Let There Be Light
April 13, 2025
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
1 Corinthians 14:26-40
26 What then, brothers? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up. 27 If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret. 28 But if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silent in church and speak to himself and to God. 29 Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. 30 If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent.31 For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged, 32 and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets. 33 For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.
As in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.
36 Or was it from you that the word of God came? Or are you the only ones it has reached? 37 If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. 38 If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. 39 So, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. 40 But all things should be done decently and in order.
I don’t want to overly draw attention to Susan’s leadership, but I suppose you’re already sitting out there connecting the dots between what was just read in our passage and her, shall we say, brazen lack of silence. As well as the lack of silence by our Scripture reader. I was talking with Susan last week, and I told her I wished her well as she tried to find a way to lead the music during the service and also be silent. That’s hard to do.
Maybe that’s a funny joke; maybe it is not at all. I’ve been thinking about this passage for over twenty years. Others here have been doing the same, perhaps longer. Still others are just seeing these verses for the first time. Regardless, I do not want to imply that the Word of God is something to scoff at or that a properly ordered Christian worship service is something to scoff at. God says through this passage that what we do, and how we do it, is so important that it even communicates who God is. Think of that responsibility and privilege we have, to communicate who God is—whether a God of disorder and dysfunction and chaos and a clanging, unintelligible cacophony of noise or whether a God of order and peace and calm and blessing. So those verses about silence said three different times do mean something that really matters. But maybe what it means is not exactly what it seems like at first. Let’s pray and ask for God’s help.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
So last summer I’m at a birthday party for kids and I’m standing around with a few parents and I get to talking with another Christian who attends a different church, a great church with a great pastoral team, and the lead pastor is my friend. This other Christian says to me something like, “Okay, I have to ask. Why would you want to be at a church that doesn’t pick theological positions?” And he must have seen a strange look coming over my face, so he stumbles a bit more into something like, “I mean, I could see church attendees not necessarily picking theological positions but not pastors. Like, why don’t you have theological convictions?”
I felt like he was asking, “Like why you just show movie clips and not preach the Bible at your church?” That’s not exactly what he meant; he didn’t intend it to be as insulting as it sounded. But it did feel like he was asking why I’m a squishy pastor who wants to lead a squishy church with the lowest theological denominator.
As you might imagine, he’s at a church where the membership of the church and the leadership of that church have decided their view on a whole host of theological positions—just as our church and our leadership and our denomination have decided our view on a host of theological positions. Our church denomination has a strong, orthodox statement of faith on God, the Bible, the person and work of Jesus, humanity, the Holy Spirit, the church, Christian living, the return of Christ, and final destinies.
What he meant, I believe, was something more like why, among the orthodox views, don’t you pick a theological position about human responsibility and God’s sovereignty in salvation? And why, among the orthodox views, don’t you have a specific view of the return of Christ? And why, among the orthodox views, don’t you have a specific view on the issues surfaced in the passages we’ve recently been preaching, specific views about the so-called charismatic gifts of healing, prophecy, and tongues? Why not? Maybe you’ve wondered the same thing.
This acquaintance of mine assumed that our choice, or even my choice specifically, was not to pick a particular view on each of these issues and two dozen others issues and require them of our members, because I had never thought of them, because I was too afraid to pick a view, or because I didn’t think they were important. None of which are true. I have convictions about all these issues.
So I tried to tell him that, actually, our church denomination had picked a lot of theological issues that are very important, perhaps we might say the most important, but, he was right, we have chosen to not pick a few of the issues at the level of the denomination so that we could try to do the hard thing saying together rather than endlessly dividing until everyone shares the same theological views on first, second, third, and fourth order issues. And then I said, rather than making it easier for me, rather than letting me be lazy or fuzzy with Scripture, or intentionally cryptic so as to build a big church that doesn’t think these things matter, I told him it actually makes my job much harder. “Oh, how is that?” he asked.
