Building with Care — Part Two
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Building with Care — Part Two

When establishing a local church, the key element is not the building, the congregation’s size, or the programs offered, but that God’s Spirit is present and His Word is preached. Following Paul’s example, Alistair Begg reminds us that God resides in His people by His Spirit, and when we gather, His Spirit is uniquely manifest. We must guard against taking pride in human wisdom or attaching undue importance to teachers, but rather boast in the Lord.

Series Containing This Sermon

A Study in 1 Corinthians, Volume 1

A Firm Foundation 1 Corinthians 1:1–4:21 Series ID: 14601


Sermon Transcript: Print

I invite you to turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians chapter 3. First Corinthians 3:16:

“Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you? … Anyone [who] destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.

“Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a ‘fool’ so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: ‘He catches the wise in their craftiness’; and again, ‘The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.’ So then, no more boasting about men! All things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.”

Amen.

Our God and our Father, as we silence our hearts before you, we have come to offer you our worship, and we come now to hear you speak. “Speak, Lord, in the stillness,”[1] in and through the voice of a man, but may it be the voice of God that we hear. Speak to comfort those whose hearts are heavy, to lift up the downtrodden, to correct the faulty, to strengthen the weak, to enable the dispirited, to warn the careless, to build up the church. Hear our prayer, and let our cry come unto you. For Jesus’ sake we ask it. Amen.

For some of us, we might almost have forgotten that we were studying 1 Corinthians. The nature of things has been such that we’ve been away from our studies for a couple of weeks, and so I want to take just a moment to remind you of what’s been going on in 1 Corinthians chapter 3. You can see this simply by scanning from verse 1 to verse 23, that Paul has first of all confronted the church with the incongruity of division. It is not that division is impossible in the church, but it is incongruous in the church. And he addressed that in verses 3 and 4. He then has established clearly for the believers the place of God’s sovereignty over the affairs of his people. You will notice, for example, in verse 5 that he says that “the Lord” it is who “has assigned to each [one] his task,”[2] both in the planting and in the watering, the establishing and nurturing of the church. And then, in being part of the body of Christ, God is sovereign in both giving gifts and in establishing where and what we ought to be and do.

We focused last time when we were together on verses 10–15, and we concluded by noting the inherent challenge, which was a challenge to our motives and to our service—the fact that when we build on the foundation of Jesus Christ, there is going to be a test, and the test will be qualitative, not quantitative. And it will test the motivation, and it will test the nature and quality of what we’ve been doing. This test will be on that “Day.” You will notice that “Day” in verse 13 is capitalized, reminding us of the day when God will wrap things up and bring the record books before him, and he will establish not whether we are going as believers to hell or to heaven, but he will determine how well we have done and where there is in our life and in our ministry the opportunity for reward.

God is sovereign in both giving gifts and in establishing where and what we ought to be and do.

Now, the issue that the Corinthian church faced and the challenge which was before them is no different from the issue and challenge which we as a church face this morning. And it is this: On that day, will the work of the church in Corinth and here in the Chapel in Cleveland prove to be what God has done by his Spirit? Or will it prove to be what we have erected by our own resources for our own benefit and our own glory? That’s the challenge! He says it will be possible for the watching world to assume that all that we are doing is right and good and effective, and then on that day, when the reckoning is made, it will become apparent to us that what we did was motivated wrongly because we were consumed with ourselves and our opportunities rather than with God and his glory.

Now, this may be such a challenge to our lives this morning that we feel that it’s almost a neutralizing truth, that it may tempt us to close down and to endeavor to do nothing at all. After all, if some of what I do is going to be burned up, maybe I ought not to do too much, and then there won’t be too big of a bonfire when I get there, because I’ve already done so much. Well, let me say this to you: the quality of all our work is mixed. The quality of all our work is mixed. There are none of us who are doing quality work a hundred percent of the time. That possibility lies only in heaven. So we need to be sane and sensible. The quality of all our work is mixed. All of us, without exception, will see stuff burned up.

In light of that, it ought to encourage us to be prayerful, to be humble, to be expectant in engaging in any form of ministry. Every time there is an opportunity call for ministry here in our church, we ought to be examining the motives of our hearts, not in a way that would neutralize us and prevent us from activity but in order that we might come into the service of God in a way that is pleasing to him.

Somebody would be tempted to say, “Well, you know, I fear that on the day of judgment, when I stand before the Lord, not only will all my work be burned up, but I think I’m going to be burned up myself.” Well, verse 15 addresses that. You will notice he says, “If it”—namely, the work—“is burned up, he will suffer loss; he himself will be saved, but only as one escaping through the flames.”

