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1 Corinthians 6:1-8
6:1 When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? 2 Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? 3 Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more, then, matters pertaining to this life! 4 So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? 5 I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers, 6 but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers? 7 To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? 8 But you yourselves wrong and defraud—even your own brothers!1
[1] 6:8
(ESV)
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
Well, good morning, everybody. We're gonna be continuing our study in 1st Corinthians. So if you've got a Bible, go ahead and open up to chapter 6, First Corinthians chapter 6. It's in your worship guide. There are also some Bibles, on the backs of the pews there if you wanna grab one of those.
Jeffrey Heine:As Joel mentioned earlier, we're gonna be looking at the the bulk of chapter 6 next week, but today, we're gonna be looking at verses 1 through 8. 1 through 8. 1 Corinthians chapter 6. We've been in this study for a number of weeks now. We're gonna be picking up here in chapter 6.
Jeffrey Heine:So let us listen carefully, for this is God's word. When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Or do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels?
Jeffrey Heine:How much more then matters pertaining to this life? So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers? A brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers.
Jeffrey Heine:To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded? But you yourselves wrong and defraud, even your own brothers. The Word of the Lord.
Jeffrey Heine:Thanks be to God. Let's pray. Father, we come this morning to be reminded, to be reminded of your love for us, to be reminded of the glory due your name, to be reminded of the reconciling work of Christ that makes us family. So spirit, would you speak comfort where we need comfort? Would you speak truth where we believe lies?
Jeffrey Heine:Would you lead us to a deeper trust and obedience to Christ our King? Lord, we need you, now and at the hour of our death. We pray these things in the name of Christ, our King. Amen. 450 years before Paul wrote this letter to the to the Corinthians, this this letter that we call 1st Corinthians.
Jeffrey Heine:Before he wrote that, Plato wrote a dialogue called Gorgias, set in Athens. Athens is about 50 miles away from Corinth, kind of Birmingham to Tuscaloosa. I'm sure that comparison is made a lot. But around 400 BC, Plato wrote the Gorgias, and it's an account of an argument, a debate. A debate amongst, the great philosopher Socrates, and mainly 3 men, Gorgias, Polis, and Calacles.
Jeffrey Heine:And you'll wanna write that down because it will be on the exam later. They debate a number of issues, like the value of rhetoric, the role of politics, and what a good life is. And I studied this dialogue when I was in college with one of my favorite philosophy professors, doctor Franklin Robinson. He's now passed and I miss him. He always come into our 8 AM class, Plato Socrates was the name of the class.
Jeffrey Heine:And he would come in and he would bring one of those truck driver things of coffee, like that holds 2 pots of coffee. I'm not kidding. I think it held 2 pots of coffee, and And that was just for like the morning session. And he would also come in and he would complain about how, smoking had been banned in the classrooms, and how he despised talking about philosophy without being able to smoke. And sometimes, he would stand by the window out of habit while he was lecturing, and sometimes he would even light up, but we wouldn't tell.
Jeffrey Heine:But what I remember most about Franklin, besides the pot of coffee and the complaining about smoking, was his love for Plato's gorgias. Plato wrote 41 dialogues, but something about the Gorgias drew Franklin in. And because I held Franklin in such high regard, I leaned in too. The Goree has holds some of Socrates' most fundamental arguments about what it means to think rationally about the world and existence, to think about life with more than just a passing glance. In the Gorgias, Socrates argues about the value of arguing life out, and not settling for what Walt Whitman called taking things at second or third hand.
Jeffrey Heine:After Socrates has been arguing for a while about life and what a good life is, he has this exchange with the character, Paulus. Paulus says this, is not suffering injustice a greater evil? Socrates replies, certainly not. And Paulus says, then would you rather suffer than do injustice? And Socrates says, I should not like either, but if I must choose between them, I would rather suffer than do evil.
Jeffrey Heine:And after that, the character, Calicles, frustrated with how Paulus is kind of handling this argument with Socrates, jumps in and says this, tell me, Socrates, are you serious, or are you joking? For if you are serious and what you say is true, that it is better to suffer than to do evil, the human life must be turned upside down. When we read what Paul is saying to the Corinthians here in chapter 6, do not miss that he is calling them to something that those Corinthians, and us, if we are honest, would likely think must be a joke. Anyone who has suffered wrong, anyone who has faced injustice, anyone who has been cheated, when you hear, why not rather be wronged, Your reasonable response is, are you serious, or are you joking? Why not prefer being wronged?
