Let's Wrap It Up | 1 Corinthians 16:21–24

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Amen. You may be seated. Well, good morning and uh welcome. Glad you're here. It's good to see each of you here. Before we get into the text, let me just make a couple of comments uh just to recognize a couple of things. I feel like maybe it was me and in my seat that uh the the moment of baptism seems to kind of rush us by, or rush by us, and we miss maybe what that is. Um I just don't want that to be missed. I feel like it deserves maybe some elaboration or some some some explanation. So, first I need you to know that is not a person getting saved. That is a person who has placed faith in Christ, the regenerating power of the Spirit of God has already brought them to life, and then God, in his word, has given us a way for that to be expressed publicly. That is not a take it or leave it activity, though, even though it's not necessary for salvation. It is necessary for obedience. To live in obedience, a person after having been saved follows the Lord in baptism. It's part of the Great Commission. We talked about that a little bit last week in the host moment. It is part of what we as a church are called to do, to go into all the world, preach the gospel, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And so the testimony that was shared is a testimony of what God has already done and then pictured in the process of baptism. And so I just feel like if you see uh and in the second service, we'll have three more baptisms. If you see them, know that that's a that's a big deal. And I think what might be lost on us sometimes in America is that act costs us nothing. And there are places in history and in the world where that act costs lives and costs family and careers and status and ultimately uh a lot of things. And so I just I just don't want that to be lost on us because we are just so used to it that it's just one of those things that we just kind of hurry past in a worship service. Let's pause and let's just thank God for it. And then if you can stick around for the second service to witness three more, uh don't miss that. That is that is gonna be special as well. You can stand in the back. Don't take seats from people in the second service. We won't have room for everybody, but you can stand in the back or watch it on the screen, and uh, we definitely want you to be able to witness as the church what God is doing in the saving of souls testified through through baptism. Second thing I want to say is uh the student ministry has done a lot of work to try to prepare for this student camp coming up, and it is uh not, this cannot be seen as the opportunity for us with students to get a break for a week or a weekend. Uh that's not what this is. This is warfare. This is sending our kids to a place where we are begging God to save them and to call them and to bring them into spiritual victory and flourishing. And so let's see it that way. And if we can, let's let's just shower this. Let's just saturate this in prayer. So it's about a week and a half, a little over a week and a half until they go. And so here's here's what I'm gonna challenge you to do. If you have a student that is going to camp, please do this for me. Just uh tap that QR code or that sticker on the back, and in the prayer request section, put their name. So my my uh prayer request in my prayer request section will read Ava, Allie, and Adrian, because those are my three students that are going to camp. And here's what I think we do then is as the however many people get the prayer requests, uh all the pastors, all the staff, and others on the prayer team, there will be that those people naming your child, or if you have a grandchild, put them on there. Or if you just know one, you're like, I know that kid. I don't really like him, but I'll know him. His name is this, and so I'm gonna put it, he needs Jesus, so I'm gonna put his name on there. Right? I'm just saying, as many times as we can get some of these kids' names uh just brought to the Lord and just asking God to do something in their in their lives, I think it's gonna do something. For for one, it will it will posture our heart in a place of love and care for our students because you can't uh pray for somebody and not love them. And so I think that's important. But then we're just asking God to do a move. We're asking God to protect our kids and to accomplish something great. So do that, all right? I'll pause. I'll wait a second. Go ahead and do it right now. You guys aren't moving. Scan that thing. Scan that thing. Okay, you can do it while I'm preaching. I'll understand if you're looking down. Scan that thing, put the name in the prayer requests. Please do that. I want there to be so many names. There should be 110 names named in our uh prayer requests this week because you, as a parent or grandparent or somebody who knows them, have put them in there. Okay? Good? Amen? All right, let's try that again. Amen. We love students around here. Amen. The next generation. You you're you're all getting old. We need that next generation to keep this thing going. Listen, Christianity's one generation away from extinction. There's no passed down inheritance of Jesus. Their faith in Christ is theirs, not yours. And we're begging God to do something in the next generation through our students and through our church. And so let's see that that happen in that way. Okay? Well, 1 Corinthians chapter 16. One more time. 1 Corinthians chapter 16. This is it. This is it. This is it. This is the final time, at least in this study, we are turning together to 1 Corinthians. It's been fun. I gotta be honest. I've I've actually uh joked about the difficulty of the book of 1 Corinthians, and uh obviously there are some difficult things in it, but we are um I've enjoyed it. I've enjoyed the study, I've enjoyed the challenge, I've enjoyed what it's done to