Christ Church Memphis
Christ Church Memphis
The Prodigal Church Pt. 1: Our Calling | Nathan Cook
In this sermon, we begin a series on Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, uncovering our divine calling. We explore the significance of Paul's introduction in 1 Corinthians 1:1-9, emphasizing the church's sanctification, grace, and the essential role of fellowship with Christ. From understanding our call to holiness to considering our vocational purpose, this sermon challenges us to reflect on how we live out our faith in a world that desperately needs transformation.
[0:17] This morning, we're excited to begin a new sermon series at Christ Methodist Church on Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth.
[0:25] Hear the word of God from the introduction of this letter, 1 Corinthians 1, verses 1-9. Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
[1:35] This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God. Good morning, church. My name's Nathan Cook. I'm the missions pastor here. It may seem strange to you for an introduction to a letter to be somebody's favorite passage of Scripture, but this really is one of my favorite passages of Scripture. And the reason for that is for years, I had the opportunity, I think I've told you this before, but to disciple young men and women who were medical students through Christ Community Health Services. And we would have people from all over the country come to Memphis and live in the Binghamton community with us for a month. And I would have an opportunity to sit with them and meet with them and talk with them about their calling. And this is one of the texts that we would look at.
[2:30] So if you notice, as Grant was reading this passage, that Paul talks about calling at least in three distinct ways, and that's kind of what we're going to focus on this morning. But in order to kind of start in the right way, it's important for us to understand.
[2:46] About the ekklesia, which is the Greek word that we use for church. But that word literally means to call out from. It's a compound word. Ek means out of, and kaleo means to call. And so the word means to call out. And this was a word that was used in Greek culture. And the idea of it was that in these Greek city-states that existed, that there would be a town crier or a herald who would go throughout the town and would cry out and call people out of their homes and to come to the agra, to the city square, and he would call the people to come and to meet and to deliberate in the city square about the affairs of the city.
[3:30] And that's the term that was given to the early church. And so you can see some of the similarities here and the idea and the understanding that evangelists would go out into the world and to cry out the gospel and to gather people who responded to the good news of Jesus Christ together to worship him and to love him and to serve him. And it was there at those church meetings that people would deliberate together about how to use their gifts and their graces to serve God and to love one another. And so this is the idea of where we get the term the church. So the church is not a building. It's a summoned people that all of us who are in Christ have been called.
[4:18] We've been called out of the world and into fellowship with Jesus Christ. And so we're going to look now at how Paul talks about calling in these three ways. And we're going to start with the last one that he gives in looking at that verse one, verse nine, chapter one, verse nine. It says this, God is faithful by whom you are called into the fellowship of his son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.
[4:46] And so all of us are called in this way. We're all called into fellowship with Jesus Christ. So this is how it works. Paul, in another epistle that he wrote, the Ephesians, he talks about our spiritual condition in this way. He says, you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind. And we were by nature children of wrath, just like the rest of mankind. And so Paul's talking about the fallen state of mankind that is common to all of us, that we are born into sin. Our sinful natures were born into sin under the influence of Satan. Under the influence of a fallen world, under the influence of our own sinful flesh, that that is the spiritual condition that is common to all mankind. Now, some people have a hard time identifying with this passage or the reality of this passage because you, like myself, grew up in a Christian home, and maybe you weren't fully exposed to all the dangers of the world. But really, when the New Testament and the Bible kind of looks at people and categorizes people into two categories.
[6:15] Either the Jewish people, you either belong to the Jewish people or to the Gentiles, which means everybody other than the Jewish people, the nations of the world. And so there may be one or two of us in our church, a few of us in our church, maybe that come from a Jewish tradition, that were born in that Jewish tradition. We can trace our spiritual lineage all the way back to Abraham, and can say that there is a relationship with God in our family all the way back to the time of Abraham, but even Abraham was called out of the world and into a relationship with Jesus Christ. So maybe the spiritual lineage goes back that far. For my own family, I was raised in a Christian home. My parents were Christian. My grandfather was a Christian. My great-great-grandfather was actually a circuit rider for the Methodist Church, and started churches in Georgia. And his father was a Christian. And we can keep going back somewhere. At some point, we can trace my spiritual lineage. We haven't made it back this far, but at some point we'll land somewhere in England where my ancestors worshiped trees and were Druids and were pagans. At some point along the line, a missionary or a community pastor or somebody, a friend, shared the good news of Jesus Christ with my ancestors.