Jeffrey Heine:Why not prefer suffering? I'd go as far as to say that if you can nod along with Paul here in agreement with what he is saying, then you're not taking him seriously. Because if you take him seriously, then you think he must be joking. But he isn't. And this morning, I'd I'd like for us to figure out why.
Jeffrey Heine:Why is he not joking? To do that, I think we need to consider again what Paul is doing in this letter to the Corinthian church. I won't go all the way back to the start, but we'll kind of pick up chapters 45 and see what is leading into these words here at the start of chapter 6. In chapter 4, Paul talked about the Corinthians judging his character and in finding him weak and unimpressive, and they questioned his worth and his status as an apostle. And he responded by saying that their maligning of him didn't bother him because his identity, who he was, was completely wrapped up in the person, Jesus.
Jeffrey Heine:Then in chapter 5, Paul calls out the Corinthians for not dealing with very serious sin that's going on in the community. He told them that their arrogance was on display in thinking so highly of themselves while tolerating grievous sin. He reminded them of the role within the church to call out sin, to point it out so that repentance, reconciliation, a turning from sin to God would happen. And he tells them that they're they're not in charge of judging the outside world, they're in charge of judging and calling out sin within the faith community. The outside world, Paul tells them, God will judge.
Jeffrey Heine:So those are the 2 big claims that are happening here. And just to summarize them and maybe put them in some language that's a little bit easier to digest and and remember, Paul is saying, the inside, meaning the church, the inside judges the inside. The inside, the church, judges the church, the inside. The inside does not judge the outside. And then he moves to the big claim of chapter 6, which is that the outside, the world, does not judge the inside, the church.
Jeffrey Heine:In chapter 6, we see again, Paul is applying this gospel ethic where he takes an issue, a problem, a problem of belief or behavior, something that is incompatible with the gospel, and he holds it up. And he explains to them how it is incompatible with the gospel, this belief or this behavior. And then he wants to tell them what what right activity, what right belief or behavior is supposed to connect to the gospel, what plays out from the truth of the reconciling work of Jesus. And then he calls them to that, that that's how they would then live. And so the problem that we see at the start of 1 Corinthians chapter 6 is that the inside, the church members are going to the outside world to judge disputes among the brothers.
Jeffrey Heine:They are going to these civil authorities, they are going to the outside, to the world, and saying, judge and and bring wisdom to this, bring justice to this. And he's going to lay out how that's incompatible with the gospel. So if he's been talking about how the inside judges the inside, how the inside does not judge the outside, and here, how the outside does not judge the inside. And he's gonna explain what that looks like and why that is. So let's see how he does it.
Jeffrey Heine:Look at look with me at verse 1. When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? The passage actually begins with that word, dare. Do you dare do this? Do you dare to go to the outside to judge the inside?
Jeffrey Heine:They're going before these these other rulers and and and authorities to to judge what's going on inside of the church. He calls them the unrighteous, and he says, to judge the things for the saints. That's how he calls the people of God here. And that's the big problem, that they're doing this, and he's going to give his reasons why this is incompatible with the gospel. He's gonna give 4 different reasons.
Jeffrey Heine:And the first one is this, it's it's helpful for us to know as we explore this first reason that that the civil courts in that time were totally unjust. Their judges were unrighteous, and the system was intentionally, by and large, intentionally set up, for corruption. The grievances would be settled primarily by who could bribe the most, who had the most cultural sway. And the court system was established differently in their culture. But we can't say that it's entirely different than our own culture.
Jeffrey Heine:Right? Right? Like, we we understand that there are still systemic problems within our own structures of of government and law. We can't say that the US court system is entirely different than the corrupt times of Corinth, but by and large, what they were setting out to do was a system that was overtly corrupt, and it was a way of intentionally oppressing the poor. It's worth noting here's a little side note.