We need always, when we read verses like this, to remind ourselves of the correlative truth of Scripture, and in specific this truth: that because of what Jesus has accomplished on the cross, no amount of wood, hay, or stubble, or any other rubbish with which we may appear before the bar of his judgment can ever put us back on the downward path to spiritual destruction. “There is therefore now no condemnation to them [that] are in Christ Jesus.”[3] However, those that are in Christ Jesus, when the qualitative test is applied to our work, will discover that some of it goes as dross. However, we should not, in recognizing that, fall foul of the Evil One’s accusations that God may, as it were, simply turn the flames a little higher and thereby remove us from all the promise of heaven and his eternal blessing.

Now, having introduced this notion of destruction, he then continues this theme in coming to verse 16. And so, this morning, I’d like to try and look with you at three facets of Paul’s instruction between 16 and 23. First of all, I’d like you to notice that there is a question to be answered, there is a deception to be avoided, and there is a provision to be acknowledged.

A Question to Be Answered

First, then, there is a question to be answered. It’s in verse 16a: “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?”

By means of a rhetorical question, Paul reminds the Corinthians of what was self-evident but nevertheless, forgotten. It is possible for us to forget self-evident truth in all areas of life. Sometimes children go to school, and they’re moving so quickly through their exercise books that by the time they get to exercise number 9, they have forgotten a self-evident truth from exercise number 4. And the teacher’s responsibility is to say, “Don’t you remember what we discovered in chapter 4? This is how it relates to chapter 9.”

Paul recognizes that if these believers and if the church in general are ever going to get to grips with the plans and purposes of God for them, they need to be aware of this foundational truth. And he awakens them to it. They, he says—and we, therefore—are not just any old building; we are the temple of God.

Now, this would be particularly relevant to those who had come from a Jewish background, because they knew that the temple of God in the Old Testament signified the place where God’s glory dwelled. God had manifested himself to the people. He had put his glory symbolically in the ark of the covenant. The ark of the covenant had then been taken and included in the temple. And so, when the children of Israel thought about the temple, they thought about God dwelling there.

Now, says Paul, in the same way that God dwelt in his temple, symbolically manifesting his presence amongst his people in the Old Testament, so now, he says, after the resurrection of Jesus Christ, following Pentecost, God now has revealed himself and manifest himself in a whole new different temple. And the church now is the dwelling place of God. God resides by his Spirit in his people.

And he is addressing this matter from a peculiarly collective sense. It is true that in 1 Corinthians 6:19, he refers to individuals as being the dwelling place of God. There he is talking about matters of moral purity. And that is true. But he is referring here to it in a corporate fashion, suggesting, reminding us, that if we do not grasp much more than this about the church, if we grasp this, at least we’re off to a very good start.

When God’s people are brought together in God’s purposes, in a unique way, his Spirit dwells there.

The local church in Corinth was the dwelling place of God, and the local church everywhere is the dwelling place of God. That’s why people say, you know, “Well, I’m not really into the local church. I’m just into the church universal.” Let me ask you: How do you apply the principles of the New Testament to the church universal? In what context do they apply? The only way that they can be meaningfully applied is when you have a local church. That’s when you can say, “Exhort one another, and encourage one another, and forgive one another, and do all these other things.” That’s when the principles of worship become obvious. That’s when the responsibilities of meeting together become obvious.

You see, Hebrews 10:25 doesn’t mean anything if you just believe in the church universal and you just go out in the fields. “The fields are my church!” says somebody, and it sounds so spiritual. No, they’re not! The fields are not the church. Forests are not the church. When God’s people are brought together in God’s purposes, in a unique way, his Spirit dwells there. That’s why he says, “[Forsake not] the assembling of [your]selves together.”[4] And it is in that togetherness that the Spirit of God is uniquely manifested.

Calvin suggests that this verse ought to be translated with a because as the hinge word, reading thus: “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple because God’s Spirit lives in you?”[5] And that, of course, is in concurrence with what Paul teaches when he writes to the church at Rome and he says in Romans 8:9, “You, however, are controlled not by the sinful nature but by the Spirit, if the Spirit of God lives in you.”[6]

Now, in our New Age day, it is customary for men and women to say, “Everybody has the Spirit of God. The Spirit of God is everywhere. God is all-embracing. God is everything. Therefore, we’ve all got it. Some of us know we have it, and others don’t. Some of us got it by means of this journey and others by this journey.” Well, how do you respond to that? You respond to that by going to your Bible and saying, “Is the assertion of our culture borne out in the truth of Scripture?” And the fact of the matter is, no.

