SPEAKER_01: First Corinthians chapter three.
SPEAKER_00: According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder, I rate a foundation.
SPEAKER_00: And someone else is building upon it.
SPEAKER_00: Let each one take care how he builds upon it.
SPEAKER_00: For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Now, if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one's work will become manifest, for the day will come, the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.
SPEAKER_00: If the work that anyone has built on this foundation survives, he will receive a reward.
SPEAKER_00: If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: God, thank you for your word, and we ask that you would speak to us through this text.
SPEAKER_01: As we go through 1 Corinthians, God, we trust that you want to speak to us.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, we ask that you would build us as a good building, Lord, built up.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, that you would that that foundation in our life would be Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, teach us and apply these things to our specific lives so that we can obey you when we leave here today.
SPEAKER_01: We pray this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: You may be seated.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so we continue on.
SPEAKER_01: Last week, Pastor Henry was with us teaching verse four through nine.
SPEAKER_01: Did you enjoy hearing Pastor Henry last week?
SPEAKER_01: He's a good brother, huh?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I love that guy.
SPEAKER_01: He is uh he is a real blessing.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and God's spoken to me and my life through him.
SPEAKER_01: So I appreciate him taking the pulpit while I was away in in Portland.
SPEAKER_01: Um we had a I was I'm in seminary.
SPEAKER_01: I'm still kind of working my way through seminary, had a week full of classes, both my wife and I, and we did 40 hours of lecture last week.
SPEAKER_01: Uh that was pretty intense.
SPEAKER_01: Eight hours a day, five five days straight through, man.
SPEAKER_01: So um I appreciate him being here.
SPEAKER_01: Let me let me um start with this by way of illustration.
SPEAKER_01: On the 14th of June, 2017, a fire broke out in a 24-story building called the Greenfill Tower.
SPEAKER_01: It was a block of flats in North Kensington, West London.
SPEAKER_01: It caused 72 deaths.
SPEAKER_01: More than 70 others were injured, and 223 people escaped.
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember this event?
SPEAKER_01: So just a couple of years ago that this took place.
SPEAKER_01: It was the deadliest structural fire in the United Kingdom since 1988.
SPEAKER_01: The fire was started by a malfunctioning fridge freezer on the fourth floor.
SPEAKER_01: It spread rapidly up the building's exterior, bringing fire and smoke to all the residential floors.
SPEAKER_01: This was due to the building's cladding, the external insulation, and the air gap between, which enabled the stack effect.
SPEAKER_01: You learned about the stack effect if you're in Boy Scouts.
SPEAKER_01: It burned for about 60 hours before being finally extinguished.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes a building's material is junk, but you don't know it until the fire starts.
SPEAKER_01: The actual construction, in this case, was flawed, but it didn't become apparent until there was a fire.
SPEAKER_01: This morning, our text is going to use this image to talk about the church's development.
SPEAKER_01: And the question that we will ask ourselves is this besides my belief in the gospel, what else composes my life?
SPEAKER_01: And would it stand up to the fire of God's evaluation?
SPEAKER_01: Now, for those of you that are just joining us joining us this morning, we've been going through the book of 1 Corinthians.
SPEAKER_01: And if you are new to the Bible, the Bible is made up of two major parts.
SPEAKER_01: You have what's called the Old Testament, and you have the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: The New Testament starts with four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and that's the story of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And it takes you from 3 BCE up to 30 A.D.
SPEAKER_01: Then the next book in your New Testament is the book of Acts.
SPEAKER_01: Acts is the story of the early church, and that basically takes us from 30 A.D.
SPEAKER_01: up to 60 A.D.
SPEAKER_01: Now, overlapping that, we have some other books which are really called epistles, and those are letters.
SPEAKER_01: Those letters start around 45 A.D.
SPEAKER_01: and they take us all the way up until around into the late 90s, and then you have the book of Revelation.
SPEAKER_01: The last book in your Bible is Revelation, probably written in 96 A.D.
SPEAKER_01: That's what your New Testament is.
SPEAKER_01: And so if you're new to the New Testament, I encourage you to study it.
SPEAKER_01: We're going through the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: We finished off Ezra and we looked at Luke, and now here we are in the book of 1 Corinthians.
SPEAKER_01: This is a letter that Paul wrote to a church that he planted or that he started about three years earlier.
SPEAKER_01: So Paul's writing this letter from Ephesus.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this map here is the Mediterranean.
SPEAKER_01: You have Israel.
SPEAKER_01: This would be kind of modern-day Turkey, Mesopotamia, not Mesopotamia, but Greece, Macedonia, kind of up north there.