my heart and spirit uh in challenging me to get into the word. Uh I can sometimes uh uh moan about, man, another one. Oh my goodness, another one, another difficult one. But one of the things I've learned is that when I am forced to get my nose in the book and uh get my understanding around the text, uh, I am better for it. I am sanctified by it. The word of God has a power to sanctify. And that really is just kind of a maybe a free nugget, uh, just studying. You're like, I just I don't know this text. I don't know that text. I don't know this topic. I'm just gonna study it. I'm not gonna ask somebody. I'm gonna study it. I'm gonna do my own study. I'm gonna work and I'm gonna mind this and I'm gonna spend some time with the Lord. I'm gonna open it. I'm gonna have a notepad open. I'm gonna jot some notes, I'm gonna read some commentary or something trustworthy. Uh, you will be better for it. You will be sanctified by it, you will be strengthened in it. So make that, if you would, something that you long for. The psalmist said he loves it. He thinks about God's law while he's laying on his bed. And it's like sweet honeycomb. It's it's sweetness to his life. And that's what we're studying uh as we or what we're feeling as we study these texts out together. So, 1 Corinthians 16, there's something about a last word, isn't there? There's just something about a last word that just demands our attention. We just we cherish them. We cherish last words. If you uh maybe had a letter that you received from someone who loved you, uh maybe handwritten, this note that they gave you, maybe from a grandparent or or a mentor, maybe from someone that you have since lost, and those were their last words. Uh wherever you've kept it, I would bet that you pull it out and uh you read those last words. You value those last words, you remember those last words. Man, that was the last thing he said to me. That was the last note she wrote to me. That was the last text message I received, or that was the last uh letter that they wrote. You go straight to the closing because there's something in us that knows the closing is where the heart lives and is expressed. It's just that that last bit that they're just wrapping this thing up. I just, I want you to know I love you. I want you to know I'm for you. I want you to know something. The closing is where a person says, maybe what sometimes is what they most need you to carry with you. We see this in parenting, don't we? We're about to leave, we're about to leave our kids at home, and we've told them all kinds of instructions, and right before we walk out the door, we say, Don't forget, 911, don't kill your brother, dinner's on the table. Got it? Now we just gave them all those instructions, but last few things, don't forget. I want to summarize all of what I'm trying to say to you in this quick. I'm closing the door, I'm about to leave. Now we've arrived at that part. Paul has spent 16 chapters with this church. He has confronted factions in the church, he's confronted their sexual immorality, he has called out their abuse of the Lord's Supper. He has addressed their chaos in worship, how they've misused spiritual gifts, how they were arrogant and self-exalting. He addressed their theological confusion about the resurrection. I think as he's as he's as he's delivered this, he wept over them. I think he reasoned with them, he argued in his mind with them, he pled with them, he has pastored them from a distance, pouring himself out in ink because he could not be there in person. Now we know that uh most of Paul's writings, the majority of them were written by a scribe or something like a secretary. So he dictated the words and somebody wrote them down as he was talking. That's that's what happened in 1 Corinthians. However, the last few verses that we're about to read, beginning in verse 21, is Paul's own handwriting. And he did this several times. In fact, in one of the letters he wrote, he it is believed and is seen that he wrote big letters. Maybe because his eyes were going, or maybe because he just wanted to like bold and large it to be like, this is my words. Listen, right? I'm writing this. And so in verse 21 through verse 24, we read what Paul wrote. Paul looks to his scribe and he says, Here, give me that pen. I got a few things I just want to I want to finish this thing up with. And he writes it, signs his name on it, and sends it on its way. So let's read this. 1 Corinthians 16. We're gonna read verse 21 through verse 24. Okay? You read it, you read us along silently. I'll read out loud. Words are on the screen if you need them. These are God's words for us today. Let's uh let's be helped by them. May they come to bear on us as God uh superintends them to. Verse 21. I, Paul, write this greeting with my own hand. I took the pen from the scribe, and I'm writing this. If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. Our Lord, come. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen. Paul's writing, summarizing it all up. He takes the pen out of the scribe's hand, he writes the closing. It's his own handwriting, it's his own words, it's his own verses. And in those four verses, he distills everything this letter, everything that this letter and series has been about, into really four movements. He says, I'm writing this, and there's there's four quick things I need you to say as I'm about to close this door and head out. I need you to get these. This is the the distilling or the summary. If you get these four things, everything in the rest of the letter will fall in place, it will make sense, will we come together. And so, big idea is simple, not anything quippy, but it's it's simply this. Paul's final words, 1 Corinthians, his final words of this letter reveal the marks of a beautiful church and a broken culture. Remember, we are we are dealing with the topic beauty in the broken. It's a broken culture, and