The Absurdity of Division & the Cross of Christ (1 Corinthians 1.10-17)

One of the truths the Bible teaches about marriage is that whatever should happen in a church, should also happen on a smaller scale in the home. So I’m going to start by using marriage as an example. Most of you know a little bit about my marriage to Loanne, but it’s just too appropriate an illustration to not use it today.

Loanne and I have been married for longer than some of you have been alive—it will be 23 years in April. Our marriage happened very quickly: we met in mid-February 2003, and we were married at the end of April—nine weeks later. So we didn’t have time to actually get to know one another before we get married.

We should have, because if we had given it a bit more time, we would have realized that we have nothing in common. We like some of the same music, some of the same books, but pretty much nothing else. In our day-to-day lives, it’s an easy bet that if I would do things one way, Loanne would do that same thing the opposite way.

So reading what the apostle Paul says in v. 10 can seem almost ridiculous, in the context of our marriage.

I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.

Loanne and I agree on almost nothing. We do not have the same mind, we do not have the same judgment. So how can we possibly obey what Paul says here? How can we not be “divided”?

And when we take this verse in the context of the entire church (which is its proper context), we could ask the same question. How could any church ever truly be “united”? When you have this many people, there are bound to be disagreements—even profound disagreements—among our members. How could we ever really be united in the same mind and the same judgment?

That’s the question of today’s text, and it’s a question we’ll keep coming back to over the course of the next weeks and months.

If you remember, last week Paul began his letter to the Corinthians by affirming the work of God in their church. God has shown them his grace in Jesus Christ, he has sanctified them and called them to be saints, and he has enriched them in every gift they would need to persevere until Christ’s return.

All of these things are true, and will remain true. But it is possible to live with a deep disconnect between what is true about us and how we’re actually living. And that disconnect is woefully present among the Corinthians.

So now that he’s established what is true about them, Paul is going to begin addressing the many problems in their church. The first problem Paul highlights in his letter, following his encouraging introduction, is that of division in the church.

Be United (v. 10-12)

Paul makes no transition. He reminds the Corinthians in v. 9 that they have been called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. And because they are all in fellowship with Christ, because they have all been saved by Christ and are in Christ, that necessarily implies that they should be in fellowship with one another.

That’s why Paul says (v. 10):

10 I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.

This appeal Paul makes is not a suggestion; he’s not giving advice. He appeals to them by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. So he’s invoking Christ’s authority as Christ’s apostle: this command is non-negotiable. Divisions among you are unacceptable, he says: Be united.

And the unity to which he calls them well-defined, not vague. He says, “be united in the same mind and the same judgment.”

It’s important to understand what he means here. He’s not talking about uniform personality or identical opinions: he’s talking about shared identity, and shared trajectory.

Let’s come back to the example of my marriage to Loanne. Like I said, we could not be more different. We disagree all the time. And we’ve had some hard periods in our marriage because of that; no one said it would be easy. So how is it that we’re still married today? How is it that we really are “united”?

Because no matter what things we don’t have in common, there are two main things that have united us, from the very beginning.

First, we have a shared identity. We are both disciples of Christ, children of God, saved by grace through faith, united to one another as brother and sister in Christ. Our identity comes from the same source, and it doesn’t at all depend on similarities of personality or opinion.

We also have a shared trajectory. From the very beginning, for everything on which we disagreed, we have always agreed on the one essential thing: what is the goal of our marriage? If you’re newlyweds, of if you’re engaged, or if you’d like to be married one day, listen closely, because this is important. The goal of marriage is not to make one another happy; it’s not to fulfill one another’s needs. The goal of marriage is to glorify God by displaying the gospel to the world through the life we live together.

That is the goal. We are coming from the same place, and we are going in the same direction, and we are using the same means—the grace and gifts God has given us in Christ—to do it.

That is what it means to “be united in the same mind and the same judgment”. The goal of marriage is also the goal of the church. It is unity in the way we live out the gospel with one another, for the sake of the glory of God. This means being united in our identity and our trajectory. It means having the same basis for judgment (which is what God has revealed to us in his Word). It means having the same authority that guides our decisions (not our own opinions or reason, but again, what God has revealed to us in his Word).

Today, churches tend to normalize division, because fighting for unity amongst diversity is hard work. If it gets hard, just find another church. Paul doesn’t do that. Paul doesn’t tell the church to “try to get along.” He treats division in the church as a contradiction of their calling, a contradiction of who they are in Christ.

And we can see this is what he’s getting at—that the division is coming from mistaken identity rather than simple disagreement—when he explains why he’s saying these things. V. 11:

11 For it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers.

We don’t know who Chloe or her “people” were, and it doesn’t matter—the point is that Paul names his source. The problem is public and verified. This isn’t a rumor; it’s a problem the Corinthians can observe among themselves, and that they can’t deny.

12 What I mean is that each one of you says, “I follow Paul,” or “I follow Apollos,” or “I follow Cephas,” or “I follow Christ.”

