All For the Glory of God

 Paul’s call in 1 Corinthians 10:23–11:1 shows us how to live with wisdom in a spiritually complex world. Because everything has the potential either to become idolatry or to become worship, Christians are called to filter all of life through the pattern of the gospel: Does this glorify God, and does this benefit others? In Jesus, we see the perfect example of one who gave up his rights for God’s glory and our good, calling us to do the same. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Chapter eleven verse one. Please listen as I read God's word. I have the right to do anything, you say, but not everything is beneficial. I have the right to do anything, but not everything is constructive. No one should seek their own good, but the good of others. Eat anything sold in the market without raising questions of conscience, for the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. If an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience. But if someone says to you, This has been offered in sacrifice, then do not eat it, both for the sake of the one who told you and for the sake of conscience. I am referring to the other person's conscience, not yours. For why is my freedom being judged by another's conscience? If I take part in the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of something I thank God for? For whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks, or the Church of God, even as I try to please everyone in every way. For I am not seeking my own good, but the good of many, so that they may be saved. Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ.

SPEAKER_01 1:34

Here at Elmwood on a Sunday mornings where we are looking at this letter that we call First Corinthians. And today's actually the last time we're going to be looking at this letter for a little while here, actually until the month of January. And we've been trying to take this letter in sort of smaller chunks so that we don't try and do all 16 chapters all at once, because that's really long and it would take us two years, and we need some variety. We would get really bored if we were just stuck in this letter uh for what feels like forever. So we've been taking some breaks. We'll be taking a break on this summer when I am on sabbatical and then for the fall and advent. And I know that you are all just dying to get to the very next passage that comes after this one, uh, which talks about women and head coverings in the church service. So uh if you're looking forward to that message, number one, pray for me. And uh number two, you'll have to wait until January, but we'll get to it eventually. Um, as Dave mentioned just a few moments ago, I'm gonna be on sabbatical this summer. And because I love you, what I've done is I have roped in a whole bunch of other pastor friends of mine to be here when I'm gone. Okay, so those friends of mine are not gonna be at their church that Sunday. They're going to be here serving you well. And there's a couple others uh from our district staff that are also going to uh to be here as well. If you if you know me at all, you know that I care deeply about the preaching of God's Word. Uh I I take this part of my role and this part of our the gathered life of our church very seriously. And uh so what that means is uh that the people that uh are gonna be here are people that I trust. We don't just hand a microphone to anyone and give them this responsibility. These are trusted friends of mine, and so I'm really looking forward to uh what God does through those folks and through uh what they get to share with you. Of course, they're different than me in some really good ways, and so they they preach different and they they have different personalities, and it's gonna be really good to hear from different voices this summer, and I'm really looking forward to that for you. And uh, I'll be honest with you, it feels weird to think that this is the last time in over two months when I'm gonna be preaching here at Elmwood. So you're gonna have a nice uh good break. We always tell our children when we go on a vacation without them, we say, You get a vacation from us too, you know that? And so you guys get a vacation from me, uh, mostly from me, not from my wife and our children, because they're great. Um, so we're looking forward to uh what God does in and through those uh other men as they come to uh share God's word with you this summer. Uh but with that let me invite you to join me in a word of prayer as we come to these verses today. The earth is the Lord's and everything in it, the world and all who live in it. For he founded it on the seas and established it on the waters. Who may ascend the mountain of the Lord, who may stand in his holy place, the one who has clean hands and a pure heart, who does not trust in an idol or swear by a false God, they will receive blessing from the Lord and vindication from God their Savior. Lord, this morning we declare that the earth belongs to you and everything and everyone in it, that you established it. And we praise you and worship you for being a creative, good God. We also praise you for making a way for those of us whose hands are not clean and whose hearts are not pure to stand in your holy place. God teach us and instruct us this morning as we look at these verses from 1 Corinthians that by your Spirit would you guide us, please, and provide for each one exactly what we need here today. We look to you for this as we do always. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. How do we navigate life in a religiously diverse environment? This is a question that the members of the Corinthian church faced on a daily basis. As they walk through the marketplace, what they would encounter is a large statue to the goddess Athena. As they walk to and from work every day and about their normal lives, they pass temples, many temples that were dedicated to other gods, gods like Apollo and Poseidon and Demeter and Isis and Aphrodite. This was the religious climate of the city of Corinth and the Roman Empire, and uh the cultural expectation that existed in that time was that everyone would give their worship to all these different gods. If you wanted this thing, you would go to this god. If you wanted this thing, you would go to this god. And so it was totally normal and totally expected that everyone would go to various gods for different things, and it was even expected that they would worship the emperor as a god incarnate. So this is the environment that the Corinthians lived in it. They lived in a place where there was idolatry all around them on every side. Now we live in a cultural environment that in a lot of ways is very different than theirs, but is in a lot of ways very, very similar to theirs as well. All the data that's out there that you can find shows that while a larger than ever number of people are identifying as having no religious affiliation, we all know that religion and religiosity is not on the decline. It's actually as prevalent as it's ever been. And of course, it works its way out in different ways, in different places. There's all sorts of new age things out there. There's, you know, people look to politics now to fill the role that religion had once played in people's lives. And so, yes, it expresses itself very differently, and people may not be associating themselves with a certain organized religious group, but we are continually surrounded on every side by idolatry and by religion. We too are daily faced with the complexity of life in a world where we are surrounded by these things. And so, how do we navigate an environment like this? That's a question that I want to think about with you today. This is this is what Paul addresses and has been addressing in this letter that he wrote to this church. This is a church plant filled with people who came out of, most of whom came out of a uh pagan sort of Gentile background. They didn't grow up culturally or religiously Jewish, and so they're bringing in all of these things that were just normal to them in their everyday lives. They're bringing these things into their relationship with Jesus, and Paul is trying to untangle all of this for them and help them live the way that God has designed them to live. And so uh it's wise for us who live in a similar environment to them to pay attention to what Paul says here about how to live in an environment like this. So let's spend our time looking at this text, and as we do, the first thing that we're gonna see Paul uh naming for us and calling us to do this morning is this is to recognize the spiritual potential of absolutely everything. Paul says, everything has a spiritual potential in one of two directions. The first direction is spiritual potential for idolatry. So uh remember what he said. In verse 25, he says, Eat anything sold in the market without raising questions of conscience, for the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. If an unbeliever invites you to a meal and you want to go, eat whatever is put before you without raising questions of conscience. But if someone says to you, This has been offered in sacrifice, then do not eat it, both for the sake of the one who told you and for the sake of conscience. So uh what Paul is doing here in this section of the letter is he is uh he's addressing two different scenarios that are an extension of this bigger thing he's been addressing in chapters eight through ten. So if you've been with us, you know that some of these members in the church in Corinth have been participating in what's called idol feasts. So they've been going to these temples and going to these different religious ceremonies and banquets where there's food that's being sacrificed to an idol, and then they were all together eating the food that was sacrificed to that idol. And Paul's instructions to them was do not participate in this kind of thing, because in doing so, you are participating in the idolatry itself. But this was those those temples were not the only place where they would experience and encounter food that had been sacrificed to idols. They would experience that uh meat and that food in other places, and this is what Paul is addressing in these two things that I just uh read for you here. So the first place that they would encounter food sacrificed to idols outside of the temple context was in the meat market. So, what would happen is that they would offer sacrifices to these various gods and they would share this meal together, and then at the end of that meal, there would very likely be food left over. And so, what do you do with the meat? They would take it to the market. There was a specific meat market that they would take it to, and they would sell this meat market. And so Paul envisions here, he's assuming that some of these Corinthians have the means and the ability to purchase meat from these markets. And he says, you don't have to launch an investigation into where this meat came from, whether it was offered to an idol or whether it wasn't. You don't have to do that. Just eat the meat, because, and the reason he gives is he quotes from Psalm 24, verse 1, and he says, The earth is the Lord's and everything