Letter to the Corinthians 1 Cor 6:9-11 God's Kingdom and our salvation

in first Corinthians so I've titled this section we're going to finish up through verse 11 today and then Mike's going to pick up in verse 12 and following in the following weeks so I would label this message God's kingdom and our salvation and you'll see that as we get into it here and this is really a very interesting section I get to repeat my kind of Chided me?

I don't know. What did he say? He said, you'll get to those verses with all the yucky stuff, basically. Well, I'm to those verses with all the yucky stuff. So we'll see. Lord willing, we'll... It'll be it'll be I tried to think I was thinking about some of the things and thinking about what's What's God's view of these yuckinesses or these sinful activities? And so I tried to put that in there too.

So so with that in mind, so let's look today's outline I'm using Macaulay again here and also Some folks may see some little strange lines in there I'm not quite sure why they're there. I didn't put them in the press that wasn't put it in the presentation myself They just appeared and they don't appear on both screens. The wonders of technology. Anyway, so don't worry about those little yellow lines floating around. It's like at the doctor's office, they say, those little floaters, don't worry about that, they're all good.

Okay, so we're in chapter 6, and we're going down to verse 11 today. But we've been, the last couple of weeks we've talked about lawsuits among the Corinthians and Paul is really exercised with their lack of understanding about taking their brother to court.

And he uses words like audacity, ignorance, immaturity, spiritual defeat. And we're going to cover that briefly, or review it briefly. But today we're going to look at two aspects. Labels that he has the lawsuits betray their ignorance of the makeup of God's kingdom That's 9 through 10 and then the lawsuits betray their indifference to their salvation So with that in mind, so let's go ahead and I was gonna do a brief review.

You'll be happy. No, this is a one-chart review, you know, sometimes I'll go back I'll do multiple charts and so no here goes Roger again. He's gonna go through and in all these extra charts and only one chart review this time and then we'll get into the main part because there's lots to do in this part so okay so the discussion in five through eight from last week taking their their complaints with their brothers or sisters before the unrighteous law courts and not before the saints so in verse five he said I say this to your shame is there's not not one wise man among you to decide this that was verse five and then verse six But brother goes to law, to the law course with brother, and that before the unbeliever.

And this is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged and be defrauded? We talked a little bit about that last week. You know, it's becoming of a Christian to be wronged, in a sense, for the Christ's sake, and to be defrauded. because his focus is on Christ and not upon the things of this world. Yes, he may lose some money. Yes, something may be said that's not true. But for Christ's sake, it's well worth it.

And then lastly, he says, but you yourselves wrong and defraud, and you do this even to one another, even to your brethren. Okay, with that in mind, we're ready to start into verse 9, which kind of starts a new section. And so I thought it's good, Mike's going to be looking through this too. We have the old phrase, do you not know? It occurs six times in chapter six. So I listed all six.

We've looked at the first two already in verses two and three. Or do you not know the saints will judge the world? And then in verse three, or do you not know we will judge angels? And now today we have it, or do you not know the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Then in the following weeks there's three more and Mike gets to deal with all these three. Some of these are fun and some of these are not as fun. Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Do you not know that the one who joins himself to a prostitute is one with her? Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit? So Michael will be covering those in the coming weeks.

So I'm going to focus on verse 9 here coming up. So the verses for today are, Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminates, nor homosexuals, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, will inherit the kingdom of God.

Such were some of you, but you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and in the Spirit of God." Boy, that last part is, you know, you look at this list, there's 10 in there, 5 at the end of verse 9, 5 and 10, you look at that list and you say, wow, you know, that's not a fun list to deal with, but there actually are more, you know, Scripture talks about more beyond this, but what God in His grace, Has put has performed a work in us and we're going to talk about that in verse 11 being washed and sanctified and justified So God has a remedy for the sins of man Which is which is wonderful news Okay, do you not know this is a little bit of a repeat? Or do you not know no is Oida in the Greek and it's in the perfect tense so you could render this you Corinthians have known this in the past and and you continue to know it up into the present. So this is something they knew. The Corinthians should know this.

And so the last part of the verse is, the unrighteous is a subject, will not inherit is a verb, and the kingdom of God is a direct object. So we're going to look at each of those three. So let's start with thinking about the unrighteous. And it's kind of important to know, to understand about how God sees the unrighteous.

So who are the unrighteous? And we saw this right in verse 1 where the Corinthians, where Paul was on their case about you Corinthians dare to go to the law before the unrighteous and not before the saints. So based upon that verse and other verses, the unrighteous are people outside the church. And that was Paul's message to why are you taking your business to outside the church?

