And Such Were Some of You

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And we come to the end all too soon as far as I’m concerned because there’s so much more to say. But we come to the end of our month’s theme which was idolatry and its insanity. And the only way that I could tackle it in a short time was to choose 4 passages and that I’ve done and I find it very difficult actually to know which passage to choose today because so many were clamouring to be heard. But I’ve chosen this marvellous little passage in verses 9 to 11 and this once again gives us something of the ugliness and the peril and the madness of idolatry. What a crazy thing it is as we, we see it and its results.

Well, I’ve chosen this little passage of 3 verses largely I think because of the wonderful sentence at the beginning of verse 11. In the older versions as in the Revised Standard Version it reads: And such were some of you. Just half a dozen words and yet how powerful those words are and I hope that as I expound them today they’ll come home to you with force and that like me you won’t be able to forget them all your lives. And such were some of you. Now the controlling theme of this paragraph in chapter 6 need not delay us.

We ought to put things in context if we can. Let me tell you briefly that the context is that the Christians in Corinth are being tiresome again. They really were a very difficult lot and they were quarrelling a lot and they were taking their quarrels into the public courts and the apostle Paul simply couldn’t understand why they should do that. Were they not spiritually mature enough to deal with their own problems? Why did they want to wash their dirty linen in public?

He’s quite amazed and he speaks words here of strength to them in chapter 6. But I want to take, in a sense, not out of its context but simply because we haven’t time, to take only 3 verses now in this whole discussion which I think are very powerful in their, in their ability to diagnose certain things. And so I’m going to stand here this morning as a diagnostician. I think the Bible often is brilliant in its diagnosis, in giving us symptoms of certain things And I hope that this may help to draw all the threads together of our 4 Tuesdays and to summarise what we need to know about idolatry according to the Bible. First, I want to look at the infallible symptoms of a pagan society, and those symptoms of course are those read just now by Mark at the end of verse 9 and the beginning of verse 10, a truly horrible and shuddering list.

Now when in the autumn of A.D. 50 Paul arrived in Corinth, he found himself in the middle of a cosmopolitan city where there were people from every conceivable part of that world of the day. And it was a particularly licentious city, well known for it. Indeed, the word a Corinthian came down in our own language right until the Regency days And in the Regency, a Corinthian was a man of fashion and a man of pleasure. And just to cheque on that, I’d learnt that from one of the commentaries, I looked at my shorter Oxford Dictionary just before the service and was amazed to find that it’s still in the dictionary as an archaism of our language. To Corinthianize is simply to live for pleasure.

So it’s an amazing length of time that word has been used in our language from Paul’s day. In Paul’s day, if anybody was to produce a play and they had a drunk character in that play, they’d automatically make him a citizen of Corinth. It was just notorious that that’s where you found the drunkards. Now at the heart of this violent and licentious pagan society was the worship of Aphrodite, which was a particularly foul and unclean cult. And what Paul is really saying here, in short, is that where you get this kind of paganism, this kind of idolatry, you will always get these particular outworkings of evil, these particular symptoms of adultery and robbery, drunkards and so on.

Now I’ve been brooding a lot on these, this little list during this morning. One wonders why he chooses these particular things. Did he just have a list of sins in his file and he just banged them down in the letter saying, well, I must put down a list of evil things? Or did he think of them very carefully or were they things that he himself had noticed and seen or what? And it occurred to me, I don’t want to be dogmatic about it, but it occurred to me that actually what he’s giving us here, he seems to be choosing the particular sins and evils in a society that make it impossible for us to have community, that degrade our humanity and our dignity, that make it impossible to live together.

I mean drunkards, well, that’s a caricature, isn’t it, of human dignity? Man ceases to be man as he lurches up the street.

Adultery, homosexuality, these are things that destroy human relationships. Robbery, well, you can’t live in a society with a lot of robbers without it breaking down trust. You have to lock every door behind you. What a difference from when I first came to St. Helens. We now lock every window and every door behind us and in front of us all the time.