in it. Therefore, you're free to eat the meat at the market, even though they would know that it was overwhelmingly likely that that meat had been offered to an idol. He says, You're free to eat it, because the earth is the Lord's and everything in it. So the point that he's making here with this case of meat offered in the market is this. He's saying, when it's removed from a religious context, it's just meat and you're free to eat. It's just meat and you're free to eat. So that's the that's the first sort of principle he lays out here as it relates to these two different scenarios where they would encounter this food. The second thing he describes here is being invited over to a meal that took place inside of someone's home who was not a follower of Jesus. And I think that what's really important for us to remember and to recognize about this is that Paul assumes that the Corinthians are continuing in relationships with people who do not follow Jesus. He's assuming that they have relationships with people who are who don't believe like they do. And in fact, he wants them to be so deeply embedded in relationships with these people that they're faced with these kinds of dilemmas. And so he says, he envisions someone invites you over for dinner, and you sit down at a meal, and unbeknownst to you, one of the things that's on the menu for that meal is food that's been sacrificed to an idol. And he says, if no one says anything to you about it, and you don't know that it's food sacrificed to an idol, just eat it. Eat whatever's put before you. And the reason is the same reason he already gave before. The earth is the Lord's and everything in it. However, he says, if someone then tells you this meat has been offered and sacrificed to an idol, you are not free to eat. There's a lot of scholarly uh debate about this. Uh the question that uh scholars and commentators ask is, okay, who made this announcement? That the food had been sacrificed to an idol? Was this the host of the meal? Was this just like your Christian friend who sits there next to you and ribs and says, Did you know that this was offered to an idol? Like, who's the one, who's the one making this announcement? Uh the scholars are not, there's uh there's some division over this. We don't all agree and and hold the same position on this, but I'll save you about 40 pages worth of dense scholarly reading and just tell you that of the people that I read, the consensus, uh, three-quarters of the people who wrote about this say that it is the host of the meal who makes this announcement. I'm not going to go into all the details of why I think that is, but uh, I think that it's the host who's making this announcement. And the only reason why a host would make this announcement is if they have ascribed some kind of religious meaning to that meat. And so what Paul's envisioning here is a host who says that this is sacrificed to an idol in order to turn this into a religious meal. And Paul says, at that point, you are not free to eat. So when it's removed from a religious context, Paul says, it's meat. It's just meat and you're free to eat. But then he says, when it's used in a religious way, it becomes more than just meat and you are not free to eat. You see how these scenarios uh give us both sides? When it's taken out of a religious context, it's just meat. When it's made to be a religious thing, it's more than just meat. And you see him uh showing here that it's just meat, but it has the spiritual potential to become idolatry. Everything has spiritual potential for idolatry, but not only for idolatry, it has spiritual potential for worship. Paul points us in this direction in verse 31, where he summarizes and says, So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Notice here how he he widens the scope from food and drink and the kinds of things that they would encounter at these meals. He widens the scope to include everything. Whatever you do, in everything you do, do it all for the glory of God. And so he's he's I think uh he's recognizing the potential for worship in just about everything that we do. And I say just about because there's a caveat we need to make here. Okay, he is not saying that everything has the potential to glorify God. Okay, we've seen all throughout this letter already, where he has he's named all kinds of things. He's named things like idolatry and sexual immorality and drunkenness and uh fighting one another, and and he's named all kinds of things, and he says these are categorically off-limits for you as followers of Jesus. You cannot do this for the glory of God. And I think that's what we should see him saying here is that it's not that everything can glorify God. That's not what he's saying. He's not saying anything can glorify God. What he's saying is only things that glorify God are permissible. Now remember that just earlier in this passage, he quoted this slogan that they were saying to themselves, I have the right to do anything. I'm free to do whatever I want. And Paul says, you're not free to do whatever you want, you're free to do only that which glorifies God. So if we if we take the things that by definition cannot be done to the glory of God, we can all think of the long list of things that the Bible says, don't do that. You cannot glorify God by doing X, Y, and Z. If we take all of those things off the table, what Paul is saying here is that everything that's left has the potential either for idolatry or for worship. And we can uh we can see this if we think about the things that we encounter in life on a regular basis. The same good food