A Simple and Pure Devotion to Christ

Transcript

JR 10
10/23/2022
A Simple and Pure Devotion to Christ
2 Corinthians 11:3
Jesse Randolph


A couple of years ago I had the great privilege of taking our church out in California through a survey of 2,000 years of church history. Ambitious guy that I am, I tried to cram all 2,000 years of church history into the course of an eight-week course taught over eight Wednesday nights. It was a daunting topic to take on that much history over that short a period of time. In that class we covered church fathers, we covered the creeds, we covered councils, we covered ancient heresies, the rise of Roman Catholicism, the theological downgrade that was brought about by liberal theology. And of course, we covered the grave witness of many faithful men and women whose stand for Christ ultimately cost them their very lives. We covered Clement of Alexandria who was tied to a boat anchor and cast into the sea. We covered Irenaeus of Lyon who was fed to the lions. We covered William Tyndale who was strangled to death before he was burned at the stake. And we covered Jim Elliot who was impaled by an Auca Indian's spear, and many other faithful witnesses.

Well, as brave and as fearless as those martyrs were, their bravery and their fearlessness, I would contend, paled in comparison to the bravery and the fearlessness shown by the Apostle Paul during his years here on earth. We won't have time this morning to go through every one of these examples I'm about to rattle off, but just think of what the book of Acts alone records about Paul's bravery and Paul's fearlessness. Think of these. He was persecuted and run out of Antioch. This was all after being knocked off his horse on the way to Damascus, by the way. He faced possible stoning at Iconium. He was stoned and left for dead at Lystra. He was opposed and made the center of controversy at the Jerusalem Council. He was beaten with rods and imprisoned at Philippi. His life was threatened in Thessalonica. He was forced out of Berea. He was mocked in Athens. He was opposed by the silversmiths in Ephesus. He was plotted against by the Jews in Greece. He was apprehended by a mob in Jerusalem. He was arrested and detained by the Romans. He had to be rescued from the Sanhedrin. He endured a two-year imprisonment in Caesarea. He was shipwrecked on the island of Malta, and if all that were not enough, he suffered a snakebite, Acts 28.

The witness of Scripture to us is that everywhere he went Paul was on trial, Paul was persecuted, he was beaten and otherwise on the verge of grave injury. And then when we get to 2 Corinthians 11 (which is where we are going to be today, by the way, so go ahead and turn with me to 2 Corinthians 11) we switch from Luke's account of all that Paul suffered in the book of Acts, to what Paul recounts of how he suffered in his own writing here, directed by the Holy Spirit in 2 Corinthians 11.

In fact, we're going to look, just to sort of set the stage for where we'll be going this morning, at 2 Corinthians 11, starting in verse 21. This is Paul's own summary of what he went through for the sake of the Gospel. 2 Corinthians 11:21, he says, “To my shame I must say that we have been weak by comparison. But in whatever respect anyone else is bold, I speak in foolishness, I am just as bold myself. Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they descendants of Abraham? So am I. Are they servants of Christ? I speak as if in insane, I more so; in far more labors, in far more imprisonments, beaten times without number, often in danger of death. Five times I received from the Jews thirty-nine lashes, three times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked, a night and a day I have spent in the deep. I have been on frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my countrymen, dangers from the Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers on the sea, dangers among false brethren. I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure.” And then verse 28, “Apart from such external things there is the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches.” Putting it simply, Paul was one of the most tried, battle tested and fearless Christians to have ever lived. And we know that his fearlessness would cost him dearly with his own faith being ultimately sealed in his blood.

