UNITED UNTO HOLINESS

Posted by Pastor Greg Allen on November 28, 2021 under 2021 |

Bethany Bible Church Sunday Message; November 28, 2021 from 2 Corinthians 12:19-21

Theme: We must work together with unity in Christ so that we can protect the holiness of the church.

(All Scripture is taken from The New King James Version, unless otherwise indicated).

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I’m very grateful for this church family. I’m grateful for the unity we share together in Christ. But have you ever been in a divided church? I’ve been in one of those too.

The word ‘church’, in the original language of the Bible, means ‘an assembly of called-out people’. And so, when you think of it, a ‘divided assembly’ is a strange kind of oxymoron. I can tell you, by sad experience, that a divided church—a church in which different individuals or factions hold a relationship of anger and suspicion and hostility toward one another—is a very miserable place to be. It’s the kind of place where people lose a sense of things that really matter; and where they turn instead against one another over things that don’t really matter at all. Words are said that should never be spoken. Attitudes are expressed that should never be embraced. Grudges are held on to that should never have developed in the first place.

Believe me; to be in a divided church family is truly a spirit-draining experience.

But it’s not just that a divided church is a sad and draining place to be. It can also become a morally dangerous place. The divisiveness creates the kind of atmosphere in which the Lord Jesus and His good commandments for us are increasingly forgotten, and in which spiritual matters that need to be taken care of are increasingly neglected, and in which the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives is quenched. A church that’s divided and disunified—a place that ought to instead be promoting holiness in the lives of the people in it—very often becomes, through the subtle activity of the devil, a breeding ground for all kinds of sin.

When the apostle Paul wrote 2 Corinthians, he was writing to a divided church. Not only were some of the people of God in strained and broken in their relationships with one another; but sin in their midst was no longer being dealt with as it should. Paul wrote some very hard things in his letter to that church family—not only to become united again, but also to exhort them to deal with sin in a loving and redemptive way.

One of those hard things is found in 2 Corinthians 12:19-21. He wrote to the Corinthian Christians on behalf of himself and his ministry team, and spoke very directly about their disunity:

Again, do you think that we excuse ourselves to you? We speak before God in Christ. But we do all things, beloved, for your edification. For I fear lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I wish, and that I shall be found by you such as you do not wish; lest there be contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, backbitings, whisperings, conceits, tumults; lest, when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and I shall mourn for many who have sinned before and have not repented of the uncleanness, fornication, and lewdness which they have practiced (2 Corinthians 12:19-21).

Do you notice in this passage that he is concerned about some particular sin issues that he might have to come and deal with?—such things as uncleanness, fornication and lewdness? But in this passage, he’s not writing directly to the group of people who are committing those acts of immorality. Instead, he’s writing directly to a different group of people—those who were demonstrating a divisiveness toward one another—and demonstrating that divisiveness through such things as contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, backbitings, whisperings, conceits and tumults.

What this passage is showing us is that the divisions in the church were preventing the people of God from dealing with the issues of immorality that were going on in their midst. A divisive spirit was keeping the church from diligently pursuing true holiness. And before those sins of immorality could effectively be dealt with in a way that they should, a spirit of true, Christ-centered unity needed to first be restored to the whole church family.

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Now; there’s a backstory to this passage. And it would be very important to be reminded of what was going on at the time.

A year or so before the apostle Paul had written these words, there had been a serious sin problem within the church family. The Christians within the church were engaging in a lot of the immoral practices that characterized the Corinthian paganistic culture. These Christians were participating in the worship of false gods, and were even falling into the kind of gross acts of sexual immorality that accompanied that kind of paganism. Some of the sinful practices going on in the church family were so bad, in fact, that they would have been shocking to the pagan people who heard of it. Paul wrote much in 1 Corinthians 5 and 6 to deal with these problems.

Those are not the kind of problems that only occurred sometime in the ancient past, are they? Even today, we see some professing Christians getting easily caught up in the immoral practices of the ungodly world around us. In a good, healthy church family in which the believers are united together in Christ, those kinds of sin problems are, ordinarily, ongoingly dealt with in a godly and loving and restorative manner. Our Lord Jesus, through the ministry of the indwelling Holy Spirit, has built His holy church with a kind of spiritual ‘immune system’; so that, when a church family is as healthy as it should be, it fights off the subtle and corrupting influences of sin. But something else was going on in the Corinthian church that was not allowing it to function as the healthy church family that the Lord Jesus intended it to be.

You see; by the time we get to 2 Corinthians, a new problem had developed. False teachers had made their way into the Corinthian church; and they were telling the Corinthian Christians that they could only make themselves right in the sight of God by observing a set of religious regulations and ceremonies. They were turning people away from the apostle Paul and from the simple gospel of faith in Jesus that he had taught them. These false teachers were even going so far as to suggest that Paul had been writing the hard things he had been writing to the Corinthian believers in order to simply appear ‘approved’ in their sight. And their false teaching—as false teaching almost always does—was creating great division within the church family. As a result of that divisiveness, important things were being neglected—particularly, the church’s responsibility to deal with the problem of immorality in its midst.