“Well,” I said, “if I were a part of one of the several conservative Presbyterian denominations, then I’d have the Westminster Confession of Faith stand upon, which,” I told him, “I tend to think is a wonderful document of profound theological depth written by godly people. Or if I were a part of several Baptist denominations, I’d have similar but different shared confessional documents that would tell me and our people what we believe. And that’s all fine, maybe even good. But,” I said, “when I come to a passage, because our statement of faith is good and strong but, admittedly, thinner, I have to make sure whatever I teach is from the Bible. And in this way, the Bible—week after week—has an opportunity to become more and more prominent. I can’t take for granted that our membership already has a shared view of all the issues. And that,” I said, “in the long run keeps us honest and faithful and seeking the help of God for when we come to really hard passages.”
Now, if you didn’t know much about our church or the denomination of the Evangelical Free Church of America, now you know a little bit more. But that’s not my main reason for saying all of that. I say all that because the chapter of 1 Corinthians 14 would allow us, if we are not careful, to pick our favorite emphasis and ignore the rest. I’ll be more specific. Last week, Pastor Ron led us through the first half of 1 Corinthians 14. Whether you were here or not, I’ll tell you that the bulk of the sermon funneled toward Paul’s challenge. You can see it in v. 12. God wants us to be “eager for manifestations of the Spirit, strive to excel in building up the church.”
God wants us to so think and so pray and so love and so bring our full selves to God and to church and to one another, that we could be actually described as those who are eager for God to work among us in more and more powerful ways, even ways that might make us uncomfortable. Now, there’s more in the first half of the chapter than that, but that’s the main thrust: be eager to see the Spirit of God work among the people of God as we each use the various gifts he has given and use them to build up one another.
What is the point of the last half of the passage, the passage we have in front of us today? We’ll see it in more detail as we go along, but I’ll give you a summary right now. Paul makes some general commands about church gatherings and using gifts in an orderly way. He says something about using tongues, and how to use them, and how to be silent when not using them. Then he makes commands about prophecy and how to use it, and when not to use it by staying silent. He says something about men and women and then comes back to his main point in this half of the passage. His main point is that God is orderly, so our gathering to worship God should also be orderly.
What does that have to do with my long story about someone asking me why we don’t just pick every theological position we can? I tend to think there are those denominations that are known for the way they eagerly pursue the things of the Spirit. And there are other denominations that are known for being orderly and proper, for being doctrinally minded. And those denominations are different denominations. I’m not saying I endorse this distinction, but the perception is that Pentecostal churches, Assemblies of God churches, and some non-denominational churches have the Spirit of God working powerfully among them and are, therefore, godly. And then the Presbyterians and the reformed Baptists, well, they have order and doctrine and predictability, and are therefore, godly.
I don’t say this to insult those groups. I suspect that thoughtful men and women in each group might say, “Yes, these are our temptations.” Just I will tell you our temptation might be to avoid hard doctrines, remaining squishy.
I guess I’m trying to say that when we look at a passage like this, we are forced to figure out how to keep all this together: be eager and be orderly, not be eager or orderly, but both. I like that challenge. The God who inspired these passages wants his people to receive that challenge of keeping this together with excitement at how he will provide. In a way, the challenge of keeping this together keeps us dependent upon God.
But this challenge, the challenge of being eager and orderly, was a challenge for the church in Corinth too. They might have been eager, but they were not so orderly. They wanted to use the gifts of God but wanted to use them as they saw fit. We can be like that too. Yes, we want the extravagant experiences with God, and we want his gifting, but we want to use these gifts on our terms: when we want, how we want, and are often not nearly as interested in using God’s gifts in the way God intends.
Let’s get into the details. I won’t really be able to separate the points of the sermon so neatly as we sometimes do. I’ll be doing what Ron did a few weeks ago, just reading a few verses at a time and showing how these main points appear in each cluster of verses. To state it again, the main points will be these: church, be eager for greater manifestation of the Spirit, and pursue order that reflects the peace of God. In short, use gifts eagerly and orderly for the glory of God.
Look with me at v. 26.
26 What then, brothers? When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation. Let all things be done for building up.
This list gives us a glimpse of their church service. Now, it’s not all that they did or we do. Elsewhere, Paul talks about the Lord’s Supper. In fact, Pastor Tony will be covering that on Good Friday. There’s a long section about the Lord’s Supper in chapter 11. Chapter 11 also speaks about prayer. And earlier in the letter Paul talked about baptism. So this list in v. 26 does not have everything. But you see the point. When you come to church, be eager to use your gifts. Some might be signing. Others might be encouraging. A few people might teach a class or preach a sermon. But everyone can come to church eager to bring encouragement to share with their brothers and sisters, even if those encouragements happen in private conversations before and after the service. Come to build others up, Paul writes.
