From Compromise to Commitment

When our kids were little, like most parents, we would take them in for a check-up at the doctor’s office a couple of times a year. The first thing you do when you get to the doctor’s office is you…? You wait. It’s not a hard question. You go to the waiting room, and you wait. That’s what it is called, so that is what you do there. Then they take you in. The first thing they do is they measure your child—check their height, check their weight—and then they put those measurements on a chart so we can see how our child has grown and how they’ve matured over the years and since the last time they visited. It’s a way to measure their maturity to make sure everything is developing the way it should. If they’re not growing, if they’re not maturing, you know something is wrong.

In some ways this is what 1 Corinthians does for us as believers. Paul provides these marks of maturity. It allows us to gauge our growth as believers. He planted this church three years earlier, and now he is challenging them to go on this “Journey to Deep” because they weren’t growing as they should. Instead, he’s received these reports of immorality and division within the church. So now he is writing, and he is challenging them to grow in their walk with God.

And so, we’re going on this journey together, as a church, as well. If you have your Bibles, open to 1 Corinthians 5. You have some notes in your worship bulletin, so please pull those out and follow along, because we’re going to go from chapter 5 through chapter 7 and there is a lot of material here.

In chapters 5 through 7 Paul talks to us about moving…as believers…from compromise to commitment. His primary focus is sexual immorality. There is this sexual immorality in the church that has compromised the church, has compromised these believers. They are looking more and more like the culture, so he addresses that.