Life doesn't always go the way
you have it planned. Sometimes there are some real
disappointments in life, and we need to recall Romans 8, 28. that yes, all things work together
for good to them that love the Lord, to them who are the called
according to his purpose. If you can say, I love Christ,
everything's gonna be fine. It's all gonna work out for your
good and God's glory. Now think about just a few times
in your life. This is when you find out if
you, can you really trust God? You know, I've been around this
world 75 years almost, there are going to be bumps in
the road when you're not going to, why on earth did that happen? And the way to get through that
is if you can just trust God, believe what he says, that everything's
working out. I mean, if you know him, everything's
working out according to his good pleasure and will. And you
can get over the bumps in the road. I said all that just to
encourage you. Okay, so some bad things have
happened to you. They may be really good things
in disguise and they will be good as long as you can thank
God for them. God knows what he's doing. All right, the church
at Corinth, all my life being in the Baptist church, I've heard
that we, we Baptist, we're the true church. like you Catholics
have heard all of your life that the Catholic Church is the true
church. The Church of Christ people believe
that they are the true church. And when I was growing up, the
statement was just made all the time from the pulpit, we are
the New Testament church, and it was in a kind of a bragging
way. And as I became a young minister
and began to study the word, I thought to myself, I began to see these churches,
they were in such a mess, like the church at Corinth. That church
met to take the Lord's supper and they had real wine, not grape
juice. And instead of taking the Lord's
supper, they got drunk. They drank all the wine and got
drunk. Even to cause the apostle Paul
to say, don't you have your houses to eat and drink in? What are
you doing this in the worship of God? So, Just claiming, what
is a New Testament church anyway? Are we a New Testament church? Are we a Christian church? That's kind of how we know that
we are the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. We just don't make
our boast about being a denomination, but that we are truly a Christ-centered
church. I want you to go to 2 Corinthians
real quick. You guys, if you're, oh, you
got to sit down, okay. All right, good. Okay. All right. Let's go to 2 Corinthians chapter
11. Here's what the apostle said.
Chapter 11, verse two. For I'm jealous over you with
a godly jealousy. This is to the church of Corinth,
he's saying this. For I have espoused you, I have
engaged you to one husband. Not to two, not to three, not
to four, one. That I may present you as a chaste
virgin to Christ. Not just a virgin, but a chaste
virgin to Christ. But I fear, lest by any means,
as the servant beguiled he through his subtlety, so your minds should
be corrupted from the simplicity or single-mindedness. The word
simplicity there means single-mindedness. That is in Christ. For he that
cometh preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached. Or
if you receive another spirit which you have not received or
another gospel which you have not accepted, you might well
bear with me. In other words, the apostle said,
you are engaged to Christ. Anything that caused you to look
anywhere else other than to Christ is fornication. It's unfaithfulness. It's adultery. Are you following me? All right.
So I've espoused you to one husband, to Jesus Christ. You're engaged
to Christ and you to have a single mindedness toward Christ. That means you're not to look
to baptism or to the Catholic church or the Baptist church
or the holy sacraments taking them. It's Christ, the person
of Christ, the doing and dying of Christ. Your faith is built
on nothing less than Jesus' blood and righteousness. You're totally
in love with Christ. You don't look anywhere else.
To me, oftentimes on TV or even on the radio in the car, I'm
listening to some preacher and think, what an ugly message you
have. Because it's not exalting Christ.
But then I've heard the silver bells of Christ being preached
by a preacher too, and got happy in my car or wherever I was listening
to him uplift Jesus Christ. Rather, the proof that you are
a child of God is that it's Christ alone with you. It's Christ alone. You want to hear him preach,
him exalted. Like the Bereans, you saw him
only. You saw Jesus only. Let me show
you real quick now. And by the way, the subtlety
of Satan is to get your mind settled on something besides
Christ. just cheat a little bit. Now
those of us who are married, we don't expect our partners
to cheat even a little bit. I would be very upset with Ms.
Pam if she cheated even a little bit. You see, because I'm jealous. I want to be her number one. Usually when I talk of, Yeah. And I truly think I am with her.
