1 Corinthians 16
The whole relationship between
pastor and people depends on united, continual prayerfulness. When ministers
and people become conscious of the power and blessing of the Holy Spirit that
comes from their prayer, then the church will begin to know what Pentecostal,
apostolic Christianity is.
That was a quote from Andrew Murray a South African writer, teacher, and Christian pastor. He lived from May 9, 1828 to January 18, 1917. His father was a Dutch reformed missionary to South Africa from Scotland. His mom was of French Huguenot and German Lutheran descent. So when he was talking there about Pentecostal, apostolic Christianity, he was not talking about what people today usually think of when you hear the word “Pentecostal.” He was talking about the kind of spiritual movement of God that was happening all over the Roman world with the leadership of St. Paul the Apostle.
Andrew Murray believed, as I do, (and as Francis Chan does, for those of you in Sunday School, that the church desperately needs to base everything it does in prayer), believing that prayer is the essential work that releases the power of God to the church. By prayer and only because of prayer the church will have the same power and effectiveness and fruitfulness that it exhibited in those early days.
That may sound like an odd place to start this last message in the book of 1 Corinthians because prayer hasn’t even been mentioned in this section. But it must be understood that the Church being built by God through Christ is not a human institution. It is a work of God. Its growth in the world, especially in the early days, was miraculous. This letter to the church at Corinth was written in AD 55, only 20-25 years after Jesus death and resurrection. Paul’s conversion can be dated to only a few years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Paul’s conversion itself is a proof that God was working to create and spread the Church, even to the Gentiles. This noted Pharisee would have had nothing to do with the Gentiles if Jesus had not changed his life and thinking. He was a devoted Jew bent on destroying those other Jews who he thought had left the true Jewish faith by believing in Jesus. This man who once hated Jesus and all his followers enough to have them arrested and stoned to death.
But beginning with his personal encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, Paul became the greatest evangelist among them, specializing in a ministry to the Gentiles. The fruit of his labors after his conversion to Christ had grown, in just a couple decades, to cover most of the Roman world, from Greece to Asia. But of course he didn’t do it alone. Paul was just the most famous of the evangelists who worked hard to serve the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit. He was the leader of the ministry to the Gentiles, appointed by God and partnering with and supported by almost everyone else he talks about in his letters.
The evidence of this team work is in chapter 16. Although we only read verses 5-12, I am really going to draw from all the rest of chapter 16 for today’s message, the final message in our series to study the entire first letter to the Corinthians. This section of Paul’s letter is filled with logistics of his travels and other simple matters such as personal greetings and acknowledgments of fellow servants, so it is hard to see what use it is to a modern church. Yet there are a few nuggets to dig up here. Chiefly, there is an attitude toward team work and unity in the Spirit.
Secondly we see that Paul’s commendations and requests for other leaders to be respected are not based on their positions in the church, but on their work record. Function not status was the key for servant leaders. Service, not privilege; that is the Christian ideal for earning respect as a leader.
Lastly, Paul maintains an active concern for fellowship among the various congregations as he emphasizes their connections to one another through the greetings to Corinth from the other Churches. These things are all about team work and cooperation to accomplish the one overall goal given by God, proclaim the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ! As it says in 1 Cor. 16:16 everyone is encouraged to join in the work and labor at it.
This last week I kept thinking about Pentecost. When the early church first started out, even before it was started and the disciples were simply waiting for God to send the promised Holy Spirit, all they could do was pray and wait. That is the source of their unity in the Spirit and it always will be for us also. They worshipped God as they prayed. They gave thanks for Jesus, and that he was not really dead, and that he had proven he is God and that they had been forgiven for their lack of faith in him and their fear of the religious leaders. Jesus, God, still loved them and still had work for them to do to bring in the kingdom. They were eagerly waiting to see what this promised Holy Spirit would be like, but they really had no idea how they would begin!