Apollos was a well-known Christian teacher at the time, whom Paul knew personally, and Cephas is another name for the apostle Peter. The point isn’t whom these people claim to follow; the problem is that they are identifying with whom they claim to follow.

Even those who say “I follow Christ” are part of the problem, not because they follow Christ—he’s the one we should all be following—but because they say they follow Christ in comparison to everyone else. In the church of Corinth, little clans have popped up, clans that identify with specific people rather than with the message of the gospel.

And if we think things are better today, we are hopelessly naïve.

Loyalty to celebrity leaders, adherence to certain teachers as a way to signal status… These things are alive and well in our Internet age, and in the context of evangelical churches in France—a world which is relatively small. It’s easy to “follow” a hundred different teachers, and even feel loyal to them, to the detriment of the gospel.

I hesitated before bringing it up, but it’d be sort of strange if I didn’t: a couple of years ago, this church was nearly divided because of just this sort of thing. A group of people in the church felt an aberrant loyalty toward another pastor, and tried to sow division in our church by pitting their group against those who wanted to stay in Connexion. We didn’t care that these people didn’t feel loyal toward us; we cared that they were pressuring faithful church members to leave, by suggesting those who remained at Connexion were actually being unfaithful. We cared that they had turned the situation into “us versus them”.

God was gracious, and we came out of that situation stronger, but it was incredibly painful.

Christians today still build identity around leaders, tribes, platforms and traditions. To be clear, we’re not talking about having different types of churches built around different types of theology. There are many churches with whom we disagree with them on some secondary but important theological points. It would be very difficult, and ultimately harmful, to just combine and form a single church together, because this sort of clan-thinking would quickly surface.

But we are not divided from our brothers and sisters in these churches; there are good churches with whom we disagree on secondary issues. Our disagreements would make common ministry difficult, but we still share the central beliefs of the Christian faith; they are still our brothers and sisters.

That is not the “division” we’re talking about. We’re talking about division in the midst of a single local church, based upon different ideas of who we are, and where we are going. This sort of thinking is natural, but for those who have been saved by the gospel of Jesus Christ, it makes no sense. And Paul shows that it makes no sense by asking three surgical questions.

The Absurdity of Division (v. 13-16)

We find all three of them in v. 13; we’ll take them one by one.

First:

Is Christ divided?

Of course not; the idea is absurd. We have one Jesus Christ, one Savior, one Lord, who has saved one people. If Christ is not divided, neither is his church.

Second:

Was Paul crucified for you?

Of course the answer to this question is also no. But Paul isn’t asking the question because he thinks the Corinthians don’t know the answer; he’s asking the question to redirect their loyalty.

Loyalty in the church is never meant to be directed toward a person, or a tradition, or a theology, or or a culture. Loyalty belongs where salvation occurred. Christ saved his people by living our life and dying our death and being raised again to give us life. He saved us at the cross. So Christ and his work alone deserve our loyalty.

Third:

Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

Again, no. When anyone is baptized, they are baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Baptism explicitly names ownership. Christians belong to God, not to pastors or preachers or ministers.

His point is that division within a local church isn’t just bad behavior; it’s theological nonsense.

And Paul shows how little sense it makes by downplaying his own role. V. 14:

14 I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, 15 so that no one may say that you were baptized in my name. 16 (I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized anyone else.)

I love that Paul can’t remember exactly whom he has baptized; that ambiguity in his own mind is exactly the point. It doesn’t matter who baptized whom. It doesn’t matter if he’s the one who baptized, or if it was someone else. Paul refuses to let baptism become a badge of pride. There is no cult of personality here, no “my pastor is better than yours.”

Paul makes much of Christ and little of the church’s leaders, even himself. And that’s the way it should be.

When I was a young Christian, no pastor was more helpful to me than John Piper. I found his ministry online, and Piper’s teaching was one of the foundational pillars of my faith in those early years; John Piper is the pastor who taught me how to read the Bible.

So you can imagine what it was like for me when I became a pastor and had the opportunity to meet John Piper for the first time. And then, some time later, I had the chance to spend time with him, to have dinner with him! (And he remembered me!) I’m not too proud to admit there was a good bit of hero worship there.

It took me a long time to realize that my admiration of John Piper, while not inappropriate, could easily have sent me in a direction similar to what we see in these verses. And it would have gone completely against everything I’ve ever heard Piper say, because all he’s ever wanted is to point people to Christ, and his work, and his glory. It’s the double-edged sword of being a good teacher: all you want is to make much of God, and people begin making much of you.

We do need leaders, and there’s nothing wrong with being thankful for the faithful leaders God has provided. But we do not draw our identity from the leaders who have helped us. Ministers in the church are not figureheads; they are interchangeable servants, pointing us to the work of Christ.

The Center of the Ministry: The Cross of Christ (v. 17)

And that’s what Paul says last, in v. 17:

17 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.