Another way to say this is to say that church is not a spectator sport. Paul assumes going to church is more like going to play a game of pickup baseball at the park with your extended family than it is like going to watch the Phillies play a game. In a pickup game at the park, you come to play. That’s like church. No one expects to go to a Phillies game expecting to play. That’s not like church.
Just a quick, funny story about that. I have a friend named Kevin. He’s been the chaplain of the Chicago White Sox for the last few years. During that first Covid summer, it was so hard to keep players healthy and not quarantined and all of that. I remember texting with him about it. He said the roster was so low that he started bringing his old baseball glove to the stadium and leaving it in his car! I loved that. He’s a pastor who, I think, only played high school baseball, showing up to pray at a game, and deep down he’s praying they put him in the game! I love that.
Now, I don’t want you praying that I get sick, and you have to preach, because that would be an odd prayer. But based on v. 26, I do want you to be eager to come to church and eager to come with your full presence and in the power of the Spirit of God, to come to give what God has given you away to others. And that might really change the experience of church for you, if you viewed it that way. Yes, we come to get more and more grounded in the love of God for us in the person of Jesus. We come to worship. But we also come to give and to build.
Let’s keep going. I’ll read vv. 27–33.
27 If any speak in a tongue, let there be only two or at most three, and each in turn, and let someone interpret. 28 But if there is no one to interpret, let each of them keep silent in church and speak to himself and to God. 29 Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. 30 If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent. 31 For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged, 32 and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets. 33 For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.
I’m not going to cover the same ground Pastor Ron did last week with his helpful and extended definitions of prophecy and tongues. Tongues seem to be the speaking of a language unknown to the person that, along with an interpretation, God uses for the good of building up the body. And prophecy is something like a specific word of encouragement or challenge that is timely and particular to a person or a church. That was all covered last week.
And this week, what does Paul emphasize? That all things be done orderly. If we speak this way, then we must do it with a limited number of speakers and always with interpretation—or what? Or you stay silent, he says. And with the kind of speaking, you go in order, and you always have a view to whether others might have something to say, and being ready to sit down for another to have his or her turn. And it must happen with feedback and testing. Those lines about testing are important. This kind of speaking cannot be a “Thus says the Lord” kind of prophecy. Even at the end of the passage, Paul tells them he is commanding them in the Lord’s commands. He’s not telling them to test his words as he does prophecy. So there is a “Thus says the Lord” kind of speaking that God did sometimes through the apostles that was authoritative. But this kind of prophecy was not. So when it happens, it needs to happen in a certain way, and if not, then what? Then you stay silent, he says.
“But,” someone might protest, “God is speaking through me right now, and I have to say it, and I can’t control saying it, and I don’t want anyone to tell me whether what I say is true or not, and I need to teach this class or sing this hymn or make this prayer or baptize this person right now, because I have the gifting so I get to use it when I want and how I want,” and so on they go.
What would Paul say to that? No, he would say. Yes, we must be eager for the Spirit of God to work, but the Spirit of God is orderly. Gifts are not about self-expression. I’m not primarily a pastor because it satisfies some itch in my soul that just has to be scratched and can only be scratched when I preach and lead. I’m a pastor primarily, I hope, out of obedience. Church is not to be like a battle of the bands, where everyone is trying to one-up the person who did something last week because we can’t help but blurting things out. Love does not insist on its own way, and “the spirits of prophets,” Paul says, “are subject to prophets. For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.”
And now we come to the verses that surely caught your attention at the start. Look with me at vv. 33–36. I’ll read them again.
As in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.