SPEAKER_01: And so Paul started this church in the city of Corinth in about 52 A.D.
SPEAKER_01: And then in 55 A.D., he's over in Ephesus there, the blue arrow, and he's hearing bad reports about the people in Corinth.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I'm sure, I'm sure you're shocked that a church, there would be a bad report about a church.
SPEAKER_01: I say that facetiously.
SPEAKER_01: I do have, I have a sense of humor if you're new to listening to me.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes people in the church behave badly.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes church is really messy.
SPEAKER_01: And uh and you would think, you know, as good as Jesus was, and as good as his teaching was, how can the church be so messed up?
SPEAKER_01: And yet here is this church that's only three years old, and it's a mess.
SPEAKER_01: There's over 11 different issues that this church faced.
SPEAKER_01: You've got divisions or factions.
SPEAKER_01: You've got um sexual immorality, you've got a guy that's sleeping with his uh stepmom.
SPEAKER_01: You've got people in the church that are suing each other.
SPEAKER_01: Uh you've got people getting drunk when they're taking, supposed to be taking communion.
SPEAKER_01: Um you've got all kinds, I mean, this is a mess of a church.
SPEAKER_01: And so Paul hears this and he writes a letter to address these issues.
SPEAKER_01: He's also addressing some questions that the church had.
SPEAKER_01: Now, we're in this major section that started in chapter one and goes through chapter four, and this is a section about the divisions in this church.
SPEAKER_01: And so we're kind of plodding our way along.
SPEAKER_01: And the way that Paul is dealing with this, these factions in the church is by kind of going under the surface and addressing some of the motivations causing the divisions.
SPEAKER_01: Now, last week Pastor Henry walked us through verses 4 through 10.
SPEAKER_01: There, Paul explains the growth process of the Christian and how various Christian ministers factor into the growth.
SPEAKER_01: Paul used a picture of farm servants that are just engaged in the agricultural process.
SPEAKER_01: And he talks about how maybe one farming servant would go and plant the seed, and then that particular plant begins to grow, and it is not relying on just that same servant carrying it through the whole agricultural process.
SPEAKER_01: No, there's another servant that'll come through and waters it the next day, and then another servant waters it the next day, and different people are coming through helping this plant grow.
SPEAKER_01: And then some other servant is harvesting it at the end of the time, right?
SPEAKER_01: So that is the picture that Paul uses.
SPEAKER_01: Now, why does he use that picture?
SPEAKER_01: What he's doing is this.
SPEAKER_01: I think I put this into a slide.
SPEAKER_01: The point Paul is driving at is this.
SPEAKER_01: If you self-identify with only one of these pastors, Apollos, Paul, Cephas, Christ, then you're failing to acknowledge, that should be a, not as, a season of growth that God ordained for them or through those ministers, to them.
SPEAKER_01: We live in the internet age, right?
SPEAKER_01: I don't know about you, but I love podcasts, man.
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm subscribed to probably like 45, 50 different podcasts.
SPEAKER_01: Not all, not all Christians, just I listen to business podcasts and leadership development, and and then there's some great, great ones.
SPEAKER_01: If you if you have never subscribed to the Bible Project, that's a great one.
SPEAKER_01: I would really encourage you to subscribe to the Bible Project.
SPEAKER_01: Tim Keller has a really good one.
SPEAKER_01: Robbie Zacharias.
SPEAKER_01: If you're really into apologetics, there's one um called by Justin Brierly called Unbelievable.
SPEAKER_01: Um Sean McDowell does another one.
SPEAKER_01: So if you're like, if let's if you're a thinker and you're wondering, is Christianity true?
SPEAKER_01: and you just want to um engage it more philosophically, Sean McDowell's um, I don't remember what the title is, but type in Sean McDowell's podcast and you'll find it.
SPEAKER_01: Same with um Justin Brierly's Unbelievable podcast.
SPEAKER_01: They're engaging um Christianity more from a philosophical perspective.
SPEAKER_01: But but regardless, there's all these different people, right, that I'm I'm listening to on podcasts, watching on YouTube.
SPEAKER_01: And all of those people are contributing to who I am as a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: So if I decided, you know what, nope, I'm just gonna listen to the one person who led me to Christ, which was my grandpa, he's the only person that's gonna have spiritual input on my life, I would be a severely anemic Christian.
SPEAKER_01: Because my grandpa was rough, he was pushy, and he had a bunch of weaknesses.
SPEAKER_01: You know, he had some emphasis, some things that are like, this is what you have to do, this, and he was a pastor, this is what you've got to do.