in so many ways it was a broken church, but the gospel was coming to bear on them to make something beautiful from them in their brokenness. And so Paul's final words reveal what he would say. This is what you need to get. This is what I need you to hear. This is what I need you to take away. If you forget some of the things I've said, I understand. But if these things are in place, if these conclusions are right, then your conduct will follow and the rest of these things will take care of themselves. And so these are the marks of a beautiful church and a broken culture, according to Paul. We've seen this week after week. God doesn't wait for Paulish people, but he enters into broken lives. The church at Corinth was fractured in almost every conceivable way, and yet in verses uh two of chapter one, he calls them sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints. That's the gospel making something beautiful in something that was broken. Here in these four closing verses, this beauty kind of gets its final, fullest expression. And so I want to consider these four summarizing marks of a beautiful church. And let's bring this together. The landing gears out, we're about to touch down and taxi into the terminal and finish this up and join into our summer series. So let's work through each one of those, okay? Jot these down. There's four of them. We'll come through them through the text. We'll do it this way: a beautiful church. These are four marks of a beautiful church. So just the heading is a beautiful church. Number one, here's what a beautiful church looks like. He says to love the Lord supremely. To love the Lord. Just as his reminder. And he and he he does it in an interesting way. In fact, look at it in verse 22. If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed. And we can't move past that sentence too quickly. We have to understand it. If we do, we're gonna miss what in a lot of ways is one of the most important things Paul says in the entire letter. He's summarizing it up right here, most important thing. And after 16 chapters of pastoral correction, after this incredible uh uh discourse on love in chapter 13 and the great resurrection chapter of 15, and after detailed instructions on worship and gifts and the Lord's Supper, Paul seems to close with a curse. That's the word. Let him be accursed. The word is the Greek anethema. It's a word used for things devoted to God for destruction. Total exclusion, condemnation, total and utter separation from God and his people. That's what he says. So it's not Paul exaggerating, trying to get people's attention. When Paul writes anethema, he means it fully with the weight of theology and the Bible backing it. Now, what what does he say is the reason or the condition for this anathema or this condemnation or being fully devoted to destruction? The condition for this curse is not if anyone denies the resurrection. That's interesting. He's not saying the cursed person designated for destruction is the person who denies the resurrection. He doesn't say if anyone continues in sexual immorality. All of those matter, all of those are enormous, and Paul has spent chapters addressing them. But the condition of anathema in Paul's words here is this if anyone has no love for the Lord, if you don't love the Lord, the Greek word for love here is phileo. It's it's not the word agape, like we would kind of maybe assume. It's the language of personal affection, warmth, and delight. It has this idea of the person who does not delight in the Lord. It's not describing understanding and believing theological truth. That's not what that is. It's not describing church attendance or religious duty, it is describing the orientation of one's heart. The person who is designated for destruction is the person who has not placed their delight in the Lord. So that's interesting. So we just pause there for a second and think, well, do I love Jesus in this way? Is is that what's going on here? Do I find delight in him and warmth in him? Does thinking about him move something in you? Do you like being with him? This is this is the fundamental question here. So why does Paul put this here? At the end of the letter to this church. And here's why. Here's why I think this is what Paul's doing. Because the Corinthians had built an entire religious culture on everything except love for Jesus. It had welcomed people in who were teaching things that were not in love or out of a love and delight in Jesus. They had spiritual gifts. Spiritual, sophisticated, impressive, publicly displayed, but they lacked love. That's why chapter 13 says what it says. They had theological knowledge, but Paul had to warn them that knowledge puffs up while love builds up. Chapter 8, verse 1. They had worship gatherings, but their worship had become a performance of self rather than a worship of the Lord. They had the Lord's Supper, but they were eating it as a social meal for caste and order and honor, some going hungry while others were getting drunk. Chapter 11, verse 21. They had Christian systems, doctrine, and ritual and community, but the actual heart of it all, the the the hot center of it all was hollowed out. There was no love. And Paul's words to a Christianity without love for Christ is anathema. Isn't that crazy? Christianity, a system of Christianity without delighting in the Lord is anathema. Designated for destruction. This is not a contradiction of grace, by the way. We are not saved by the strength or purity of our love for Jesus. Thank God for that, right? Because our love is far too inconsistent and imperfect for that. But we are saved by his love for us. He loved us, he died on the cross for us. He took our sin upon himself and suffered the judgment and rejection that we deserved. That was the greatest display of love the world could ever display for us. But genuine salvation and genuine regeneration by the Holy Spirit, which