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August 24, 2008
I Corinthians 6:13
Exordium: Is it not amazing how the Holy Spirit uses specific situations in the history of His Church to teach some of the grandest themes in our faith?
In fact, the doctrines of the Church are almost never presented in a vacuum or in abstract passages. They are usually applied to particular events in the life of the early Church in which God wants us to discover some wonderful truths of His.
Explication: Take the matter of the human body. The Bible does not tell us directly that the Christian faith is the only world religion that takes the body as seriously as it does or the religion that gives to our bodies the greatest degree of dignity and honor. It doesn’t tell us that the stoic Greeks thought of the body as a prison house or a tomb, or how Epictetus said that he felt “like a poor soul, shackled to a corpse.”
Instead the Bible takes us back to a problem in the Church at Corinth. Corinth was a very wicked city, probably more evil than any city on the face of the earth today. The sins of the flesh and the mind abounded. The people who believed the message about Christ that Paul preached had themselves been caught up in those wicked ways- and some of them continued in them even after their baptism.
So Paul writes to them to show them that they were using their bodies in ways that did not honor the Lord. He is teaching them that their bodies were holy, and were to be used in holy ways.
He might have come out hard against them and said “no”, to this or that, or applied God’s commandments rigorously and perhaps harshly to their conduct, but he did not. He took a wiser approach. He puts himself in their place, and tries to understand how they are thinking and trying to justify their conduct. So he states their excuse for the wrong uses of their bodies as they would say it, “All things are lawful for me.”
There is truth in that statement. In Christ, we are free from the rigors of the Mosaic Law. The commandments of God will always be with us, but the additions to the law which the Jewish leaders had developed are not binding upon us as believers in the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. He has set us free from those.
I. HOWEVER, THERE IS A FAILURE HERE IN THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF CHRISTIAN FREEDOM Read the rest of this entry »
July 27, 2008
John 16:5-15
Exordium: In this passage our Lord Jesus makes a momentous promise to His disciples and to us who follow him as well. He is about to leave them as far as His bodily presence goes, but He tells them (and us) that He will send a Helper to them who will do even more for them than He did while He was with them in the flesh.
The Word “helper” which Jesus uses is paraclete in the Greek, it means one who so teaches others as to delight them in His teaching-a comforter. This, of course, is the Holy Spirit whom He did send as He promised on the day of Pentecost. He was poured out in fullness then and remains with us at work the world even now.
But how do we have fellowship with this third Person of the Trinity? We have already seen the particular communion we have with the Heavenly Father is love and with the Lord Jesus is grace. In what way does the Holy Spirit hold personal intimate communion with the Christian in his or her daily walk with God?
By being that essential friend which every soul requires. That one who delights us with His teaching and His comfort.
Explication: The work of the paraclete is divided into two parts: The comforting work and the saving and sanctifying work. We confine ourselves this morning to this first part. It is in this ministry that the believer has the particular communion with the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit lives in the regenerated heart after He has saved that person. There He carries out His comforting work in the person by repeated acts of helping. The Helper, the essential friend, does this in several different ways, by a series of acts, each differing from the other, though all are connected as parts of a whole.
Comforting work does not mean just soothing words or thoughts but teachings and specific acts that help the person along the way. That is what comfort means: com=together with, and fort = courage and practical help. That is our essential friend, the Holy Spirit, the Helper. Read the rest of this entry »
