1 Corinthians 6:9-11
Please be seated. Turn in your copy of God’s holy word to 1st Corinthians chapter 6. Today we’ll be looking at verses 9 through 11. 1st Corinthians 6, 9 through 11. This is what I call a two water bottle sermon. You know how you go to the Mexican restaurant and the top of your head is sweating because of the spices. This is this is one of those passages.
And so we want to be faithful to the scriptures and true to what God teaches, but also be merciful in the gospel. This is a passage I mentioned earlier that will say two times. The unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of heaven, and there’ll be a list of sins. But then there’s, of course, gospel hope. And we’ll see that at the end in verse 11. Before we read the passage, let’s go to God and ask for his help and blessing. Pray with me.
Lord, without eyes to see or ears to hear or hearts to understand, we would just see these as empty words, probably antiquated, outdated, not with the times. But we understand your word was written by holy men of old, carried along by the spirit. These things were written down for our instruction. They were written for our warning. And so may we today, Lord, tremble at your threatenings. embrace your promises and yield our hearts, our lives to your commands, all by your grace, all for your glory and for the good of our neighbor, we pray in Jesus name, amen.
First Corinthians six, beginning at verse nine, the apostle Paul says to the Corinthians in what’s now his second letter to them, or do you not know that the righteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived, neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
And such were some of you, but you were washed. You were sanctified. You were justified in the name of the Lord, Jesus Christ, and by the spirit of our God. Amen. If we were watching a modern day news clip of, say, a pastor reading this passage, you can imagine what they would edit out.
And it would be verse 11. They would read verses 9 or let the video show verses 9 and 10 and say, oh, look at these hard-nosed people. Look at these folks, what do they call us today, haters, that kind of thing. But verse 11, verse 11 is the critical verse to understand in this passage. So how do we think about such a weighty passage?
Go back to the beginning of God creating the world and everything in it. Go back to God making man in his own image. God gave man in Adam knowledge. He gave him righteousness. He gave him holiness and he gave him dominion over the creation and in Adam’s task, in mankind’s task.
He was to fellowship with God, worship God, work and live a righteous life so that that glory, that goodness would spread across the face of the earth. The garden was not supposed to be a local place that stayed local, but the garden was to be spread across the face of the earth until the glory of God and the righteousness of God and righteous humanity spread across the face of the earth. But we know the story, how the evil one who fell in heaven, Satan or Lucifer or the devil, he fell from his place of glory in heaven as John Milton, the great poet said, Satan’s words were something like, I’d rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. And so when he fell from his place in glory, he slithered into the garden, Genesis chapter three, and he tempted Adam and Eve by attacking God’s goodness and God’s authority and God’s blessing.
And he offered Adam and Eve autonomy. You can rule yourselves. You don’t need God. He told them God was holding back good things from them. And to borrow a modern phrase, he gave them a little message on you can have your best life. now. They saw the fruit. They took the fruit. They ate the fruit. And it was a delight to their eyes. But their eyes were opened. They were naked. They were ashamed. And so they hid from God.
Well, God comes mercifully in the garden searching for Adam and Eve. He comes for that daily fellowship and they’re nowhere to be found. Of course, the all knowing, all seeing God knows exactly where they are. He knows exactly what they’ve done and he knows exactly what he will do.
And he promised them, if you eat, you will die. And in God’s mercy, in his gospel, an animal was sacrificed. The skins were taken and Adam and Eve’s shame and sin and nakedness was covered. And in that grace and in that covering, their death, the wages of sin is death, was delayed. God doled out the consequences, pain and childbirth, thorns and thistles in the land and all the rest.
And life east of Eden was difficult. It was painful. It was without fellowship with almighty God. It was with a loss of righteousness, with the loss of that knowledge and that holiness that they had in the garden. And so life east of Eden, was the spread not of righteousness across the face of the earth, but it was largely the spread of unrighteousness across the face of the earth.
And we see it in Adam and Eve’s offspring, Cain and Abel, the brothers, both went out to their respective tasks, one a worker of the field, one A worker of beast and Cain in time came to worship the Lord and offered the first fruits. It was not what God wanted and God did not accept it, but Abel offered an animal sacrifice. God was pleased. Cain rose up against Abel and killed him.
And on from there, we see the spread of unrighteousness. Not too many generations past Cain, we find Lamech. And when God had marked Cain with his mark that no one would kill him, Lamech says something like, as he sings to his multiple wives, he sings a song something like if revenge against Cain is sevenfold, revenge against Lamech is 70 fold.
And so you see the pride of the heart of man as evil increases, unrighteousness increases and spreads across the face of the earth. And this unrighteousness spreading across the face of the earth comes to the attention of God. It comes to the attention of God because he only sees a few righteous ones like Enoch, who lived and pleased God and God took him. The scripture says he pleased God. We see glimpses of righteousness in families like Noah.
But things got so bad, what did God say about chapter six of Genesis? He only saw evil. in man and that evil was continual. Man in his heart only did evil all the time. Man in his heart was only unrighteous. And so God decided to flood the earth. He decided to destroy mankind, the unrighteous from the face of the earth. But we’re told Noah found favor in God’s eyes. Noah found favor. And so by faith, Noah spent a hundred years building an ark. Noah spent a hundred years building that ark. He brought his family into it and they were saved.
And when he comes out of the ark, a similar command that God gives to Adam in the garden, but also to the church and the great commission is essentially to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with the righteousness of God. And there was a way made for sin to be dealt with. And there are altars and sacrifices and atonement. There are moral laws given. There is the glimmer, the glimpse of the Messiah. And so if one put their faith, one put their hope in the Messiah, they would see one day the righteousness of God, the face of God.
And so we come to a passage like this that says so clearly twice, The unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. And then we have this list of sins and we say to ourselves, gee whiz, who can stand before God? Who can enter his presence? Who will make it to heaven? Who will be accepted as righteous in the kingdom of heaven?
Well, a passage like this leads us straight to the gospel. A passage like this, yes, points out common sins in our day and common sins throughout the history of God’s people. Apparently, they were quite common at the church at Corinth. But who can stand in God’s almighty present? Our passage speaks of righteousness. Our passage speaks of holiness, our passage speaks of justification, and our passage points us to Jesus, the second Adam, who will not sin against God and who will fulfill all righteousness, who will be the righteous one that if we put our faith in him, our hope in him, salvation will be granted to us.
And I think all of this Paul had been preaching to the Corinthians, all of this had been re-emphasized to them by Timothy and by Peter and by Apollos and probably others who taught and preached in the congregation. But what do we do with a list like this, especially in the midst of our current times, and especially when the list brings up certain issues of our days? Well, remember something we’ve discussed over the last couple of weeks. In the life of the church, you will have, as Jesus says, the wheat and the tares.
There will be in the church those who profess faith and also possess faith. Indeed, their profession of faith is out of a reality of a changed heart. And so when they profess faith, they give obvious signs that they possess faith. Their life is a fruitful life of obedience. But then also in the church, there will be those who profess faith, but do not possess it.
And in due time, it will be shown that their profession of faith was not out of a heart changed by God. but simply out of giving words, giving lip service to things that they may have felt or heard or in some way, shape or form believed. And so what has happened in the church at Corinth? What can happen in our churches? What can happen in church throughout history?
Uh, things like on this list can rear up their ugly head. And you look at this list and at the very center of these kind of two tables of five. In fact, one commentator I read said that you got, you got two lists of five, sort of like the 10 commandments.
Uh, but at the center of each list, you have a key word. And then the first list, the key word is idolaters. And these idolaters are immoral, adulterous. They are soft and they are sodomites. That’s sort of the list for the first five. The second list is greed. Greed would be the main thing or idea in the list. They’re thieves, they’re drunkards, they’re revilers, and they are swindlers. Why is Paul giving this list to the Corinthians? Why are we hearing this list today?
Well, as believers, We witness this kind of thing all the time out in the world, but from time to time we do witness it in the church. And because of idolatry, we can fall into immorality. Because of greed, we can fall into theft and covetousness and all the rest.
And so when Paul is speaking of it in the church at Corinth, My thinking is there are two ways to look at this. One is you have people who profess faith, but do not possess faith, and they continue on in unrighteousness. And we understand that possibility, don’t we? Jesus said that in the church there would be the wheat. and there would be the tares, there would be the righteous, and there would be the unrighteous. We come to the church by profession of faith, and then over time we hope to see fruit. But it is possible to be in the church, to not be truly saved, and to bring a scandalous list like this of sins that detract from the glory of God and hurt the holiness of the fellowship.
But I think a few weeks ago we mentioned that four believers, Believers who are justified in Christ. I mentioned to you Martin Luther’s famous little Latin phrase simul justus at peccator We are at the same time justified or righteous and sinners It can be that a Christian falls into idolatry and greed it can be that a Christian falls into sexual sin and or becomes a thief, a drunkard, a reviler, or a swindler. And we have wonderful passages like Matthew 18. If someone sins, we go to them. We have Galatians chapter 6. If someone is caught in a sin, we, who are mature, should gently restore them.
The church is a hospital for sinners. The church is a place where we expect sin not to reign and rule, but we do expect sin to exist and we have a means to deal with it. And so it could be in the Corinthian church, it could be in our church, it could be in any church throughout human history. You have people who profess faith, don’t possess faith, They are idolaters, they’re immoral, they’re adulterers, they’re soft, they’re sodomites, they’re greedy thieves, drunkards, revilers, swindlers, and they are not gonna change their ways, but they’re gonna come to church because it’s respectable. They’re gonna come to church, and it could be this.
Think about this in our culture today. It could be the church has said, your sin is okay, right? Don’t we live in a world that says love is love? It doesn’t matter what you do in private, as long as you do it sincerely. It doesn’t matter what you do in private, as long as you do it in a committed relationship. That’s not what the scripture teaches, is it?
The scripture teaches that there are ways of righteousness and ways of unrighteousness. And so these, these lists point out, they very clearly say what a righteous person does and what an unrighteous person does. And so we have a passage that is very weighty for our own hearts, for our own fellowship, for our own culture, for our own time. What if a believer falls into a grievous sin, is deceived? living in such a way. What do we do? We understand remnant sin. We understand the seed of every sin is in the heart of every believer. And it’s possible for a Christian to fall into these sorts of sins. And so why does Paul give a passage like this to the church?
Let me sort of mention this by way of encouraging you to pick up Kevin de Young’s Little book called daily doctrine. I think it’s 52 weeks five days a week. Whatever five times 52 is that’s I don’t know the mathematicians that’s 200 and something but anyway, he’s got all these daily doctrine that little daily studies a page page and a half that follow a the regular order of systematic theology that we hold to, and somewhere in the section about two-thirds of the way through, this caught my eye in the last year of having this book and making our way through it, it has a little chapter on what to do with the warning passages.
What do you do with the warning passages? You got places in Hebrews that will say, don’t fall away. You got passages like Jesus, is your house built on the rock or on the sandy land. You’ve got passages that seem to say, even as a believer, you could really make a shipwreck of your faith.
Now, follow me for a second here. We are believers in the Reformed tradition. We believe that when God starts a work in us, He is faithful, as Jude says, to complete that work. God doesn’t start something and say, well, I really goofed on this one. No, if you are regenerated by the power of God and the Holy Spirit, and God is at work in you, he will complete that work and bring you safely home to heaven. We believe in the assurance of salvation. We believe in the perseverance of the saints.
And it could be that perhaps someone in our midst is an unbeliever and living an unrighteous life, and they need to hear this warning, you will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. That’s quite possible. And I hope you won’t stomp out of here today. I hope you’ll call for coffee or call for a chat.
But it very well could be that there are believers in our midst who are deceived and have fallen into grievous sin. And warning passages like this, according to Kevin DeYoung, point out that it is the gospel that saves us and it’s the gospel that gets us all the way home. It’s a wonderful little page and a half chapter on the warning passages. The gospel is what saves us, but it’s the gospel that gets us home.
How often have you as a Christian been feeling pretty doggone good about yourself? The Lord is lucky to have me. Right. And then you read a list like this and say, oh, boy. And in your brain and in your heart, you’re not looking out the window saying, oh, that’s all those people driving by. Remember the rule of scripture, if there’s a bad character, it’s you. And if there’s two bad characters, you’re both of them. You’re never the hero, that’s only Jesus.
And so when we hear a list like this, we ought to be stirred in our mind and heart. And I think it’d be pretty easy for us to say, well, I’m not immoral. I’m not a homosexual. I’m not whatever the thing is on the list. I’m not a thief, a drunkard, a swindler, a reviler.
But you are greedy and idolatry, right? What does Jesus say? This is an adulterous generation. Our hearts go far astray from the Lord. And can’t you, at some level, maybe say, well, good thing I’m not on this list. Oh, be careful lest you fall, right? But we are idol makers every day. And our idols may not be immoral things or adulterous things or even homosexual things, but our idolatry may be things that have replaced God. And we need to take Jesus’ word seriously. We are a spiritually adulterous generation.
We say, oh, I’m not a thief. I’ve never robbed a bank. You know, I’m not a drunkard. I don’t touch the stuff. I’m not a reviler. I keep my mouth shut, except on Twitter. I’m not a swindler. You know, I don’t sell used cars or, you know, life insurance to old people. But we’re greedy. And so think about that list, idolaters and greedy. But do think about the world around us, a very unrighteous world.
And when the church, and we should use that term loosely, you’ve all been through Machen’s Christianity and liberalism. There’s a point where a church ceases to be a church and it’s just a liberal organization. But we live in a day where the church has tried to move the boundaries and the goalposts and say, you can identify as some heinous sin. And even in our conservative circles, our sister denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, just went through an uproar of, can you be a gay Christian?
Can I be a thieving Christian? I mean, that’s how ridiculous it gets. Can I be a swindling Christian? And it’s tripping through. We’ve even got, can I be a racist Christian popping through our conservative churches. And anytime you modify the word Christian, you’ve taken away the reality of the gospel.
And I want you to see that to be true, because verse 11, after giving the list and twice saying, these folks will not inherit the kingdom of heaven, what does Paul say? But some or such were some of you. So in the Corinthian church, you had people that are former idolaters, former immoral folks, former homosexuals, former thieves, greedies, drunkards, swindlers, revilers and the rest. But what happened? They heard the gospel. and in response to the gospel and in the power of the triune God, they were washed, they were sanctified, and they were justified.
Why is it we live in a world that wants to change the boundaries and move the goalpost instead of just say, here’s the gospel? You think about it, the God who made the world and everything and spoke it into existence, the God that made Adam from the dirt, breathed life into his nostrils.
Can he not save someone from the deepest, darkest sin? Now, the problem with our world is we don’t define sin as sin anymore. The problem with the world is we want people to be okay, feel okay, and sort of sprinkle a little Jesus on their crummy, unrighteous life. It doesn’t work that way, does it?
He says here clearly the gospel, such were some of you. You were washed, you were sanctified, and you were justified. So what does God do in the gospel? He takes unclean people and washes them in the waters of regeneration by the Holy Spirit. What does God do in the gospel? He takes unholy people and sets them apart for himself. What does God do in the gospel? He takes unrighteous people And he declares them righteous.
And so we think about this wonderful verse 11 here, which, again, if we were to, you know, show a clip on the modern day news of Christians speaking and talking about these sorts of things, they’d cut that out, only have the dirty list, you know, and call you Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or something like that and say, you’re just judgmental, right? That’s sort of the pejorative way this would be treated. But you were washed, you were sanctified. and you were justified.
Think about the power of God, not only to make the world and everything in it, but also to remake it when it’s bent up and bruised and broken by sin. That’s the hope we have, isn’t it? One day of a new heavens and a new earth, God will take this old sin-filled, sin-broken creation and he will make it new. Romans chapter eight tells us that creation is groaning under the travail of the curses, and it can’t wait for the adoption of the sons of God because it knows it’s going to get made new. It knows it one day will be made whole again. And so the God that can make all things new does that in the lives of believers.
If you read through Paul’s 13 epistles, you will see language like verse 11, just spelled out in all kinds of ways. What does God do? He says, go wash in the river seven times and heals lepers. He speaks and people see. He lays his hands on people and their broken bones or their palsies are gone. What does God do? He washes away sins. But that’s not where he stops.
You know, it’s one thing this morning, maybe you brushed your teeth, maybe you took a shower, took a bath. It’s one thing to be clean and have bright shining teeth with a little gleam, right? But it’s another to say, I’m going to live for the Lord today. Yes, I’m clean, but I’m going to live for the Lord. And so God does wash us. He does regenerate us, but he also sets us apart. He sanctifies us. He makes us holy. But then he justifies us. And that is a judicial position we have in Jesus.
What do we say from the Heidelberg catechism? God sees us just as if I never sinned and just as if I have always obeyed. Now there will be unrighteous people in this world who like to do the stuff on this list and probably wake up every day to check it off and make sure they did it right. What does Romans chapter one say?
It says that unrighteous people suppress the righteousness of God. They suppress the revelation of God. They suppress the knowledge of God that’s written in their hearts and they suppress their conscience and they go out and they do wicked things. And it sort of seems to say this is a little paraphrase. They seem to look for people doing bad things and slap them on the back and say, you’re doing a great job. Keep doing it well. Right. But God can change all that. God can wash and he can sanctify and he can justify. He sees us as if we’ve never sinned and as if we have always obeyed.
And so how does one who is unrighteous inherit the kingdom of heaven? How does one who does not meet God’s standards inherit the kingdom of heaven? Does the church say, lift up the rug, sweep it under, God will never see it. Does the church say, let’s move the boundaries for the changing times?
Is that how it works? Now, there is a standard of righteousness. It’s God. There’s a standard of holiness and it’s given in the scriptures and it’s given in the kingdom. And there’s a standard that God gives us the fitness to meet through Jesus Christ. And that’s the wonder of the gospel.
We don’t have to have a testimony that says, I was all this. Some of you may have grown up in a home where you never knew anything but righteousness. Some of you may have grown up in an environment where this stuff just never came at you. And others of you, it’s all you know, and it’s strange. And so whatever your experience, Jesus paid for it at the cross and he can fix it. He can repair it. Now, some will say in this world, what’s the big deal? What’s the big deal? Why is God so nitpicky? Why did he flood the earth? Why did he send hellfire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah?
Surely he would not repay the sins of this earth with that kind of thing again. And the answer is, no, he won’t because all hell broke loose on his son on the cross. And when the Lord Jesus, the night he was betrayed and gave the the last supper to the disciples. He went off into the garden to pray. And the Bible tells us he was in such agony that his his capillaries in his body burst. He was sweating, not perspiration, but blood. He knew the next day he would drink the cup of wrath and he would drink every last bit of it. The wrath of God for sin would be poured out on him on the cross.
And so how does A holy, righteous God make unrighteous people fit for his kingdom. He lays their sins on Jesus. And he lays sins like that are on this list, idolatry and greed. He lays sins like homosexuality and adultery and immorality and greed and drunkenness and revilers. He lays even what we call the respectable sins, you know, gossip and telling little white lies and all the rest. All that is laid on Jesus. And when we come to the church, when we come to faith in Jesus, we’re set apart. Yes, we’re washed. Yes, we’re cleansed. And we’ll have relapses.
Some of you know the story of C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. There’s the little boy Eustace, who I think if you look up pain in the rear end, his picture’s in the dictionary. Eustace is a horrible character. You hate him when you read The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And Eustace so loved the dragon. He so loved the things of the evil one that he became like a dragon himself. And by the end of the story, you see God redeeming Eustace. He says, just tear off all the scales. And so Eustace sets apart to tear off the scales of his dragon like life. And he can’t do it.
But finally, God does. And there’s something in that wonderful story of C.S. Lewis where it says, in a little Britishism sort of way, Eustace has become a fine little boy, mostly, and he continues to have relapses. And that’s our life, isn’t it, as believers? We once were on this list, but now we’ve been washed, we’ve been sanctified. We’ve been justified, but there are relapses in the Christian life. There are everyday dangers and toils and stares. And so the warning of this passage is to the unrighteous, you will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. But there’s a warning, I think, to believers.
We need to live kingdom lives. We need to leave behind greed and idolatry and live a life that is washed and sanctified and justified. It’s a difficult one. but by God’s grace, it is possible. Let’s go to him now in prayer. Lord, help us to live by the spirit and not the flesh. Help us every day to be reminded that those who live by the flesh will not inherit the kingdom. Lord, let us live as baptized people, as people who profess faith in Jesus, and as people who’ve been set apart by you for a holy purpose.
Lord, you’re the potter, you’re the clay, and we pray that you’d round off our rough edges, continue to mold us and make us and shape us and conform us into the image of Christ. Be patient with us, Lord. We are in love with this world. We are in love with the desires of the flesh, and we are in love with the shiny things that Satan offers. Keep removing the scales from us, the dragon-like scales, until we are made Bright and shiny like Jesus. Lord, take us home soon. Glorify us in our bodies and our souls, and let us enjoy you for eternity. This we ask in Christ’s great name, amen.