Which is why when we run our eyes up the page to 2 Corinthians 11:3 to Paul's first words here to start verse 3, it's a bit jarring. Look at what he says, “But I am afraid.” We need to stop right there. When Paul, fearless Paul says I am afraid, we need to take note as to what it is he is about to say. And what is it that Paul was afraid of? What is the one thing Paul feared? Well, he tells us, he feared for the spiritual health and vitality of these early Corinthian Christians. These were people that Paul had originally led to Christ, he had instructed them, he had taught them, he had trained them, he had equipped them, he had shepherded them. But now this bold evangelist, this trailblazing theologian, this otherwise fearless apostle says, he is afraid. He was afraid that these beloved saints in Corinth, as we're about to see, were starting to drift and defect toward other sources of false teaching. He was afraid that the Corinthians would lose their faith in the true Christ in favor of faith in another Christ, a cheap Christ, a weak Christ, a false Christ. He was afraid that they would lose their grip on Christ, that they would lose their affections and passions for Christ, that they wouldn't finish strong, and rather that their faith would be shipwrecked.

Now the back story here is that Paul had planted this church in Corinth. According to Acts 18:11 he lived and ministered here in this region, this city, for 18 months. And anytime you spend 18 months with anybody you are going to know those people. And these people had become near and dear to the Apostle Paul, so near, in fact, that he wrote multiple letters to this church. We have the two inspired canonical letters, what we know as 1 and 2 Corinthians, and we have at least three, some would say four letters that he wrote in total. (Others that would have been outside the canon.)

1 Corinthians was written to confront this church as it had become strongly influenced by the immorality of the surrounding city of Corinth. This church at the time of 1 Corinthians had become deeply divided in its fellowship. It had become very chaotic in its worship practices. 2 Corinthians, where we will be today, was written to this same church later to warn against false teachers who had recently infiltrated the church. False teachers who claimed to be true apostles. False teachers who claimed that Paul was not a true apostle. And so what we see thematically in 2 Corinthians is Paul refuting these false apostles and their so-call apostolic credentials while defending his own apostleship.

And in the middle of all of that, with all that background to set the stage, we see these four, I would say, startling words in 2 Corinthians 11:3, “But I am afraid.” Now one of the things we know about Paul is that he was both a man of conviction and a man of action. So despite his fears, the fear he is articulating here, he clearly was not about to let these fears cripple him or otherwise hamper his ministry to the church there at Corinth. Instead, what we're going to see here, is Paul taking those fears and sliding them over into these words of warning that he is going to give the Corinthian Christians in our text for today. By the way, this is a one-text message, we're going to be spending our time this morning unpacking this one verse, 2 Corinthians 11:3.

But before we do so, I've only read four words so far. Let's read the whole passage. “But I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness, your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.” Again, Paul is not frozen in his fears here. Instead, what he is doing is he is taking the fears he has for these beloved Corinthian Christians and he is packaging them as words of concern, even warning, for them. And from these words of concern and the warning that Paul gives the Corinthian church we're going to unpack three principles here this morning for living in such a way today that we are maintaining our focus on Christ and maintaining, to borrow Paul's words here, a “simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.”

So another three-point sermon based on one verse, and here are going to be the three points today. Point 1 will be “Honor the Bride of Christ,” point 2 will be “Uphold the Word of Christ” and Point 3 will be “Behold the Person of Christ.” I'll say it again and we'll get into these one by one, “Honor the Bride of Christ,” “Uphold the Word of Christ,” “Behold the Person of Christ.”

Let's start with the first one, “Honor the Bride of Christ.” Now no single Bible verse, as we know as good Bible scholars and students here, just stands on its own. Rather, individual passages of Scripture are connected to what surrounds them in the way that my finger is connected to my hand, which is connected to my wrist, which is connected to my forearm, which is connected to my elbow, and so on. In a similar way when Paul says here, “But I am afraid,” at the beginning of verse 3, those words link back to what he says in verse 2. So we actually need to go there first, to verse 2. Paul says, “For I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy; for I betrothed you to one husband, so that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin.” Now in the days that Paul wrote those words a father was responsible for insuring the purity of his betrothed virgin daughter all the way up to the time of her wedding.