I do. That's what makes our marriage.
It doesn't mean we don't disagree on things. She's often wrong. But we are single-minded in our
love toward one another. Don't want anybody else, not
looking for anybody else, blind to everybody else. I'm in love
with Pamela Jean Clark and have a single-mindedness. And you know, in the Bible, marriage
is pictured that way between us and Christ, the church and
Christ. We are the bride of Christ. We are a spouse to Jesus Christ. So don't be cheating. Don't be
looking to your denomination. Well, I'm a Baptist. Well, so
what? Or a Catholic or whatever you
are. It's Christ and Christ alone. Long time ago, I began to say,
people say, well, what are you? I'd say, I'm a Christian. I'm a Christian, that's what
I am. I'm a Christian. Now, you guys getting tired yet?
You all right? Okay. Real quick, I'm just going
to go through the Corinthian letter, starting with 1 Corinthians. And here's what the apostle said.
This is his theme. I've espoused you to one husband,
and I'm jealous over you with a godlike jealousy. You know,
usually when I talk about jealousy, I pronounce it jelousy because
usually it is kind of a work jealousy. But this is a godly
jealousy that you should be fixed and your mind should be centered
on Christ alone. I can tell you this, when you're
listening to a message, and the preacher is hitting on sour notes. It doesn't bring joy and glory
to Christ. You got to tune it out. Find
some place where you can be in the house of God and hear Christ
and him alone. It's very simple. The Bible concerns
itself with Jesus Christ. The scriptures are they, Jesus
said, that testify of me. Moses wrote of me. It's all about
me, Jesus said. And it is the wonder that God
invaded history and came to this earth. That's what this Bible
says, to save sinners. And that's always such an awesome
thing to think that the God, the great creator God, came to
this earth to save somebody like me. I just marvel at that. I never get tired of hearing
that. Why would he? How could he? Oh,
how marvelous. Oh, how wonderful is the Savior's
love for me that he has come to earth to save me. Well, the
apostle Paul, what the Corinthian church was doing. Now, I would
say this. It's all right to enjoy certain
preachers more than you enjoy their style of preaching maybe. But the truth is this, the message
is what we rejoice in really. I mean, that ought to be the
foundation, whether it's me or Darren or Pastor Bradley or whoever
it is preaching, the message is Christ. Now we may like different
styles, but here's what the Corinthian church was doing. I like Paul. Oh no, I like Cephas. I like
the apostle Peter. He's my favorite. Blah, blah,
blah, blah. And here's what Paul says in
the 13th verse of 1 Corinthians 1. Is Christ divided? The way
you're acting, Christ is divided. Was Paul crucified for you? Or
were you baptized in the name of Paul? Be careful about picking
out your favorites in the sense, because none of us preachers
redeemed you. And the truth is, you can get
excited whether a man kind of talks like this, or he's a hillbilly
preacher that goes, hey, hey, hey. I mean, you know, he gets
excited. The truth is the truth. and Christ is not divided. Here's
what Paul said in verse 18 of Corinthians 1. For the preaching
of the cross is to them that perish foolishness, but unto
us who are saved, it's the power of God. So we hear the preaching
of the cross of the substitutionary propitiation for our sins on
the tree of the cross and we rejoice in that. Paul said in
the 23rd verse of the first chapter, but we preach Christ crucified.
The Jews a stumbling block to the Greeks foolishness, but unto
us, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. It's a
simple message of him and him alone. And we rejoice in that.
The apostle said in the second chapter of 1 Corinthians, when
I came to you, I did not come to you, verse one, with excellency
of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God.
In other words, I made it really clear. And then in verse two,
he said this, for I determined not to know anything among you
save Jesus Christ and him crucified. That's pretty plain. I preach
Christ to you. You know, the one that was crucified
on the cross in your room, stand in place. He continues to talk about that
throughout the Corinthian letter. In the 15th chapter of first
Corinthians, he said, I delivered unto you first of all that which
I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to
the scripture was buried and rose again. He's just saying
the same thing over and over. You know, in many, in many churches,
religious places where people go to worship, you have to kind
of figure out the lingo before you get it. Should we kneel?