[7:39] And they left the world and came into following Jesus Christ and to fellowship with Jesus Christ. And they had children and they encouraged their children to follow Christ. And they encouraged their children to follow Christ.
[7:54] But guys, we're entering into a time where that's a lot less likely to happen. Back in the 70s, when I was born, 90% of the United States of America identified as Christians. Today, it's under 50%.
[8:15] So we today are back in the same spot that Paul's talking about. People are giving up their identity in Christ. They're deconstructing their faith. They're leaving the church to enter into the world. And it's really true that in every successive generation, it is our responsibility to share the good news of Jesus Christ with our children and to win them to the faith and not to expect just because they were raised in a Christian home that they will continue in that path. Every generation must be won to Christ because our spiritual condition is the same today as it was in Paul's time, that we're born into sin.
[8:59] And Satan and the world and our own sinful flesh are trying to persuade us to break fellowship with Christ. They're trying to persuade us to pursue our own goals and our own desires apart from Christ. They're trying to persuade us to follow the lust of our flesh instead of surrendering to the lordship of Jesus Christ. Thank you.
[9:26] So the same is true for us today as it was in Jesus' day. Jesus also, in the early church, existed in this time where there was tension between the world and Christianity. And there were even in those early days people who initially gave their lives to Christ and found fellowship with Jesus as their Savior, but continued to be lured away by the riches and comfort of the world. And so John, in the book of Revelation, writes these letters to the churches. And the church of Laodicea is very similar to the church in America today.
[10:04] And we need to listen to those warnings and to hear how is Jesus calling us today? How is Jesus calling us back into fellowship with him? In Revelation chapter 3, it says, and to the angel of the church in Laodicea write, the words of the amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of God's creation. I know your works. You are neither cold nor hot. Would you that be either cold or hot? So because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
[10:36] For you say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourselves, and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see.
[11:02] Those whom I love I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Behold, I stand at the door and knock If anyone hears my voice and opens the door I will come into him and eat with him and he with me.
[11:21] The one who conquers, I will grant him to sit with me on my throne, as I also conquered and sat down with my father on his throne. He who has an ear to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. And so you see here that as John is writing this letter to the church in Laodicea, that they had fellowship with Jesus and they let it go. They decided to follow the riches and comforts of this world instead of following Jesus Christ. And guys, that is the day in which we live. That is what is going on right now.
[12:06] That we have become comfortable and that we have found comfort in the things of the world. And just as then, today, Jesus is standing at the door of our households. He is standing at the door of our heart and he's knocking and he's saying, repent. Turn away from your own sinful flesh. Turn away from the desires of your fallen heart. Turn away from the fallenness of this world. Open the door of your heart to me and I will come in and have fellowship with you. And you will experience my joy. But he's calling us to repentance. We have to bend our knee to Jesus as our Lord and Savior for Him to come in and to have fellowship with us. For us to enjoy the richness of His love that He is ready to pour out upon us. But we must bend our knee to Him.
[13:08] When we do so, we're given a new identity in Christ and a new purpose.
[13:14] 1 Peter 2.9 says it this way. He says, You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. Jesus wants to take us as his own possession and to possess us by his Spirit, to dwell with us, to live with us, and to give us a new purpose, a new mission, to proclaim his excellencies to the world, to separate ourselves from the darkness of this fallen world, and to come into the light of his countenance and his presence, to live in the light as he is the light.
[14:08] So Jesus is calling us, church, into fellowship with himself, to enjoy fellowship with Jesus Christ. That's true of each and every one of us. There is not one of us in this room
[14:22] who has not been called by God in that way, to have fellowship with Jesus Christ. The second way in which all of us are called is that we are called to be holy and.
[14:33] So again, in 1 Corinthians, in verse 2 of this chapter that we're looking at, Paul says this, he says, To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all of those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. That we are called to be saints. That word saint means holy one. A holy person is someone who's been sanctified.
[15:01] A sanctified person is someone who's been set apart from the world. Leviticus says it this way. He says, you shall be holy to me, for I, the Lord, am holy and have separated you from the people that you should be mine. And so that's what Jesus does when we come into relationship with him. He separates us from the world. He separates us and calls us to be a part of his family. He adopts us into his family and that we are to take on his character. That we are not to be like the world, but that we are to be like Jesus Christ, that our character should reflect the character of God, and the character of God is one of holiness. That word, that one word, holy, is the word we use to sum up all of the character of God. That in Isaiah, when Isaiah sees this vision of the temple, and he hears the seraphim crying out, they cry out, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty who was and is and is to come. They're crying out and worshiping God, calling out his character of holiness.