See, just a sign that these symptoms are not creeping back exactly, running back into our society. And if we believe the New Testament, they are symptoms of a society that is turning its back on God and indulging in false beliefs, false religion and in heart idolatry which is covetousness. Now if this is at all true, if this diagnosis of the apostle is right, what it means is really quite startling. It means that as regards our standard of living, and I use that in the widest sense of the word, word, what it means just to be a human being in our society, the enjoyment of our society, with regard to all those things, what the economists and the politicians and even the educationalists do is comparatively unimportant. What really matters is what’s going on in the hearts of men and women and young people and what is happening in the churches or not happening in the churches.

Now don’t get me wrong, I hope that we shall continue to have a good standard of living And I’m thankful for what all the city institutions do for it. Since coming to live in the city, I’ve appreciated some of the things that they do do for us.

Nevertheless, when it comes to this standard of living, what it means to live as human beings in society together, I realise that economics and politics don’t touch it. Increasingly we realise this, don’t we? And that it goes to the root of whether we’ve got a right relationship with God or not. Of course, somebody coming into church as a stranger and perhaps not as a believer might think this is all quite ludicrous and Gilbertian. They hear that the rector of St. Helen’s saying that St. Helen’s is more important than the city institutions, you see.

And they say, this poor chap’s suffering from an identity crisis like all clergy. He realises that people don’t think he’s got a proper job to do, so he has to say loud and clear, I’m more important than anybody else.

Now of course I’m not saying that a clergyman is more important than anybody else. What I am saying is that what happens in the churches and in the hearts of people is more important than anything else in our society and in our country. Because if there is false religion and if God is not truly worshipped and if we fall away into idolatry, then all these repulsive symptoms will recapture our society and we shall all suffer. It’s interesting that that rather terrifying and gloomy chapter that we looked at last week, and I guess somebody who came last week for the first time may never come again, wonder if we’re always as gloomy as that. Well, we just have to face facts.

I just want to tell you, if you’re new to us, that, um, going out of St. Helen’s and saying, well, I don’t believe these things, makes absolutely no difference to the facts. What you believe or don’t believe makes no difference whatever to the eternal facts that God has laid down in the way he’s made the universe. If you want to say that a sheep has 5 legs, you’re at quite liberty in Britain to say so. It doesn’t alter the fact that a sheep has 4 legs. If you want to say that you don’t believe in God or this, that or the other, you don’t believe in the apostle, well, you said it, it doesn’t change it.

What Paul said in Romans 1 was that if we turn away from the truth of God that he’s given us, if we break up our relationship that way and destroy it, then he will destroy our relationships that way. And sins like homosexual perversion and adultery will become the order of the day. Children will be crying out because their parents will be unable to live together.

See, that’s God’s punishment, a lie over some far horizon. Comes right now into our society. Infallible symptoms of a society which has got false religion and idolatry at its root. Well, thank God we’re not like Corinth yet. We have a great Christian heritage but you can see the Corinthian things coming back, can’t you?

And that’s the reason as Paul gives it here. Secondly, infallible symptoms are given us in these 3 verses of true conversion.

Now these people had been revolutionised, hadn’t they? What an amazing power had been taking place in their lives. If you and I had gone to church in Corinth and looked round at the worshipers, we should have seen families, many of whose members, not all, it says some here, doesn’t it? Many of whose members were people guilty of these things, sometimes all of them. But God had worked, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Spirit of our God, the Trinitarian God.

Notice by the way how the Trinity is mentioned in verse 11 at the end. You see, when the Christians talk about God, they always talk in Trinitarian terms: the Lord Jesus, the Spirit, the Spirit of our God. Now God had been at work. He’d washed these people. They were dirty before.

So were you before Christ came to you. If he hasn’t come to you, you are now in God’s sight. He had sanctified them, consecrated them to himself. He had justified them, put them right in his sight. And he’d done all this through the power of the gospel.