Then the Holy Spirit came and filled them all with an overwhelming desire to praise the Lord and thank Him for life through Jesus Christ. They sang out loud and strangely enough, these simple men and women were singing in foreign languages they did not know before. They were being understood by the many foreigners visiting in Jerusalem from all over the world! God was at work, born out of their prayerful waiting to see how he would direct them. They worked as a team, all doing the same work, because they were all working for the same God who directed them all in the one unique mission of proclaiming the gospel baptizing new disciples and teaching them to obey the commands of God.
From the beginning then, the church did its work not by focusing on evangelism, or marketing, or fund raising, but by focusing on prayer and worship, seeking the will of God, and the power of God to do his will. As a result, the church spread quickly. The body of Christ grew many hands and feet, bringing hope, comfort, and light to tens of thousands of Jews who were waiting for the Messiah, as well as Pagans who had no idea what God is really like, but if they worshipped any god at all were either gripped with fear of powerful spiritual forces, or were using religion as an excuse for all kinds of sin.
The persecution of the church, the saints suffering as Christ had suffered makes it plain that ours is a spiritual battle. The real enemy is satan, the fallen angel who uses humans as pawns in his campaign to destroy the work of God. Satan hates the true Christian for several reasons. One is that God loves the Christian, and whatever is loved by God is sure to be hated by the devil. Another is that the Christian, being a child of God, bears a family resemblance to the Father and to the household of faith. Satan's ancient jealousy has not abated nor his hatred for God diminished in the slightest. Whatever reminds him of God is without other reason the object of his malignant hate.
A third reason is that a true Christian is a former slave who has escaped from the galley, and Satan cannot forgive him for this affront. A fourth reason is that a praying Christian is a constant threat to the stability of Satan's government. The Christian is a holy rebel loose in the world with access to the throne of God. Satan never knows from what direction the danger will come. (A.W. Tozer, That Incredible Christian, 71.)
So the team work we see, because in our text Paul has mentioned many of his fellow servants, is not something that Paul came up with. He didn’t develop this strategy. He and his fellow Christians prayed. God opened the doors. It is significant that Paul said in verses 8 & 9 of our text, “I will stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost, because a great door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many who oppose me.” Ordinary humans, unaware of the way God works and empowers his people, might find it hard to think that the work could be very effective when there are many who oppose you. We do not like to fight. We would rather work where there is no opposition, or even competition.
Indeed, even Paul would prefer to strengthen the fellowship. In the verses just before this he said, “Perhaps I will stay with you for a while, or even spend the winter, so that you can help me on my journey, wherever I go. For I do not want to see you now and make only a passing visit; I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits.” But the Lord’s will must prevail.
We are servants of God. That is why Paul’s commendations and requests for other leaders to be respected are not based on their positions in the church, but on their work record. Function not status was the key for servant leaders. Service, not privilege; that is the Christian ideal for earning respect as a leader. Even Jesus told the Pharisees, as recorded in John 10:37, “Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father.” In the same way, the people we are trying to reach for Christ will not believe unless they see the Father working in and through us and that is only going to happen as we keep in touch with Him through prayer. It is the same with the human body. An arm or a leg can do nothing if it is not connected to the head through the communication system of nerve cells. Prayer is our communication system with God. We cannot serve Him if we do not pray.
As the church grew and spread out geographically, naturally the various groups meeting in house churches, in various towns, in several different countries and cultures began to develop their own unique expressions of the faith, much the same way that even here in the one country of the United States we may all speak English but we have geographically determined accents, different ways of expressing the same ideas. In our education system there is a concern to maintain some basic Standard English grammar and spelling rules or else we would continue to diversify until our accents grew into distinct languages. Even with that it isn’t always easy for a person from New York to understand a native of Mississippi, for just one example.