[16:08] That we too, as 1 Peter 1, 14 and 15 says, it says, as obedient children, do not be conformed to the passions of your former ignorance. But as he who called you is holy, you also be holy in all of your conduct. So how do we do that? How do we take on the character of Christ?
[16:32] Well, it's not something that we can do on our own. In fact, it's something that God does for us and in us, and it's called sanctifying grace, that it is by God's grace that we are made holy. And what we are to do is to respond to God's initiative, that we are to humble ourself and to receive God's grace. And so in the church, we talk about the means of grace and the means of grace are ways in which we experience in a very real way, the grace of God is the way in which we encounter God's grace, the way in which we internalize it and make it our own.
[17:07] And so one of those means of grace is by reading the scriptures. And so as we read the scriptures, our mind is formed around the thoughts of God, that we renew our minds to think like God thinks by reading the scriptures. We understand how God thinks. We understand the mind of God by reading the scriptures. And if we're not reading the scriptures, if we're not bathing in them, then our mind is going to wander, and it's going to take the shape of the world around us. It's going to take the shape of our own fallen sinful flesh. And so the way in which we internalize the grace of God, one of those ways is by reading Scripture and renewing our minds by agreeing with Scripture and by thinking about Scripture and by meditating on Scripture.
[17:52] The way in which we align our heart with God's will is through prayer, that as we listen to God and as we commune to God and as we pray to God that our heart begins to take the shape of God's heart. Through the sacraments, through baptism in the Lord's Supper, the sacraments are an outward, invisible sign of an inward and invisible grace. It's the way in which we identify with God in the world. So this is what I mean by that. Through baptism, we are identifying in Jesus Christ's death and resurrection. In the Lord's Supper, we are identifying with the forgiveness that we receive through Him pouring out His life upon the cross.
[18:39] The sacraments, for those of us, again, like myself, who've grown up in the church and we see baptisms regularly and we, might have lost some notes there, but it's okay.
[18:54] We communicate, we see the sacraments regularly in our life. And so they become kind of mundane to us, normal to us. But Kim and I have had the opportunity through our lives to travel to different parts of the world and to go into, I've been to Sudan and we've been to Afghanistan and we had friends in Afghanistan who grew up in a Muslim family and in a Muslim culture where Christianity, you didn't see it anywhere. In fact, that in the 70s under communist rule that they had destroyed all of the church buildings in the country. So you couldn't go to a public place of worship. And so in that context, to be baptized means I'm turning my back on this culture and I'm receiving Jesus as my Lord and Savior, and I'm coming into, I'm going to live my life in a new way. I'm going to be holy as Jesus is holy. And that's when there is pressure that's put upon them to recant their faith and to turn back, that a lot of times there's toleration for exploring things through reading the Word of God, but you cannot do that. Once you are baptized, there's no turning back.
[20:10] And that's the way baptism was designed to be. That's what God designed, is that He designed it for it to be an outward sign of what's going on in our heart. It's a proclamation that I no longer belong to the world, I now belong to Jesus Christ and to Him alone. It is a means of grace by which we identify with Jesus Christ.
[20:35] Another means of grace is fellowship and accountability. Just as iron sharpens iron, one man sharpens another. It is through our fellowship and accountability with one another that stimulates us to love one another and to good works. Through service and generosity, service and generosity breaks our self-centered orientation and it manifests God's giving nature. Through taking Sabbath and through worshiping, Sabbath re-centers our identity in Jesus as Lord and not in our own personal productivity. It helps us to find our meaning and purpose in Christ. Through fasting, we train or tame our own physical appetites while elevating our spiritual hunger. So it's through all of these different means of grace in which we are slowly but surely cut off from the world around us and set apart to belong to Jesus.
[21:40] It's how we find our new identity. It's how we find our purpose. It's how we reflect his goodness in the world around us.
[21:49] Finally, the church is given a mission, right? And it's a common mission. It's common to all of us. That when Jesus was asked the question, what is the greatest commandment? He gives an answer. He doesn't say, well, they're all equally important. He says, the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself. And then he goes on to give a commissioning to the church, to all of us, and says, go and make disciples, teaching people to obey all that I've commanded you. And so that mandate to love God and neighbor and to make disciples belongs to all of us as followers of Jesus Christ. We're all called into that mission. We're all called to participate in that mission together.