They are unrighteous according to God's standard. This is not unrighteous according to man's standard. This is God's standard. And they are contrasted with saints in that 1B verse. And the Greek here for unrighteous is adikos, something like that. Which means unjust, unrighteous, falling short of the righteousness required by divine law, and that's from Vine. So, one of the key verses in defining the unrighteous, and we probably have memorized this, it's a memory verse for many of us.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So think about it. God is not a respecter of men. There's not one man outside of his son that can come before God and claim that he has any standing with him. So God in Paul speaking here in Romans says for all and that's there's no exclusion. It's every single man woman and child and that's from their birth.

They don't become sinners. They are sinners. They're born with a sin nature. They have the Adamic nature, which is a sin nature and they sin because of that nature. So so that makes them unrighteous right there. But I didn't want to leave you with a real negative, but the good news is that, and we have it in Romans 4.3, and Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness. So we're talking about the unrighteous. So how does one become righteous?

At the very core of that is belief in God, and Abraham exercised that, and we exercise that because we have the full information of both the Old and New Testament. We exercise our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and the person and work of what Christ did on the cross. But Abraham believed God and what he understood at that time and it was looking forward to Christ and we exercise it now based upon the complete knowledge. So there is good news. The unrighteous can become righteous just from looking at those two verses. So that's wonderful news. So let's continue on. So let's look at the verb here.

Will not inherit Actually, in Sunday school we were talking about the heaven, the kingdom of God. This verb tells us, it's a future tense, that the unrighteous will not inherit God's kingdom. Inherit here is the idea, and it has in connection with God in scripture. Zodiaty says, to be an heir to any person or thing spoken only of friends of God, as receiving admission to the kingdom of heaven. And I prefer here, I think in this context, kingdom of God is better. So here's a verse that kind of speaks to the issue, speaks to the issue that you can't come on your own of your own good works.

In 1 Corinthians 15.50 it says, Now I say, brethren, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable.

Our flesh and blood that we had from Adam is perishable. It's going to pass away. We're going to be put in the grave unless the Lord comes. But our new bodies we will receive are imperishable. So we cannot inherit the kingdom of God in this body we have now. It's impossible. Okay, so now let's define kingdom of God.

And I like Schaeffer. I looked around, and in fact, when he helped me, I was kind of flailing. You know, you have Kingdom of God and Kingdom of Heaven, and some think they're synonymous, and some think they're not. Anyway, I think in this context, it's best to understand the Kingdom of God as follows. Schaeffer does a really good job here. He says, which includes all intelligence in Heaven or on the Earth who are willing to be subject to God. Entrance into the Kingdom of God is by birth from above.

So I think I need to make a little explanation here. I take that as, you know, God in his design has a kingdom that will be the eternal kingdom. It starts with the millennial kingdom and it will become the eternal kingdom. There'll be the Jews and the Gentiles on the earth. There'll be the heavenly city of Jerusalem. There'll be all these wonderful things, but they're all subject to God.

And entrance into that kingdom is by faith. And once we exercise faith, we're born again and we get this new imperishable body. And so it's wonderful. Actually, the imperishable body doesn't come until later on. I don't have my imperishable body right now. If I did, I'd be a lot healthier, I think. Okay. Alright. So the following verses tell us about God's kingdom. And actually this is a repeat. Now I say to you, brethren, flesh and blood will not inherit the kingdom of God.

And then Ephesians 5.5, For this you know with certainty, that no immoral or impure or covetous man who is an adulterer has an inheritance in the kingdom of God. Somewhat a parallel verse to our verse today in 9.

And 2 Timothy 4.18, For the Lord himself will rescue me from every evil deed and will bring me safely to his heavenly kingdom to him be the glory forever and ever amen so that ends that's the A part of this verse so now let's go to the B part of the verse the B part of the verse starts into this list of the unrighteous sins and it starts off with this phrase do not be deceived and it's a command present and actually it could be rendered stop being deceived That's kind of the gist of it.

And so, once again, Paul's telling the Corinthians they have a problem. They have a problem with the legal system. They have a problem with these lifestyles that describe them before they knew Christ. He says, stop being deceived. And deceived here is often used in the sense of deceiving oneself. And I have a couple of verses here, actually three. The first one is using the same word.

Do not be deceived. Bad company corrupts good morals. Do not be deceived. God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows, this will he also reap. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. And actually the good part of that verse follows that, and I didn't put it in there. That's about every good thing given, every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights. So He doesn't want us to be deceived. God has a wonderful plan for man and His word describes that. And this was an action, this deception was going on in Corinth. So apparently they were getting confused, it seems like.

They looked around and their society was described a lot by these 10 sins we're going to see. That was the society of their day. And you could argue that that's the society of our day. A lot of these are very familiar things that we see today. And so they were getting confused by that. And now we'll see the confusion here. Okay. So now, now the fun, now the unfun part. Okay. So the rest of the verses, this is the first five.

Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminates, nor homosexuals, basically will inherit the kingdom of heaven is the context. The list addressed sexual sins and the sin of idolatry. God's standard for sexual relationships is between one man and one woman who are married. And I wanted to preface before I got into the sexual sin, I wanted to go through and say, well, what's God's standard? I didn't want to just jump into those. What is God's standard? So this is God's standard.

You know, God is the author of... I was thinking, you know, we often see... Vonnie and I like to watch Hallmark and There's always an episode about a wedding planner. It's usually a lady. It's almost always a lady. And she's running around. She's doing a thousand things a minute and planning weddings. Sometimes she's planning multiple weddings. Well, God is the ultimate planner of weddings. Or actually of marriage, if you see. So anyway, this is God's plan. This is His design. And you may... I don't know. You shouldn't have an issue with this. It's a bottom line. Okay. God is the author.

And it starts back in Genesis. For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And this verse is repeated multiple times in the New Testament. Just a wonderful verse. Just describes God's plan and the oneness. The oneness that God wants a man and a woman when they're married to have. One flesh.

And then he elaborates in Hebrews, marriage is to be held in honor among all, and the marriage bed is to be undefiled. So the relationship that a man and a woman have is God's design, God's plan. But man and his sinfulness has corrupted that. And that's what we're going to see here. The list represents deviations from God's standard.

And they're all nouns. They describe a person or persons. with these immoral activities and they continually practice these and that's what he describes as the unrighteous. Let me read that again. The noun forms indicate that these immoral activities are the continual practice of the unrighteous.

And none of these people listed above will inherit God's kingdom. Of these five and the next five, none of those will. So one of the questions we're going to have is, how do I move from this state to the other state? And I've already kind of given the message there.

So now, this is my approach. So I link fornicators and adulterers together. So I think this is a good way to look at it. These sexual relationships are contrary to God's command. but they are natural in function between a man and a woman. That's one set. The next set of feminine and homosexuals. These sexual relationships are contrary to God's command and in addition are unnatural in function between persons of the same sex.

So I'm not going to go into the nitty gritties of all those. You can look in your dictionaries. You guys already know all this stuff. And Mike's covered it, so it's all good. All right, idolaters. I didn't know this. I got this from Vern. While primarily about the worship of idols, they also included temple prostitutes. Apparently they were idols, which seems, you know, boy, if you're going to pick an idol, it doesn't sound like my pick. But anyway, they were pretty strange. Okay, so that's the sexual sins. Let's go on to the next group.

So now we have nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. Okay, so there's five more in here, and once again, they're nouns again, and they're the lifestyle of these people. Thieves is the idea to steal by fraud in secret, and also is the idea of stealing ideas, stealing ideas away from the truth, or not putting forth the truth. Like this verse John 10 10 the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy This is Christ speaking. I came that they may have life and have it more abundantly so contrasting the thief with Christ, you know Incredible the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy So that's that's part of the lifestyle of some Corinthians there was their lifestyle covetous eager to have more To have what belongs to others, hence greedy of gain. And this is a list of some of the sins again.

No immoral or impure or covetous man who is an idolater has an inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Drunkard. One who is drunk with wine. It seems like what's in view in scriptures mostly is always wine. and this mulled wine, I guess I'm not sure I know what that is. In Proverbs it says, for the heavy drinker and the glutton will come to prop poverty and drowsiness will clothe one with rags. So drinking does not lead to prosperity in this life and does not lead to prosperity in the future life.

Revilers, abusive, railing, reviling, And John 9, 28, this is interesting. This is the Jews talking to this man who was born blind, who Christ healed. They reviled him, the man born blind, and said, you are Jesus' disciples, but we are the disciples of Moses. So they already had their opinion of Christ. Well, Moses, he's our man. swindlers extortion extortioner a ravenous person animal or wolves and this verse is kind of interesting Matthew 7 15 says beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing but in inwardly are ravenous wolves so I have a story courtesy of Bonnie she reminded me of this story many years ago she was reading the Denver Post and there was an article about this church in Denver They had a person in the church who deceived many people apparently so much so it made the news made the paper So they talked to somebody in the church, and and this was his comment This is an interesting comment, and it sounds like he knew something about scripture his comment was this You know you know sir.

He just had an extra good set of sheep's clothing and That was his description of this deceiver. Yes, sir, he just had an extra good set of sheep's clothing. That's one you have to think about for a while. I thought that kind of went along with this person here. Beware of false prophets who come to you with sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

Alright, so that's the end of the 10 and at the end it repeats this again, no one inherit the kingdom of God. Now, that's been the hard news. Now let's look at the good news. Let's look at the wonderful news that's available to every person who's unrighteous.