The power of God is heard in the gospel, is found in the gospel. I know that again this seems amazing to some young people when they come to the city for the first time. They’ve studied the Bible or the New Testament or R.E. at school and there it was in the classroom. It was as dry as dust and it seemed just like any other subject and it was pretty much the dullest on the list.

You groaned when you came to school. Scripture and perhaps the teacher groaned too because they weren’t believers or whatever it may be. And little did you know then, perhaps you’re just beginning to discover now, that these old scriptures, this Christian truth is itself the power of God. I mean, why are so many people here whose lives have been changed? I could turn here, if there were time, to many people and ask them, how did the power of God come into your life?

And they would say, it came through the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now the infallible symptoms of the power of God happening to us are mentioned here in moral terms, not emotional terms. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t want to say a word against emotion because I think that if you’re a real Christian, God will certainly move your heart. If you are a Christian and you don’t know what it is to have the love of God poured into your heart, then I’m sorry for you. If you’re a believer in Christ and you don’t rejoice sometimes with joy unspeakable and full of glory, you ought to.

Nevertheless, every older Christian here will know what I mean when I say that feelings can be very deceptive. You can’t really prove anything by them in the end. When we get flu, they fly out of the window. Do I still belong to Christ when I feel my head’s like a lemon?

No, you see, the sure sign, the infallible symptoms are to be seen in moral change. You were adulterers and perverts and thieves and greedy and drunkards and robbers, but now you’re washed, consecrated, justified. You’ve got a new hatred for these things, you avoid them like the plague. You have been morally changed. I think we need to cry this out more and more today.

That’s the proof of the pudding. I did not say, by saying that, that Christians do not fall back into sins. But oh my, when they do, what misery. How tender the scars are, how they long to hasten back to God. What a terrible thing it is in their experience.

It’s no longer something that they can take lightly. They find that their heavenly Father chastens them and breaks them and humbles them. Now I’m not saying that Christians are faultless but what I am saying is a great change of direction has happened, a great change in the heart so that I hate what I loved and love what I hated. I love the things of God, I no longer laugh at them. I hate the things of the enemy, I don’t want to be deflected from the ways of Christ.

Now what a revolution that is. And this is the revolution we need, don’t you? I was just going along in the car yesterday, saw a great notice outside a building, Workers Revolutionary Party. Well, my friends, if they take charge, it’ll be a very different revolution from this. It’s likely to make most people miserable.

But we really do have— do you believe it? If you do believe it, it’s vital that you should say so and live by it. And your church at home and it should be seen by everybody that here is a revolution that really matters because it changes evil men into good men and ungodly men into godly men.

And I want to say, I think I’m right in saying that there’s nothing you can do for our society better than to live a godly life. There’s no greater contribution you can make.

A really changed life living it out is my biggest contribution.

Infallible symptoms of conversion. And conversion without these, mystical experiences without this, are not worth the paper they’re written on.

I remember the storey, Herringay’s storey, and I’ve just forgotten the name of that fine Methodist minister who used to preach at Kingsway, the Archway Methodist Mission up at Archway. And I remember him saying when he heard all the criticisms of that great campaign in 1954, he said, well, if lives changed and marriages healed and societies influenced for good, are proof of anything. They’re proof of the fact that something happened in Harringay in 1954. It wasn’t just emotion, it wasn’t just talk.

I wonder if those kind of proofs can be seen in your church at home or in your life. Thank God if they can.

Thirdly, I want you to look at infallible symptoms of a church on the downgrade. Infallible symptoms of a church on the downgrade.

Now a mighty miracle had happened in Corinth. Into this licentious city, this cosmopolitan sink, there arose a group of people, men, women and children, who showed a new, a new life and a new light to the world all through the gospel of Jesus Christ. But alas, evil came in and false teaching And it seems to have been the church that gave Paul most trouble. And we find him constantly saying this little sentence at the beginning of verse 9: Do you not know? Don’t you know?