[22:40] But there's a third type of calling, and it's a vocational calling that helps us to understand how do we localize that mission? How do we live it out in our day-to-day life and through our workplaces, through our families? How does that get expressed is through our vocational calling. And so, again, our final verse is in 1 Corinthians 1.1, where Paul says, Paul called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus. So Paul was called to be an apostle. An apostle was one who was sent. That's what it literally means. One who is sent out, one who is sent out on God's mission.
[23:22] And so Paul's vocational sphere, the place in which he lived out his calling, was among the unreached people groups of the world, that he planted churches where they had never existed before. And so in Romans chapter 15, verses 20 and 21, Paul describes his calling, his vocational calling in this way. He says, And thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, least I build on someone else's foundation. But as it is written, to those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand. And so Paul is called by Jesus. And if you flip back to Acts chapter 9, you can see this in his encounter with Jesus. As soon as he comes to faith in Jesus, Jesus gives him this sense of calling. He says that you are to be my witness among the Gentiles, that you are to be my apostles to the Gentile nations, to those who are without Christ, to those who do not know me. He was called to be a missionary. That was his vocational calling. And God is calling some of us in this church to take up a similar calling, to be missionaries, to go to places where the gospel has never been proclaimed.
[24:40] To be a cross-cultural witness. But that's not the only way in which God's mission is expressed in the world. So I want to give you some other examples of people that I know and their vocational calling. And so one is Alan Barnhart. So a couple of weeks ago, my son went to work at Barnhart Crane and Rigging. He's a welder and he works in their fabrication department. And so Alan Barnhart inherited this engineering firm from his father, and he has dedicated that business to the Lord. So 50% of their profits go towards expanding God's kingdom all over the world. And so he's giving away millions of dollars every month to advance God's kingdom.
[25:30] For many years, they, within their business, they had a ministry called Economic Opportunities. Economic Opportunities has now grown outside of that and has been kind of launched into its own kind of full-time ministry. But what they were doing at Economic Opportunities when it was under Barnhart Crane and Rigging is that they were taking men who had been incarcerated and helping them to find employment. And so he took that on as a personal risk and as a risk to his business in order to give people an opportunity in order to practice this idea that Jesus teaches us about forgiveness and giving people a new opportunity, extending grace and love to those who are on the margins of society,
[26:14] that he incorporated that into his business. And so Alan sees his business as an expression of his calling, not only to do excellent work in the field of engineering, but to provide opportunities for those on the margins and to advance God's kingdom.
[26:31] Another example of a vocational calling that I kind of want to highlight because it's very different from that is my wife, Kim. And so from a very early age, Kim felt like God was calling her to adopt children. When one day that she would get older and be married to adopt children and looking at her life, you can see how that calling has kind of grown in the fact that we adopted our first two children. But not only that, that Kim began to network with other adoptive parents in the city and began to help them into adoption and through the trauma that can come that some adopted children experience as a part of adoption. We've had many families from our former church who've gone overseas who've also adopted. And so there's a whole new set of circumstances for those families to kind of work through where they don't have these supportive networks. And so you can see that calling as a theme throughout our life. Not only that, but a part of our calling has been to disciple our children and to create a home that's hospitable to our neighbors. And she's our connecting point to friends and neighbors, not only in our own neighborhood and in the city, but all over the place. She has been the point of connection for our family.
[27:58] So she is living out God's calling as a mom and as a wife. And that mission is localized primarily in our home and in our neighborhood, but it extends from that through all of our relationships that we have.
[28:18] So each and every person in this room has a different vocational calling. And so the question is like, how do we determine what that is? How can we discern what that is? And so there are a couple of different ways that we can kind explore that. And so one is that we have to, again, be abiding with Christ in prayer and in His Word to hear from Him, to hear His still, small voice. Because if we're not doing that, then in our day-to-day routine, we're just going to be expressing, unfortunately, maybe our own sinful desires through our business, through our family, through our family.
[28:59] It's the word of God and prayer that keeps those things in check, that keeps our own sinful flesh in check and keeps us hearing God's direction, hearing our calling. Another thing that we can do is take an inventory of our own spiritual gifts. And so in Romans chapter 12, 1 Corinthians chapter 12 and 14, there are lists of our spiritual gifts and we can read those things and see what is it that we identify. Is it in teaching? Is it in serving? Is it in helping other people?