is a leading us to faith in the love of Christ, uh the love of God through Christ, it produces a love in us for Jesus Christ. Romans 5.5. God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. So we know the love of God, and when we are made alive by faith in the love of God displayed in the cross, something turns in us that produces a love for him. And 1 John 4.19 says all about that. We love because he first loved us. You can't say I love God and hate your brother or not obey what he says. This is the commandment we have from him. Whoever loves God must also love his brother. So there is this reality that salvation in Christ results in this deep affection for him. So when he says love the Lord, he is talking about delighting in the Lord that is the result of faith in Christ and is manifested through obedience to Christ. Jonathan Edwards understood this. He wrote a paper, an article on it called Religious Affections, and he argued that at length that the true religion, true Christian religion, consists fundamentally in holy affections, and the chief of those affections is love for Christ. Do you see the difference here? Religion is usually all about feel better about yourself, fight in your own power, elevate yourself to a place of prestige and honor and feel good about what you accomplished. But what we're learning in scripture is that true religion, true Christian, regenerated, God-established religion is an affection for Christ. It's a delighting in Christ, it is a love for Christ. So where there is no love for Christ, there is no Christianity, regardless of what the religious machinery surrounds it with. A man can preach, a person can serve, families can give and attend and pray. A person can know theology and still have no love for the Lord. And Paul says, anathema. Let him be accursed. So what is he saying by that? What is he calling on us to do? He's calling on us to hold up a mirror. And not necessarily a curse pronounced upon the Corinthians, but awarding them with it. He's saying, look at yourself. Is your love real? Are you delighting? In the Lord, or are you delighting in the religion that you are participating in? Have you built a religious life on the form of Christianity while the heart of it has gone cold and has no love for the Lord? True faith, true salvation, true regeneration is always results in a delight in the Lord, which then shows in obedience to the Lord. So behold, before we move on, I just want to hold up that same mirror. Not to condemn, but because this was what faithful pastors do before the series is over, before we close the letter, before we move on with our lives to the next chapter or next next study, I want to ask to stop and answer this question. Do you love the Lord Jesus? Maybe it maybe put it this way. Why are you here? I'm glad you're here. I hope you're here for good reasons. I'm not trying to say it in a way like, what are you doing here? Get out of here. I'm not doing that. But but I'm not interested in your attendance or your serving or your affirming of the right doctrines. Those are important. I want those. Those are great. They have their place. But what I want from you, what I'm begging God to do is to bring you to regenerating saving power, uh salvation by his power, so that you will know and experience the love of the Lord. And then by knowing and experiencing his love for you, you will fall in love with him. You will love him, you will delight in him, you will have a heart for him in every way. That's the question. So the first invitation that Paul gives us is this love the Lord supremely. Love him supremely, delight in him supremely. So you think about all of the issues that they were navigating in this in this church, if they had just loved the Lord supremely, if they had just loved the Lord more than self, if they had just loved the Lord more than being right, or more than being welcoming, or more than being religious, those things would have taken care of themselves. So that's what he's giving us here. To love him supremely. In fact, that's Matthew 24, verse 37, was mentioned already in the baptism. He said, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength. Everything else, everything else in this letter, everything else in the Christian life flows from this or it flows from nothing. So the first thing, the lat, the first of the last things Paul wants to write down is love the Lord supremely. Let's just find it uh uh in our religious activity that we are delighting in him, that we are satisfied with him. One man put it this way if if you think of heaven, so we love, we sang about heaven, we think of heaven, we long for heaven, and if you think of heaven without Jesus and are still longing for it, then you have no delight and love for Jesus like you should have. The thing that makes heaven so incredible is it is that we will be with our Lord. And that is the love that he's talking about right now. We delight in him. Okay? That's number one. Love the Lord supremely. Number one. Number two, beautiful church number two characteristic mark is this to anticipate the return eagerly. Verse 22, the second part, after he says anethemah, he says, Our Lord come. Our Lord come. Two Greek words in the text. Paul doesn't write them in Greek, he actually writes them in Aramaic. It's Miranatha or what we would say marnatha. He leaves them untranslated for his Greek-speaking audience in Corinth. That's interesting, isn't it? That he's writing to a Greek-speaking church and he's writing everything else in Greek, but he leaves this one phrase in Aramaic. Why? And it's probably this because the phrase was old and sacred. It was a liturgical word. It was ancient, it was preserved, it was untouched. And this was in other writings, one of the earliest Christian documents outside of the New Testament used this word as a liturgical response during the Lord's Supper in the worship of the early church. So