SPEAKER_01: But there's a bunch of things that, you know, I didn't learn from him and wouldn't have learned from him if I had only camped out on just listening to my grandpa.
SPEAKER_01: And that's Paul's that's Paul's case.
SPEAKER_01: He's like, if you are just picking your favorite pastor and you're just you're fighting with other Christians because you've got your favorite pastor, then you're missing out on the growth that God has for you because God is using a bunch of different ministers to contribute to your own growth.
SPEAKER_01: So in our text this morning, here's kind of our outline.
SPEAKER_01: Verses 10 and 11 is the foundation must be Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Then in verses 12, really, it's actually it's just verse 12.
SPEAKER_01: I forgot to update this.
SPEAKER_01: It's verse 12 talks about the building materials, and then 13 through 15 is the final evaluation of the building material.
SPEAKER_01: So let's walk through this briefly.
SPEAKER_01: Let's look at verses 10 and 11 first.
SPEAKER_01: The foundation must be Christ.
SPEAKER_01: So we are going to switch metaphors.
SPEAKER_01: And Paul began to switch metaphors in verse 9 last week.
SPEAKER_01: So we went from the agricultural metaphor in the picture of a farmer, and now we're going to jump over to a construction worker or an architect, a general contractor, and all of the language that we're using this morning is that metaphor or in that arena.
SPEAKER_01: So Paul says, according to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation.
SPEAKER_01: What's the foundation he's talking about?
SPEAKER_01: He's talking here about the church, this local church corporately.
SPEAKER_01: Imagine he's writing to the Corinthians, and he's saying, When I started you guys out as a church, I laid a foundation.
SPEAKER_01: And then someone else is building on the foundation that I laid.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: So Paul helped these individuals in the church get started in their relationship with God.
SPEAKER_01: Then other pastors and preachers came through.
SPEAKER_01: We know one was Apollos, and then we know one, it seems like some people interacted with Peter, also known as Cephas.
SPEAKER_01: And then there's neither Cephas nor Apollos were in the church at this time, so there was local leadership.
SPEAKER_01: There were local Christians that were there.
SPEAKER_01: So he says this at the end of verse 10 let each one take care how he builds upon it, or upon that foundation.
SPEAKER_01: Then we have a substantiation in verse 11.
SPEAKER_01: For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: No other foundation, right?
SPEAKER_01: So Paul says, I laid the foundation for your walk with God.
SPEAKER_01: And there's no other foundation that can be laid than Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: That is the fundamental foundation.
SPEAKER_01: So what does it mean for Jesus Christ to be the foundation of the church?
SPEAKER_01: The life of Jesus, the death of Jesus, the resurrection.
SPEAKER_01: You see, God sent his son.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it says this in John.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I don't have it.
SPEAKER_01: It says in John, John 3, 16, says that God loved the world, and so he sent his son Jesus into the world.
SPEAKER_01: He sent his son into the world as his only begotten son.
SPEAKER_01: That whoever would believe in his son Jesus would not perish, would not face eternal damnation, but would have life.
SPEAKER_01: Now many of you are familiar with John 3, 16.
SPEAKER_01: That that lays out that principle that Jesus is the foundation.
SPEAKER_01: So Paul is establishing that the Corinthian church was founded, it started with this teaching about Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: But then we get to verse 12, and Paul is going to elaborate on these other people, these other ministers, and he says, now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw.
SPEAKER_01: So notice there's six pieces of building material here, and they're distinctly different, right?
SPEAKER_01: If you are going to build a barn with gold, we would ridicule you, right?
SPEAKER_01: But if you built a palace with straw, we would also ridicule you, right?
SPEAKER_01: The building materials here are distinctly different.
SPEAKER_01: And what Paul here is he's carrying on the metaphor.
SPEAKER_01: And he's saying, there are people that are going to come after me that are doing this ministry.
SPEAKER_01: He's already affirmed them, but he's also suggesting that look, just because a pastor comes into town and teaches doesn't necessarily mean that his building material is quality, right?
SPEAKER_01: Some, he's suggesting, have these precious or excellent materials, and then others are using common materials like wood, hay, and straw.
SPEAKER_01: Now, I think Paul's intentionally being vague.
SPEAKER_01: He's not naming anybody.
SPEAKER_01: He's not even identifying necessarily a teaching that would be wood, hay, or straw.
SPEAKER_01: But Paul is suggesting that a church, imagine like the churches, you know, our church and other churches, that fundamentally a church has to have Jesus Christ as its foundation.
SPEAKER_01: A Christian church, like we meet, we gather in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Like if you go to our website and you look at why do we gather, we gather because we love Jesus, right?