She bore some responsibility, of course, but the father bore responsibility as well. In fact, let's turn over to Deuteronomy 22 where we can see the context that Paul here in 2 Corinthians is drawing from. Turn with me to Deuteronomy 22 for some context of what Paul has in view here. And admittedly some of this is a bit graphic as parts of the Old Testament can be, but I really want you, as we read through this, to pick out the role of the father in ensuring the purity of his betrothed daughter. Okay? So Deuteronomy 22, starting in verse 13. Deuteronomy 22:13, “If any man takes a wife and goes in to her and then turns against her, and charges her with shameful deeds and publicly defames her, and says, ‘I took this woman, but when I came near her, I did not find her a virgin,’ then the girl's father and her mother shall take and bring out the evidence of the girl's virginity to the elders of the city at the gate. The girl's father shall say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter to this man for a wife, but he turned against her and behold he has charged her with shameful deeds saying, “I did not find your daughter a virgin.” ’ ” Now this is the father still speaking, “ ‘But this is the evidence of my daughter's virginity.’ And they shall spread the garment before the elders of the city. So the elders of that city shall take the man and chastise him and they shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give it to the girl's father, because he publicly defamed a virgin of Israel. And she shall remain his wife; he cannot divorce her all his days.”

So that is one scenario where the young virgin daughter is proven to be a virgin. But verse 20, “But if this charge is true, that the girl was not found a virgin, then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father's house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death because she has committed an act of folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father's house. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you.” A lot of detail there, admittedly, just trying to set the scene here. Maybe one day we can study the book of Deuteronomy as a whole, the one idea though I want you to grab onto from that scene in Deuteronomy 22, as we go back to 2 Corinthians 11, is the active role the father played in ensuring the purity of his daughter before marriage.

So bring you back to our text, 2 Corinthians 11. The picture that Paul is painting here for us is that of a father whose daughter has reached marriage age and the father's aim and his responsibility is to keep her pure for marriage. And Paul understood himself to be the spiritual father of the Corinthians, the father of the bride you could say, with their bridegroom being none other than the Lord Jesus Christ. With that sort of fatherly perspective you can understand a bit more about what Paul is saying here in verse 2 when he says, “For I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy.” See, those words have a specific meaning and a sweet meaning. See, Paul here is not expressing human jealousy or sinful jealousy or jealousy motivated by greed or pride or self-interest. Rather, Paul is expressing jealousy here for that position of protection and stewardship which God has entrusted him with toward this Corinthian church. Paul's was a deep and impassioned and God-fearing jealousy. It was a jealousy that wanted to see this church and these saints remain pure. Not flirting with the world. Not loving the world. Not being corrupted by the world in a manner that would dishonor the gracious God who had saved them but rather remaining unstained by the world.

Next in verse 2 he says, “for I betrothed you to one husband.” Note it says “one husband,” not a husband. The idea here is of exclusivity, not possibility; singularity, not plurality. Paul betrothed them to the only one they should be or needed to be spiritually wed to—Jesus. He then rounds out verse 2 with these words, “so that to Christ I might present you as a pure virgin.” Paul loved the church at Corinth. In 1 Corinthians 4:15 he refers to himself as their spiritual father. When Paul initially preached the Gospel to this church, what he was doing was betrothing that Corinthian group of believers to their one true spiritual husband, the Lord Jesus Christ. At salvation they pledged their loyalty to Christ, that's the moment at which every Christian who became a Christian in that city was betrothed to Him. And the Corinthian Christians in that city would eventually, like all who have lived in the present church age, be presented to Christ at the Rapture and eventually feast with Christ at the marriage supper of the Lamb. But those events had not arrived yet, just as they haven't arrived for us yet. And so what Paul wanted to do in this passage in the meantime was make sure that the Corinthian church, the Corinthian Christians, remained pure. He was determined to present them as a pure virgin to Christ, he was singularly concerned with the bride, the church, at Corinth remaining pure for her bridegroom. Which was rooted in his understanding, as we see all throughout Ephesians 5, that Christ loved the church. He loves the church. He gave Himself up for the church. Ephesians 5:26, He gave Himself up for the church “so that He might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the Word.” And Ephesians 5:27, He seeks to “present to Himself the church in all her glory, having no spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that she would be holy and blameless.”