they would gather around the Lord's Supper, and at the end of it, they would say, Maronitha, come, Lord. This was the prayer on the lips of the very first disciples in Aramaic. So it was well known. They would have known it. He didn't want to change it because it had impact in its form. And he had recognized, they had said that these people who had walked with Jesus in the flesh, they had heard his voice, they had felt his presence. His disciples who were there when they watched the nails go in his arms, his hands, they saw the stone rolled away, they watched him ascend into the sky and disappear into the cloud. And when they gathered at the table of the Lord's Supper to remember him, this is what they cried. Think about that. They lived with him, they walked with him, they experienced him, they learned from him, and then they watched him leave, and then for the rest of their life they would gather around the table and they would say, At the end of that gathering, Moronitha, our Lord come. They were not praying for an idea, they were aching for a person to come back. They expected him back. Here's what's crazy about this idea that Paul expresses here. The New Testament consistently presents the church as this community that is living between two comings. Between the first coming of Christ in humility and suffering, and the second coming of Christ when he will come in glory and in judgment. So we are the people of the in-between. That's kind of cool. The people of the in-between. We have seen or we have read, or part of us was there when we saw the first coming, and we are waiting for the second coming. Paul has woven this eschatological tension throughout 1 Corinthians. In chapter 4, he says, the Lord is coming and will disclose the purposes of the heart when he comes. In chapter 7, we studied, he urges contentment in present circumstances because the appointed time has grown very short, meaning the coming is happening soon. In chapter 11, he says, we proclaim the Lord's death at the supper until he comes. He's coming. Maranatha. In chapter 15, the great resurrection chapter, he he visions the final moment. When in verse 24, 25, and 26, he says, Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power, for he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. And now he closes with the prayer that has been underneath every one of the passages. Come, Lord. Return. We're aching for you. You know the book of Revelation ends the same way in 22, verse 20, when it says, Come, Lord Jesus. Same word, Maranatha. Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus. It's the bookend of the New Testament. The entire Christian story is lived inside the tension of this prayer. The church has always been a people this way that delight in the Lord. That's point number one. They love the Lord. It's not about empty worship. It's not about works-based. It's not about feeling good about myself. I am just delighting in the Lord, loving him. And that love brings me to the point where I ache for his return. I just can't wait for him to come. I'm living in the in-between. There are some of our brothers that were part of the church that saw him and experienced him and watched him ascend. And there are some of us that will be alive when he returns. And most of us live in the between of those two times when we are just aching for his return. Since my uh oldest daughter is graduating this week, you're gonna have to bear with me for a second because um I'm sentimental a little bit. I'm about to watch my daughter walk across the stage, get a diploma, head off to college, and it's gonna be horrible, right? It's just gonna be horrible and wonderful at the same time. And I was thinking this week, this this morning, actually, just reminiscing on that, and there was a there was a moment I I specifically remember Claire's day that uh I was pastoring in Colorado, and I would on my way home call my wife and be like, hey, I'm on my way home, or text her, I'm on my way home. And multiple times I'd pull up to my driveway, and there was my little Ava, four years old, sitting on the front porch, waiting for dad to pull in the driveway. You wanna you wanna melt a man that thinks he's tough? Do that to him. I would get out of the car and she was waiting there for me, just anticipating my return. Now she's leaving me. Can you believe this? It's ridiculous. She was anticipating my my return. Here's the reality: she was anticipating my return, not because she was so miserable at home with mom, but because she loved her dad. And she was aching or longing for me to return and hold her and play with her again. That's what this prayer expresses. Maranatha is not an escapist prayer. It's not a prayer for people who have given up on the world and just went out. It's the prayer of a people whose love for Christ is so real that his absence is felt deeply. You don't ache for the return of someone you don't love. So Marinatha is a prayer that proves the first point that you can only pray it genuinely if you love him. It's also the most clarifying, most sanctifying prayer you can pray. Because if the Lord would come back in the middle of your week, think about that. Then certain things would become urgent and other things would become small, wouldn't it? The things we worry about wouldn't, I mean, like, really, who cares? Big deal. Jesus coming back tomorrow. We're not finishing that job. I'm not paying that bill. Praise God for that. That'd be cool. The grudge you've been nursing becomes unsustainable, it becomes unimportant. The conversation you've been avoiding becomes a little bit more important. The idol that you've been protecting becomes exposed for what it is. The suffering you've been enduring becomes a temporary ache in a way that makes it bearable. Listen, here's the reality of what this phrase, Maranatha, expresses. You were not made to be fully at home here on this earth. If you