SPEAKER_01: To worship Him.
SPEAKER_01: But a church is more than that, right?
SPEAKER_01: We we talk about a lot of things on Sunday mornings, you know?
SPEAKER_01: And it's easy for a church to begin to be built on stuff that may not be the strongest material.
SPEAKER_01: And so Paul is here very gently suggesting that there could be, there could be ministers that come through who try to build on this foundation of Jesus with lesser quality material.
SPEAKER_01: Now, we have this whole idea of a judgment that comes along.
SPEAKER_01: Here's what it says in verse uh thirteen each one's work will become manifest, for the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire.
SPEAKER_01: And the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.
SPEAKER_01: If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.
SPEAKER_01: If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.
SPEAKER_01: What in the world is he talking about here?
SPEAKER_01: Do you notice the tense?
SPEAKER_01: He's talking in in about the future.
SPEAKER_01: That there it will it will become manifest.
SPEAKER_01: It's not manifest yet, it will become manifest.
SPEAKER_01: The day will disclose it, it will be revealed by fire, the fire will test.
SPEAKER_01: So there's this future evaluation that takes place.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna teach you uh a um theological word this morning.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna kind of throw you into the deep end of theology.
SPEAKER_01: You ready?
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: It's the word eschatology.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know what eschatology means?
SPEAKER_01: It's the study of end times, the things that take place in the end.
SPEAKER_01: Now, the Bible gives us a sense of what's going to take place in the end.
SPEAKER_01: Some of the big pieces would be this.
SPEAKER_01: First of all, the Bible gives us a clear framework regarding the future uh regarding the body.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to be given a new body in the future.
SPEAKER_01: When we die, this body, it says, is put off and it decl decays.
SPEAKER_01: But there is a future body that we're going to be clothed with to go through eternity.
SPEAKER_01: The second thing that the Bible says is that Christ will come to earth again.
SPEAKER_01: Every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.
SPEAKER_01: This is the second coming of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible predicts and tells us that Jesus, who came to earth once, about 2,000 years ago, right?
SPEAKER_01: The dividing point between BCE and AD, Jesus Christ, a historical figure, that Jesus will come again and will establish an earthly kingdom located in Israel.
SPEAKER_01: And he's going to reign and rule over the whole earth.
SPEAKER_01: There will be a judgment determining who's in the book of life and who isn't.
SPEAKER_01: So there's going to be a final judgment that takes place.
SPEAKER_01: You can read about that in Revelation 20.
SPEAKER_01: Satan and all demons will be cast into a lake of fire.
SPEAKER_01: I'm giving you the scripture references there if you want to look this up.
SPEAKER_01: Satan and all demons will be cast into the lake of fire, and then God will create a new heavens and a new earth.
SPEAKER_01: Now, if you're new to the Bible and you're not a Christian, and you're like, you're probably looking at that and saying, that is far out, difficult to believe.
SPEAKER_01: And I understand you.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible doesn't start with these truth claims and says, it doesn't just say, hey, you need to believe that this is going to take place.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it establishes Establishes itself as a viable source, a reliable source, by predicting a first coming.
SPEAKER_01: So before Jesus came as a historical figure 2,000 years ago, there was prophecy predicting that a baby would be born of a virgin, would be born in the city of Bethlehem, that he'd come out of Nazareth, that he would be located, and there would be a relationship that he'd have with Egypt, that he would be pierced, that he would uh uh be that he would suffer, that his garments would be divided.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, there were over 300 prophecies about Jesus coming as a historical figure more than a thousand years before he came.
SPEAKER_01: And were those fulfilled?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we look back and we see that Jesus was a historical figure that fulfilled those claims.
SPEAKER_01: If you go and you look at the mathematical probability of Jesus fulfilling those prophecies, you would come up with a number with zeros that it would be you that just go on and on and on and on.
SPEAKER_01: Just look it up on YouTube.
SPEAKER_01: You can easily find a three-minute video about how unprobable, improbable it was for Jesus to fulfill those different prophecies about his first coming.
SPEAKER_01: So it's that God who wrote that Bible who predicted the end times, that gave us an eschatological vision, a vision of future things.
SPEAKER_01: And so I would just suggest to you that Scripture has a pretty strong track record up to this point in terms of predicting the future.
SPEAKER_01: And when it comes along and it says you will have a new body, that there will be a future reign of Christ on the earth, that the world will be judged, that Satan will be judged and cast into the lake of fire, and that there will be a new heaven and a new earth.
SPEAKER_01: God has a good track record.
SPEAKER_01: And if you struggle with those truth claims, that's fine.
