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You're listening to audio from Faith Church Indie. If you would like more information about our church ministry and upcoming events, you can find it at faithchurchindie.com. Now, here's the teacher. Well, I am really pleased this morning that we have Nicholas Piotrowski, Dr. Nicholas Piotrowski, president of Indianapolis Theological Seminary, to bring God's Word to us today. 

But before he comes, let's stand for the reading of the scriptural passage that he's preaching from today, 1 Corinthians chapter 3, beginning in verse 10. Hear the word of the Lord. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation.

Someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it, for no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now, if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one's work will become manifest, for the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. 

If the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he'll receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him, for God's temple is holy, and you are that temple. 

This is the word of the Lord. Good morning. It's always a pleasure to bring the word here at Faith Church. 

As Tom introduced me as the president of Indianapolis Theological Seminary, we are now in our 11th year. We're about to start our 12th year at the seminary, and I've known Tom from back in those first days when we were just getting started. He was an encouragement to myself and the others, and this church has been a big encouragement to us along the way. 

I know many of you, you've been gracious with your space down there. Some of you are supporters, donors of the seminary, had some of you in classes, and so faith has a special place in my heart as I lead the seminary, and I thank you for your support, and I continue to solicit your prayers as we move into another academic season soon. And because you have a special place in my heart, it is my joy to open the word of God with you today. 

Let's just take a moment and instill our hearts, then hear from the word of the Lord. The Bible is a very down-to-earth book. It concerns itself with matters in this world. 

If you haven't read the Bible, you might think that, well, as the holy scriptures of the Christian faith, it's always talking about heaven, and it talks about heaven a little bit, but far more than that, it talks about matters here on earth. It's very earthy. In fact, when the books of the Bible were written, they were written in very embedded contexts, and what I mean by that is the authors and the first people to read the Bible were living in very real historical situations. 

As we look at 1 Corinthians today, Corinth was a city in Greece, and it had all the history of the Greeks and Romans behind them, and the culture, and the economics, and the philosophy, and the ethics of that first century world, and they spoke Greek. And here we are, 2,000 years later, basically eavesdropping on what Paul said to them about their church. So it's amazing to me how historically embedded the scriptures are in their original time, original social location, but endlessly relevant wherever they are read, whether it's 21st century North America, 17th century China, 5th century North Africa, the Bible has this amazing capacity to speak to human hearts and communities wherever they are, and I think the reason for that is is because it speaks to issues that are very common in every human heart and in every community.

What we're going to see today in 1 Corinthians 3 is the way Paul speaks to one of those very common endemic conditions of the heart and communities, and it is this. It's very common for human beings to think of themselves first before they think and consider others. That's not a sin, I don't think. 

It's just very natural for that to happen. But whenever you have a group of people together who are thinking of themselves before they think of others, the conditions are ripe to have a lot of disunity. People don't understand each other, they don't understand where they're coming from, why they said the thing they did, what you did was wrong, it's easy to judge others, it's very hard to give others the benefit of the doubt, think the best of them, it's hard to bring people together to the same space to understand we disagree and try to understand why do you see things different than me and nonetheless come to a place of understanding, and it's a lot easier simply to draw the conclusion you're wrong. 

You're wrong, I'm right, of course, because this is the way I see things. And whenever you multiply that over dozens or hundreds of people, the conditions are ripe for much disunity. And that's another component that's very common in our world. 

Anytime you bring together three or more people, chances are there are going to be disagreements, different opinions on things, and temperatures and tempers can rise. Well, Paul talks a lot about unity, a lot about unity, and a lot about how communities can live together in peaceful, unified ways. Now why does he speak so much about it? I draw two conclusions from that. 

Number one, it must be important. Paul must really care about the unity of the people of God, and we're going to talk about that today. Why is it so important? And number two, he must talk about it so much because it's like hard. 

If it wasn't hard, he wouldn't need to talk about it. But it's important, and yet it's difficult. And because it's important, it's worth putting in extra work to overcome those difficulties.

So what we're going to see today is that Paul has a prescription. It's probably not a thorough prescription. He's probably not answering all questions of community unity, but he has three ways to avoid disunity, strengthen the unity that's already there, and perhaps recreate unity that was once there. 

What are those three ways? There needs to be, across the community, a mind for truth. A mind for truth. That the teachings of the gospel, the teaching of the scripture, really matter. 

We know them. We value them. We have a mind for truth. 