that can be savored and enjoyed and received and eaten with gratitude and hearts of gratitude to God can be used and turned into gluttony and overindulgence. We can it can be a form of escape. It's called comfort food, right? You you feel bad emotionally, and so you eat a tub of ice cream or whatever else the thing is that is is is your fancy, right? So it can be used both for idolatry and it can be used for worship. The same thing is true of good drink. The same good drink can be enjoyed with friends and received as a gift from God, or it can lead to drunkenness, and it can lead to addiction, it can lead to lowered inhibitions, which then lead you to make other bad choices that you shouldn't have made, that you wouldn't have made if you hadn't been drinking. The same physical beauty that we see in someone else who's created in the image of God can lead us either to worship the God of beauty who creates beautiful things and beautiful people, or it can lead us to lust. It can lead us to long for that which we don't have, which we want God to provide for us. It can lead to worse than even that. The same pleasures and luxuries that are so readily available to us in our modern Western context. All of those things can be received as a gift from God, who is the God of abundance and the God of provision, who provides for us so much more than we actually need. He provides in excess. It can be used to worship Him, or it can become a source of privilege and a source of entitlement and a source of grumbling when God doesn't provide those things that we think we deserve. The same accomplishments and achievements, whether they're in school or your education or your family life or your vocation or whatever those accomplishments are, those things can be rightly so a source of satisfaction for having done something amazing. It can be rightly so a source of recognition from other people and an affirmation and approval of a job well done. Or those same accomplishments can become the source of your identity and the source of your purpose in life, and you become no one if you are not doing the things. So everything, Paul says, either has all the things that you know that are on the table for us to do, can either lead to idolatry or they can lead to worship. Paul wants us to recognize this. He wants us to recognize that absolutely everything has this kind of spiritual potential, either for idolatry and sin or for worship. But not only does he want us to see the spiritual potential in all these things, what he wants us to do then is to filter all of life through the pattern of the gospel. And it's it's because we recognize that everything has this spiritual potential, that is why we have to filter all of the things through the pattern of the gospel. In chapter 11, verse 1, Paul says, Follow my example as I follow the example of Christ. So he points us to he points us to Jesus. Jesus is the example, but then he points us to him and says, Follow me, but only to the degree that I follow Jesus. Follow me as I follow Jesus. Jesus is the pattern. And there's so much we could say about the pattern here, you know, of uh the this gospel pattern. But I think Paul sort of drills down into two specific things here in these verses that uh encapsulate this pattern, and it's the glory of God and the good of others. He names the glory of God and the good of others as this is the pattern that we are that we have to follow. And we have to filter all of our behavior through this pattern. In a way, it's uh it's very much very reminiscent of the greatest commandment that Jesus says is to love God and love your neighbor. He says, all of the law, everything in God's instruction is for that, is summarized in that commandment. And in the same way, he's taking the whole message of the gospel and he's distilling it down to this pattern of glorify God, benefit others. Jesus is the one who embodies this pattern. As you read the stories of Jesus' life and his ministry, what becomes really obvious and clear is that Jesus did every single thing he did for the glory of God the Father. Everything. Everything that he did, his thoughts and his emotions and his actions, his behavior, his intentions, everything he did was lived in total alignment with the will and the purposes of God the Father. And he did everything he did for the glory of God. We see him saying this directly in John chapter 17, where the night before he's executed, he's with his disciples and he's praying. And in uh what's known as the high priestly prayer, uh Jesus prays this. He says, Glorify your son, that your son may glorify you. And then John 17, 4, he says this, I have brought you glory on earth by finishing the work you gave me to do. So Jesus understood that everything he did was for the glory of the Father. Not only this, everything Jesus did was for the good of others. One of the things that Paul's been hammering home in this letter as a whole, but in this section in particular, is how Jesus lived the exact opposite way of the Corinthians. Remember the slogan that the Corinthians have where they say, you know, I'm free to do anything. And actually in verses 29, 29 and 30, you've got these questions. Uh, scholars think that these questions are Paul anticipating the objections of the Corinthians when he says, Hey, if someone tells you you can't eat this meat, he's anticipating that their question is going to be, why is my fruit in being judged by another person's conscience? If I take part in what the meal with thankfulness, why am I denounced? Because of something I thank God for. They are living with an attitude that