SPEAKER_01: God puts himself out there in writing, you can wrestle through those things.
SPEAKER_01: There are many smart people smarter than I who would be happy to engage you on YouTube and argue for the veracity of these statements.
SPEAKER_01: I'd encourage you not to just take a leap of faith, but to consider them because it's a description of the future.
SPEAKER_01: But Paul assumes these things, assumes that we are Christians and that we accept these things as true, and he includes it in his teaching.
SPEAKER_01: So as he explains these pastors, he says, These pastors that are teaching in your church will face a day of evaluation.
SPEAKER_01: They're going to face the day.
SPEAKER_01: We already looked at uh the day back in chapter one, where he says this who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: There is a future day that it's coming.
SPEAKER_01: There's a day that's that the world will face, where we come face to face with God.
SPEAKER_01: And God is going to first will be evaluated on the decision that we made related to Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Did we accept God's plan of salvation?
SPEAKER_01: If you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, your name is written in the Lamb's Book of Life.
SPEAKER_01: You're brought into God's family, you're guaranteed heaven.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: You've been reconciled back with God through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.
SPEAKER_01: But you and I that have accepted Jesus Christ, we still face a judgment, not to damnation, but an evaluation of our works.
SPEAKER_01: What did we do while we were in the body?
SPEAKER_01: What did we do with our time?
SPEAKER_01: What did we do with our life that was given to us by God?
SPEAKER_01: Evaluation, I would say, is a lost concept within Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: We think that we have escaped hell.
SPEAKER_01: As Christians, we believe.
SPEAKER_01: Like I believe, I've escaped damnation, that I should be on my way to hell, but because I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, I have been forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: So I've escaped hell.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, this is the problem, though.
SPEAKER_01: This is uh there is um I've escaped accountability.
SPEAKER_01: That's that would be the mistake I think that Christians make.
SPEAKER_01: Somehow there is this sense that we are off the hook once we accept Jesus Christ's work on the cross.
SPEAKER_01: Our Christian tradition, as Protestants, finds its roots in the Reformation where Luther and Calvin rediscovered salvation through grace alone.
SPEAKER_01: During the time of Luther, Luther rebelled against the Catholic Church of his day because they were selling penance, and the relationship with God was very much contingent upon works.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh and kind of a the church had been corrupted.
SPEAKER_01: And so Luther read Ephesians chapter 2 and he saw that our salvation is not through works, but it's by God's grace that we're saved.
SPEAKER_01: That we believe in Jesus Christ and God's grace is uh God's grace saves us.
SPEAKER_01: That is our Christian tradition.
SPEAKER_01: Many in the church realize that religious effort was not God's means of salvation, and what a relief.
SPEAKER_01: Today, if you, if this is new material for you, that's fine.
SPEAKER_01: But if you have this conception that you're going to be good enough to get into heaven, or that you're going to be good enough to please God, you need to know that the Bible says you cannot placate the wrath of God.
SPEAKER_01: You cannot escape the judgment of God by evening out the scales of I've done this much good stuff and that'll outweigh the bad stuff.
SPEAKER_01: No, the Bible says if you've transgressed the law, you and I are a lawbreaker, that we're condemned, and we needed somebody else to stand in our place as a mediator between us and God to take the punishment, to take the wrath of God on our behalf so that we could be forgiven.
SPEAKER_01: And that's what Jesus Christ did.
SPEAKER_01: He stood in our place.
SPEAKER_01: But we still will be held accountable for the life we live in the body.
SPEAKER_01: We have been saved by grace.
SPEAKER_01: We continue to do life by God's grace.
SPEAKER_01: But Jesus told his disciples many parables about how he's going to come again and he's going to take account.
SPEAKER_01: As if taking account of a steward or a financial, your your financial investor who handles your money for you, right?
SPEAKER_01: What kind of return did I get on my investment?
SPEAKER_01: We will face that same evaluation.
SPEAKER_01: God will hold us to account for the life that we live in the body.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus Christ is our foundation, and he is the foundation that we continue to do life along.
SPEAKER_01: One of the other images that we have related to the future is the image of a wedding.
SPEAKER_01: It says that we as the church are the bride of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, Jesus told these parables to the disciples to get them to be ready, to get them to be ready for a future wedding ceremony.
SPEAKER_01: That there is coming a day where we are going to be married, where we are going to be wed with Jesus as his bride.
SPEAKER_01: So the earthly institution of marriage is only a reflection of a greater spiritual truth.
SPEAKER_01: There is this hope, there's this anticipation for us of this beautiful day where we will be unified with Christ.