A Fractured Flock
September 15, 2024
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
1 Corinthians 1:10-17
10 I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. 11 For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers.12 What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” 13 Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? 14 I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. 16 (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
I was listening to a few other pastors preach these verses, and one pastor said the hardest thing for him in recent years is when church members come to him and point out all the ways their church has taken a position or (taken a non-position) that is different than the position of other, celebrity pastors. “But Pastor,” they say, “don’t you know how this pastor or that pastor did this or that. And even though they pastor different churches with different members in different states, don’t you know why they did what they did and why we should do it too?”
I heard that and thought, “That’s pretty honest.” Then I thought, “What Paul wrote then, is still pretty relevant now.” As we get into the sermon, we’ll see issues of divisions within the church was not a conversation the church in Corinth wanted to have. But we’ll also see it is a conversation God wants his church to have. Let’s pray as we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
If you were here last week, you know we began what will be a longer series through the letter in the New Testament called 1 Corinthians. We’ll go for a while and take a break. Then go for a bit and take a break. Paul wrote the letter to a church in a city called Corinth. It was a church of perhaps one or two hundred people in a large, metropolitan city. From the standpoint of geography, ancient Corinth would be like Baltimore in that Corinth was a significant port city, a hub for shipping, industry, and travel. From the standpoint of morality, ancient Corinth would be like Las Vegas, a city known for its excess and extravagant sin.
Paul planted the church when he spent eighteen months in Corinth, and then he moved on to other missionary work. You need to know that he wrote this letter as a response to two things. First, the church had questions for Paul. They wanted to know all sorts of things about marriage and worship and gifts and even questions about where they could buy their meat. Some Christians were getting a really good deal on an aftermarket steak from the pagan temple nearby. True story. And some Christians in Corinth wondered what God would say about that. It’s all super interesting and super important. That’s the first reason for the letter—their questions.
Second, Paul heard a report about them, and what he heard, he needed to respond to.
Which do you think he addressed first? Their questions or the report about them? We don’t have to guess. You don’t need to flip there now, but the first verse in chapter 7 reads, “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote . . .” That’s chapter seven. The church thought they needed to know about this and that—and they did, just as we do. And yet Paul spent six chapters talking about the issues that they didn’t think were a big deal, but Paul believed would destroy them if they were not addressed.
The first issue, which we begin this morning, is the fracturing of their church into divisions. There were several ways they divided, but the chief issue was around celebrity teachers. The city of Corinth had a celebrity culture, especially with traveling teachers. Rhetoric and speech were a big deal. And the best speakers became celebrities. That celebrity culture trickled into the church, causing fractures. The Christian church today has a similar challenge: we’re in a country (perhaps a world) that loves celebrities, and we’re often a church that does the same—which leads to fracturing.
As we look at this passage, we’ll do so in three categories: We’ll talk about the fractures in the body of Christ; we’ll talk about the unity in the body of Christ. We’ll finish talking about the supremacy of Christ, the head of the body.
1. The fractures in the body
After a very warm welcome at the start of the letter, where Paul addresses them with affection and grace and thanksgiving, he turns his attention to their fractures. Look with me again at vv. 10–13.
10 I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. 11 For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. 12 What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” 13 Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
Paul says that people from Chloe have given Paul a report. We don’t know anything about her. Clearly she was known to both the church and Paul. Perhaps she was a prominent businesswoman, and associates of hers had done business in Corinth and then returned to Ephesus, where Paul was at the time, and reported to Chloe and Paul about the state of the Christian fellowship there. I don’t take this as gossip. Offering an update would be a normal thing to do.
We’re about to send seven people to Southeast Asia for a mission trip, so we’ll get some updates. But if in a year from now, one of you had a business trip to the same area and you were able to visit these same churches, we’d love to hear how they are doing. So, the existence of a report is normal. But the report itself is also not good.