“If anyone,” quoting Romans 8:9, “does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Christ.” It is in belonging to Christ that the Spirit of God dwells in an individual, and it is as Christ is the head of his church that the Spirit of God is revealed within his people. Ephesians 2:22, reminding us of the church’s glory and significance, says, “In him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.”

This ought to be the key thing about a local church. The key thing ought to be about a local church: not its size, not its programs, not its buildings, but its God, so that people come in the church and they go, “God dwells here! God’s here!” And God’s presence will be evident in worship. Because when the Spirit of God is in the heart of a man, he creates within him “a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that [acknowledge] his name.”[7] And when you take a thousand people offering up a sacrifice to God and an outsider walks into the building, they immediately feel some measure of discomfort, because they reckon that these people know someone that they don’t know—not in a sense that would drive them away but in a sense that would draw them in.

Now, the Spirit of God here is what makes us God’s temple. Notice in passing that this emphasizes the divinity of the third person of the Trinity. When God’s Spirit lives in you, that means you’re God’s temple, because the Spirit is God and God is the Spirit. We ought not to miss these little matters of theology as we’re going along. Talk to the cults about the Holy Spirit; they have no Holy Spirit. They don’t know what to do with him. There is no notion at all. And sometimes, when you listen to Christians talk, they refer to the Spirit as “it”: “It did this,” and “It did that.” The Spirit is not “it.” It’s not neuter. It is “he.”

And here you have one of the great illustrations of the divinity of the third person of the Trinity. If the Spirit, the third member of the Trinity, were a created being or simply something given to us, he could not, by definition, by indwelling us make us the temple of God. The only way you could become the temple of God as a church is if God is in you, right? That’s how it’s “God’s temple,” because God’s in there. How is God there? God is there by his Spirit. And they that worship him therefore worship him “in spirit and in truth.”[8] That’s why we have no shrines. That’s why we have no altars. That’s why we have no crucifixes. Because we collectively are the church. Here is our glory. Here is our significance. When we gather, God’s Spirit is manifest.

Now, it is on account of this that verse 17 then has significance. His question, which we’re addressing, is “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit lives in you?” Answer: “Yes, we’ve got that now, Paul.” “Okay,” he says, “think this one out”: “If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him; for God’s temple is sacred, and you are that temple.” You know, you go and get married in another church, and someone in the church says, “Here are the rules for the church. You can’t walk in door B, you can’t take photographs between 8:25 and 9:37, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.” And you ask them, say, “How did you ever come up with all these rules about this church?” And they will say, “Don’t you know: ‘If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy him’?” Say, “Don’t you know your Bible?” Now, people have every right to take care of buildings, and that’s good, and we have a stewardship of resources. But that’s not the temple of God. It is God’s Spirit dwelling in God’s people, and that temple, then, is sacred.

“Now,” says Paul, “if anyone attacks God’s people with a view to destruction, they themselves will be destroyed.” Now, this immediately makes us feel uncomfortable, the same way that the death penalty makes many of us feel uncomfortable. But the death penalty never made God feel uncomfortable. He wrote it right into the Ten Commandments. God is not uncomfortable with the death penalty. You only need to read the Old Testament to discover that. But God was very clear: “You take a life, I’ll take a life.” That’s the way it is. That’s how he set it up. That’s why he has no problem saying, “You destroy my church, I’ll destroy you. ’Cause that’s how much I care about my church.”

Now, how do men and women destroy the church? Jesus no longer walks the streets of Cleveland in bodily form. Jesus walks the streets of Cleveland in your form. And men and women will seek to destroy you, to malign you, to say to you at school, “You’re a wimp,” or “You are a weed,” or “You are a weirdo, if you really are going to follow after Jesus Christ.” And that is why Jesus said, “Blessed are [you], when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and … say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be … glad: [because] great is your reward in heaven.”[9] That’s what Paul means when he says that he was able to top up, as it were, the sufferings of Christ in his own body.[10] He does not mean by that that Jesus Christ’s sufferings were ineffectual in any way but that what they did to Jesus they still seek to do to Jesus. And since they can’t get ahold of Jesus in bodily form, they will get ahold of his people. And that’s what this is about.