[29:31] What are the ways in which God has designed us and fashioned us and to tap into those things? We can seek wise counsel from others, from mentors, church leaders, spiritually mature friends. We can test the waters. If we have no idea, we can just try different things out. You're going to hear in a minute an invitation to come help at VBS. You might think that's terrible. I don't want to do that. Or you might think I love children. It doesn't matter. Just come try it out. See what happens. See what God does in your heart that he may be calling you into deeper relationship with these children over time. We can attend to both the Spirit's peace, and this is key, and to the pressure that the Holy Spirit applies to us. And so we've heard lots of times, pray about it and see if God gives you a peace about it. Well, sometimes God does that. He gives us a peace. Other times he gives us a pressure. Well, Nathan, what do you mean by the Holy Spirit pressuring us? Well, the apostle Paul in Acts chapter 20, he talks about it this way. He says that I feel compelled by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is constraining me and he's taking me to Jerusalem. And as Paul shares with others, you're going to Jerusalem there. He's given warning by prophets and saying, like, when you go there, you are going to suffer. You're going to experience suffering, that you're going to be imprisoned when you get to Jerusalem.
[30:52] And so there's not necessarily a peace that's telling Paul, I need to go there. It's a pressure. The Holy Spirit is saying, he's constraining him and saying, this is my will for you in this hour. And yes, it may be hard, but I need you in Jerusalem on this day, at this hour, for this purpose.
[31:14] And so sometimes God calls us to do things that we do not want to do at all, but it's because he sees a grander picture and a bigger purpose that we cannot see. And he's asking us as his children to bend our knee and to do it just out of blind obedience to him. And he will show us when it comes, when that day comes, what the purpose is. Or sometimes we might not know until we get to heaven what the purpose of that was. But we can trust a good and holy God, a God who loves us more than anything in the world. We can trust Him to do hard things and to trust Him when He calls us to do things that we're not comfortable with.
[32:00] Finally, we're to submit to the community for confirmation of our calling. So, again, in the example of the Apostle Paul, that he prayed and he fasted with the leaders in the church of Antioch before he began his missionary journey. And again, that through prayer and fasting, the community discerned that Paul and Barnabas were being set apart from their role and responsibility within the Antioch church. They were being released from those responsibilities in order to go and plant
[32:33] churches where they had never existed before. And so a lot of times, again, this can be a check for us against kind of this radical individuality of American culture, that God, for God, God wants us to discern our calling and community and through trusted leaders who can help us to see our blind spots and can help us to go in the direction that God has for us. For those of you who might be interested in a deeper dive of understanding this idea of calling, I had an opportunity a couple of weeks ago to interview Lucas Pulley, who's the executive director for Tampa Underground.
[33:14] Which is a network of about 170 microchurches, house churches throughout the Tampa area that are serving in all different kinds of missional ways. And what drives their mission is they say this, that we don't start a micro-community. We don't start a house church without a called leader.
[33:34] And so they build the whole ministry around God's calling to a person. And so we were able to kind of talk through a little bit about what does that look like? And so on Wednesday, that's going to come out. We've started a podcast called Latitude. You can find Latitude wherever you find podcasts, Spotify, Apple, all those places. And it's a really great conversation about calling.
[34:01] And so, in conclusion, we as God's people are a summoned people. He has called us out of the world and into fellowship with Jesus Christ. He's called us to take on His likeness in His character, His holiness. And He's called us into all kinds of different, very specific fields to labor for Him, to love our co-workers, to carry out His mission in a variety of different ways. Will we answer the herald's cry? Will we gather with the saints? Will we have the courage to step back into a broken and fallen world, not as those participating in the sinful pleasures of the world, but as Christ's ambassadors, taking his good news to a broken world, confident that the one who has called us is faithful, and he will surely accomplish his kingdom purposes through us. Will you pray with me?
[35:15] Heavenly Father, we thank you that you have called us out of darkness and into the light. Lord, you've called us out of the world and into fellowship with your Son. Lord, you've called us to lay aside our sinful pleasures, to crucify our flesh, to take up our cross and to follow you, to be your disciples, to love our brothers and sisters, just as you have loved us. Lord, we know that you who have begun this good work in us, Lord, will bring it to fruition. It's in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit that we pray. Amen.