You can see the fractures in v. 12. “What I mean,” Paul writes, “is that each one of you says, ‘I follow Paul,’ or ‘I follow Apollos,’ or ‘I follow Cephas,’ or ‘I follow Christ.’” (Cephas, by the way, is just another name for Peter.)
Let me tell you a bit about each. In Acts 18, you can read that Paul founded the church. Later he sent Apollos to visit the church and encourage them. If you know the story about Apollos, it’s really neat. He was an African Jew from Alexandria in Egypt. He was a very, very gifted speaker. But at first he didn’t have the full context of the gospel. A woman named Priscilla and her husband Aquila discipled Apollos about the full gospel, and Apollos only got more powerful in his preaching.
In Corinth’s celebrity culture, this was huge. The apostle Paul planted seeds. Then Apollos watered them. Great, right? In fact, when Paul talks about this in chapter 3, he says exactly that, that he planted and Apollos watered and God made it grow. But the imagery of planting and watering were not just theoretical. That’s how it went. Paul was there first and then Apollos.
And this caused problems. Look at vv. 14–16 for more texture.
14 I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. 16 (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.) 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
The guy named Stephanas is named again at the end of the letter (1 Cor. 16:15). It’s said that Stephanas was one of the first converts to Jesus that Paul made in Corinth. The guy named Crispus, we read in Acts 18:8, was the ruler of the Jewish synagogue, and he converted to Jesus and all his household, and Paul baptized him. The guy named Gaius seems to show up in a few places in the New Testament. Paul apparently baptized him in Corinth. In another letter, the one called Romans, Paul lists Gaius as the host of the church in Rome (16:23), so he must have had some wealth to be the host. All great.
But do you see the issue? Paul preaches. People get saved. He baptizes a few of them, one guy who was probably wealthy and another guy who used to be a popular religious leader. Now add this detail. We know from other places in this letter and others that Paul was a simple preacher. Paul was probably a better author than a preacher. He’s still the Great Paul, of course. But he moves on. Then comes this great preacher named Apollos. Man, Apollos is something else. I mean, Paul was good, but, boy, Apollos can really command a room. And we know Peter, of course. That guy spent time with Jesus. He’s certainly a celebrity. And there’s Jesus himself. It seems people were saying, “I’m with Jesus.” That’s a good thing, right? Look at v. 12 again with me.
What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.”
Maybe it is a good thing to say I’m with Jesus. But the context seems to indicate otherwise. I read this and think of that icebreaker question that goes, “If you could eat dinner with anyone, dead or alive, who would it be?” And some say this and others say that. And then some really spiritual person goes: “I’d have dinner with Jesus.” Apparently, in Corinth, there were super spiritual people who said something like that. “I don’t listen to any teachers other than Jesus.”
But there’s a problem with that. If Jesus saved these other teachers and Jesus called those other teachers into ministry, then it’s really not possible to say, “Well, I just follow Jesus,” if you don’t also follow the people Jesus saved and called to be teachers. Do you see? It wasn’t a positive thing.
And these divisions rippled out to another area. Including the Lord’s Supper. We’ll get to that when we get to chapter 11, but evidently, when they had the Lord’s Supper, it was a larger meal, something like a buffet. That’s fine. But all the rich people were going through the line first, so that when the poorer members of the church came through to get the body and blood of Jesus, there wasn’t any left for them.
We might not have these exact same divisions. But we certainly have our own. We divide over which method of schooling is the most Christian method. We divide preferences over music style. We divide over which church will make us the most comfortable because the congregation looks like us and has about the same amount of money as us. During Covid, we had a dozen new ways to divide. And we divide over our favorite Christian teachers and preachers.
And so I come back to Paul’s appeal in v. 10. He writes, “I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.”
Notice the active language. God wants us not only to pursue unity, but God wants us to be troubled when we do not have unity, at least unity on the biggest and brightest truths. Speaking of unity, let me go to the second point.
2. The unity in the body
We talked about the fractures in the body of Christ. But this passage also speaks to the unity of the body of Christ. It even shows the way that Paul is trying to cultivate that unity, the ways he himself is pursuing the unity that he is urging them to pursue.