Jeffrey Heine:It's just it's worth noting that passages like this are not grounds for Christians to ignore the responsibility to engage law enforcement in different issues, especially those that deal with harm and abuse. That's not what Paul's advocating for here, and that's not what the elders of Redeemer, what we how we would want to lead and serve. In any use or any issue of of abuse or harm, we wanna stand on the side of protection. And passages like this have been misused in the history of Christianity, and and I anytime there's one of those that we come, in contact with, something that's been misused in history, we we wanna clarify what we mean when we look at it together. So when the Christian brothers, when when they would go to the civil system, they were most often doing so to strong-arm a person of weaker status.
Jeffrey Heine:So the first reason that he gives that this is incompatible with the gospel is because it's abusive. It's abusive. Going to court wasn't about getting justice or wisdom. It was about showing that social dominance. That's not the only reason that Paul gives.
Jeffrey Heine:It's it's probably just the most glaring at that time. They're going to these these civil authorities, and it's a it's a means of abusing the poor and the oppressed. But he keeps going. Next, Paul says that it's incompatible with the gospel because because you are preparing to judge the world. So what does he mean by that?
Jeffrey Heine:Look with me at verses 2 and 3 here. Or do you do you not know that the saints will judge the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you incompetent to try trivial cases? Do you not know that we are to judge angels? How much more than matters of this life?
Jeffrey Heine:Paul is saying that if this news about the Messiah is true, as we confessed together earlier in our time together, that for us and for our salvation, Jesus really did come from heaven. And right now, he is seated at the right hand of the father. He will come again with glory to judge the living and the dead. He will reign, and he will judge. Part of that being true, what we confessed, Paul says that we will join in his reign.
Jeffrey Heine:And even in that, judging the world and judging the angels. Now, that might seem incompatible with one of the things that we said earlier about the inside not judging the outside, but we're talking about when he comes in glory, when he comes again, that we would be with Him. And this is what's really important to catch here, because this image of judging and judging the world and judging angels, a lot of this comes from Daniel 7, and also in Jude. There's some different places where we get a sense of what this means, but I think we can boil it down to this, that we are so enjoined to Christ. Because of the work of the holy spirit, that we are so entwined and wrapped up and caught up in the person Jesus that we join as as as co heirs with Christ.
Jeffrey Heine:We join in that reigning rule. A place that we do not, we are not there because we are better beings, or that we are superior in our wisdom. We are brought into that place because of Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit bringing us together in union with Christ. And then from that, Paul says, if that's your certain future, if there's no life for you outside of life in Christ, and this is Christ's future, it is your future, and if this is your future, start living in that godly wisdom now. Isn't there anyone among you who is wise enough to settle these little disputes?
Jeffrey Heine:Isn't there anyone among the saints, the brothers that are there, that can take these issues, these problems, these complaints, these grievances? There's not anyone among you has enough wisdom to settle it. This is your future. And remember, Paul is driving at this judgment, because I don't know about you, I don't know about kind of your history, either in the church or not in the church, but the word judgment might might bring to mind these certain pictures or ideas of what judging people looks like. And and I wanna I wanna supplant that picture with this, a picture of love, a picture of love that Paul loves these Corinthians so much, even though they're maligning him, even though they're making fun of him, they're saying that he he doesn't even deserve the role of apostle.
Jeffrey Heine:Maybe he's not even supposed to be regarded as an apostle. They are maligning him, dragging his name through the dirt, and he loves them so much that he wants to call them to repentance. He wants to call them to right living with their God. Judgment, when it when it comes to judgment, we can't see it apart from it being rooted and grounded in love. Do you not know, Paul asks, that you, the saints, will judge the world?
Jeffrey Heine:And if that responsibility will be for God's people, are are are you not are you not practicing that wisdom now that you can settle these issues yourselves? Do you not know, Paul says? He says it 3 times here. He's gonna say it 12 times throughout this letter. And I think he says it over and over again because he has toiled with these people.
Jeffrey Heine:He has cared about them. He has walked with them. And he has tried to impart this gospel understanding of life. And so he's imploring them. He's saying, do you not know?
Jeffrey Heine:Do you not know where this gospel of good news leads us? We will reign with Christ. We will judge the world, and we will judge the angels. Can can you not handle the matters of this life with godly wisdom? Paul goes on.
Jeffrey Heine:Look with me in verse 4. So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers? But brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers.
Jeffrey Heine:To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. You're going to these courts to win, and you're already losing, because you have a case against your brother that you're taking to the outside. You've already lost. And he's saying these things to their shame. To summarize so far.