The body of Christ was concerned about maintaining its unity from the very beginning as we see from Paul’s expressed concern. In these closing verses he mentions his fellow workers, Stephanas from Achaia, Apollos, Timothy, Fortunatas, Achaicus, Aquila and Priscilla. And commends them to the Corinthians. They are all servants of God from various places. He mentions some of those places too such as Galatia, Macedonia and Ephesus. In this there is a message of maintaining and celebrating what we have in common. Not just because we have it in common, but because the Kingdom of God is the one universal kingdom over the whole world. Even today, all the human organized nations of political interest are literally under God and mostly in rebellion against his rule, incited by satan to oppose the kingdom of God by asserting their own sovereignty with no regard for God’s.
Similarly, today there are many denominations that split the One Universal Body of Christ into distinct divisions of theological disagreement. But this never should have happened if the Church had maintained its unity through prayerful connection to God. I believe that every denomination in the world today is born out of a sinfully unresolved conflict. This must be undine and it can only happen as the various congregations in each town seek Christ together in prayer together. But even on a micro scale, the members of each congregation must seek Christ together or we will not be unified in our understanding and vision of God’s will for us.
We must seek the eternal King. Jesus our God will lead us and help us to see the spiritual nature of our warfare against the forces of satan and how to employ the weapons of God’s choice, namely faith hope and love, so that we don’t see people as our enemies, but as the prisoners we are sent to set free from the clutches of satan, even if many of them seem to not appreciate our efforts to set them free, so deluded are they by the lies of the prince of lies that they seem eager to do his work and stand against us.
The language of warfare, the kind of language you will encounter in our next hymn after the message, is not popular today, especially not in songs of the Church, where we want to focus on God’s love. But God’s love is fiercely devoted to the cause of Christ. So Paul wrote in verses 13-14, “Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love.”
Let us then, as members of the body of Christ be committed to our unity in the Spirit, seeking to serve the one perfect will of God almighty, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We have to team up with each other. But more importantly we all together have to team up with God so that we are enabled to maintain fellowship with the world wide body of Christ, supporting that work all over the world in every place that Christ is preached faithfully, whether it is easy, as it is for us in the land of the free, or under duress as in the lands where our admirable brothers and sisters really suffer for preaching the gospel. Let us remember always that we will only succeed in these things as we pray to the King who will lead us if we pray. Amen.
That was a quote from Andrew Murray a South African writer, teacher, and Christian pastor. He lived from May 9, 1828 to January 18, 1917. His father was a Dutch reformed missionary to South Africa from Scotland. His mom was of French Huguenot and German Lutheran descent. So when he was talking there about Pentecostal, apostolic Christianity, he was not talking about what people today usually think of when you hear the word “Pentecostal.” He was talking about the kind of spiritual movement of God that was happening all over the Roman world with the leadership of St. Paul the Apostle.
Andrew Murray believed, as I do, (and as Francis Chan does, for those of you in Sunday School, that the church desperately needs to base everything it does in prayer), believing that prayer is the essential work that releases the power of God to the church. By prayer and only because of prayer the church will have the same power and effectiveness and fruitfulness that it exhibited in those early days.
That may sound like an odd place to start this last message in the book of 1 Corinthians because prayer hasn’t even been mentioned in this section. But it must be understood that the Church being built by God through Christ is not a human institution. It is a work of God. Its growth in the world, especially in the early days, was miraculous. This letter to the church at Corinth was written in AD 55, only 20-25 years after Jesus death and resurrection. Paul’s conversion can be dated to only a few years after Jesus’ death and resurrection.
Paul’s conversion itself is a proof that God was working to create and spread the Church, even to the Gentiles. This noted Pharisee would have had nothing to do with the Gentiles if Jesus had not changed his life and thinking. He was a devoted Jew bent on destroying those other Jews who he thought had left the true Jewish faith by believing in Jesus. This man who once hated Jesus and all his followers enough to have them arrested and stoned to death.
But beginning with his personal encounter with the risen Lord on the road to Damascus, Paul became the greatest evangelist among them, specializing in a ministry to the Gentiles. The fruit of his labors after his conversion to Christ had grown, in just a couple decades, to cover most of the Roman world, from Greece to Asia. But of course he didn’t do it alone. Paul was just the most famous of the evangelists who worked hard to serve the Lord in the power of the Holy Spirit. He was the leader of the ministry to the Gentiles, appointed by God and partnering with and supported by almost everyone else he talks about in his letters.