I am going to refrain from doing a thirty-minute discussion of the general principles that God teaches through all the Scriptures about men and women in ministry together. I did that when we hit chapter 11 a few weeks ago. The summary from that sermon is this: God has created men and women both in his image and both with dignity, value, and worth. And as such, both men and women have prominent roles to play in the kingdom of God, loving and serving each other and pointing a sinful, broken world to the beauty of God’s forgiveness found in Jesus. And the way men and women do that has many overlapping roles or responsibilities. But at the same time, we also have differences. And both the sameness and the differences between men and women are of God and thus good. Celebrating both the sameness and the differences in men and women can be very hard for us to do with sin in the picture. But God gives us his grace in Christ. And God’s grace to men and women does not explode our sameness and differences, making us interchangeable. Rather, his grace is given so we can live out our sameness and differences in a way that gives him glory and serves one another. That’s a one-minute summary of the long sermon I have on these issues about four weeks ago.
Now, with these specific verses here in chapter 14, what is going on? Admittedly, it seems like God is saying that women should not ever talk in a worship service—no announcements, no singing, no calls to worship, no testimonies about God’s grace, prayers, no Scripture reading, no nothing. Silence.
A command of absolute silence would be strange for several reasons. But here’s the strangest. If you were to flip back a page or so to chapter 11, you would see Paul state that women should speak in church, specifically that women should use their gifts in a worship service to pray and prophesy. It would be strange if Paul said in one place that women should pray and prophesy and in another that they should be silent. It would be strange to take this as an absolute command.
The better way to understand these verses is to understand them in the context of the statement about judging prophecy. Paul wants women to be silent when there is a contentious case of prophecy that needs to be tested.
Now, whenever someone is speaking in church, who should be evaluating whether it’s biblical or not? Well, everyone. Everyone should be asking not do I like this teaching or do I like this application, does it make me feel good. Instead, the whole church should be thinking about whether what is said is biblical, weighing whether what is said fits with the rest of the Bible. We all should be doing that, men and women. But who has the formal responsibility before God to protect the doctrine of the church? Do we all just vote on everything? No, the membership of a church commissions godly pastor-elders to determine doctrine. I’ll say it this way, the whole church should be testing the doctrine, but a few have a responsibility to test doctrine for the whole church.
We believe that God has left the office of pastor-elders to godly, qualified, affirmed men. You might not agree with that. I’m not going to teach that from these verses. I wouldn’t use these verses to teach that. That would require using passages that are, we believe, more clear. But just for a moment, even if you don’t see the Bible teaching this, or even if you do see the Bible teaching this but it increasingly feels strange, let me show how this view could play out from this passage, whether you hold this view or not.
Let’s illustrate 1 Corinthians 14:34–36 with a fictitious example. For us this would probably happen in a membership meeting, rather than a church service, so I’ll just put it there. In some member meeting I say to the church, “I sense the Lord is telling us that we need to abandon our efforts in one area of ministry and give our efforts entirely to another area of ministry.” And let’s just say that the ministry I suggest seems a very radical departure from what we have been doing. And it even seems to link us in with a movement that is not very biblical. After I say this, a few other pastor-elders of our church weigh-in on the situation, bringing up passages of Scripture and pointing to what God has clearly said. As this happens, let’s be candid, for everyone this is pretty uncomfortable. We have three or four pastor-elders involved in what seems like an argument—maybe it even becomes an argument. That’s the situation I believe these verses address.
Into that context, it would not be right for a married woman to go around her own husband, especially if she is perhaps newly connected to the church and newly connected to Christianity, for her to jump in and start making statements and asking questions.
You might not see it that way, but that is, I believe, the best way to make sense of the silence. Which, as I said, was not complete silence. Those who had a tongue were not always to be silent. Just in situations without an interpretation. And those with a prophecy were not to be always silent, just when it wasn’t their turn. And women were not to always be silent, just when prophesy was being evaluated for the whole church.
If we only focus on this contentious part, we’ll miss something encouraging. In their culture, I don’t think that “be silent” would have struck them as too odd. Of course, it strikes us as odd. But you know what might have struck them as odd. It’s the same phrase that still catches many off guard today. We are too slow to celebrate theological education for women. Look at v. 35: “if there is anything they desire to learn . . .”
Many of those in Corinth might have heard that and said, “No way. Women shouldn’t be eager to learn, shouldn’t be eager to be trained in such a way that they have something more to offer in a church service.” But that’s not Paul’s answer. He wants the home to be a special place of theological learning, for men and for women and for children.