Which brings us again back to our feature, main verse for this morning, verse 3, where Paul says, “But I am afraid.” Now the word that Paul uses here for “afraid” is “phobomai,” “phobomai,” from which we get our English word “phobia,” or the word we borrow, “phobia.” And that word literally means, in its most wooden, rigid sense, to put to flight by terrifying. To put to flight by terrifying. The best picture I can think of is one of my boys grabbing a stone and throwing in the direction of a flock of geese. And what do they do? Scatter. That's the idea here of this word Paul uses when he says, “But I am afraid,” “phobomai.” And not only that, but we see the word “afraid” as being in the fourth place in our English sentence. It is actually in first place in the Greek New Testament, meaning this has prominence, this idea of fear has prominence in what Paul is saying here. He is afraid, he is stirred, he is agitated. And that really speaks toward the love that he had for this church, the desire, the passion, the godly passion he had for this church. He wouldn't be getting so worked up and fearful as he is in this language if he didn't have a deep and abiding love for the Corinthian church. It is evident that he loved this people. That he desperately did not want to see them wane in their fidelity to their King. So we connect verse 2 and verse 3 here, and as we are tracing this development of Paul's thought we see him honoring the bride of Christ, specifically the church at Corinth.

But not only that, as we keep working through verse 3 we are going to see not only was he committed to honoring the bride of Christ, he was committed to, and we are now being charged, to uphold the Word of Christ. That's our second heading for this morning, “Uphold the Word of Christ.” Look at the next part of verse 3. After Paul says, “But I am afraid that,” he says, “as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness.” Let's stop right there, those are words that are easy just to read real quickly during our daily Bible reading or during our group Bible studies. Just “as the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness.” Paul here is giving us a strategically placed illustration. He is connecting the spiritual drift that he fears the Corinthian church is headed toward with an earlier moment of spiritual drift, the deception of Adam and Eve, and specifically Eve in the Garden of Eden.

Before we unpack that more, I don't want us to lose sight of this, that in providing this illustration it is immediately evident that Paul takes the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to be historical fact. To Paul the Genesis account of a serpent talking to a woman, a literal serpent talking to a literal woman, was fact and not fiction, history and not mythology. It came to us from God, not from some ancient Near East tribal records. This is not, this account, some sort of glitch or abnormality that needs to be dismissed or excused away or reconciled with the spirit of the age. No, in Paul's mind what Genesis describes is absolute truth. Truth that needs to be upheld. Truth that needs to be affirmed to explain other passages of Scripture, even, as Paul is doing here. Don't you just love that when biblical authors -- and taking it a step further, the Lord Jesus Christ Himself -- affirm what they know to be true. That God's Word is not only true but it is truth.

“Thy Word is truth,” meaning that God's Word does not need the stamp of approval from the minds of any dead, liberal German theologian. God's Word does not need to be molded or contorted to account for Darwinian evolutionary theory. God's Word does not need to answer to William Lane Craig or any other ivory-tower type who is willing to sacrifice Scripture on the altar of academia. God's Word does not need to stand before the bar of today's boards of education or school boards. God's Word does not need to be twisted to fit what has become most important to or even celebrated by the culture today. No. The Word of God is inerrant, it is infallible, it is authoritative, it is sufficient. All of it, every jot and tittle.

That's what we see undergirding what is happening here. Paul here is speaking matter-of-factly about the Genesis account of a talking serpent. And so should we, without blushing, without back peddling, without biting our lips or our tongues in embarrassment. No. The Bible says, “the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness.” Do you want to know what that means? I'll give you the Greek translation—the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness. We can move on.