belong to Christ, there is something in you that has never quite fit in in this world. You feel that. You feel that. You should feel that. C.S. Lewis would call it sinsucht. That's a German word that I slaughtered, but you can correct me later. I'll accept it. But what that word means by C.S. Lewis was this: an inconsolable longing for a country you've never visited but somehow recognize. I've never been there. You're somebody might be like, I'm aching for heaven, and somebody might ask, Well, what's it like? You're like, I don't know, but I can't wait to see it again. Have you been there before? No, but I ache for it, I long for it. I can't wait for it. There is this longing. So if every beauty that almost satisfies, and every joy that points somewhere else, every love that aches because it knows it's not yet complete, that's what it's pointing to. This longing for that world is not something broken or malfunctioning in you. It is the compass that God in his spirit has placed in a redeemed heart. See, what he's done is when he saved you, he did something incredible. He put in you a love for the Lord that delights in him and so aches for him that you long for a country you've never been to before. That's what Paul's praying for right here. It is the spirit in you, agreeing with the spirit in every believer across 20 centuries. Miranatha, we are not home yet. May this be a way that we greet one another or say goodbye to one another. So that's the invitation to wait eagerly, not anxiously, not passively, but like that little girl aching for daddy's return home. Let the reality of his coming back reorder what you hold tightly, what you hold loosely. Live this week like he might interrupt it. Because he might, and that changes everything. So Paul here is saying as he closes out this letter, there's a lot of things that I dressed for you, and I just want you to know that a lot of those things will take place if you just live with this prayer, this ache in your heart. Even so, Lord, come quickly. Lord, come. That's number two. See it? First, love the Lord. In fact, if anyone doesn't love the Lord, it is a mark that he is not a true follower of Jesus. If he's not delighting in the Lord, but his delighting in the Lord will be reflected in his aching for the return of our Lord come. That's the anticipating the return of Christ. And then he says this in verse 23. This is number three. A beautiful church is this. Depend on grace continually. Look how he says in verse 23. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. I love that. This is cool. Don't miss this, because I again we could read this, close it up, and be already moved on. But one cool thing here is that Paul opens the letter in chapter 1, verse 3, seven years ago when we started 1 Corinthians. We read that, right? You remember? Feels like that long. Remember in verse 3? In chapter 1, he says, Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. So he puts at the very beginning of the book, uh, of the book ends or the bookcase, grace to you. And now in chapter 16, verse 23, he says, the grace of the Lord Jesus be with you. So grace was the first word and the last words of 1 Corinthians. Everything in between, all the rebuke and all of the correction and all of the anathema and all of the theology breathes this air. Not this reward at the end of a difficult letter. He didn't like beat them up. It was like, okay, now I hope you have some grace. He started it with grace, he ends it with grace, meaning that grace was more than just this thing. It was an atmosphere, it was this saturation of the whole letter. Gordon Feast said it this way: Grace is the beginning and the end of the Christian gospel. It is the single word that most fully expresses what God has done and will do for his people in Christ Jesus. Nothing is deserved, everything is freely given. And Paul knows that. Paul's not naive about who he's writing to. He spent 16 chapters just blasting them with lobbing bombs at them, cataloging their failures. He knows who these people are. He knows about the man sleeping with his father's wife in chapter 5. He knows about the brothers suing each other in a pagan court, chapter 6. He knows about how the rich were eating lavishly and getting drunk while the poor were going hungry at the Lord's table, chapter 11. He knows about their envy of one another and their disorder and their arrogance and their theological drift. He has named every piece of it, and after all of it, knowing everything, his closing word is, Grace be with you. Not grace be with those who got it right, not grace with those who heeded my corrections, not grace for the spiritually mature who try harder than the rest. But the grace of the Lord Jesus be with you, all of you, in all of it. This is what makes grace grace. Grace is not the reward for improvement, it is the power that makes improvement possible. Grace does not wait for us to become worthy, it's what makes us worthy. Grace doesn't stand at the edge of our failure, waiting, encouraging us to climb out. It enters our failure with us, begins to do from the inside what we cannot do from the outside. Dependence on grace, then, is our only option. Paul knew that if this church was going to heed his instruction, that if they were gonna correct the things that needed to be corrected, if the gospel was really truly gonna make something beautiful out of that which was broken, they needed grace. They needed to depend on grace, they needed the power of grace in every part of their life. I think about dependence on grace being our only option. Because we are already way beyond what we can handle on our own, aren't we? Think about Peter. Peter sees Jesus walking on water and he says, if you're really him, bid me to come out of the boat and walk to you. And he's like, Come on. Peter gets out of the walk out of the boat and he begins to walk on water, and he's already, once he steps