANS 2:5 Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus:
6 Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be grasped,
7 but made himself nothing,
taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
8 And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to death —
even death on a cross!
9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place
and gave him the name that is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Jesus became one of us so he could win us.
He went as far as a cross. How far will we go in his name, so that we can reach those who are separated from him, and demonstrate in our own lives the love of God?

* Sparks, Jack, God’s Forever Family, The Zondervan Corporation, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1974, p 13, 14
Other references in this sermon are from the same source.