Now; if we were to look ahead just a bit to Chapter 13, we’d find—in the first few verses—that Paul addressed the problem of immorality. Just like a stern father, he warned them that he was coming to them; and that he would deal with those who had sinned in the past, but who were not going forward into repentance. He wrote;

This will be the third time I am coming to you. “By the mouth of two or three witnesses every word shall be established.” I have told you before, and foretell as if I were present the second time, and now being absent I write to those who have sinned before, and to all the rest, that if I come again I will not spare—since you seek a proof of Christ speaking in me, who is not weak toward you, but mighty in you. For though He was crucified in weakness, yet He lives by the power of God. For we also are weak in Him, but we shall live with Him by the power of God toward you. Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless indeed you are disqualified. But I trust that you will know that we are not disqualified (13:1-6).

So; we could summarize the flow of the situation in this way: (1) false teachers were causing divisions in the church; (2) the church’s divisiveness was keeping it from dealing with sin as it should; and so (3) immorality in the church was therefore not being dealt with in a godly manner. And Paul fully intended that the problem of immorality be dealt with. Before he could help the Corinthian church family to effectively deal with the immorality in its midst, he first needed to help them overcome their disunity. And so, in our passage this morning, he deals directly with that disunity.

This is a hard passage. Paul says some tough things in it. But I think it would be good to draw out the positive implications of what he says and learn from them. Paul, through the enabling ministry of the Holy Spirit, is setting before us a very encouraging principle that—if we will grasp—will motivate us and enable us to protect our witness as a holy church to this world. He is showing us that we must work together with unity in Christ so that we can protect the holiness of the church.

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ; there has never been as many things for a church family to become divided over than there are today. So; just think of what a relevant word from the Lord this is! May God help us to protect our precious unity, so that we can truly labor together to present a genuinely holy witness of our Lord to this world.

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Now; let’s begin where Paul begins. And that’s with the fact that when it comes to church life …

1. OUR EDIFICATION IN CHRIST IS WHAT WE SEEK.

To be ‘edified’ simply means to be ‘built up’. And that’s what the things that we do together as a church family are meant to accomplish. That’s the basic priority. It’s to all work together toward our mutual work of building one another up in a deeper relationship with Jesus. Paul exemplified this in verse 19; when he said, “Again, do you think that we excuse ourselves to you? We speak before God in Christ. But we do all things, beloved, for your edification.”

Paul started off by explaining that he was not doing what the false teachers had said he was doing. He wasn’t writing all of these hard things in order to somehow ‘defend’ himself or to gain the approval of others. That was not Paul’s motive at all. He said so in 13:7;

Now I pray to God that you do no evil, not that we should appear approved, but that you should do what is honorable, though we may seem disqualified (13:7).

He was not concerned at all with how the Corinthians evaluated him; nor was he concerned with what the false teachers thought of him. His only concern was with the Lord’s evaluation of his ministry. He knew that the Lord was the one who had commissioned him as an apostle; and he knew it would be to the Lord alone that he must give an account. When he spoke these hard things, it wasn’t merely for ‘effect’. It wasn’t merely intended to create an ‘impression’. Rather, he spoke these things sincerely as before God in Christ. In 2:17, he said;

For we are not, as so many, peddling the word of God; but as of sincerity, but as from God, we speak in the sight of God in Christ (2:17).

(And by the way; may God help us all to be like that!)

So; if he wasn’t out to impress anyone with his apostolic authority, then why did he speak and write and work as he did? It was for the edification of the people of God. It was for the sake of their being built up and strengthened in Christ. As he went on to say in 13:9—speaking for himself and his other fellow gospel-workers;

For we are glad when we are weak and you are strong. And this also we pray, that you may be made complete (13:9) …

… that is to say, complete in Christ!

And dear brothers and sisters; let’s not pass by that too quickly. That absolutely needs to be our motive toward one another. We exist as a church body—joined together by the Lord Jesus Himself—not so that we may pursue our own agendas; but rather, so that we may build one another up in our Lord Jesus. He has joined us together into one body for that very reason. Paul put it this way in Ephesians 4:11-16;

And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till we all come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a perfect man, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ; that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ—from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love (Ephesians 4:11-16).

If we will humbly set our own personal agendas aside, and make it our aim instead to build one another up in the love of our Lord Jesus Christ—seeking to make one another complete in Him—then we will have done a great deal to prevent ourselves from becoming a divided church in the first place.

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So; we need to make it our aim to edify one another in Christ. And in order for that to happen as it should; then we should understand that …

2. OUR UNITY IN CHRIST IS WHAT IS ESSENTIAL.

We see this in verse 20. As we go back to the hard things that Paul had to write to the Corinthian church, we see that he said, “For I fear lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I wish, and that I shall be found by you such as you do not wish; lest there be contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, backbitings, whisperings, conceits, tumults …” What a dreadful list! Sadly, if you’ve been in a divided church, that list is already all too familiar to you.