Paul’s mission is not to become the figurehead of the early Christian church by baptizing as many people as possible; his mission is to preach the gospel.

And the way he preached was just as important as the content of his preaching.

In Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, he mentions one criticism that was often pointed at him. 2 Corinthians 10.10:

For they say, “His letters are weighty and strong, but his bodily presence is weak, and his speech of no account.”

In other words, the guy writes well, but when he speaks, he’s fairly unimpressive.

Paul says here in v. 17 that this is intentional. He says, “Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom.”

The culture of the city of Corinth valued eloquence; they valued rhetorical showmanship; they valued someone’s ability to make a good speech. If the speech was well-prepared and well-delivered, it was generally more convincing.

And of course, we see this today as well. The person who is able to find the best punchline is the person everyone will remember.

Paul wants to intentionally steer clear of this kind of mentality. He refuses a ministry whose efficiency is based on performance. He refuses to rely on his education (which was extensive), his oratorical skills (which, we see in the book of Acts, were sharp), or his personality. When he preaches the gospel, he does it simply, in a manner that’s not eloquent or impressive.

Why? “Lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power,” he says. That is his controlling concern.

The good news of the finished work of Christ is enough. The work of the Holy Spirit to take the gospel that is proclaimed and use it to wake people up, to bring them from death to life, is enough. Christ doesn’t need Paul to be eloquent. He doesn’t need Paul to be a good preacher.

He needs Paul to be faithful in his proclamation of the good news. That’s it.

Conclusion

Division amongst Christians happens all the time. And 99% of the time, that division makes no gospel sense.

How can a marriage like my marriage with Loanne work? It can only work if our marriage is not the center of our marriage. It can only work if Christ and his cross are the center of our marriage.

The same is true with every relationship, every endeavor, every aspect of our lives as Christians. And that’s what the Corinthians have not understood: the church fractures when anything or anyone other than Christ and his cross becomes the center.

We can see now why Paul began his letter the way he did, in the verses we saw last week. He wanted to remind the Corinthians of what God has actually done for them, because that’s where their identity truly is—and if that truth is kept central, the tracks will be laid for the gospel to do its work.

It won’t happen easily, and it won’t happen on its own; keeping the cross central is very hard work. But it’s the essential work of the church. Every problem Paul will address in this letter has that same root cause: in the church in Corinth, the cross has been displaced as the center.

The cross should level all markers of status. But in the church in Corinth, there’s division—their identity is built on human teachers rather than Christ crucified. This produces competition, pride and comparison.

The cross should remind us that Christ died to make a holy people. But in this church in Corinth, there is open sexual immorality and boasting about the sins they tolerate—their identity is built on cultural sophistication rather than holiness in Christ. This produces pride in sin rather than grief over sin.

The cross should absorb wrongs rather than retaliate. But in this church, Christians are suing one another publicly—their identity is built on personal rights and honor. This produces a public disgrace of the gospel.

The cross should remind us that Christ redeemed our bodies; we belong to him. But in this church, there is deep confusion over sexual ethics and the body—their identity is built on their idea of freedom, and their own appetites. This produces the feeling of Christianity with none of its substance.

The cross should show us that our worship is for him, not for ourselves. But in this church, worship is a disordered means of showing everyone else how good they are—their identity is built on gifts or spiritual experience.

I could go on. Every problem we see in this church—and most of the problems we’ll see in any church—is the same disease wearing different clothes. When something other than the cross becomes central, identity shifts. And when identity shifts, communion fractures, and sin gets the upper hand.

We can see this on a large scale, on the level of an entire church, but we can also see it in each of us as individuals. Every pattern of sin we see in our lives, in our relationships, in our jobs, in our pleasures, can always be traced back to something else slowly but steadily edging the cross of Christ to the margins and taking its place in the center.

It’s subtle, because most of the time, the things that edge out the cross of Christ are not bad things in themselves. We want to be happy in our homes, so we make happiness into an idol, and end up abusing our parents or our spouses or our kids. We want to be secure in our lives, so we make work into an idol, and end up making our careers the central goal of our lives. We want to feel good about ourselves, so we make validation into an idol, selfishly working for others’ approval rather than resting in the approval we already have in Christ.

No matter the sin, it’s the same problem with a different mask, and Paul’s solution is always the same: keep the cross central. Find your identity in Christ. Grow in your knowledge of the gospel, and let nothing eclipse the good news of Jesus Christ.

This is not easy to do, and it will require sacrifice—most often, that sacrifice is quite simple, and looks like staying and persevering rather than leaving when things get unpleasant. But that is our calling.

That is our job, and it is a job we cannot do on our own. We need one another to remind each other of what is true, and what is central. Keep your eyes on the cross. Help others keep your eyes on the cross. And let yourself be helped by them. We do not follow a leader, we do not follow an idea. Our loyalty belongs where our salvation was born. It belongs to the work and person of our Savior.