And so the writer is very, very clear: there is no hope in eternity for those who, in time, reject Jesus Christ and seek to destroy him in the person of his people. In other words, the person who commits a grave sin lays themselves open to a grave penalty. Listen to what Jesus said in Matthew 18:6: “If anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin…” Okay? Just to sin! If you or I are responsible for causing our brother or our sister in Christ to sin, Jesus said, “it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”[11] Why is that? Because the Spirit of God dwells in that individual. And God is concerned for those who are his own.

So when you’re out and about, when you’re traveling as young people, when you’re involved in all areas of life, remember Matthew 18:6. You cause your brother or your sister to sin, you’d be better off with a big millstone hanging around your neck and thrown in the depths of the ocean. Does God care about his church? He does.

A Deception to Be Avoided

Now, that’s the question to be answered. It’s a vital question. Our understanding of the nature of the church is going to determine much of what we do. But secondly, there is a deception to be avoided. Verse 18: “Do[n’t] deceive yoursel[f]. If any one of you thinks he[’s] wise”—now notice the next phrase, it’s very important—“by the standards of this age, he should become a ‘fool’ so that he may become wise.”

When we think too highly of ourselves, that’s when we’re at our greatest propensity to do damage to others.

Now, when I read this at first, I said to myself, “I’m not sure how this fits together from all the instruction about ‘You are the field’ and ‘You are the building’ and ‘You are the temple,’ and then all of a sudden, it seems that we’re right back to where we began, with this notion of ‘the wisdom of [the] world’ and the foolishness of God and that great paradox.”

But the more I thought about it, it became apparent, at least to me, that here Paul, by the Spirit, is putting his finger on the root of the trouble. All the damage came about and comes about in the church as a result of men and women thinking too highly of ourselves. When we think too highly of ourselves, that’s when we’re at our greatest propensity to do damage to others. “Therefore,” he says, “you don’t want to begin to think so highly of yourself. Rather, you ought to take the standards of this age, set them aside, and be prepared to be thought a fool in the world’s terms so that, in actual fact, you might become a wise man.”

Now, what this doesn’t mean—and I need to keep saying this again and again so that we understand this—this is not an instruction here for us to resent or reject education and intellectual advancement. Anyone who uses the Bible in this way uses it wrongly. We recognize this morning that as a result of God’s common grace, there have been advances in science and in engineering and in mathematics, on all kinds of levels, for which we ought to be thankful to God. When he writes about “the standards of this age” being foolishness, he is not suggesting for a moment that mathematical formulae are foolish, nor that scientific advancement is nonsense. What he is saying is this: that those issues have no ability to address the essential implications of our humanity—that mathematics and science and art ultimately are foolishness and useless when it comes to wrestling with the essence of what it means to live before a holy God.

Mathematics has nothing to say to spirituality. It has little to say to faith. That’s why it’s so futile to try and approach God by means of rationale. People say, “I will prove God,” or “I will disprove God.” We learned in 1 Corinthians 2:14 that that’s a sad road to go down, because “the man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they[’re] foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them.” Why? Because he’s daft? No, he may be really smart. “He can[’t] understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

Human wisdom has no way of discovering and understanding divine things. That’s probably the reason that Einstein said, “[I’ve discovered] the men who know [the] most are the most gloomy.”[12] That’s why intellectual pride will keep a man or a woman from the kingdom of Christ or will keep them from usefulness in the kingdom of Christ. In an earlier generation, a man by the name of Quintilian said, “They would doubtless have become excellent scholars if they had not been so fully persuaded of their own scholarship.”[13] It is a prerequisite to become a good student to realize your great need in going into the class.

You know this proverb: “He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool; avoid him. He who knows not and knows that he knows not is a wise man; teach him.” You got it? “He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool. He who knows not and knows that he knows not is wise.” And this paradox has been repeated many times for us throughout history.

