These guys can teach the Word...
I'll give you some of Matt Chandler...
Here we go..
We find ourselves within the confines of the Bible Belt, and there’s all these kind of oddities and kind of weirdness to a life in suburbia, Bible Belt, (Houston) area. And as a pastor within that cultural context, I find myself in the same conversations over and over and over again when it
comes to spirituality.
Like, people want to talk traditional vs. what we would call ourselves, more missional and focuses. They want to talk music.
They want to talk about dress, whether it’s right or wrong for me to be wearing blue jeans right now,
-whether this angers the Lord or not if we should wear hats or not wear hats,
-how loud should the music be.
You know, you have to deal with weird statements like, “Well, I want my kids to know the hymns, and they don’t know the hymns.” In the end, I want my kids to know Jesus. I don’t care what song they’re singing.
-I end up getting into these questions about whether beer or wine is sinful whether it’s not. I always try to be really honest: light beer is sinful, regular beer is fine…according to the Scriptures.
-We get into whether we’re allowed to see certain movies or not.
-I always end up once a week, no matter how hard I try to find it, over a cup of hot tea, talking about the end times. And I try to be honest: I don’t know. I know He’s coming back. I know I want to live today like I actually believe that, but if you get too deep outside of that, you’re
going to get into a lot of conjecture. And so, we end up talking about that often.
-I end up talking a lot about philosophy of ministry in terms of small groups and Sunday school
and why we do them. And on and on and on it goes.
-Eldership vs. deaconship vs. staff led. We’re in the Bible Belt, this is what we do.
I’ll even find, “Hey, what do you think about this church? What do you think about that church?” Like, everybody’s been wounded by some church around here. If you stay here long enough, we’ll light you up too, but that’s a part of…everybody’s sinful.
You’re not going to find a non sinful place. It’s going to happen. Wherever you gather sinners, redeemed or unredeemed, sin happens. They’ll try to bait you, “Did you hear what such and such is doing? Hmm?”
-This is what I find myself in. And then, if the seminary guys get through the filter that we’ve built to try to avoid them, I end up having to talk Calvinism vs. Arminianism and I end up talking gifts, whether the gifts are dead or whether the gifts are alive and well. And this is what we do, because if you’re a churchman in the Bible Belt, these are kind of consuming ideas.
I mean this is what we talk about, “How do we…My church doesn’t do Sunday school…Well, beer is evil, it’ll kill you…”
And we love to get together and talk about what in the end, although important, are peripheral things.
They’re not the main thing.
In fact, in some of those instances, they’re so far down the line, they’re not even
numbered. So, what’s the main thing? What is, as the apostle Paul will soon tell us, what
is of first importance? Because I think that if you get the main thing down, then there’s
all this grace all over the place. If you get the main thing down, then all of a sudden,
there’s a lot of grace and there’s a lot of freedom and there’s a lot of friendships vs. nonfriendships and a lack of grace and a whole lot of judgment. Yeah, if we could just get
the main thing down, then all of a sudden, maybe all the other things aren’t as important.
Maybe I’m wrong, but maybe I’m right.
Let’s get into 1 Corinthians 15:1-2. “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I
preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you--unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance...” Everything else gets melted away here because Paul, who wrote 75% of the New Testament, the guy that wrote this book that we’re in, is going,
“Of everything I wrote, of everything I talked about, of everything I unpacked for you, let me give you what’s of first importance. Let me give you what you can’t mess up. If you mess this up, everything else is off. Even if it’s right, you’re off in how you operate in it. You’ve got to get this right.”
Okay, so here we go. “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.”
And then, God in the flesh, Jesus shows up on the scene and has His blood
drained and carries away the sins of the world. So, what's of first importance? The
sacrificial, ransoming, expiating, propitiating cross of Jesus Christ.
But he doesn't stop there; he keeps going. “For I delivered to you as of first importance
what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”
Now, here's something very intriguing.
Mainly, when you hear the cross of Jesus taught, it just kind of stops there. But it doesn't stop there when New Testament writers address it. They don't address the cross of Jesus Christ and the resurrection as two separate instances but rather one in the same event.
Over and over again, you'll hear about the cross and the resurrection, the death and the resurrection. These ideas are inseparably linked to one another. Christ died on the cross, absorbed the wrath of God, carried away the shame of mankind, was buried...this is the idea that He actually died. There's a lot of National Geographic and Discovery Channel speculation about whether He was dead or not.
I still contend that when you get beat nearly to death and hung on a cross for at least eight hours, lungs filling up with blood, and then get stabbed in the heart underneath your ribcage by a spear, you don't pop up two days later.
I'm just contending that you don't just show up two days later going, “Touch My side. Go ahead, feel My hands, Thomas.”
I'm just contending.
MY NOTE:
Let's focus on the thing of first importance... not the peripheral things.. not the opinions based on speculations... not man-made traditions that we are so full of.They’re not the main thing.
In fact, in some of those instances, they’re so far down the line, they’re not even
numbered. So, what’s the main thing? What is, as the apostle Paul will soon tell us, what
is of first importance? Because I think that if you get the main thing down, then there’s
all this grace all over the place. If you get the main thing down, then all of a sudden,
there’s a lot of grace and there’s a lot of freedom and there’s a lot of friendships vs. nonfriendships and a lack of grace and a whole lot of judgment. Yeah, if we could just get
the main thing down, then all of a sudden, maybe all the other things aren’t as important.
Maybe I’m wrong, but maybe I’m right.
Let’s get into 1 Corinthians 15:1-2. “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I
preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you--unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you as of first importance...” Everything else gets melted away here because Paul, who wrote 75% of the New Testament, the guy that wrote this book that we’re in, is going,
“Of everything I wrote, of everything I talked about, of everything I unpacked for you, let me give you what’s of first importance. Let me give you what you can’t mess up. If you mess this up, everything else is off. Even if it’s right, you’re off in how you operate in it. You’ve got to get this right.”
Okay, so here we go. “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures.”
And then, God in the flesh, Jesus shows up on the scene and has His blood
drained and carries away the sins of the world. So, what's of first importance? The
sacrificial, ransoming, expiating, propitiating cross of Jesus Christ.
But he doesn't stop there; he keeps going. “For I delivered to you as of first importance
what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”
Now, here's something very intriguing.
Mainly, when you hear the cross of Jesus taught, it just kind of stops there. But it doesn't stop there when New Testament writers address it. They don't address the cross of Jesus Christ and the resurrection as two separate instances but rather one in the same event.
Over and over again, you'll hear about the cross and the resurrection, the death and the resurrection. These ideas are inseparably linked to one another. Christ died on the cross, absorbed the wrath of God, carried away the shame of mankind, was buried...this is the idea that He actually died. There's a lot of National Geographic and Discovery Channel speculation about whether He was dead or not.
I still contend that when you get beat nearly to death and hung on a cross for at least eight hours, lungs filling up with blood, and then get stabbed in the heart underneath your ribcage by a spear, you don't pop up two days later.
I'm just contending that you don't just show up two days later going, “Touch My side. Go ahead, feel My hands, Thomas.”
I'm just contending.
MY NOTE:
The thing of first importance is that God loved you so much that he came down and clothed himself in flesh and dwelt among us... and he Died and Rose again.
done.