Should we stand? Should we make the sign of the
cross? It becomes very difficult unless you've been there several
times to kind of learn how you ought to do. I really am weary. I get weary of routine. That's
why tonight we just sang a couple songs that you picked. Or we
might take the offering last. Or sometimes, don't get your
hopes up, but sometimes I might dismiss in five minutes. It doesn't
take long to tell out the truth. that God came into this world
in the person of Jesus Christ, walked the Judean acres without
sin, kept the law for us, sewed a robe of righteousness for us,
and then went up on Calvary and paid our debt, went down into
the grave, got up the third day, went back into heaven, and there
he's our lawyer, because we all need a good lawyer, because even
though we're converted, we still have our flesh, right? and we
need a good lawyer. So the apostle constantly was
preaching Christ. Here's what I hope that you will
do and think about, the simplicity that is in Christ, the single
mindedness, that you have a single mindedness toward Christ. And
I'm gonna tell you this, there's only one reason this place is
seeing the wonders that it's seeing is because we exalt God's
son, the Lord Jesus Christ. And we point directly to him
and we don't give any wiggle worm opportunities. No. People often say to me, how prone
we are to want to do a little strutting, a little bragging.
There's no room for that. There's one message, where to
be single-mindedness about that message, proclaim that message,
and God's gonna do great things. I thought tonight while we were
singing, my mind went back to many years ago. I was preaching in Danville, Kentucky. on a Sunday morning, right in
the middle of my message, people started singing. Somebody just
started singing. I mean, I was thinking tonight
how wonderful it was and how I sense that you were getting
a little happy and that the spirit of God was here. Wouldn't that
be an awesome thing that you kind of got out of control? I
mean, that you just got so happy you couldn't help it. Now you'd
start singing amazing grace. I'd give you time to do that.
If I discerned it was the spirit of God leading you like that,
I think we could have sung tonight and gone home and we would have
worshiped God. Here's the thing. Say, well,
pastor, you know, I just don't feel like I'm growing because
you always preach the same thing. Oh, you have grown if you recognize
that. that you recognize that it's
constantly Christ. Somebody said, well, you know,
I need to know how to live. Oh, I'll leave that to the spirit
of God inside you. I'll preach Christ, you'll be
overcome by the love of God for you in Christ, and you'll wanna
be holy. Over 55 years, I've said this,
I'm not gonna follow you around with a baby bottle. No, nor am I going to follow
you around. You know, when I was, this is
the truth. I could tell you some real stories
on Church Anity. I can remember when our church
had a couple of deacons that we didn't have them hired. In
other words, we weren't paying them, but we believed some people
in the church were having an affair. And so we had the deacons
take cameras and kind of spy on them. You won't find me doing that.
I'm not trying to spy you out. I'm not even trying to catch
you using drugs. I'm trying to keep you from using
drugs. Serving the Lord and rejoicing
in Christ should be a joy. The love of Christ constrains
me, not legalism, not laws, not rules, not me threatening you,
not even dropping tests will not sanctify you. It may cause
you to think, they're going to drop me tonight, maybe you won't
use, I don't know. But they're not the true sanctifier. They help hold people accountable,
but The true sanctifier is the same one that justifies us. It's love to Christ. I serve
him because I love him, not because I'm afraid of going to hell or
fear. I know I always say, hey, folks,
we made it to Wednesday, but just think about it. We're here.
We're singing. We're safe. We're sober. We're saved. Who's got it better than us? Tonight when we lay our heads
down on our pillow, let's do some business with God. And the best
thing we can do is know that his blood has gone deeper than
our iniquities and our stains. And that's something to be worthwhile.
Let's bow our heads in prayer. Heavenly Father, what we know
not, you always teach us. What we have not, you always
provide. And in the process of sanctification, what we are not,
you're making us. Teach us to be kind and merciful
one to another. Teach us to lift one another
up in prayer. Teach us most of all to love you and to keep that
single-mindedness of what you've accomplished in our stead. We
ask these things and pray these things in Christ's name, amen.