Number two, a heart for people. A heart for people. A genuine care and concern for the people next to us.

It's very easy, especially in our world, just as in the world of Corinth, to think, well, I know the Lord. I'm saved. I'm trusting the gospel. 

Everything's fine vertically right here between the Lord and me, but I don't really know or care or concern myself with what's going on with those around me. Can you imagine a community where people really care about the truth? They care about doctrine. They care about learning, but they don't care about each other. 

That is a recipe for disaster. So you have to have a mind for truth, a heart for other people, and a constitution, a disposition that desires and promotes unity. In other words, you got to go out of your way. 

You got to try to create such a community where people genuinely know the truth, love one another, and promote unity. It's not just going to happen. I think what Paul is saying is you have to have all three of those. 

You have to have that mind for truth, heart for people, and constitution for unity. You can't have two and not the other one. You can't have one and not the other two.

This is a trifecta of attributes that if they pervade a people, you will see them with a powerful gospel witness. So let's see, how does Paul get there? How does Paul get there? Well, how did he get there in Corinth? Here's what's going on in Corinth. Corinth, as I mentioned, was a city in ancient Greece. 

They were like the rival to Athens. They wanted to be as esteemed as Athens, and they wanted to be as known for their wisdom as Athens is, right? So the people of Corinth, before they became Christians, would have been deeply enamored with things like rhetoric, education, of course commerce and politics, the arenas of the intelligentsia of their world, greatly valued that, right? So you can see the residue of this in chapter 1, verses 20 and 21. Paul asks the question, where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through its wisdom. 

It pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. Now why does Paul have to go on about the wisdom of this world, and that one knows the gospel not through the wisdom of the world, but through preaching, but because they still have that high value on human wisdom, and what is perceived as erudite, and therefore prestigious in the eyes of the world. So that's the context in which he speaks.

And when you have people, a group of people, who are united around the different, excuse me, when you have a group of people who should be united around one thing, but then find themselves with different opinions and values in other areas, well then you're going to get disunity. So for example, look at chapter 1, verses 12 and following. What I mean is this. 

Each one of you says I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I follow Cephas, or I follow Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul? What's happening there is Paul originally planted the church, and he preached the gospel, and they believed it, and then he moved on, and Apollos came, and he preached, and he, I suppose he pastored really, you would say, that community there in Corinth, and later Timothy came, and Peter dropped by, and so on and so forth, and each of them had a different rhetorical style. In other words, they were all different kinds of preachers, and in time, the Corinthians started to navigate towards and pledge their allegiance, as it were, I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, pledge their allegiance to these different preachers, and so you have these different factions in the church, and so because they had a high esteem for the skills of rhetoric, giving a good speech, they therefore had different value systems for evaluating who gave the best speech, and boom, there you have the disunity, and there are other reasons in Corinth why they're disunified, but the way worldly wisdom and influences from the culture around them have crept in to therefore create disunity. 

Now, how does Paul address this? How does Paul address this? Now we come to chapter three. Let me pick up in verse five, a little bit before, where Brother Tom had read. This is how Paul leads into that section. 

He says, what then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth, so neither he who waters nor he who plants is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor, for we are God's fellow workers, and you are God's field, you are God's building. 

The point Paul is making here is, yes, I have a style, Apollos has a style, other preachers have a style, there are all kinds of different opinions and style for ministry and styles of ministry, but really we all come from the same God. We all preach, this is the important point, the same gospel. The same God sent us, the same gospel is preached, and this is Paul's overall point. 

If you hear nothing else today, you should hear this, that when you have a community of people, you will have different opinions, different values, and different contradictory visions of church life. It's inevitable, it's inevitable, but is there something strong enough to cut through the differences and nonetheless still create unity amongst them, and therefore live with the diverse opinions, whether it's of rhetoric or anything else, while still being unified? The answer is yes, the answer is the gospel of Jesus Christ. Here's how Paul gets there, look at verse 10. 

According to the grace of God, that God gave to me, I am like a skilled master builder. Okay, so now Paul is is banking now on that last comment, you are God's building, you are the building, and Paul is saying I am the builder, and so what have I built with? I laid a foundation, someone else is also building upon it, so I build, Apollos builds, Cephas builds, Timothy was also there, he builds, so on and so forth, yet, this is still verse 10, let everyone take care how he builds. So while you can have different ministers and different styles of ministry, different church ministries, different buildings, different songs, different all these kinds of things, right, on what you're building on this foundation, be careful how you build. 