Let's get to the illustration itself and what it means and what Paul is intending to convey. When Paul says, “the serpent deceived Eve by his craftiness,” what he is saying is that Eve had had the wool pulled over her eyes, she had been hoodwinked, she had been tricked. Paul says something very similar in 1 Timothy 2:14, he says, “And it was not Adam who was deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression.” And how did Satan deceive Eve? Well, he did so by running the same old plays from his dusty old playbook. He did so by getting Eve to reject truth, truth which Adam had received directly from God. He did so by duping Eve into embracing falsehood which he, Satan, had personally served up to Adam and Eve. He did so by telling Eve lies which were designed to get her to doubt God's Word. He did so by twisting the commands of God to make them seem unfair. And finally he did so by denying the punishment that God had promised for disobeying His commands. Well, it worked.

What Satan told Eve appealed to her and it seemed to make sense to her. She bought the lie, she ate the fruit, and now here we are today in this fallen and sin-cursed world. And friends, that is what Satan does, that's how the enemy works. He hasn't changed his game plan in 6,000 or so years. He takes our dictionary, (if I can use that term) the Bible, he uses our words, biblical words, and then he turns those words around and provides different definitions of those words. And the result is that what he suggests to us, though it may have some appeal and may sound right, in fact is wrong and many times is so devastatingly wrong.

See, Satan is fully supportive of anyone in this room talking about their faith, as long as they are not talking about an exclusive faith, a faith that boldly and unashamedly proclaims that Jesus is the way, the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father but through Him [John 14:6]. Satan is fully supportive of us talking about religion. In fact Satan is pleased that the University of Nebraska and other college campuses have religious studies departments and high schools and colleges have interfaith study groups. He just doesn't want us talking about biblical Christianity. Satan is fully supportive of us talking about Jesus so long as we're not talking about the Jesus of the Bible; the Jesus who existed from eternity past, along with God the Father and God the Spirit -- the Jesus who became incarnate, taking on flesh to walk the earth as the fully human, fully divine God/Man -- the Jesus who died a horrific sinner's death on the cross, absorbing the wrath of God which should have in fairness been poured out on wretched sinners like you and me -- the Jesus who rose from the grave, walked the earth in His resurrected state before ascending to the right hand of the Father -- the Jesus who now sits at the right hand of the Father as our advocate and mediator before He comes to judge all the earth -- the Jesus who demands that sinners repent and believe in His saving Gospel message, turning from their sin as they turn to Him in faith. So long as it's not that Jesus, Satan is okay with it.

Satan is okay with us thinking about Christianity and talking about Christianity, so long as the Christianity we profess is a matter of self-improvement or self-worth or self-promotion rather, than self-denial. Satan is fully okay with us going to church and thinking of church as a glorified social club. Something that just sort of fits into the rhythm of our weeks, like the (what is it called?) the Halfsie [half marathon] or going grocery shopping or going to Little League games or watching our favorite TV shows. Rather than a place where we intently come to worship and we come to eat with eagerness, to be needfully nourished, on the Word of truth. The moment that we let our guard down over any of those matters, we have opened ourselves up to the enemy's most subtle and predictable ways to lead a believer, a Christian, away from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.

We then have fallen prey to Satan's tactics to get us to use a whole lot of Christian language and Christianese without actually living a Christian life. We cannot forget this, friends, we cannot forget that Satan is all about deception and distortion and confusion. His ways are never obvious. He disguises himself as an angel of light. And his means and his methods are to slowly coil himself around us, progressively choking us and suffocating us through his lies and his deceit. And the only way to pry ourselves, to escape from his filthy clutch, is to do what I laid out as our second point this morning, which is to uphold the Word of Christ, to uphold the Word of Christ.

And how do we do that? Well, there is the personal and individual level where we make sure that we are allowing Colossians 3:16, the Word of Christ to dwell richly within us. That's referring in that context to that devotional reading of God's Word, through the personal study of God's Word, to be fed and nourished in our time with the Lord through His Word. But then on the corporate churchwide level, that means having elders who are submitted to God's Word, a pulpit that is anchored in God's Word, pastors who are committed to heralding God's Word, teachers who are competent and equipped to give instruction in God's Word, and a people who are committed to hearing and doing and living out God's Word.