says, My freedoms and my rights are the highest good. That's what I'm living for. And Paul has been saying all throughout this letter, he's saying, guys, don't you understand your life is founded on a man who lived the exact opposite way. He did not live for his own rights and benefits. He gave up his rights. He laid down those things that were owed him, he let go of his freedoms so that others could experience and receive eternal benefit. He did that for us. He left the glory and the riches of heaven in order to live a life of relative poverty and to suffer and to die and to be rejected so that we could be brought back into relationship with God the Father, so that we could experience forgiveness of sins and the cleansing of the stain of our idolatry. That is why Jesus gave up his rights for our ultimate good. And so Paul points us to this pattern of the glory of God and the good of others. And he says, this is the pattern that you have to filter every single part of your life through. It's in Jesus that we see this pattern, and because everything has this spiritual potential, we should be the kinds of people who filter our lives through the pattern that we see here. And we can do so by asking these two very brief questions. Does this glorify God? Does this benefit others? That's really it. It's really not complicated. Does this glorify God? In other words, uh, is this something that is commanded that we do it? Love your neighbor, love your enemy, live with care for the marginalized, live with compassion and live with justice and live with holiness and righteousness. If it is commanded that we do it, it will glorify God and we should do it. We should ask ourselves questions like this does the Bible prohibit that I do this? Because if it does say I shouldn't do this, then it means there's no way I can do it and it will glorify God. We should ask questions like, Am I doing this because I want to glorify and worship him? There's a heart aspect to this. Do I want to honor him? Do I want to worship him and love him through this action? Does my heart want to please him? If it glorifies God, go to town. Right? I think of this like uh in Galatians 5, Paul, in a different one of his letters, he talks about the fruit of the Spirit, which is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. He names these uh this fruit of the spirit, and he says, against such there is no law, meaning do these things as much as you want. You can never do them too much. Your life can never be too much characterized by self-control and by love. So you should do these things all you want. And I think the same exact thing is true here. If it glorifies God, if it brings honor to him, if it truly does glorify him, do it all you want and do it a lot. Does it glorify God? Second, does it benefit others? Does this build others up in Jesus? Will doing this lead other people towards Jesus or will it lead people away from him? Will this thing that I am about to do damage those for whom Christ has died? And this is uh this is this gets a little bit sort of fuzzy, doesn't it? Because how how do you know that? I found myself this week as I was uh preparing for this, I found myself kind of irritated with Paul. Uh you know, because you read this stuff about, well, if if if you go to the meal and no one says anything, you can eat it, but if someone says it's been offered, then you can't eat it. And I'm like, this is why? Like, literally nothing changed about the meat. But you're telling me that if someone says it's been offered to an idol, I can't eat it. And I found myself really irritated and and sort of having the realization of like, I'm really irritated at the thought of someone else limiting what I believe to be my freedom. And then it hit me like this is exactly what the Corinthians are doing. They're the ones who are saying, Well, what do you mean I can't do this because someone else is gonna be upset by it? Or this is gonna hurt someone else? It's my freedom. Is this gonna do damage to someone for whom Christ died? That's not always a very black and white question. Will it do damage to someone for whom Christ died? Will this give someone who doesn't know Jesus a distorted picture of Jesus or the gospel or the church? Does this glorify God? Does this benefit others? Those are the two questions. Because everything has this spiritual potential for idolatry or for worship, we should filter our lives through these questions. Does it glorify God? Does it benefit others? And the point is very simple, friends. Whatever glorifies God and whatever benefits others, do those things. Each week we come to the communion table, and what we do when we come here is we get to be reminded of the fact that what Jesus did, he did for the glory of God the Father, and what he did by giving himself for us was so that we could experience and receive eternal benefit. He did everything for the glory of God, everything for our good. And that is most clearly seen in the communion table, which points us directly to the cross. And so we come here today seeing what he's done for us, which then leads us to say, I want to, I want my life to reflect because what he's done for me is so good and so beautiful. I want my life to reflect this. I want to do all things for the glory of God. I want to do all things for the good of others. And that's motivated by seeing what Christ has done for us. And so we're going to come to the communion table and get to receive that good news here today. So let me invite you to take just a few moments for silence and confession, and then we will come celebrate Christ together.