Jump down to verse 12, because he says, if any one of you builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, but others will build in wood, hay, and straw, each one's work will become manifest, for the day will disclose it, it will be revealed by fire, fire will test it. In other words, Paul has this idea here that there's a foundation, and I've come along, and I've built something up, and now I've gone away, and someone else has come along and built something up on that same foundation, and we're building a building. The building is the church.

We know this because in verse 16, he says, do you not know that you are God's temple? That's the building. To put it another way, I think you had some teaching on the temple recently, maybe a couple weeks ago, and I don't know everything that was said, but it was probably something like this. In the Old Testament, it's impossible, I would say, to overestimate the importance of the temple in the Old Testament. 

I mean, it is the climax of everything in 1 Corinthians 8, 9, and 10, when Solomon builds it, because the temple is the place where the God of heaven comes to dwell on earth. Yes, God is everywhere, because he is eternal, and omnipotent, and omnipresent, big word there, but in a special, gracious, covenantal way, he is located in the temple. So the temple is the place to which people would pray. 

In the Old Testament, people didn't pray upward, like maybe we think of our prayers going up. They would pray toward the temple, because that's where God is. So it's the place where God hears prayer. 

It's the place where he receives sacrifices. You can't just sacrifice anywhere. You've got to bring your sacrifice to the temple, and most importantly, it's the place from which he forgives you of your sins. 

So the place of prayer, the place of sacrifice, the place of forgiveness, it's just impossible to overstate the importance of the And now Paul says, you are the temple. The church is the temple. The church of Jesus Christ is the place where God hears prayers, the place where he dwells, the place where he forgives sins.

But he's not talking about the building. He's not talking about the physical building. He's talking about the community of people. 

That's where God is active with his saving purposes. But Paul calls the church, therefore, the temple and a building. Now, when he says in verse 12, that I build with gold, silver, and precious stones, he's still talking about the temple, because the temple in the Old Testament was built with gold, silver, and precious stones.

But the church today is built with you. You understand? Paul is saying, if he is the worker, it is through his preaching ministry of the gospel that the temple is being built up all over the world. And now 2,000 years later, that temple that Paul began to build, and others have built on for 2,000 years, has now stretched all the way out to Indianapolis. 

And the temple of God is here, and you are the gold, the silver, and the precious stones. The people are the work that he has laid down on the foundation. And so, he goes on, when the day comes, this is verse 13, the day of judgment, it will be revealed as through fire, where's the gold, where's the silver, where's the precious stones? Because what happens to gold, silver, and precious stones in the middle of fire? Do you know? Yes, they melt, but they're not destroyed, are they? They're not destroyed.

In other words, when the fire is over, the gold, the silver, and the precious stones are still there. However, what happens to wood, hay, and straw in a fire? Those are consumed. Those are consumed.

In other words, Paul is saying, through my gospel ministry, if you have believed the the proclamation of Jesus Christ, God has therefore included you into his new dwelling place on earth. You are the gold, silver, and precious stones of the new temple of God. However, there are others who are not gathering wood, hay, I'm sorry, they're not gathering gold, silver, and precious stones, they're gathering together wood, hay, and straw, and that will not be revealed. 

In other words, they're preaching a false gospel, and people are trusting that gospel, and they will not survive the day of judgment. So that man might be saved, he might believe the gospel, but because he was tempted by worldly philosophies, and he allowed all the isms, and different worldviews, and philosophies of the world to encroach in on his ministry, he therefore created converts who were not trusting in the true gospel, but a false gospel. That's just a terrible thing, that someone can preach, or disciple, or go on mission, think they're doing their audience good, but because they're delivering a false gospel, they are not.

I believe verse 11 is what reveals this. You see where it says there, verse 11, no one can lay a foundation other than that which has been laid, which is Jesus Christ. What Paul means there, is that there is only one foundation on which this temple house can be built, the foundation of the gospel. 

Can you imagine a house, or a building, any kind of building, with different foundations, like one is higher than the other, or sloping in a different direction, than competing foundations? What Paul's saying is, in this house that God is building, his dwelling place on earth, called the church, there is one unifying component, the gospel of Jesus Christ. And that gospel is sufficient to bring the different parts of the temple building into one unified reality. So what is the gospel of Jesus Christ? Critical to be clear on this.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is the story, an historical reality, that the God who spoke, and worlds came into existence, all power, and glory, and majesty from eternity past, that same God has stepped into history, is incarnate, became a full, fully a man, and walked among us, lived our lives, experienced our world just as we do. That God, full of power, and majesty, and glory, became weak, became small, had to grow, had to read books, had to learn, had to grow up, and had to experience the sufferings of this world just as we do, yet never sinned, never sinned, never coveted, never told a lie, never bore false witness of his neighbor, never rushed to judgment, lived a perfect sinless life, the only one to ever do that. And yet he came to die. 

Now we know that the wages of sin is death. So if Jesus has no sins, why is he dying? He's dying for the sins of his people as a substitutionary atonement, so that he dies to bearing the penalty for your sins. And then on the third day, he rose again from the dead, and he is alive forever right now, and therefore, able to give his people equally resurrection life. 

That's the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's Paul preaches throughout the cities and repeats throughout his letters. And that is the foundation on which the temple must be built. 

If someone builds with a different gospel, some different message, infiltrated by the philosophies and worldly isms of our age, then he is building with wood, hay, and straw that will not survive the day of judgment. And so verse 10, Paul calls himself the builder. Verses 11 and 12, he's building on the gospel specifically. 

Verses 13 through 15, that results in a saved people who are the temple of God. That's why in verse 16, he begins with a rhetorical question. Do you not know, to get to the point, you are God's temple, and God's spirit dwells in you. 

While it's true, the spirit of God dwells in every believer individually. That's why we have different spiritual gifts. Nonetheless, Paul's emphasis here is that the spirit dwells among us, making us into this singular reality called the temple. 

To put it another way, verse 16 is like the punchline. If you think about it, how many temples are there? There can only be one, because there's only one God. In Paul's world, multiple temples, there are temples in every city throughout the Greco-Roman world. 

Why do they have so many temples? Temple to Zeus, temple to Apollos, temple to Athena, blah, blah, blah, it goes on and on. Why do they have so many temples? Because they believe there were so many gods. But Paul says there's one God and one Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. 

Therefore, there is one temple. So, you have to be unified. You send a false message to the rest of the world when you're disunified.

And the only foundation that will keep it unified is the gospel of Jesus Christ. But like I said, this community, in order to be unified as the temple of God in the world, needs three attributes. A mind for truth. 

A mind for truth. A community that is committed to the gospel. The gospel of Jesus Christ must be the central organizing idea for everything else.

Every song you sing, every prayer you pray, every sermon you hear, every picnic you have, every counseling session, everything has to emanate and come from that gospel. The Incarnation of God in Christ, His sinless life and atoning death and resurrection on the third day. It's so simple you can summarize it in 10 seconds, but so complex it can keep you your whole life meditating on how profound it is that God died for sinners to give you eternal life in His presence. 

You have to have a mind for truth. And I lament to say there are communities that mean to be Christian who have departed from the gospel. The worldly influences, the temptations of the philosophies and spirit of the age all around us have infiltrated enough that they have departed from the gospel or become unclear on the gospel. 

Uncertain how the gospel functions as that central organizing idea. But there can only be one foundation, verse 11. And number two, a heart for people. 

A heart for people. When Paul talks about his work, the work will become manifest. Or verse 14, if the work that anyone has built. 

Or verse 15, if anyone's work is burned up and so on and so forth. What is the work? The work is not just generic sort of Christian behavior. It's specifically disciples. 

It's specifically converts. The work is the people. In chapter 9, Paul says, you are my workmanship in Christ. 

Now why is this important? This is an important observation because what does Paul see as his greatest contribution, his greatest success in the world? It's not the letters that he wrote, though he wrote great letters. They're famous 2,000 years later. I wish I could write something people were still reading 2,000 years later.

But it's not his letters. It's not his sufferings and the great stories about him and what he endured for Christ. It's the people. 

It's the people that he met. The people he looked in the eye. The people whose hands he shook. 

The people who he kissed. The people to whom he preached. The people who were converted and came to Christ and became gold, silver, and precious stones. 

Paul had a mind for truth but also a genuine love for others. He genuinely cared about their spiritual outcome. He could never imagine a community of people who were only concerned about their own vertical relationship with God through Christ but no concern about the people around them.

That's why he calls them a family. That's why he calls them one temple. Every stone bearing the weight of every other stone that therefore really matters how those other stones are doing.

So a mind for truth, a heart for people, and a constitution for unity. Again, that's why in 16, he emphasizes you, plural, are the singular temple of God because there can only be one temple. So I'll repeat the comment I made a moment ago that Paul is talking

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