Messy Church: Money, Sex, and Power 11/10/2019

Pastor Pete Hartwig

Sermon Notes

SLIDE: Messy Church: Money, Sex and Power pt. 1

 

SLIDE:  1 Corinthians 1:1-3

Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ…

Sanctification – Called to Holiness

 

This sermon is for followers of Jesus

 

Corinth – Aphrodite –

The City of Corinth = Amsterdam , 4 miles wide, Caesar – 44 BC – rebuilt

Freed men, 3 ports , NSEW trade. 4 mile main street

 

Aphrodite = goddess worship and temple prostitution

 

Money, Sex and Power pt.1

 

“To the church of God in Corinth”.

 

Money, Sex and Power –

Talk about – “POWER” – Paul’s warnings

 

My dad   Construction – here is how…

Parental voice – danger

 

 

Participants with demons

 

SLIDE:  1 Corinthians 10:20-21 Paul’s warning “demons”

No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons. 21 You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons.

 

There are more to idols than meet the eye!

 

As there are natural beings in a natural realm

There are spiritual beings in a spiritual realm

 

 

SIDE: Ephesians 6:12  “Powers”

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the “powers” of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

 

SLIDE: John 10:10  What Jesus believed about satan –

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. – Jesus Christ

 

SLIDE: Acts 10:38  – what the first century church believed

“God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.” – Apostle Peter

 

An evil personage – the serpent, devil, satan, lucifer, demons, the thief, the anti-christ, prince of the air, “the spirit of the age” and often…  “The Powers”

 

Columbia University literary scholar Andrew Delbanco

 

SLIDE: The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil by Andrew Delbanco

 

“So the work of the devil is everywhere, but no one knows where to find him. We live in the most brutal century in human history, but instead of stepping forward to take the credit, he has rendered himself invisible…Despite the shriveling of old words and concepts, we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that used to go under the name of evil…We have an inescapable problem: we feel something that our culture no longer gives us the vocabulary to express” (pg.9)

 

The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil by Andrew Delbanco

 

SLIDE: Yet, despite the monstrous uses to which Satan has been put, I believe that our culture is now in crisis because evil remains an inescapable experience for all of us, while we no longer have a symbolic language for describing it. Sontag herself expressed the crisis in the form of a question: ‘How,’ she asks, can we find our moral bearings ‘when we have a sense of evil but no longer the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil?’” (pg.224)

 

SLIDE: “in the words of the psychologist Henry Murray, with a Satan who is ‘no more than a vestigial image, a broken-spirited relic of a perished past, a ludicrous ham actor with no greater part to play in man’s imagination’” (4).

 

The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil by Andrew Delbanco

 

Delbanco’s conclusion…

SLIDE: When we cease being able to imagine and name this evil (whether in horror movies or serious literature or daily conversation), it will have truly gained mastery over us.

 

Under the pressure of modernity –

“The Spirit of the age”

 

SLIDE: The devil: CS Lewis

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.

 

SLIDE:  1 Corinthians 10:20-21 

No, but the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons. 21 You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too; you cannot have a part in both the Lord’s table and the table of demons.

 

 

 

 

SLIDE: 2 Corinthians 11:3  Paul’s Concern about “serpent’s cunning”

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.

 

STORY: !!! Snake in the laundry!!!

 

Genesis 3:1-13  The Fall

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.

Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

 

Genesis 3

  1. Did God really say? “You will not certainly die,”

Can God’s Word truly be trusted?

 

  1. the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows your eyes will be opened”

 

God is actually holding out on you!

God knows you will see things correctly

 

  1. “you will be like God”  –

be your own boss

THE DANGER IN THE FRUIT IS FOUND IN THE ONE WHO IS CHEERING FOR YOU TO EAT IT.

 

HUGE for… Money, Sex and Power pt.2

 

 

SLIDE: Jesus has provided for us the victory

Colossians 2:15  And having disarmed the powers and authorities, Jesus made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.

 

THE VICTORY HAS BEEN WON WE NOW MUST WALK IN HIS VICTORY

 

Martin Luther – A Mighty Fortress is Our God

 

2 Did we in our own strength confide,
our striving would be losing,
were not the right Man on our side,
the Man of God’s own choosing.
You ask who that may be?
Christ Jesus, it is he;
Lord Sabaoth his name,
from age to age the same;
and he must win the battle.

3 And though this world, with devils filled,
should threaten to undo us,
we will not fear, for God has willed
his truth to triumph through us.
The prince of darkness grim,
we tremble not for him;
his rage we can endure,
for lo! his doom is sure;
one little word shall fell him.