C. S. Lewis was really wise. In his wisdom, at the age of twelve, he walked out of church and looked up in the sky and said, “There is no God. I have determined it to be so today. Goodbye.” And he walked out into the path of intellectual achievement and achieved well. It was finally only in 1924 that he knelt down in his room, in either Oxford or Cambridge—I can’t recall—and he said, “I admitted that night that God is God, and I became the most reluctant convert in the whole of England.”[14] And then all the great wisdom and ability of C. S. Lewis became channeled, offered up as a sacrifice. But by his wisdom he knew nothing concerning spirituality. When Christ turned the lights on, then his spirituality began to flavor all of his human wisdom. Professor Donald MacKay of Keele University in Britain was a man of great and phenomenal academic prowess in matters of the brain and neurology, in matters of the mind, and yet he was a man of the most humble, childlike faith, because he recognized the danger of being like the fool in the Psalms, who says, “There is no God.”[15]

Now, I wonder if we are, some of us this morning, not finding ourselves all scrambled up in relationship to this. We’ve spent all of our lives determining that it’s very important to be smart. Half of our self-esteem is wrapped up in our qualifications. And yet, despite all of our qualifications, we’re not proving to be much use in the kingdom of God at all. So he says, “Don’t fall guilty to this deception. If you think you’re wise by the standards of the age, become a fool, and then you’ll really become wise. Because the wisdom of the world is foolishness in God’s sight.” And then he quotes from the Old Testament, and he says, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.” And again, he means in ultimate terms. It doesn’t matter how smart you are when they play taps for you over your grave. It’s not going to matter where you graduated from. You won’t be able to get the Encyclopedia Britannica in your coffin. And even if you took it, you couldn’t use it.

There are, in a group like this this morning, men and women who are guilty of no other more significant sin than the sin of unbelief—refusing to believe. And the deception into which you have bought is that your intellect allows you the privilege of that unbelief. Don’t be deceived.

A Provision to Be Acknowledged

Finally, there is a provision to be acknowledged. A provision to be acknowledged. “So then,” he says, “let me apply this. When you think this out, there’s no reason to be boasting about men. There’s no reason to be arguing about who your main man is. Any preeminence given to man which devalues Jesus is a sacrilege. Instead of taking pride in your human wisdom,” he says, “and attaching undue importance to your teachers, remember what I said in 1:31: ‘Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.’”

You see, they were like so many churches. They got themselves in little groups; they determined that this was the man they liked and this would be their man and they would follow him. Apollos from Alexandria, from the right kind of university background, able not only to speak dynamically but also clever—he was the kind of man that they would follow. For others, they liked Paul and his kind of more stumbling, bumbling style. After all, he had a tremendous pedigree. Others were right with Cephas: “Anybody who puts his foot in his mouth that many times, he’s our man. We want to be with him.” And so they determined that their significance was wrapped up in who they hung with: “I’m Cephas’s man.” “I’m Apollos’s man.” “I am this man.”

Paul says, “Listen…” Quoting Calvin again: “Since nothing is more worthless than man, how little security there is in leaning [on] an insubstantial shadow!”[16] Why lean on a shadow? Who would lean on a shadow? A shadow couldn’t take your weight. And he says, “When it comes to it, that’s all that these teachers are.” These people were saying, “I belong to this guy.” Paul says, “You’ve got it the wrong way round. He belongs to you. He belongs to the church. He is, if you like, in one real sense, the property of the church. They belong to Christ.”

And so, what they were doing was they were missing out on the great, vast panorama of God’s provision by tying themselves to one teacher. The Father’s concern all the way along is that we might listen to his Son, Jesus. You remember that in Matthew 17: “This is my [beloved] Son …. Listen to him!”[17] Therefore, it is to Christ alone that authority attaches. It is Jesus alone who is able to rule by his word. Those whom God has given as teachers in the church are therefore to teach his Word, since he is the Ruler and he is the Head. Therefore, the church needs nothing other than what God has to say through his Word. That’s why we do not have popes. That’s why we do not have hierarchies. That’s why we do not have people who are able to make significant statements that may parallel the Scriptures. All who are in a position of leadership in the church are under the Scriptures.

And this phenomenal statement here that wraps up this chapter is something that ought to encourage us as we go into a new week. God has appointed these teachers in the church that the church might benefit from them, not that they might become dictators to our conscience. We should accept what they teach insofar as it can be seen to be clearly derived from Christ.

So, what we have is, essentially, in this concluding section, a commentary on Romans 8:32, which reads, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” Like what? Well, all these teachers, for a start. He’ll give us Paul or Apollos or Cephas. He’ll give us teachers, and we should be grateful for them. But they’re gifts to us. And we should listen to them only insofar as they present Christ and present his Word. And we should hold them to that.