In my own devotions, I’ve been reading through Deuteronomy, and I was struck again, as I am every year when I come to it, by the passage in Deuteronomy 6 that commands homes to be places to talk about God. The passage says that you should talk about God when you sit, when you stand, when you lie down, when you rise. The sweeping verbs are a way to say, whenever and wherever you are, be eager to learn about God. Men and women, young and old.
And as the godly church is modeled upon godly families, we should be eager to have men and women grow up into godly patriarchs and matriarchs who have the wisdom of God to bring to a world that so desperately needs it.
And in this way, even in these verses, we see both eagerness for the Spirit and orderliness, which shows up in every section.
Conclusion
Well, I need to bring this sermon to a close. The last line in the passage is this in v. 40: “But all things should be done decently and in order.” It’s similar to v. 33, “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.” I titled the sermon “Let There Be Light.” I should explain that. Flip with me over to Genesis 1, 2, and 3. In the first verses of the Bible we read,
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
The image here is of primordial chaos, the earth without form and void, and the Spirit of God hovering over the darkness of the deep. And what does God do? He said, Let there be light. God brings order. And so on for the rest of the days, creating a space and then filling it, creating a space and then filling it, creating a space and then filling it, until we read in v. 31, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.” In short, God is a God of order and peace.
And in this context of chapter 1 and then in more detail in chapter 2, we see a picture of Adam and Eve ruling and reigning together as a king and a queen over all creation. We often hear the language of subdue and have dominion that’s spoken to them at the end of chapter 1, and in our modern context, that can sound like subdue and dominion mean ruining the planet with a huge carbon footprint.
But that’s not at all how we should understand this. Adam and Eve, in the power of the Spirit of God, were to be subduing and having dominion in the same way God did, namely, eagerly and orderly using their gifts to make the earth a more and more hospitable place for humanity to thrive under the lordship of God. The Spirit of God hovering over the chaos brought order. And the Spirit still does. And so should godly Adams and Eves.
Of course, everything got hard when they sinned. Eagerness and orderliness got hard. Appreciating one another’s gifts got hard. Kings and queens have a hard time appreciating one another’s gifts. They are now seen in competition.
Which is why our only hope is a savior. Look with me at Genesis 3:15. Speaking to the serpent, God promises,
I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.
Here we have the first whisper of Jesus, the serpent crusher. He’s the one who would administer a costly defeat of sin and death and evil. He would deliver a mortal wound to the serpent, but it would be a costly defeat. He will bruise his own heel.
Next week is Easter. I know you know that. We set up our 1 Corinthians sermon series so that, after nine months, starting next week, we hit three straight weeks of preaching about the good news of the resurrection of Jesus. On Easter, we’re going to look like we know what we’re doing. But getting there at Easter meant covering some heavy stuff along the way, even today, on what is called Palm Sunday.
I was talking to a pastor friend the other day, and he asked me what I had planned for Palm Sunday, and I said I’d be preaching that passage about women being silent. He said, “Oh, no way. Not me.”
But here we are. And what is Palm Sunday? We often don’t get the imagery. One week before his death, Jesus rides into Jerusalem on a donkey. Again, we don’t get that. Imagine it’s the day in January of a presidential inauguration, and a new president rolls into downtown Washington DC with an entourage of all black SUVS and armed guards. That’s how we’d do it. That would send the message that the king or queen had arrived to bring order. The signal in Jewish culture, in accordance with what was foretold, would be that their king would ride into Jerusalem on a donkey and people would shout Hosanna, meaning “Save us, we pray.” The savior, the serpent crusher, the one who brings the Spirit and brings order, rode into the chaos of the world to bring his peace.
Friends, our hope is not that we are eager and orderly enough for God to love us. Our hope is that in our disorder and in our apathy and in our selfishness and in our sin, God sent a serpent crusher—first as a baby, then as a man, then on a donkey, then on a cross, then standing outside an empty tomb, then ascending to the throne of the universe, and one day, coming again on a white horse to split the sky and make every wrong right, and save those who are eagerly awaiting his arrival.
Until that day, if we have been saved and loved by him, we have the opportunity to use the gifts he has given and use them in his ways, for the glory of his name among the nations.
Let’s pray and invite our worship team to lead us in song.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