Notice in v. 10 that Paul appeals to them as brothers, meaning brothers and sisters. This is a family metaphor. If God is our Father, then everyone in God’s family are siblings; we’re brothers and sisters. In v. 10, he could just be calling them siblings, while he is an apostle. But look at the end of v. 11. He says, “my brothers.” Paul is united with them.
Not only in unity with them, but he’s in unity with the other teachers too. Paul could have taken this chance with his super letter-writing skills to explain why they should be saying, “I follow Paul.” But that’s not what he does. He doesn’t tear down Apollos or Peter, not here or anywhere throughout this letter. In fact, he builds them up, especially Apollos. My paraphrase would be something like, “All these guys are great teachers and preachers, and if you’re with Jesus, then you should want to build unity with them.”
To get into the details about unity even more, notice what Paul does in v. 13. He asked rhetorically, “Was Paul crucified for you?” The answer is, “No way.” But whose name did he put there? He could have put Apollos or Peter to lower those men. “Was Apollos crucified for you?” But he puts his own name. Paul makes himself as low as he can.
And not only that, but even his choice not to baptize is part of this. Evidently, as he planted the church and it started to grow, Paul must have had some sense that if he kept baptizing people, it would cause problems.
It’s a wonderful thing to be baptized (cf. Matt. 28!). We even have a baptism service planned in a few weeks. So if you’ve never been baptized as a sign that Jesus has changed your life, we’d love to see you do that with us. It’s an obedient thing, whether you are old or young, to get baptized. In fact, this morning, Scott Elder, one of our volunteer pastors, traveled to his mother and is visiting her church. Scott’s mother is eighty-two years old, and she’s getting baptized in front of her church. She’s been a follower of Jesus for many years, just never baptized.
Anyway, Paul knew their celebrity culture and, for the sake of unity, chose to have other people do baptisms. Our celebrity culture might not be as strong, but we try to cultivate unity when we do baptisms in several ways. For example, when we do a baptism, I often try not to be the one doing the baptism, having others do it. And if we have multiple baptisms on Sunday, I will make sure I don’t do all of them. We also try to cultivate unity with our preaching rotation, where I only preach every other week or so.
And speaking of preaching, we cultivate unity by not giving you our personal hot take about the latest issue for thirty minutes. Back in May, we spent seven weeks touching on more hot-button issues than usual as we preached from various passages in Ephesians. But they were not merely our personal takes. You might not know this, but to cultivate unity, each sermon and its theme was discussed by the whole preaching team and submitted to the pastor-elder team for review before they were preached. Unity was that important to us.
The bookshelf in the foyer has a ton of different authors, both men and women and young and old, and so on. Our women’s ministry has co-leaders. And the co-leaders lead a team. In fact, most of the ministries here are led by teams. We have a pastor-elder team, and guess what? I get some special preference because I’m the lead pastor, but for the most part, I’m only one vote out of eight.
I’ll keep going because cultivating unity is really important. Just to be very practical, I can tell you that we try to work on unity as a church staff and as pastor-elders. For a number of years, our pastor-elders have set goals each year. Our main mission is to see the weak, wounded, and wayward enjoy the living Jesus. To do this in 2024, we had three specific goals: improve retention, improve outreach, and improve the health of every team. After a church plant last year, these seemed like good goals.
Anyway, for many years each January, I show some version of these pictures to our staff. It’s super impressive, right? The staff teases me about this. But the idea is that God wants to move the church somewhere. The next picture has some arrows. Those areas are each of our efforts. You can see it’s hard to move the church when we’re not unified. So we write goals that, hopefully, look more like the last picture. Each staff member writes goals that reflect where the whole church is moving, unify our effort.
I could go on about what we’re trying to do as a church to maintain the unity of the body of Christ and not fracture us. Unity in our baptisms. Unity in our preaching. Unity in our bookshelf. Unity in our ministry teams. Unity in our goals. Unity in our staff.