The evidence of this team work is in chapter 16. Although we only read verses 5-12, I am really going to draw from all the rest of chapter 16 for today’s message, the final message in our series to study the entire first letter to the Corinthians. This section of Paul’s letter is filled with logistics of his travels and other simple matters such as personal greetings and acknowledgments of fellow servants, so it is hard to see what use it is to a modern church. Yet there are a few nuggets to dig up here. Chiefly, there is an attitude toward team work and unity in the Spirit.
Secondly we see that Paul’s commendations and requests for other leaders to be respected are not based on their positions in the church, but on their work record. Function not status was the key for servant leaders. Service, not privilege; that is the Christian ideal for earning respect as a leader.
Lastly, Paul maintains an active concern for fellowship among the various congregations as he emphasizes their connections to one another through the greetings to Corinth from the other Churches. These things are all about team work and cooperation to accomplish the one overall goal given by God, proclaim the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ! As it says in 1 Cor. 16:16 everyone is encouraged to join in the work and labor at it.
This last week I kept thinking about Pentecost. When the early church first started out, even before it was started and the disciples were simply waiting for God to send the promised Holy Spirit, all they could do was pray and wait. That is the source of their unity in the Spirit and it always will be for us also. They worshipped God as they prayed. They gave thanks for Jesus, and that he was not really dead, and that he had proven he is God and that they had been forgiven for their lack of faith in him and their fear of the religious leaders. Jesus, God, still loved them and still had work for them to do to bring in the kingdom. They were eagerly waiting to see what this promised Holy Spirit would be like, but they really had no idea how they would begin!
Then the Holy Spirit came and filled them all with an overwhelming desire to praise the Lord and thank Him for life through Jesus Christ. They sang out loud and strangely enough, these simple men and women were singing in foreign languages they did not know before. They were being understood by the many foreigners visiting in Jerusalem from all over the world! God was at work, born out of their prayerful waiting to see how he would direct them. They worked as a team, all doing the same work, because they were all working for the same God who directed them all in the one unique mission of proclaiming the gospel baptizing new disciples and teaching them to obey the commands of God.
From the beginning then, the church did its work not by focusing on evangelism, or marketing, or fund raising, but by focusing on prayer and worship, seeking the will of God, and the power of God to do his will. As a result, the church spread quickly. The body of Christ grew many hands and feet, bringing hope, comfort, and light to tens of thousands of Jews who were waiting for the Messiah, as well as Pagans who had no idea what God is really like, but if they worshipped any god at all were either gripped with fear of powerful spiritual forces, or were using religion as an excuse for all kinds of sin.
The persecution of the church, the saints suffering as Christ had suffered makes it plain that ours is a spiritual battle. The real enemy is satan, the fallen angel who uses humans as pawns in his campaign to destroy the work of God. Satan hates the true Christian for several reasons. One is that God loves the Christian, and whatever is loved by God is sure to be hated by the devil. Another is that the Christian, being a child of God, bears a family resemblance to the Father and to the household of faith. Satan's ancient jealousy has not abated nor his hatred for God diminished in the slightest. Whatever reminds him of God is without other reason the object of his malignant hate.
A third reason is that a true Christian is a former slave who has escaped from the galley, and Satan cannot forgive him for this affront. A fourth reason is that a praying Christian is a constant threat to the stability of Satan's government. The Christian is a holy rebel loose in the world with access to the throne of God. Satan never knows from what direction the danger will come. (A.W. Tozer, That Incredible Christian, 71.)
So the team work we see, because in our text Paul has mentioned many of his fellow servants, is not something that Paul came up with. He didn’t develop this strategy. He and his fellow Christians prayed. God opened the doors. It is significant that Paul said in verses 8 & 9 of our text, “I will stay on at Ephesus until Pentecost, because a great door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many who oppose me.” Ordinary humans, unaware of the way God works and empowers his people, might find it hard to think that the work could be very effective when there are many who oppose you. We do not like to fight. We would rather work where there is no opposition, or even competition.
