Presentation 15
Presentation 15
Introduction
As an introductory exercise write in your mind a
list of the things that you believe prevent people
from discovering the truth about Jesus and
growing in their knowledge of him. Does your
list contain the word ‘gullibility’. I think that
would be near the top of Paul’s list as he thought
about the church in Corinth. A. W. Tozer writes.
‘Faith never means gullibility. The man who
believes everything is as far from God as the man
who refuses to believe anything’.
The church in Corinth were too ready to believe
what others told them and this lay behind the
confusion which existed in their midst.
Presentation 15
Answering A Fool According To His Folly
Ironically, Paul, a true apostle of Jesus Christ was being
accused of being a false apostle by those who were
themselves false apostles. This now forces him into the
embarrassing position of blowing his own trumpet. It made
him feel an idiot v1.... [Solomon advises, ‘answer the fool
according to his folly’.] Since Paul is already an object of
ridicule in the eyes of many he risks making a bigger fool of
himself by telling them how he feels about them;
‘I am jealous for you with a godly jealousy. I promised you
to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a
pure virgin to him. But I am afraid that just as Eve was
deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may
somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure
devotion to Christ’.
Presentation 15
Answering A Fool According To His Folly
Paul is not making all this fuss for the sake of his good
name but because a much larger issue was involved.
Paul’s opponents were trying to undermine not simply
Paul, but the gospel he proclaimed. They felt his
Christianity needed a face lift. They wanted a
Christianity which would be more acceptable to the
Greek culture of their day.
Paul saw something sinister in that. Something
devilish. He saw the church being seduced, like a
bride being drawn away from her true love. He sees a
pattern re-emerging when Eve was seduced by Satan
in Eden and drawn away from her commitment to
God.
Presentation 15
Answering A Fool According To His Folly
Paul is fiercely possessive of the church he had
founded, just as a father would watch jealously over
the welfare of his daughter. He was not the kind of
possessive father who says, ‘I will never let go of my
daughter, I will never let her marry’. Paul wanted to
give his daughter away but only to the One to whom
she was engaged and to whom she rightfully belonged,
to Christ. In the interim, he was concerned that she
might be compromised by her flirtation with the world!
‘For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus
other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a
different spirit from the one you received, or a different
gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it
easily enough. v4
Presentation 15
Answering A Fool According To His Folly
Paul is appalled that they have more time for
‘spiritual gigolos’ than they do for their spiritual
father. Paul does not question their orthodoxy. No
obvious heretical errors were being taught. Their
error lay in the methodology they were
encouraged to adopt and style of leadership they
embraced. They were being persuaded to present
a gospel that would appeal to Greek society, a
gospel which majored on strength not on
weakness, in heavenly triumph and not on earthly
suffering. They wanted a Christianity that pushed
the cross into a shadowy background and brought
the spotlight of glory and blessing into the
foreground. This is the seduction that infuriated
Paul.
Presentation 15
A Threefold Defence
One charge levelled against Paul was that his ministry lacked
polish v6. By the standards of the Greek oratory Paul's public
communication was ordinary while his opponents in Corinth
had dazzled the church by their eloquence.
Primeminister Disraeli once said of Gladstone that he was
‘inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity’. He got
high on public speaking,! Ordinary folk hadn’t the slightest
idea what he was saying.
In contrast, Paul’s preaching was plain and unvarnished, but
it was substantial. He communicated truth. Paul believed
content to be much more important than polish and that
persuaded him he was not an inferior communicator.
Presentation 15
A Threefold Defence
Secondly, Paul was accused of being
unprofessional v7... He did not charge for his
evangelism. There is a mind set that believes the
more you pay for something the more it must be
worth. This has helped designer labels to flourish
in the West. This mind set also operates in the
third world e.g. some believe that the more you
pay for a medicine the better it must be.
Paul’s rivals tapped into this mind set suggesting
that since Paul’s evangelism came free, if, unlike
them he didn’t charge a proper fee, then he
couldn’t be much of a preacher.
Presentation 15
A Threefold Defence
Paul’s response is that the inexpensiveness of
his ministry was not a mark of amateurism but
a carefully developed missionary strategy. It
would have cheapened the gospel to make
people pay for it. Paul would then have been
no different from the professional
entertainers, the religious charlatans of the
ancient world who sold religion for money.
Paul did not charge fees but he did allow
Christians to provide voluntarily for his needs!
The logic of his opponents argument defies
comprehension that his failure to charge
indicated a lack of love for his hearers.
Presentation 15
A Threefold Defence
Paul's irony disappears in v13-15 and we discover what he
thinks of the super-apostles..... When Satan wants to injure
the church he dresses himself up as a Christian. Imitation and
counterfeit are his stock in trade. This is how he introduces
confusion to the church. Christians are lured away from the
path of truth by plausible charm and deceptive subterfuge.
There are a number of tests devised by banks to authenticate
banknotes, similarly there are tests we need to apply to
authenticate gospel messengers. The two distinguishing
marks that the devil is incapable of removing from his
products are moral quality and final destiny. The tongues of
Satan's agents may sound spiritual but their lives bear a telltale trademark, ‘produce of hell’ and that will be their
destiny v15 ‘their end will be what their actions deserve’.
Presentation 15
A Threefold Defence
The greatest danger to the Christian church is
not rampant materialism or scientific
scepticism but a growth in public gullibility.
G. K. Chesterton said that,
‘when people abandon truth, they do not
believe in nothing, they believe in anything’.
There are hundreds of sects in the world today
which we might expect would strain the
credulity of Simple Simon in the things they
claim and teach. But their apparent numerical
success would suggest that people are
prepared to believe anything.
Presentation 15
A Threefold Application
1. DON’T LET WORDS FOOL YOU
Paul’s rivals were good with words. That
should not surprise us because the devil is
a master of persuasion. Clever words are
his stock in trade. Sometimes he uses
flattery in order to massage our egos and
feed our intellectual pride . We may feel we
are beginning to live on the edge of
excitement when we listen to the very
latest in theological speculation so that we
find ourselves asking, ‘How did we ever
find any satisfaction in that old fashioned
conservative biblical theology in which we
used to believe?’
Presentation 15
A Threefold Application
1. DON’T LET WORDS FOOL YOU
You may think, “I could never fall for that”!
Well a N.T. scholar, who was a household
name in Scotland - an exponent of a liberal
anti supernatural theology, was in his early
years a committed evangelical and effective
open air preacher. He later ridiculed the
gospel he once preached. It flatters our egos
to tell ourselves, that these new ideas are for
truly intelligent Christians and that
conservative Christianity is for those who have
never crept out of the Victorian era. Some
believe that by embracing ‘new teaching’ they
will win the approval of the academic world.
Presentation 15
A Threefold Application
1. DON’T LET WORDS FOOL YOU
But the devil also makes great use of distorted
words. He can use the same vocabulary as
Biblical Christianity but subtly pour in a
different meaning. This is precisely what was
happening at Corinth. The false teachers were
happy to talk about ‘Jesus’, ‘the Spirit’ and ‘the
gospel’ but the content they gave these words
was quite different. And so behind a facade of
orthodoxy confusion was sown. This is
precisely what heretical sects do. A Jehovah
Witness will quite happily say that ‘Jesus is the
son of God’ but he means by that something
entirely different from orthodox Christianity.
Presentation 15
A Threefold Application
1. DON’T LET WORDS FOOL YOU
Guard against being fooled by mere words. False
teachers do not need to be outspoken in their
heretical views to be false to the gospel. Indeed, you
would be hard pressed to make any heresy charge
stick in dealing with them. They had surrendered
the gospel to the secular mood of their day. This
revealed itself in their method of evangelism, in the
emphasis of their preaching, and in their leadership
style. Worldliness isn’t to be confused with false
teaching. Wordiness is often found in genuinely
orthodox churches. ‘Worldliness is not the result of
having no cross in your theology, it is the result of
having no cross in your life.’
Presentation 15
A Threefold Application
2. DO NOT BE NAIVE ABOUT MONEY
Secondly, Paul saw that how evangelism was
financed was enormously important. He
realised that money can corrupt a preacher.
Find out where money raised for evangelism
comes from and where it goes. You may be
shocked. Successful religion is ‘big business’
today and some are eager to exploit the
religious market.
One reason Paul refused to allow the
Corinthians to support him materially was that
he wanted to separate himself from those who
peddled the gospel for financial gain. He was a
preacher not a salesman!
Presentation 15
A Threefold Application
2. DO NOT BE NAIVE ABOUT MONEY
Paul was prepared to allow believers to support
him in his missionary task but he was not
prepared to accept fees for services rendered.
To do so can alter how the preacher is
perceived. He did not want to be paid for a
good performance like some street entertainer
or street busker. That would devalue the
gospel. Paul determined to retain his ‘amateur’
status. Once we see preaching as a professional
career we have begun to exchanging our high
calling for an entertainment license and then
we begin to ask what will keep the fans happy?
Presentation 15
A Threefold Application
3. GUARD AGAINST A MISPLACED SENTIMENTALITY
Has Paul been unduly severe in describing his
opponents as false apostles and deceitful
workmen? Should we not be more tolerant of
such people? But they were not merely deluded
Christian brothers who needed deeper instruction!
Paul saw them as agents of Satan intent upon
sabotaging the church. Of being spanners in the
works! Satan is eager to infiltrate the church. With
reference to his own intimate disciple band Jesus
said, "Have I not chosen you, the Twelve? Yet one
of you is a devil!" (He meant Judas, the son of
Simon Iscariot, who, though one of the Twelve,
was later to betray him.) Jn. 6.70
Presentation 15
A Threefold Application
3. GUARD AGAINST A MISPLACED SENTIMENTALITY
To argue for a loving tolerance for all teaching is to engage in ill-informed gooey,
chocolate box, sentimentality. Sentimentality, is undiscriminating love, and Christian
love can never be that. Genuine Christian tolerance is a virtue born
of a strong conviction that the truth will vindicate itself.
Modern humanistic tolerance is a vice born of mass
indecision about the truth. It dare not confess any
particular belief for fear of being accused of
narrow-mindedness.
Paul’s love for the Corinthian church did not
stop him from denouncing as agents of
Satan those who drew the people’s hearts
away from the true gospel v11. He says, ‘I am
jealous for you with a godly jealousy’.
Presentation 15
A Threefold Application
3. GUARD AGAINST A MISPLACED SENTIMENTALITY
The most important things aren’t the things about
which all men agree but those they're willing to
fight for. Of course it’s possible to fight over trivia
and there are many examples of that. But it’s a
greater mistake to refuse to fight at all. We delude
ourselves if we believe that all men are struggling
together to discover the truth.
The one whom Jesus described as ‘the father of lies’
is at work in the world and in the church. His aim is
to sow untruths. We need to learn to resist him and
not capitulate to a modern sentimentality.
Presentation 15
Conclusion
A local church is in danger when composed of
gullible Christians. The real threat is not unbelief but
wrong belief; not scepticism but superstition; not
irreligion but gullibility, not the doubter but the
deceiver; the subtle infiltration of saboteurs who
exploit gullible Christians. In a day when leading
churchmen deny the atoning power of Christ’s death
and a literal, historical, resurrection, and TV
evangelists become millionaires, we need to guard
against being fooled by words, and against being
naive about money and against being sentimental
about tolerance. God can strengthen our hearts as
we seek his wisdom and discernment to know what
is right and the resolve of will to follow it.
Presentation 15