Paul begins his letter to the Corinthian church by
reminding them that they had been sanctified in Christ and been called of God.
He assures them of continued grace and peace from God the Father and from the
Lord Jesus Christ, and of his continual thanksgiving to God for the grace
bestowed upon them by Christ (vv. 3-4). He then proceeds to assure them of his
complete confidence that the gospel and the boundless grace of God had been
confirmed to them by the operations of God the Holy Spirit upon them in
effectual calling, causing them to ever look for Christ’s coming (vv. 5-6). He
goes so far as to assure these Corinthian believers that our ever-faithful God,
who had called them into the fellowship of Christ, would at last bring them
blameless into glory in the resurrection (vv. 8-9).
The
All these assurances of grace and glory were given by
divine inspiration to the church at
All these
things divided the local church at
A Needful Lesson
I call your attention to these
things because they set before us a very, very important lesson, a lesson of
which we need to be constantly reminded. ― God’s saints in this world are
often plagued with moral weaknesses, poor judgment, spiritual evil, and
doctrinal error. So long as we are in this world, God’s saints (all of us) are
sinners still. We dare not make excuse for our own sins or the sins of others,
giving license to evil. But, even more importantly, we dare not make ourselves
judges over our brethren, pronouncing those whom God has sanctified accursed.
If men and women profess to believe the gospel of God’s free and sovereign
grace in Christ, they are to be received and embraced by us as our brothers and
sisters in Christ, “not to doubtful disputations” (Rom. 14:2). ― “Who
art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or
falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand”
(Rom. 14:4).
God’s Work, Not Ours
Such judgment is God’s work, not ours. There are many
who think they have the ability to distinguish between sheep and goats, between
tares and wheat, between good fish and bad, and try to make it their business
to separate the one from the other. They foolishly and arrogantly think they
have the ability to determine who is saved and who is lost. The fact is:
― No one has that ability. Our Lord Jesus pointedly tells us to let the
wheat and tares grow together (Matt.
If we try
to separate the good from the bad, we will do so basing our judgment upon the
outward appearance. We have no other basis of judgment. That means, our
judgment is always wrong. ― “For the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for
man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart”
(1 Sam. 16:7).[1]
If it were
left to us, we would always run off the sheep and hug the goats, pull up the
wheat and cultivate the tares, throw out the good fish and keep the bad (Matt.
Don Fortner
[1] I
do not suggest or imply that we are to embrace as our brothers and sisters in
Christ those who deny the gospel of God’s free and sovereign grace in Christ.
Anyone who does not believe the gospel of Christ is lost, no matter what he
professes, how loudly he claims to believe on the Son of God, or how pious and
devoted he may appear to be in his outward behavior (2 John 9-10).
3