Indeed, even Paul would prefer to strengthen the fellowship. In the verses just before this he said, “Perhaps I will stay with you for a while, or even spend the winter, so that you can help me on my journey, wherever I go. For I do not want to see you now and make only a passing visit; I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits.” But the Lord’s will must prevail.
We are servants of God. That is why Paul’s commendations and requests for other leaders to be respected are not based on their positions in the church, but on their work record. Function not status was the key for servant leaders. Service, not privilege; that is the Christian ideal for earning respect as a leader. Even Jesus told the Pharisees, as recorded in John 10:37, “Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father.” In the same way, the people we are trying to reach for Christ will not believe unless they see the Father working in and through us and that is only going to happen as we keep in touch with Him through prayer. It is the same with the human body. An arm or a leg can do nothing if it is not connected to the head through the communication system of nerve cells. Prayer is our communication system with God. We cannot serve Him if we do not pray.
As the church grew and spread out geographically, naturally the various groups meeting in house churches, in various towns, in several different countries and cultures began to develop their own unique expressions of the faith, much the same way that even here in the one country of the United States we may all speak English but we have geographically determined accents, different ways of expressing the same ideas. In our education system there is a concern to maintain some basic Standard English grammar and spelling rules or else we would continue to diversify until our accents grew into distinct languages. Even with that it isn’t always easy for a person from New York to understand a native of Mississippi, for just one example.
The body of Christ was concerned about maintaining its unity from the very beginning as we see from Paul’s expressed concern. In these closing verses he mentions his fellow workers, Stephanas from Achaia, Apollos, Timothy, Fortunatas, Achaicus, Aquila and Priscilla. And commends them to the Corinthians. They are all servants of God from various places. He mentions some of those places too such as Galatia, Macedonia and Ephesus. In this there is a message of maintaining and celebrating what we have in common. Not just because we have it in common, but because the Kingdom of God is the one universal kingdom over the whole world. Even today, all the human organized nations of political interest are literally under God and mostly in rebellion against his rule, incited by satan to oppose the kingdom of God by asserting their own sovereignty with no regard for God’s.
Similarly, today there are many denominations that split the One Universal Body of Christ into distinct divisions of theological disagreement. But this never should have happened if the Church had maintained its unity through prayerful connection to God. I believe that every denomination in the world today is born out of a sinfully unresolved conflict. This must be undine and it can only happen as the various congregations in each town seek Christ together in prayer together. But even on a micro scale, the members of each congregation must seek Christ together or we will not be unified in our understanding and vision of God’s will for us.
We must seek the eternal King. Jesus our God will lead us and help us to see the spiritual nature of our warfare against the forces of satan and how to employ the weapons of God’s choice, namely faith hope and love, so that we don’t see people as our enemies, but as the prisoners we are sent to set free from the clutches of satan, even if many of them seem to not appreciate our efforts to set them free, so deluded are they by the lies of the prince of lies that they seem eager to do his work and stand against us.
The language of warfare, the kind of language you will encounter in our next hymn after the message, is not popular today, especially not in songs of the Church, where we want to focus on God’s love. But God’s love is fiercely devoted to the cause of Christ. So Paul wrote in verses 13-14, “Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong. Do everything in love.”
Let us then, as members of the body of Christ be committed to our unity in the Spirit, seeking to serve the one perfect will of God almighty, our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. We have to team up with each other. But more importantly we all together have to team up with God so that we are enabled to maintain fellowship with the world wide body of Christ, supporting that work all over the world in every place that Christ is preached faithfully, whether it is easy, as it is for us in the land of the free, or under duress as in the lands where our admirable brothers and sisters really suffer for preaching the gospel. Let us remember always that we will only succeed in these things as we pray to the King who will lead us if we pray. Amen.
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