So we've seen from our text here so far that Paul was committed to honoring the bride of Christ, he's committed and charging us to uphold the Word of Christ. Last as we wind down our time in verse 3, we see in Paul this commitment to “Behold the Person of Christ,” “Behold the Person of Christ.” That's the third heading for this morning. Look at verse 3 again. Moving on from this illustration about Eve being deceived by the serpent and his craftiness, Paul now finishes his thought which begins with “But I am afraid,” with these words, that “your minds will be led astray from the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.” Paul's point here is simple. He is afraid the Corinthians would be led astray from their faith in Jesus Christ by deception, by deceit. And he is afraid that what would be left here in Corinth would be a hollow substance-less religion, Christianity without Christ.

Now note what Paul brings to the surface here is the mind. He brings the mind into how we are to think of these things. He says that he “is afraid that … your minds will be led astray.” That's an important reminder for us. That sure faith in Jesus is about having certain core heart-level convictions. Romans 10:9, “if you … believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” But make no mistake. Christianity fundamentally is a rational faith, based on things we need to think and believe about what has been done for us through Christ on our behalf. It's not all about what we feel. I mean, that's why we have in churches the office of pastor/teacher, Ephesians 4:12, one who teaches didactically through the Scriptures, rather than having the office of the church shrink or psychologist. That's why we have pastors who preach from pulpits or podiums, not lounge chairs or couches or stools up front where I just sort of process my feelings with you all each Sunday. No.

The Christian mind is the primary target of the assaults of the enemy. He wants you to doubt the Bible because if you start doubting the Bible you'll start doubting the God of the Bible. And if you start doubting the Bible and start doubting the God of the Bible you'll start doubting the Christ revealed in the Bible. And then you'll start doubting the Bible's clear claim on Christ being the world's one and only Savior. By contrast, if we are single-mindedly focused on Christ as Paul is instructing us here or giving us a word about here, then we're going to be devoted to Him. We'll be desiring to worship Him aright, and desiring to give Him the honor and the glory He is due.

So he is afraid, afraid that our minds… and then look what it says next, “will be led astray.” Paul was afraid that this church was latching onto the teachings of flashy men introducing flashy new concepts in order to falsely capture their imagination. The Corinthians were being led astray from the true God revealed in Scripture who had created them in His image, and then in the direction of a false god who is somehow cast in an idolatrous manner in their image, a god who, if I can borrow from Psalm 50 [verse 21], was just like them, a god who was an idol. Because Paul though cared for their souls he wanted to see them abiding in their attachment to Christ. He didn't want them to lose their grip on Christ, which leads to the solution that is implied in this passage and what is really at the heart of this passage, what Paul says at the end of verse 3. After saying he is “afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve, your minds will be led astray,” led astray from what? “From the simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ.” Now in our advanced complex age we don't like words like simplicity or simple. That word has an unfortunately negative connotation. When we hear the word “simple or simplicity” we might default to thinking like simple-minded, a dummy. But that's not the meaning of the term here. It doesn't mean simple as opposed to complicated, or simple as opposed to complex. Rather it speaks to simplicity as opposed to duplicity. It means single-mindedness, an undividedness. The devotion that we are to have for Christ is not to be double-minded or two-faced, but instead is to be single-minded and undivided, meaning we are to be exclusively preoccupied with pleasing Him, serving Him, enjoying Him and seeking satisfaction in Him twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, all the time.

You know, so far I'm not one for a lot of illustrations but I'm going to give you one because I think it's a good way to understand the idea of simplicity here. When our son, Eli, was a baby, an infant, he is 8 now and has like cannons for arms and you wouldn't believe he was a baby at some point. He is just so big and strong now. But when he was a baby we had the hardest time with him, the hardest time with him sleeping. He was that kid that just would not go to sleep for anything. We tried everything. We tried sleep training of various types, the videos (I almost said cassettes it wasn't that long ago.) We tried bouncing him, rocking, gliding, shushing, placing him under like the bathroom fan just to see if that would work, lights on, lights off, lights dimmed. We tried it all.