When a church family ceases to have Jesus Christ at the center—when it loses its focus on Him—then the members of the church cease to pursue one another’s edification in Christ. Folks start to turn inward toward the pursuit of their own agendas. They divide up into camps and cliques. And what do you find? You find this dreadful list acted out in the church family:

• First, you find “contentions”. This is a general name for ‘fights’ or ‘instances of striving’—the kind of thing that should never happen between fellow believers.
• Second, you find “jealousies”. The word in the original language refers to ‘zeal’; but this is a negative kind of zeal. It’s a zeal for whatever benefits and exalts ‘self’.
• Third, you find “outbursts of wrath”. This speaks of heated arguments and angry shouting matches. What an ugly thing to hear in the household of God!
• Fourth, you find “selfish ambitions”. The word in the original language speaks of ‘factions’, or the development of a ‘party spirit’—’my group against your group’, or ‘my team against your team’. We shouldn’t have any ‘group’ or ‘team’ but one; and that’s the body of Christ itself.
• Fifth, you find “backbitings”. What a picturesque phrase that is! This speaks of speaking evil about someone when they’re walking away and out of earshot—tearing them down before another believer. How ugly! How unlike Jesus!
• Sixth—and very much related—is “whisperings”. This would speak of the spreading of gossip and slander—things you pass from ear to ear because they dare not be spoken out loud.
• Seventh, you find “conceits”. That’s when our personal pride takes over; and we seek to exalt ourselves over one another.
• Eighth and finally, you find “tumults”—which refers to disorders and instabilities and commotions. The church ceases to be a peaceful place.

Now; how can a church deal lovingly and effectively and redemptively with people in its midst who are caught up in sin, when those are the kinds of things that characterize the atmosphere? It can’t do it! And the enemy of our souls knows that very well!

Paul feared having to come to the Corinthians before this problem of division was cleared up and repented of. He didn’t want to come and find them fighting in this kind of way; and then for them to find him having to be harsh and stern with them in ways that he had to be once before.

And so; dear brothers and sisters in Christ; let’s learn the lesson from this. Let’s pursue the kind of unity in Christ that leads to mutual edification within the church family. Let’s be intentional about keeping Jesus first, and staying away from things that divide us. Where the things we find in this awful list exist among us, let’s repent of them. Let’s take Paul’s words in Philippians 2 to heart:

Therefore if there is any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit, if any affection and mercy, fulfill my joy by being like-minded, having the same love, being of one accord, of one mind. Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself. Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others (Philippians 2:1-4).

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And dear brothers and sisters; if we put the priority on our mutual edification in Christ, and if we seek to preserve our unity in Him—keeping Him first; then it will be true that …

3. OUR HOLINESS IN CHRIST IS WHAT WE PROTECT.

Paul was concerned that he would have to come and deal with what the Corinthian church should have been dealing with—but was unable to because of its disunity. He wrote in verse 21, “lest, when I come again, my God will humble me among you, and I shall mourn for many who have sinned before and have not repented of the uncleanness, fornication, and lewdness which they have practiced.”

Paul had been wanting the Corinthians to do what the Lord Jesus had taught His church to do all along. In Matthew 18, the Lord Jesus said;

“Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother. But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that ‘by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.’ And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector. Assuredly, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Matthew 18:15-18).

This is a tough but necessary thing. Its objective is redemption—the restoration of a fallen brother or sister back into the fellowship. But it absolutely requires unity. The Lord Jesus went on to say;

“Again I say to you that if two of you agree on earth concerning anything that they ask, it will be done for them by My Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them” (vv. 19-20).

Often, a church family will try to deal with problems of immorality while—at the same time—ignoring the spirit of disunity in its midst. That’s s a mistake that we must not make!

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The other day, there were a couple of men who came from a roofing company to work on the church. They were cleaning out the church gutters. And you should have seen them! It was amazing! I looked out the window from the parsonage, and I saw one man almost at the very top of the highest part of the steep church roof with a rope around himself. The rope was thrown over the roof; and he was holding the rope for the other guy who was tied to it—slowly lowering himself down the other side to clean the hard-to-reach gutters. It was almost like watching a couple of skilled mountain climbers!

I talked to them later … when they were on the ground, that is. I said that I watched how they worked; and asked, “Watching you guys was like watching a couple of acrobats! Do you ever get used to doing that kind of work?” And one of them said, “Oh, yes. We get used to doing hard things like that because we’re always looking out for each other.”

Dear church family; dealing with issues of sin in a loving way is hard work. And we can only do it so long as we are tied tightly together in Christ and are looking out for each other. Let’s preserve our precious unity as a church family; because we must work together in unity through Christ to be able to protect the holiness of our witness.