out of that boat, beyond, outside of the realm of human explanation and human power. He's outside of it. Everything he's about to do from that point on is outside of anything he is capable of doing in himself. But then the waves began to rise and the wind began to blow, and outside of his realm of possibility, he begins to act as if he has to brace himself for what's coming. And he begins to take his eyes off of Christ and look around, and he begins to sink as if his very existence on the water depended on him. That's how we act, isn't it? We're already beyond the realm of explanation. We're here, we're saved, we have been given his spirit, we know Christ. We're already beyond the realm of human explanation and human capacity. And so what we need is not more effort, more white knuckle, clenching our fists to try harder to make this happen. What we need is we need the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ to enable us and empower us and make us new so that something truly beautiful can come out of that which is broken. Grace is not passive. Depending on grace continually doesn't mean do nothing. It does not mean using grace as a theological excuse for staying exactly where we are and just be lazy. 1 Corinthians 15, 10, Paul said it this way By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me was not in vain. On the contrary, because of his grace, I worked harder than any of them. But it wasn't I, but it was the grace of God that is within me. So grace worked in Paul, and then Paul worked, but it was grace working through him that produced the work. It's the paradox of sanctification. We are utterly dependent on a grace that produces genuine effort and real transformation. The grace of God never leaves us where it finds us, it always finds us where we are. So many of us so often are exhausted because we've been trying to earn what God has freely given. We've been performing for an audience that isn't demanding a performance. We've been striving to deserve a grace that we can never deserve. We have striving to do in our own power the ability to do something in a context where we are already beyond any human capacity whatsoever. So stop striving. Start depending on the grace of God. So he's like, listen, a beautiful church is a church who just depends on the grace of God. And that grace of God produces a love of Christ supremely, it produces in them an ache for the return of Christ eagerly. That's what he's describing here. This is what grace does. And where sin increased, grace abounds all the more. And I think Corinthians needed some more of it, don't you? They were in a mess. They had a lot of problems. We'd look at this church. That's why I've seen a couple of churches in my life in certain contexts of our American of our country that named their church Corinth Baptist Church. I'm like, do you know? Have you read the Bible? Like, I just don't think you want that name associated with your church. Because they were broken. They were full of sin. And you know what they needed? They needed grace. They needed to depend upon the grace of God. Because listen, we may not be called Corinth, but so many ways we are like Corinth. And we need to go back in dependence on the grace of God. Depend on grace continually. That's how we do it. Last thing I want you to see, and we're done. Beautiful church. Not only a church that loves the Lord supremely, I just I'm delighting in him. I want, I want to be so in love with him because of his love for me. That love brings me to anticipate the return eagerly. I'm just longing for it, and I'm depending on grace continually. Let's do that. And then lastly, goes back to love. He's coming to it again, and that's this number four abound in love genuinely. Twice in this part, he talks about love. All throughout the letter, he talks about love, and he uses himself as an example. In essence, what he's saying at the very end in verse 24 is, I love you guys. I love you. My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Amen. His final words I love you. After the word anethema, after the eschatological prayer, after the benediction of grace, after 16 chapters of correction and instruction and theological wrestling, the last word of this letter is love. So he's saying love the Lord supremely, anticipate his return, depend on his grace, and I love you. It's amazing to me. I love that. I don't I just don't want to miss that. Notice how he says it my love be with you all. All y'all. Every one of y'all's. Not of factions. He does not love the team that stayed loyal to him. He's not like, uh you of people of Paul people, I love you. Apollos people, you know, you're cool, but man, I love you, Paul people. He doesn't do that. He's not like, hey, those of you who got your theology right, those of you who didn't eat meat offered to idols, those of you excuse me, those of you who took care of the Lord's Supper, right? I I love you. No, it's all of you. He loves all of them. He loves all of them. It's not a sentimental love. Paul spent 16 chapters saying hard things. He wasn't just tolerant and accepting, he confronted. By the way, that's what real love looks like, isn't it? 16 chapters of hard truths. Underneath it, a current of love. Genuine, wide, stubborn love. Just I'm gonna love you in spite of your craziness. And note how this love is located. Those of you, he says, My love be with you all in Christ Jesus. Not personality, not even Paul's natural temperament. I think left to himself, Paul might have written off the Corinthians after the first few chapters because I kind of feel like I'm like Paul. I would have done the same thing. I'm like, y'all are crazy. I'm not even wasting any more ink on y'all. Led by the Spirit in Christ Jesus, he's like, listen, I I love you. Rooted in something outside himself, rooted in his union with Christ and in the love of Christ flowing through him. They had a shared