I haven’t time to show it to you now in chapter 6 and you haven’t all got a Bible close enough to see but you could look it up when you get home. In this one chapter alone, the 6th chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul says 6 times: Don’t you know? It’s as though he’s saying, you Christian clothheads, don’t you know this? Don’t you know that? Now of course technically they all did know it because they’d been taught it by him.

So that actually all the things he talks about they knew. But what does he mean therefore by saying, don’t you know it? Well, he’s saying, you don’t seem to know it. You seem to have forgotten it. You seem not to be living by these things which were the foundation just a year or two back.

Technically they knew it. Maybe they preached about it. They learned it maybe in Sunday school, but they didn’t live by it. You see, the thing had become vague, the edges had become fudged. You know, when you go to— as you’re getting older, you go to the oculist.

Alas, you find that you can’t boastfully read that bottom line as you could before. So he gives you a stronger pair of specs and then it comes into focus, but then gradually you begin to lose it again. It’s very irritating so you have to go back for a stronger pair. Now the church is like that, isn’t it? Many churches, the church in our own generation has tended to lose the sharp focus.

Things have gone out of focus. We no longer say that evil is evil and good is good. We don’t like to be too black and white but I think you’ll agree with me that the New Testament is very much a black and white book.

A gentleman came up to me in a Christian bookshop in London yesterday. He had a very loud voice indeed, and he was explaining to me from some 3 yards away why he no longer came to St. Helen’s. It was very embarrassing because all the other browsers could hear. But what it all came to— he was one of these people who talks to you at a public meeting— what it all came to was that it was all too black and white at St. Helen’s. Well, of course, that’s never respectable.

Is it? A church that is black and white is never quite the done thing. But we’ve got to ask ourselves, are fudged edges a mark of the New Testament? Here’s Professor Barrett on this little sentence on do not be misled. He says, it is precisely in such matters, verse 9, it is precisely in such matters as this that men deceive themselves Persuading themselves that God cannot mean his moral demands seriously.

Isn’t that a good sentence? That’s exactly it, isn’t it? Men persuade themselves that God can’t mean his moral demands seriously. Oh yes, there’s no denying that he said it, but does he really mean it? He can’t mean it.

There’s such nice people up my road who do these things, and surely God is going to be loving and merciful to them.

Now we’ve got to come back, haven’t we, to these, this statement here in verse 9: Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God unless, da da da da da da, comma, unless, da da da da da, comma. No, he doesn’t say that, you see, it’s full stop.

Do you not know that? Don’t be deceived, don’t be misled. Neither this, that or the other, none of these things if continued in my life and not repented of, these things will lead me most certainly away from God and his love and away from the kingdom of heaven. The Bible is absolutely clear about it. And such were some of you, and some of you will be rejoicing as you leave church this morning because you will know that that applies to you.

And of you it can be said just as truly as it was of those people in Corinth, You were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified and this is all due to the power of the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He came to you through the gospel and he changed you and the change could be seen by your friends morally. It stuck out that this man was leading a new way of life. Well, that’s what we need to see today, isn’t it? But let’s be quite clear that this is impossible with idolatry.

It’s impossible if people fall away from the living God. It’s impossible if our heart religion is not right. That citadel must be captured. And I want to say to anybody who’s new to these things, you’ve been coming along on Tuesdays, you’re beginning to have your eyes opened, then let Christ capture today the citadel of your heart. Give your heart to him, surrender to him, ask him to wash you, ask him to take you, to change your life.

To give you this wonderful moral change and this wonderful spiritual conversion. I ask that you may become part of the kingdom of God from this day forward. Let’s pray.

Search where some of you We thank you, our heavenly Father, that through the Lord Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God, that you have continued to change the lives of men and women and young people in this wonderful way.

We thank you for what happened at Corinth.

And yet we fear as we read how they slipped away. We thank you what is happening in many churches today. We ask that we may keep these truths sharply in focus, that we may believe what is written, and grant that someone today in his seat, even at this moment, may yield to your Son Jesus Christ. We ask it for His name’s sake. Amen.