So he starts off, and such were some of you. And the interlinear has, and these sayings, some of you were. So this is where this verse kind of unlocks the fact that These activities, these ten activities that are being described are actually persons because of the way it's phrased here in the Greek. The subject is, some of you, some of you, some of you Corinthians before they trusted in Christ as their Savior were engaged in one or more of these sins.

So the verb here is kind of critical, it's ami, it's a state in which someone or something continuously exists. So Paul calls them unrighteous in their state. They continuously existed in that state. That was their lifestyle. That's who they were. They were unrighteous with those characteristics of the ten things that we talked about. Maybe one or more. And there is these things, the ten things, the ten simple things listed in the previous verses. So that part really helps us out.

But now here's what God did. Don't you love the buts in scripture? Wonderful. And this is Allah. A strong contrast. But in strong contrast, we were washed. So this is a beautiful picture here. To wash away. It's in the middle voice. To wash away oneself from. To be freed from sin. It's a past point fact. Aorist tense. Middle voice for the benefit of the recipient. And Macaulay says they were washed.

They were wash I'm sorry that they were wash points to the work of Christ and cleansing them and then Schaefer says The once for all cleansing is part of the saving grace of God toward the lost when they believe unto salvation I thought a good verse I didn't put on here. This is really good that speaks to this washing is in Titus 3 5 It reads as follows. He saved us and not on the basis of our deeds which we have done in righteousness, but according to His mercy by the washing of regeneration and renewing by the Holy Spirit. So this idea of washing is such a beautiful picture of what God has accomplished for every single believer.

But it doesn't stop there. We have three wonderful truths here. The next one is, you were sanctified. Again, strong contrast, strong but, to make holy or set apart. This is an Aristotelian past point fact. God did this on our behalf, based on our faith. All believers, if you look through scripture, all believers are sanctified or set apart in their position in Christ. At the very first verse, second verse in 1 Corinthians, we saw to the church of God, which is at Corinth, to those who have been sanctified. That defined them. That defined these believers. They have been sanctified. They have been set apart. And we're set apart in Christ Jesus.

And then Hebrews says, Hebrews 10.10, By this we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And then Macaulay adds, sanctified points to the work of the Holy Spirit in setting them apart. And we're going to see as we go through, this is the second one, that the Godhead, the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, all involved in this wonderful transaction. But you were justified. Allah again, strong contrast, but you were justified. To declare, to be righteous, to pronounce righteous, pass point fact, passive voice, God did it on our behalf. He justified it, declared us righteous.

So we see in Romans 3.26, so that He, God the Father, would be just and a justifier of the one who has faith in Christ. So we see in many of these verses, we see man's contribution is only faith. God takes that faith of a believer and does all these wonderful things on our behalf based on that faith.

Then Romans 5.1, Therefore, having been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Then Romans 8.33, Who will bring a charge against God's elect? God is the one who justifies. So we've seen God washed, He washed us, He sanctified us, He justified us. Justified points to the work of the Father in declaring them righteous.

Okay, then kind of the last couple of little phrases here. It says, In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. So the washing, sanctification, and justification were all accomplished in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we see that all throughout scripture. We'll see that they'll say, in the name of, and I believe that in the name of, it's to imply that this was accomplished consistent with the person, the person of Christ, and the work of Christ. It validates that this washing, sanctification, and justification were done in accordance with who Christ is and what he accomplished. And the last little part, in or could be by the Spirit of our God, the power of the Holy Spirit of God was involved in the washing, sanctification, and justification of believers. So as I pointed out before, This last part, these three wonderful things that a believer who trusted Christ has experienced, washing, sanctification, and justification. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were involved.

So as my usual practice, I try to find a little summary paragraph. Actually, it's not as hard. I first started doing this, and I've always thought, how do I find something that kind of sums it up? But Constable did a good job here. This is from Constable. So let me read this to you.

It says, some of the Corinthians had been fornicators and practiced other sins. Paul cited, before they trusted in Christ, however, the blood of Christ had cleansed them. God had set them apart to a life of holiness. The Lord had declared them righteous to the union with Christ by faith. and through the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit who indwells him. He made them saints. Consequently, they needed to live like saints. So Paul's whole focus here is that yes, you were that. You were this kind of person. But now you become a saint.

Now you become God's child we become born again and at the same for us and we may you know as I read through some of these I Thought about you know myself. I thought about others and there's many more What we were before Christ is often the point of sadness a point of regret But Christ has washed us. He sanctified us and justified us. So that's a wonderful message for every believer and to thank the Lord for what he's done in our lives. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this wonderful message, Lord. In Christ's name, Amen.