Jeffrey Heine:Okay. To summarize where he's been so far. First, these lawsuits are abusive. Alright. They're a way of oppressing people.
Jeffrey Heine:Secondly, the saints should be wise enough to settle these disputes among the brothers, because they have this future. The brothers and sisters in this community have a future with Christ. That's the second one. And then this third reason, the lawsuits neglect the fundamental reality of family. Look again at verse 6, and just the the way that these these words are kind of brought together.
Jeffrey Heine:A brother goes to law. So a brother goes to law against brother before unbelievers. You see that inside to outside, inside to outside. The you're you're you're you're going against your brother with these outsiders. He's highlighting this incongruity.
Jeffrey Heine:He he he's saying this is absurd. This is not what brothers do. You're missing these fundamental aspects of family. Have you forgotten that you were brothers? Magda Joris Peters was a Belgian writer.
Jeffrey Heine:She wrote in the early 20th century, and She was living in Holland with her husband during the Great War. These are her words. I'm a Belgian woman, and during the great war, I hated the Germans with the bitterest hatred. I wanted the French and the Belgians to fight more and to crush Germany, so I preached hate. I not only talked about it, but I wrote it.
Jeffrey Heine:I wrote articles for magazines and papers to create more hatred of the Germans, and I succeeded. People listened and read what I wrote, and then they too would hate more deeply and more bitterly than before. It was one winter in the wartime that I was in Holland with my husband. We rented a room from a Dutch family, and the man and the woman felt as we did about the Germans. They also hated as we hated.
Jeffrey Heine:And one day, my husband and I were walking along a road near the town, not many miles from the border of Germany, and we saw ahead of us something lying in the mud. And when we came near, we saw that it was a man. We stooped over him and saw he was in the uniform of a German soldier. He was a German, and his feet were muddy and bleeding. We looked at him.
Jeffrey Heine:We could not leave him lying there in the cold. What could we do? We could not take him to the house of the Dutch people because they hated the Germans just as we did, but he needed help. He was faint with hunger and cold, and then suddenly, we decided to take him to the house and try to get him in without the knowledge of the family. We helped him between us, back to the town and into the house.
Jeffrey Heine:The landlady, fortunately, was not around. We put him on our bed in our room. What could we do? His feet were bloody and dirty. I had to wash them.
Jeffrey Heine:So I got some water and a cloth and knelt down and washed his feet. And while I was washing his feet, something happened to me. Something fell down from my eyes, and I saw that he was a brother, a German. He's my brother, end quote. If you are a follower of Jesus, He has washed your feet.
Jeffrey Heine:He has washed you with his blood. He has made you brothers and sisters. He has made family out of people who don't want to be family, and he's made family out of people who don't know how to be family, but he has ransomed you to be family, and we must learn how to live as family. Paul says, remember that you are brothers and sisters, that the work of Christ in making you a family fundamentally changes how you treat one another, and these lawsuits are shameful, because they display that they didn't understand they were family. Paul goes on.
Jeffrey Heine:He goes on to that 4th reason, the 4th reason that what they're doing is incompatible with the gospel. Look at the end of verse 7. It says, why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded, but you yourselves wrong and defraud, even your own brothers? This is that fourth reason that what they were doing was incompatible with the gospel.
Jeffrey Heine:It is better to suffer wrong. Paul asks, why don't you prefer being wronged rather than wronging others? And if I were to answer him in his rhetorical question, I'd say, are you joking? Of course, I don't prefer suffering wrong. Why would I?
Jeffrey Heine:Perhaps it's the desire not to suffer, that I would avoid it at all cost. Maybe it's my desire to be right and vindicated, an insatiable desire to always be right and to be treated rightly. I'll borrow the response of Calicles, who said to Socrates, and we can say to Paul, tell me, Paul, are you serious, or are you joking? Because if you are serious, and what you say is true, then the human life must be turned upside down. Years ago, I was talking with a man, and he said one of the things that he liked most about the Christian tradition is that it fits so well into his lifestyle, his American lifestyle, that you don't really have to change your life to be a Christian.