Finally we got one of those swings that had not just the front-and-back motion to it, but more of the side-to-side motion to it. And that was the key. But it wasn't just the side-to-side swing that he needed. He needed a very specific song playing all the time. So one of our iPhones, I've forgotten whose it was, we just kind of wedged underneath his little chunky thigh in that swing, and played that song all night long. It was a worship song. It's a worship song now that I wouldn't recommend based on the theology of the song. But it was a song that worked for Eli at that time. And that thing would play with that swing going back and forth like a broken record for many, many, many months. And that was the one thing that Eli was focused on, the one thing that we were focused on as we tried to get that little child to sleep.

So it is with the Christian life. So it needs to be in the Christian life. We need to be consistently singing, if I can say it this way, the same tune, playing the same note—Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. That's the idea that Paul is bringing out here when he talks about our simplicity, our single-minded devotion to Christ.

Paul was concerned not only that the Corinthian church here was drifting from its simplicity of devotion to Christ, though. He was also concerned, as the Word here says at the end of this verse, that they were drifting from their purity of devotion of Christ. Which alludes to what I mentioned earlier about their recent acceptance of various false teachings which had adulterated and polluted the pure Gospel of grace by mixing in these various corrupting elements. And Paul is saying, no, return to your purity of devotion to Christ, your simplicity of devotion to Christ. The Corinthian church was losing its grip on these concepts of simplicity and purity.

And I want you to really anchor in on this. They were losing their grip on these ideas of simplicity or purity though they had been directly ministered to by Paul. This is just a matter of decades after Paul ministered to them, actually a couple years after he had ministered to them. And so they were blessed among people, to think that they had the freshest understanding, direct from the lips of Paul, of Christ and the Gospel. And he has to tell them to return to that simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ. They were in the earliest centuries already going adrift, already losing these ideas, these basics about who Christ is, what His Gospel is, all the necessary elements of what constitutes true, saving, abiding faith. They were already off course. J. C. Ryle commented on the passage and he said it well when he said it this way. He said, “who would have thought that under the eyes of Christ's very own chosen disciples, while the blood of Calvary was hardly yet dry, while the age of miracles had not yet ceased to pass away, who would have thought in a day like this, there was any danger of Christians departing from the faith?!” It's an incredible line—while the blood was hardly yet dry, he says, they were already going astray. But that's what we have here. And if we recognize that the earliest Christians there at Corinth were susceptible to drifting from this sort of simplicity and purity of devotion to Christ, how much more serious might that temptation be for us today, many, many centuries later, many, many thousands of miles away from where these events took place and an ocean separating us.

There is really one key lesson to draw from this text and this message today, and I hope you go home with this. And it is this. No matter how many sermons you listen to or preach, no matter how many theological books or journal articles or podcasts we've read or listened to, no matter how many seminary degrees we've acquired or sought or obtained, no matter how many dispensations we hold to, no matter how many Christian conferences we participate in and attend -- the most important thing that we make sure we are as we walk out of this place today is that we are a people who are known as and are living out a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. In fact, the very essence of the Christian life can be summarized as a single-minded and pure devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ. A single-minded and pure devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ.

I'm going to close this part of the message by reading a section from the old prayer book, “The Valley of Vision.” I hope it encourages you as we bring this sermon to a close. Because I do think it aptly describes and summarizes what Paul has been laying out for us in this single verse. The prayer is titled “Need of Jesus.”

Lord Jesus,
I am blind, be thou my light,
Ignorant, be thou my wisdom,
Self-willed, be thou my mind.
Open my ear to grasp quickly thy Spirit’s voice,
And delightfully run after his beckoning hand;
Melt my conscience that no hardness remain,
Make it alive to evil’s slightest touch.
When Satan approaches may I flee to thy wounds,
And there cease to tremble at all alarms.