Here’s the question. But what are you doing personally? Clearly the unity of the body is important to God? When there is strife and quarrels among us, you may not be able to fix it. I understand that. But not working on unity and not caring about unity is not a Christian option. And there is more than just working on conflict that can promote unity. There is the unity of your regular presence among us. It’s hard to be unified when people don’t come. There is the unity of your giving. There are a hundred great causes to give toward but giving worshipfully and sacrificially to the local church to which you belong is part of the way you can cultivate unity.
And as you work on unity, I believe, that by God’s grace, you’ll find and experience more unity than you expect. I believe our church will be a place where you can know the joy on the backside of Christian forgiveness and the joy of being fully united in our mission to follow Christ. Experiencing unity in following Christ is a really joyful thing.
And speaking of Christ, let me end by talking about him for a few minutes.
3. The supremacy of Christ, the head of the body
We’ve talked about the fractures in the body of Christ. We’ve spoken of the unity in the body of Christ. Let’s end by talking about the supremacy of Christ himself, the supremacy of the one who is the head of the body.
There’s a story in Acts 14 where Paul was doing missionary work and that story helps illustrate why Paul feels so passionate about not only our unity but Christ’s supremacy. In Acts 14 we read of two cities and two responses that make a fascinating juxtaposition. Paul starts in a city called Iconium. It goes well, but there is division and persecution. Paul and others must flee for their lives. “But, hey,” they think, “let’s not worry too much; this is what happens.” That’s the first city.
Then they go to a city called Lystra. Jesus helps them heal a guy with bad feet. And they also preach about Jesus. This time, however, the town thinks they are so special that they start calling Barnabas by the name of Zeus and Paul by the name of another Greek God. In fact, we read this: “And when the crowds saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in Lycaonian, ‘The gods have come down to us in the likeness of men!’ . . . And the priest of Zeus, whose temple was at the entrance to the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates and wanted to offer sacrifice with the crowds” (Acts 14:11, 13). What did Paul and Barnabas do? They lost their minds. We read this in vv. 14–15:
“But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it, they tore their garments and rushed out into the crowd, crying out, “Men, why are you doing these things? We also are men, of like nature with you, and we bring you good news, that you should turn from these vain things to a living God, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and all that is in them.”
Why? “You want to stone me for Jesus, okay? I can deal with that. But you want to call me a god and worship me, I’ll lose my mind.” That’s how Paul thinks.
Why? Because of the supremacy of the head of the body. Because of the supremacy of Christ, that’s why. We see this in 1 Corinthians 1:12, 13, and 17. I’ll read them again.
12 What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.” 13 Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? . . . 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.
Do you see the other problem with this list of four? When you put Paul, Apollos, and Peter in a list with Jesus two wrong things happen: Those men come up to high and it brings Jesus down too low. Jesus doesn’t belong in the list. Paul is jealous that the supremacy of Christ is exalted. Not his own name. Not Peter’s name. Not Apollos’s name. There is no name under heaven that men are saved except the name of Jesus. Jesus saves from sins. Jesus laid down his life. Jesus took it up again. Jesus sits on the throne of the universe. And Jesus will come again to judge the living and the dead.
Church, it may not be clear all the ways that we are to pursue unity. But the goal is to follow Christ. And as you follow him, we will necessarily get closer and closer to our brothers and sisters. That, at times, will be hard, and will, at times, cause conflict. But there is no fracture that Jesus can’t make better. If not in this life, certainly in the life to come.
Let’s pray, inviting the music team to lead us in song. Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
Sermon Discussion Questions
What divisions do you see more broadly among the Christian community?
What do you think about v. 12 and the group that says, “I follow Christ”? How could that be a bad thing?
Benjamin mentioned that as we follow Christ, we will necessarily get closer to one another. How have you seen that be true in your life? How has that been hard? How has that been good?
What areas of disunity (i.e., fractures) do you feel personally convicted about and need God’s grace to address in the coming days?