Jeffrey Heine:And what he meant was that you can keep your desires, and your drives, and your job, and your home, and your friends, and your possessions, and your priorities, and your activities. Christianity, he thought, was a nice compliment to the life he had already chosen for himself. But then we talk to Paul, who tells us that Jesus intends to turn our lives upside down. To say with honesty that we would rather be wronged, that we would rather take the hit, the loss, the shame, the ridicule, to to prefer being wronged than to vengeance, that we would rather be wrong than to win the fight, to get recognized as right, to protect our character, or reputation, or possessions. That is an upside down life.
Jeffrey Heine:And that is a life that evidences a trust in the Messiah. It's evidence of believing that Jesus is who he says he is, and will do what he says he will do, to restore and to reconcile all things to himself and to reign forever. Human life must be turned upside down. Calicles was right. Christ and his gospel turn our lives upside down, and we do all that we can to course correct that.
Jeffrey Heine:Our flesh pulls every day to set us right side up. And when we look at our lives, they will they will look incongruent to many of the lives around us in the world, the people that you work with, people in your family, people down the road. Your life will look upside down, and that will become bothersome to you, either out of shame or out of anger that you don't get to live like they do. Pools. And that's one of the reasons why we need one another in the church family so badly.
Jeffrey Heine:We need so desperately to come together and see other people whose lives are upside down, to remember that it is hard to obey Jesus like this. We need one another to be a colony of upside down lives, to be reminded that we aren't alone in choosing suffering, choosing to be wronged. Primarily, we do this, this calibrating work for one another by pointing to the one who suffered for us, the one who chose a path of suffering, the one who, when it came before him, chose to be wronged, chose to be cheated, chose to suffer. Paul will write to this Corinthian congregation again, and that letter is preserved for us in the scriptures, and and he describes this upside down life with these words. We confessed it together this morning.
Jeffrey Heine:If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come, And all this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation. That is in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, self, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message, the gospel of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors, representatives for Christ.
Jeffrey Heine:God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God. It's from this upside down life, when the sinless became sin, that we have reconciliation with the Father. It's from this reconciliation that we have reconciliation with one another, and that, Paul says, won't make sense in the outside.
Jeffrey Heine:That won't make sense in that Corinthian courtroom. The outside will not understand that reconciliation. Choosing to be wronged so that you might be reconciled to your enemy because your enemy is your brother, that is the upside down life that we have in Christ. If you're wondering at this point what 1st Corinthians 6 1 through 8 has to do with you, In short, everything. Because everyone in this room has been wronged.
Jeffrey Heine:Everyone has someone to forgive, and everyone in this room has wronged someone, and everyone has someone to whom we need to ask forgiveness. Some of you are hanging on to anger because you will not reconcile with someone that you need to forgive. You've been wronged, and someone is to blame, and maybe they're not even sorry. Maybe they don't even think they did anything wrong. Maybe they're making it very difficult to forgive them, but the upside down life that we have in Jesus calls us to forgive, and enables us to do so.
Jeffrey Heine:Too often, I cling to my own desire to be proven right, rather than my desire to reconcile. Jesus calls us to more. More trust in him as the ultimate judge. More trust in Him as the ultimate reconciler. More trust in Him to be the ultimate brother who takes our own guilt and offers us forgiveness.
Jeffrey Heine:A life where suffering leads to reconciliation. That is what Paul is calling the Corinthians 2. He wasn't simply encouraging them to develop the virtue of wisdom, though that was part of it. He wasn't simply calling them to the virtue of self denial, although again, that was part of it, but he was calling them to suffer wrong for the sake of reconciliation, because that's what Jesus did. He suffered wrong to reconcile you to the father.
Jeffrey Heine:You were not healed by Jesus's vengeance. You were healed by his wounds. You were not atoned for by Jesus's retaliation against his accusers. You are atoned for by his suffering. And when the testimony of our lives is marked by the willingness to suffer wrong, for the sake of reconciliation, we testify to the Son of God who truly did that for us, who for us and for our salvation came down from heaven to suffer, to die, to rise, and to reign.
Jeffrey Heine:Let's pray. Spirit, remind us of our desperate need. Remind us of Your plentiful grace that we see in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Spirit, help us to see. And, Lord, as we enter into this time of response, we ask that you would be present with us, leading us to righteousness and reconciliation for your glory and our great good.
Jeffrey Heine:Amen.