Be my good shepherd to lead me into
The green pastures of thy Word,
And cause me to lie down beside the rivers of its comforts.
Fill me with peace, that no disquieting worldly gales
May ruffle the calm surface of my soul.
Thy cross was upraised to be my refuge,
Thy blood streamed forth to wash me clean,
Thy death occurred to give me a surety,
Thy name is my property to save me.

I was a stranger, an outcast, a slave, a rebel,
But thy cross has brought me near,
Has softened my heart,
Has made me thy Father’s child,
Has admitted me to thy family,
Has made me joint-heir with thyself.

O that I may love thee as thou lovest me,
That I may walk worthy of thee, my Lord.

Just remember, we have been spending this morning contemplating how we are to live for Christ with that sincerity and purity of devotion to our Lord. Now in this communion portion of the service we are going to focus in on and contemplate and commemorate the death of Christ. C. T. Studd, the old missionary, once said, “If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.” And that's a great line and a great truth. Remember, we have a Savior that is worthy of serving all the days of our lives. But we need to remember we only can't even contemplate that concept of living for Him because He died for us. We have to remember a bit about some of the Gospel truths that unite us all who have trusted in Christ. We have to remember that we were created by God to have fellowship with Him.

God is the Creator of all the earth and God upholds all things and the whole earth is His. God created us to have fellowship with Him but because of that incident in the Garden that we talked about this morning, that fellowship with our Creator was broken. And we know from Romans 5 that that sin that was first imputed to Adam and Eve then has passed down generationally to everyone since, including us. So we are, as David would say in Psalm 51, now conceived in sin. We come into this world sinful, with sin nature.

But we also know from Scripture, places like Romans 3:23, that we do in fact sin. It's not just that we have a sin nature, we are in fact sinners who commit sin, standing in the face of a holy God, that same God who created us for fellowship with Him. There is no way that a holy, all-wise, perfectly righteous God can accept sinful man and woman in His presence. So we have a real problem because the wages of sin, Romans 6:23, is death. And what our sin justly deserves, rightly deserves, is to be separated from God eternally to face both physical death, which happens to all of us, and also spiritual death and eternal death. To be cast one day forever into a real and literal and perpetual lake of fire.

Now the natural tendency of every person on this planet is to seek to remedy that by our own acts, our own deeds, our own wills. To be better, to clean ourselves up, to become a better person, a better version of ourselves. But that never works because the book of Isaiah teaches very clearly that even our greatest deeds that we could ever do are but filthy rags before a perfect and holy God. So we have a problem. We stand condemned in our sin without atonement, without blood being shed, which has always been the remedy. What we are commemorating here this morning is that we don't have to work our way to God or attempt in some futile way to work our way to God. Because the remedy has been provided. The solution has been provided at the cross of Jesus Christ. Again, death on behalf of you and me, death on behalf of those who would trust in the provision of salvation through the cross and receive eternal life through His name.

So why don't we just go to the Lord in prayer and thank Him specifically for His Son. God, we thank You for this time in Your Word, we thank You that we now have this privilege to gather, to partake, in this memorial way of these elements. We thank You that You are a God who is longsuffering and patient and merciful and have certainly shown that to us as You have to generations that have gone before us. We thank You that You are a God who is righteous and holy, the One who dwells in unapproachable light. Yet is that God who is gracious and merciful and loving and who is, in fact, love. We thank You for the supreme demonstration that You have shown the world by having Your Son, God the Son, come into the world to take on humanity with a mission—to die, to die on the cross, that brutal instrument of Roman torture so that we, the wicked rebels, might live. Might have not just life, but eternal life with You, the One who we, until then, have stood in opposition to. So as we partake of these elements we simply want to say thank You. And memorialize the great cost of the blood of Your Son, the great provision of salvation, for those who repent and believe. And we give You all the thanks and praise for it. May You be glorified in this communion service. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.