identity. They all had as members of one body. This was the love that Paul was expressing to them. This is not human affection. Human affection runs out. This is this is supernatural, providential, Christ-centered, in Christ Jesus love, rooted in the cross, sustained by the resurrection, empowered by the Spirit. This love that does not run out. That's what he's modeling for us. So notice the movement real quick as we finish this up. He begins with the question of love for Christ. That's the inward orientation of the heart. That's verse 22. Then he moves to Maranatha. That's the upward longing for Christ's return. Then he looks to the grace of Christ over us. That's the downward gift from God that he gives us. And then he finally says something about his love or our love, modeling it for one another. That's the outward overflow of these things. So there is an inward, upward, downward, and outward element to this last closing. By the way, that's the architecture of a healthy Christian life. Inward, something happens in there where I delight in him, and then I long for him, and then I receive his grace, and that then flows out from me in love for one another. That's what we're getting at. Paul says this about his love after he addresses division and criticism and immaturity and frustration and correction. And Paul still says, My love be with you all. What a profound pastoral love. Not sentimental, not permissive. Steadfast gospel love, real gospel love, not disappearing when people become difficult. We all have those people in our lives, don't we? Harder to love, the more we get to know them. Feels like Paul was saying, the more I get to know you, I feel for you, I love you. I'm gonna keep on pouring this out to you. That's the fourth and final invitation. Abound in love genuinely, genuinely. That's the aim of the Christian life for one another. Paul models that for us, and then he finishes it with, Amen. Amen. One word. The Hebrew word meaning so be it. I love that. It's the seal, the declaration of faith, the affirmation that what has been said is true and what has been asked for is trusted to the faithful God who promised it. My longing for you, my heart for you is that you would so delight in the Lord, that you would ache for his return, that you would live in total dependence upon his grace, and that you would feel my love and have that love for one another. So be it, Lord, may that be true of us. And so we've been in 1 Corinthians for a long time. We have seen the beauty in the broken place. It's played out across 16 chapters. It's honest, it's searching, it's challenging. We've seen that God takes fractured people and calls them saints. He takes a divided people and calls them into one body of the church. He takes men and women strained by every kind of sin, and he pulls them in and he says, But that's what you were, but now you are washed, 1 Corinthians 6 11. Now you are sanctified. Now you are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ by the Spirit of God. That's the beauty that the gospel produces in the broken situations of life. It's the beauty in the broken. Not that brokenness doesn't hurt, not that it doesn't matter, it does. Paul pent 16th chapter saying so. But brokenness is not the final word. Grace is the final word. And that's what he's describing here in his last words. So, beautiful church loves the Lord supremely. Let's do that. Let's just love him. Let's rekindle that. Let's not leave our first love. Let's rekindle that for him by rehearsing and remembering how he loved us. Let's anticipate his return. Let's not get so comfortable in this world that we forget that this world is not where our compass is putting us toward. We're aching for a world that we've never been to before, but we have that in our hearts because of what he's done. That we depend upon his grace continually and that we abound in love like Paul did genuinely. Maranatha. So be it, Lord. This is what we want. So come. So I don't have truth to life. I'll just think about these things. I'm out of time, anyways. We're gonna pray in two minutes, but do you love the Lord because you've experienced his love? Are you ready for his return? Are you depending on grace or self? Does genuine love mark your life? Those are the questions that we take away with us from 1 Corinthians. Amen? Alright. Paul's final words reveal the marks of a beautiful church and a broken culture. We're gonna sing. We're gonna finish out our service singing and celebrating and singing to this God we love and worship. So pray with me if you would. Father, thank you for the words of Paul here. I know they're your words. I know that. I know you led him to write them. It's not lost on me that these are breathed out by you. But led by your spirit, Paul writes for us what this looks like. I pray that we would delight in you. Where that has grown cold or where that has fizzled out, maybe from what it once was, I pray that you would rekindle it today as we remember again your love for us. I pray that we would ache for your coming, that we would long for your return, that we would depend on your grace, and that we would uh love like Paul loved at the end of it all, still just feeling a great sense of love for the church. I pray that would be true of us. We know that that is possible because of what Christ did on the cross for our sin. This is a beautiful place because of what Christ did, not because we're here. Our presence here makes it the opposite, but it's what Christ did in saving us, calling us, sanctifying us, and uniting us as a people. We're thankful for that, Father. Thank you. I pray that that would be the continual work of your grace in this place, like it was in the church in Corinth and like it has been throughout the history of the church. We love you and we are grateful for the work of your word in our lives. We pray this all in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen.