First Corinthians 14:20-25 The call to mature thinking
1 Corinthians 14:20-25 · Roger Henderson · Jul 11, 2021
Letters to the Corinthians, No. 65
Holly Hills Bible Church
https://hollyhillsbiblechurch.org/teaching/messages/49261923305775

Transcribed from the recording by SermonAudio, so expect the occasional misheard word.

We're in chapter 14 of 1 Corinthians and this will be the fourth message and we have two more to go. So, Bonnie says, Roger, more tongues? Haven't we learned that yet? Haven't we learned about tongues? Well, Paul says we're not finished. So, if Paul says we're not finished, we're not finished. So, actually, today is kind of a little bit different. How would you like to have Paul as a debating opponent?

I mean, he comes at it every which way. So, now he's gonna come to you and say, Are you pretty, what's your thought process? Are you a child? Think about this. What are you doing here? So he's going to come out a little bit different today. So I'd like to go back and just cover a little bit of what I did last week and have my little pictures. And I have a new picture for you. I didn't get an A in art school, so you have to kind of bear with me.

They're kind of little, not stick figures, but they're a little blocked out. They're engineering. They're block diagrams. Okay, you'll see. Anyway, okay. So let's start out. So here's some key points, and I mentioned these last week, from chapter 14. There must be priority giving to edification. And you say, Roger, edification, that's a $64 word.

What does that mean? That means instruction, typically instruction in the things of God. So what's the church about? What are we about here? We're about knowing our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, and telling people about Him and learning about Him. So that's what edification is about in the local church.

And that should be the priority. But what Paul found in the church at Corinth, and remember this is, initially this is a letter written, two letters written to, there's more than just two, written to the church at Corinth, is about their misuse of this spiritual gift of tongues, or speaking another language, and it was impacting the edification of the church, how they got the message about Jesus Christ out. So this chapter tells us why prophecy, and remember prophecy, and I defined it in the last bullet, prophecy is a verbal telling forth of the mind of God before the New Testament was completed. So it's important to realize here that I mentioned this before that You know, we each have, hopefully we each have our Bibles with us, or our electronic version thereof, and we can look up chapter and verse, so to speak.

If I say something, and you say, hmm, it doesn't sound exactly right to me, you can check me out. Well they didn't have that. They had letters. They had Paul's letters possibly. They may not have had other people's letters. They didn't have a large part of the New Testament. And most people didn't carry around scrolls of the Old Testament that was in the synagogue. So they had to depend upon people that people that were gifted, that God empowered to speak his message to them. So they were to pin upon this prophecy.

And it's kind of, you know, when you say that word, you think of foretelling the future. Well, this is just foretelling what God wants that body of believers to know about. So that's important to realize. Okay, with that in mind, so since this chapter is all about kind of the tension between the gift of tongues, speaking in another language, and the gift of prophecy, I wanted to kind of show you both of those. So here's the intended use of tongues.

So here we have a person, it could be a man or a woman, in a body of believers, and they're speaking in a language. And typically it's a language they don't know. So they start out speaking, and so what do you do with that? What do you do with that person? How do you make sense out of that?

Well first of all, the assumption going in is that they got that message from God. He gave it to them, gave the utterance to them. If you look in early in Acts it says that people were given utterances and they were given utterances about the gospel and they spoke in the language of people that were there, other people in gather at that time period. So it was given to give out the gospel message in their language. But the person Speaking didn't understand the language. Well, obviously, God understood the language, and it says that in verse 2. When you speak in a tongue or a foreign language, God understands it, because he gave it to you. But without an interpreter, that's the second point. Without an interpreter, the church doesn't have a clue. If I speak in Chinese, and nobody speaks Chinese here, you're not going to understand one thing. It's going to be a mystery to you.

And the third thing is what we're going to spend some time on today. Tongues were given for a sign. And they actually were given for a sign to a certain class of unbelievers. And it was typically the Jewish unbeliever. And we're going to see that. That's why that reference we have in Isaiah we're going to talk about. So the tongues were given for a sign to the unbelieving Jew. Okay, so that's a picture for the gift of tongues and how it went out in the church setting. So here's a picture. Notice I have it green. Green is for good, right?

Anyway, so this is what what God desires to get his word out. So a person prophesying remember prophesying is verbally telling forth the mind of God And at that time, like I mentioned, they didn't have scripture completed. So God gave them that message. It could be, I was thinking, what might they say? The Gospel of John wasn't complete at that time. They might say, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. Well that, maybe people hadn't heard that before.

And they would be amazed by that. Wow, listen to that, listen to what our brother has to say about that, and God showed him that. So there would be edification, and there would be edification to the church body. So a person prophesying, it could be a man or a woman, the church could benefit from that. And remember Paul did a comparison? He said, you know, I'd rather have five words of using my mind than 10,000 words in a tongue, or in a foreign language. There's no comparison.

This is direct message from God going out to the church body. But then there's an even more wonderful thing that happens, and this hopefully happens in every group of believers. People come into this body of believers. Unbelievers come in, and they use this word, ungifted. And the best I can understand from that, I believe it's people that did not have the spiritual gift of prophecy. So they would be a believer, but they didn't have, they hadn't been given the gift of prophecy. So that, as we'll see in verse 24, that results in conviction, or convincing, if you will. Conviction sounds like I'm going to jail, but, you know, this is, the Lord is trying to convince them of their need for a Savior.

So we're going to spend some time looking at that. So there's my two pictures. But there's this tension all through this discussion with Paul between the gift of tongues and the gift of prophecy, telling forth the mind of God. Okay, so let's go on. So here's, it's on your handout too. Here's McCauley's, I'll just put it all up here. So here's McCauley's outline. Now we've been through, this is like the fourth message so far. We went through the inferiority of tongues, deficiencies. We had two messages on that. Mike did one, I did last week. And then we come down to the purpose of tongues.

And he starts off with this call to maturity. Let's be mature about this, brothers and sisters. Let's don't be infants. Let's don't be children. And he talks about maturing in their thinking and then the application of that maturity in terms of tongues and in terms of prophecy. Let me just reread this again. I know Jim read it, but just one more time and then we're going to go in and dig into the details.

Brethren, do not be children in your thinking. So right off the bat he tells them don't be children in your thinking, yet in evil be infants. sort of a neat contrast, but in your thinking be mature. It is written in the law by the men of strange tongues and by the lips of strangers, plural, I will speak to this people, and that's Israel I believe, and even so they will not listen to me, says the Lord.

You know, that was a constant message. If you had a message out of the Old Testament, God over and over brought people to the nation of Israel and they didn't listen to him. They just hit time after time after time. So that was not an uncommon response. And Isaiah records that. So then, tongues are a sign, tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe, but to unbelievers. But prophecy is for a sign, not to unbelievers, but to those who believe.

Just one quick note, I have to stop here. I think it's pretty critical, and as I studied through this, 21 and 22 kind of go together, because you kind of look at the same people groups here, unbelievers, believers, and it gets confusing if you don't When he gets down to 23, he talks about the whole body. And that's a whole church. So just a little footnote there. So go on with 23 now.

Therefore, if the whole church assembles together, and all speak in tongues, and ungifted men or unbelievers enter, will they not say, You are mad? And that's something you might, you know, if you've ever been around, you know, I've been around a few cases where people spoke in tongues and I didn't benefit at all by it. And I'm not sure people around me did either, but they did it and that was that. And so anyway, it's so you think, well, what's this all about? Because you can't understand it. Okay. But now he says 24th in contrast.

But if I'll prophesy, and I'm a believer, an ungifted man, which I believe is a believer, enters What happens? He is convicted, he's convinced by people speaking God's word. He is called to account by all. The secrets of his heart are disclosed. So he will fall on his face and worship God, declaring that God is certainly among you. I mean, the last, boy, that last couple of verses there, that's what coming to know the Savior, being convinced by the Holy Spirit, That's what it's all about in the Christian life. That's how you start the Christian life.

So this is really such a neat passage. Okay. So we start off, brethren, and I kind of learned something, I guess I knew this, but brethren, adelphos, you'd think that would just be, it can refer, according to what I kind of went through, to both men and women, so that's interesting. I always kept thinking men, but maybe somebody, Roy might correct me here at some point, but anyway, that's what I kind of came across. So the subject is you implied.

Do not be, and this is one of my favorite words here, because our brother Hal, ginome, ginomai, to come into a new state of being. And this is a present imperative. Stop, he says, stop becoming children, basically. Stop becoming children. It's something that's already going on. He wants you to stop doing that.

And the noun, it identifies that person. It identifies their children and their behavior. He says, stop becoming that. the brethren at Corinth had become childlike, in a childlike state. And it's a new thinking, and thinking here is the word for mind. It's a seed of mental and emotional activity. So that's the first part. Then he kind of switches gears on us here, and he kind of uses the same idea as a child or infant. He says, yet in evil be infants. So yet in contrast to being children and you're thinking be he wants you to be Naive if you will not nightman.

I even met the right word, but he doesn't want you to dig into Evil he doesn't want you to be an expert in evil, right? Can you imagine a Christian saying well, I'm an expert. I'm a Christian. I'm an expert in evil duh What's that about? He doesn't want you to be that and there's other verses that talk of it. So he says Don't be don't be babes in evil, in wickedness or depravity, and Romans reiterates that point in 16, 19b, therefore I rejoice over you, but I want you to be wise in what is good, so we're to be wise in the things that are good, and good, only God is good, right? We're wise in the things that are good, and innocent in what is evil. It doesn't say disregard evil, and then I just kind of did a quick little search through scripture there. He talks about fleeing immorality. These are different verses. I kind of jammed the parts together. Flee immorality. Flee idolatry. Flee every other sin. And then Constable kind of has a comment here. There's a sentence in which it is good for a Christian to be childlike, namely, in innocence in regards to evil.

We're to be aware of evil, we're to flee from it, but we're not to become an expert. And that's challenging today when the news 24-7 is just displaying evil 24-7. So you have to kind of, well, I want to find out what's going on. Well, you're going to get a lot of evil in there too. So you got to be wise in what you read and stuff like that. Okay, so that's kind of the contrast. Brethren do not be children in your thinking, yet in evil be infants.

Okay, then he sums it up by, but in your thinking be mature. So here's his call to maturity. Use implied again, my favorite word again, come into a new state of being, but this time in terms of maturity. So maturity describes the subject you, And it's a word for full grown in mind and understanding.

I better get something to drink. So read that, Paul's desire. I need a reader here. So Paul's desire is for the brethren to come into a state of maturity in your thinking or understanding So Wiest has it in the sphere of the reasoning process. So brethren, do not be childlike in your thinking, yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature. So now he quotes, now Paul quotes this verse from Isaiah. And it basically is bounded by, in the law it is written, and he gives the verse, says the Lord.

So that's the subject. Okay? So law here refers to, you know, the Old Testament can be divided into different sections, and one is the law, which actually I thought was just the first five books. But one comment, this constable comments here, the law here refers to the Old Testament and Isaiah. And I wasn't quite aware of that, but that's interesting.

So here's the verses in Isaiah. says indeed he will, okay the context here is that Isaiah is talking about these people that have an end for Israel and he wants to give them rest and peace but they won't listen to him. So that's kind of the context. So Isaiah says here, indeed he will speak to this people, Israel, through stammering lips and a foreign tongue. So this is a judgment against Israel. They wouldn't listen to him.

So what does God do? God isn't passive. He says, well, okay, if you're not going to listen to me, I'm going to make it even harder for you to get the message. Which seems, Lord, is that gracious? Well, the Lord knows what he's doing here. He who said, He is rest, give rest to the weary, here is repose.

But they would not listen. So he told them he was gonna bring this judgment against them and they would hear his message but not through their own language. And that's what Macaulay kind of points out. But the nation, nation of Israel, would not listen to God's word in their native language of Hebrew. God announced that he would send a message in a language they did not understand. So we start into the main part here. So we see that the first, there are two verbs here. First is I will speak and two modifiers. He will speak by the men of strange tongues or languages. And so what were the strange languages?

It seems like, you know, they spoke Hebrew. Isaiah spoke Hebrew and wrote in Hebrew. But the message of the New Testament is in Greek. So one aspect of this is that part of that judgment, the message of the good news about the Lord Jesus would come in the Greek language and not in Hebrew. And by the lips of strangers is the next part. God brought his message by the prophets like Isaiah. Now it will come from ones who are not Israelites.

Well, if we look at the history of the church, we kind of had, we had ones that were Jews and ones that were Gentiles. Both were bringing the message. But it was in a language, it was in the Greek language that scripture was. Okay. So they will not listen. So the second verb is will not listen.

So tongues in Corinth in the Corinthian church were intended to call the Jews' attention to this Isaiah passage, this judgment. It would require the nation of Israel, it would require the nation of Israel that God would speak by Isaiah was being fulfilled. It would remind them, excuse me. And then thirdly, we're gonna see that in verse 22, this is why I think it's so important to see it couples with this verse of this Isaiah passage. We'll elaborate on how tongues were fulfilled in Isaiah 28. Okay, so now we get to 22. Okay, so now a contrast here. Let me see. Okay, good.

So first, so you start off, one of the purposes of tongues, so tongues were given for a sign. If you remember in the New Testament signs, you know, the Lord Jesus did signs and they're testing miracles. They proved who he was. So we see that was a particular that's something that the Jews really sought after they sought for a sign so Paul saying here so tongues are for a sign the fact that a believer could speak in a language that he did not know was miraculous right second the sign was for a those, not for those who believe, but for unbelievers. So the focus was on the unbeliever, so tongues, at least that's one aspect of that.

Unbelievers were Jewish ones fulfilling Isaiah 28.11. And then we see this passage in Corinthians that we read earlier. For indeed, Jews ask for signs, and Greeks seek for wisdom. So the mindset of the Jewish person was, a sign's gonna tell me that God's involved in this. So he sent them a sign, a negative sign, if you will, that they did not listen to him, and they would have to seek his message through someone who spoke not his language.

And then there's kind of a statement about prophecy, comes up next in this verse. So one of the purposes of prophecy, but prophecy is for a sign, a believer that spoke forth the mind of God before the New Testament, that was miraculous too. It was miraculous that they spoke in unknown language. It was miraculous that they spoke God's word directly to the people. Who is the sign for? It tells us here, not to the unbeliever, but to those who believe. the believer in Corinth were being edified by the miraculous communication from God by the gift of prophecy. Okay. So I believe that couples close with 21.

So now we kind of turn the corner here. So I decided since we're going to turn the corner, I thought a picture might be appropriate. So here's my first picture. Once again, I have a yellow house or a yellow building, a yellow church. So if you look in the center here, and we're going to see it talks about the whole church and all are speaking in tongues or in languages. So a little caveat here. I didn't pick up on that initially.

All means none excluded. So one thought is that everybody in that church is speaking in tongues. Well, I don't think from the structure and from what I read and understand, it means all the ones that were gifted to speak tongues were speaking. That could be quite a few. But it doesn't mean everybody in that church. So the scenario is, here comes an ungifted believer, one who doesn't have the gift of tongues, or an unbeliever.

They enter the church. That's the words we're going to see shortly. They come into the church. So what is the results? What results from them hearing this unknown language? We're going to look at that. I've already read that, but we're going to look at that.

Then part two of this, about prophecy, the green structure, the good structure. Okay, the whole church, and they're all prophesying. And they're telling the mind of God. Once again, I don't believe it's every person in that body of believers. It's the one that have the gift of prophecy. And I believe they're probably in order since God reminds me of our brother in service. A man would get up. He would read something from scripture. He would sit down. Another brother would stand up. He'd read something from scripture. So maybe we have five, six, seven brothers stand, sit down in about an hour's time period.

It wasn't disorderly, but we got God's mind in that time period. This is, I kind of envision that, so they were getting God's mind in the Corinthian church there by people telling, they didn't have a Bible to read. This way, they were just saying, the Lord says, this is what it is.

Okay, so now we have, here come, here are these two guys trotting in, right? They're marching in. You got an ungifted guy, an unbeliever. They come in. So what is the result when they hear God's word told forth, they hear God's mind, what happens to them?

If you were listening carefully, you already know the answer to both these questions. So to me, this helped. Maybe you don't like pictures, you know. Anyway, some people don't like pictures. Enough said, okay, good. Okay, so now we're gonna dig into the verses. Therefore, so based on the previous version, Okay, here's the situation. If the whole church assembles together and all speak in tongues, of the ones who could speak in tongues, two categories of men enter the church. Ungifted believer, meaning he's ungifted in speaking tongues, I believe, or an unbeliever enters. What will these men conclude? And it's not pretty. So what's their conclusion? What would you conclude? Will they not say you are mad? Or literally, it's out of your mind. You got a bunch of loonies here, what's going on?

Okay, so Constable has an interesting comment. He says, Paul paints a picture of the Corinthian church assembled and engaging in a frenzy of unintelligible tongue speaking. So if it's not interpreted, it's not gonna be of much value. So Paul's trying, he's hammering away at this. He's not gonna give up on this point. He wants God's word clearly put out to the body of believers.

Okay, now we have the opposite. But now, in contrast to the whole church speaking in tongues, unknown languages, in verse 23, if all prophesy, again, telling forth the mind of God, and they couldn't do it from their Bibles, again, it is all of those who could prophesy. Not everybody could prophesy, apparently, only once they had that gift. Here we have two gentlemen coming in, an unbeliever, or it could be ladies, an ungifted man, a believer, enters, same two categories. So we find out that the rest of this passage will talk about three things occur.

He, the two types of people, is convicted. And what I found here, there's some tension here between how to translate, is this word, he is convicted, is it in the passive voice or the middle voice? It depends upon how it will read. In the passive it will read, he is convicted, In the middle voice, it would read, he is being convicted. It's an inward action.

And I kind of like that, and another gentleman liked that, too, and I kind of went along. So I'm going to say, I like number two possibility, but I think it's, you could translate it, he is convicted, and that's what the translators did. But he is being convicted sounds more like what I believe is going on there. And the Greek word, if I can, I wrote down how to pronounce it. Oklino? I don't know, it's probably terrible I did that. Roy, if you're out there, I don't know. Oklino? Let's see, I'll find it here. Ah, elinko?

Okay, anyway, it's the idea to be convicted or convinced. It's the idea of being convicted or convinced about your sin. And it's by, so what's happening here is, in that body of believers, these people enter, the unbeliever and the ungifted, and they're convinced, or they're convicted of their sin. Or they're convinced about their sin. And it's by all of those who are speaking the mind of God.

So at this point, I wanted to just expand a slight bit in this, and there's just a beautiful passage that I wanted to talk about here. The Holy Spirit's ministry and convincing us the Holy Spirit. This is so wonderful when the Lord left to Telling he's gonna go away. We had that recorded in John in the Gospel of John He talks about how the Holy Spirit is going to come and so talk about the ministry of the Holy Spirit in terms of convincing us and this is beautiful passage in John 16 and So here we have it, but I tell you the truth, it is to your advantage that I go away. This is the Lord Jesus speaking, because they're saying, Lord, you're gonna go away, where are you gonna go?

He says, but if I do not go away, the helper, the Holy Spirit, will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. And when he, the Holy Spirit, when he, the Holy Spirit, when he comes, he will convict the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.

Concerning sin, because they do not believe in me. I just have to say something about this, you know. You know, if you don't know the Lord Jesus as your Savior, if you're worried about your sin, this tells you right here, this is the one sin that the Lord, that God is concerned about, knowing his son, because they do not believe in me. Don't worry about the other ones, not that they're not important, but that's the one that he wants to, because they do not believe in me. Then he goes on, in concerning righteousness, because I go to the Father, and you no longer see me. And then lastly, in concerning judgment, because a ruler of this world has been judged. And then just a short, I really like Macaulay here. He did a great, fabulous job.

The production of conviction is linked to three entities in the New Testament. The Holy Spirit, as we just saw, is a source of conviction. The Word of God is a means of conviction, and we see that in 2 Timothy. All Scripture is inspired by God. and profitable for teaching, for reproof, which is another translation of the same word for convincing or correction. And the third thing is man, the human messenger or the agent of conviction. So we have the source of conviction, the Holy Spirit, the means of conviction, God's word, and the agent of conviction is man, is a person reading God's word. So if you read God's word to a brother or sister or to a believer, you're the agent that God is using.

It says in 2 Timothy 4, Timothy is exhorted to preach the word to be ready in season and out of season. And that word we prove again is the word for convince or convict. So the marvelous aspect of God's word for those who walk into a body of believers is that they can be convinced about the Lord Jesus. And they need to be convinced about one sin and one sin only. It's a sin of not knowing him, not trusting him, not believing in him.

So that's a little digression, but I thought it just, it really fit well with this passage. So let's go on. So number two, he says, he is called, the second part, he is called to account by all. And actually I like better, he is judged by all. I like it better. And once again, we have this, it could be translated passive or middle. And I like the middle translation, he is being judged. It's an inward action. And it's anacrenal. to examine, to investigate. And boy, this passage just nails it. It's just a beautiful passage.

Hebrews 4.12, for the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit of both the joints and marrow and is able to, what we talk about here, able to judge the thoughts and intention of the heart.

Just, you know, so we have conviction and we have this judging process that's going on. By all who are telling the mind of God. So as we read and tell about the mind of God, today it's from scripture, as we read that, we are telling what God's mind is about your sin. What God's mind is about, you know, whatever the subject might be. So the next word kind of picks up on that. It says, and the secret of his hearts are disclosed or become evident. This is the result of the conviction and judging process.

And then the third thing that happens, and this is just beautiful, so he, the two men, will fall on their face and worship God. And I couldn't exactly find a passage that spoke to that, but I did one of my favorite passages, I think, that kind of shows a tremendous revelation about our Savior is the one in John 20 with Thomas, doubting Thomas. He said to Thomas, and I skipped some part of this, reach here your hand and put it into my side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing. Thomas answered and said to him, my Lord and my God. And Thomas, it's not recorded he fell down, but it fell on his face.

But it just, I think it has the sense of that. Declaring that God is certainly among you. There's a passage in Isaiah that talked about these people that were kind of associates of Israel, and they came to realize, they said, they will make supplication to you. Surely, God is with you. They realized that, this other nation. There is none else. There is no other God. So we have those three aspects. Conviction, judging, and the results of that are declaring that God is among you.

Okay, so just a quick summary, quick statement here by Constable. Prophecy, the telling forth of God's mind, would result in the repentance of visiting unbelievers, but tongues would not. These verses summarize the effect of good Christian preaching on unbelievers. All right, I'll close with a word of prayer. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you so much, Lord. for this day, Lord, we thank you for the marvelous message about your word, the marvelous effect it can have on unbelievers, Lord, and we pray for that to be the case in our body and wherever we might be as individuals, as we talk with family members, we talk with associates, that your word would go forth, it would be heard, and people would come to know you as their savior. We ask this in Christ's name, amen.