But also, he’ll give the world to us. The cosmos is ours. That’s why, you see, all this stuff—“We are the world, we are the [people]”[18]—bogus! Not true! We are not the world. We are a part of the world. We are infinitesimally small specks of dust in the totality of the world. But here’s the good news: the cosmos is ours! That’s why it ought to be the church that’s at Rio de Janeiro—not George Bush and John Major and all these guys, off to Rio de Janeiro to talk about how they’re going to plug the holes in the solar system. The church, this is our world! “This is my Father’s world.”[19] You can stand in the night and look out up in the sky and say, “See that? My Dad owns that.” That’s it! This is our world. It’s our world.

Not only has he given us the cosmos so that we might know where it came from… Scientists don’t ultimately know where it came from until they take all their best wisdom and sacrifice it before God. The believer’s able to say, “I know where it came from. I know why it was made. I know why we’re on it. And I know what its final destiny’s going to be.” The believer can say that—not with arrogance but because he gave us the world. That’s why the believer ought to see in the world things that others don’t see.

I’ve noticed something in recent days, in being with older people. I’ve noticed how much they notice—at least the ones that are still alive. I mean that they’re not walking dead, that they’re very alert. They go, “Did you see that bird over there?” I said, “No, I didn’t.” “Did you see that flower down there?” “No, I missed that.” I miss so much! So I determined the other day, “I’m going to start looking at that stuff.” It would seem that you live longer if you look at that stuff! But also, when you look at it, you see something that unbelievers don’t see. That’s what the hymn writer said,

Heav’n above is softer blue,
[And] earth around is sweeter green!
[And] something lives in every hue
[That] Christless eyes have never seen;
[And] birds with gladder songs o’erflow;
[And earth] with deeper beauties shine,
Since I know, as now I know,
[That] I am his, and he is mine.[20]

The world, it’s yours!

Also, life: it’s yours! “He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life.”[21] In Christ, we do not merely have existence; we have life! As they used to say when I was a youth in Scotland, when you went to those Saturday night rallies, “Wouldn’t you like Life with a capital L?” “Oh, yes! What a splendid idea! Yes!” It’s like, “Yeah, I suppose so.” But, I mean, that’s the truth! This is life! We have life! Don’t go walking the streets like every other Tom, Dick, and Harry, with a face like a torn melodeon, just walking around. Why would we do that? “After all,” he says, “listen: he gave the whole thing to you! He gave you the world, he gave you life.”

Also, death. Death! To the unbeliever, death is a cul-de-sac. Death is the end. Death is “We just go, and we’re history.” To the believer, death is a gateway. Paul says, “For me, to live and to die is gain.”[22]

He’s given us not only the world and life and death, but he’s given us the present. He’s given us today. Today, with all its opportunities. Today, with every moment that is ours. He gave it to us. Yes, there will be sickness, but there will be health. Yes, there will be joy, but there will be sorrow. Yes, there will be times when it’s easy, but there will be times when it’s tough. But the fact is, he gave us the whole thing! He gave us the present. It’s our gift. That’s why you can’t waste time. That’s where you get your stewardship of time—not because you’re a driven person, because you live in Western civilization, but because he gave us the present. And since he gave us the present as a gift, it would be really wrong for us to monkey around with the gift that he gave us.

Not only does he give us the present, but he gave us the future—all that heaven will mean. “Now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.”[23]

It’s in Christ that the church possesses all things.

Our time has gone. What does it mean? It means this. Think about all the things that trouble us. Some people are really troubled about the future. Some are really troubled about the present. Some are really concerned about death. Some are worried they don’t know how to live. Some are totally freaked out about the cosmos. Here’s the thing: he gave you the whole deal. And he ties it all with a bow: he says, “All are yours, and”—get this—“you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.”

It’s in Christ that we discover the reality of fellowship. It’s in Christ that we discover the stupidity of boasting. It’s in Christ that the church possesses all things—the teachers, the world, the life, death, present, future. I find this kind of comforting. I really do! This is a good verse to memorize when you’re lying awake in bed at night, trying to play your favorite golf course to get yourself back to sleep. “What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for us, who can be against us?”[24]

Somebody came to worship this morning. You find yourself buffeted and defeated and argumentative and dispirited and everything else. And here, in the truth of Scripture, come the answers. Others come, and our hearts are heavy, and we are discouraged, and we think that really, we’re making such a minimal contribution. And the Word of God comes to us and answers our questions and helps us to avoid our deceptions and helps us to acknowledge our provision. “Christ is of God,” submissive to the Father’s will, full of the Father’s purpose.


[1] Emily Crawford, “Speak, Lord, in the Stillness” (1920).

[2] 1 Corinthians 3:5 (NIV 1984).

[3] Romans 8:1 (KJV).

[4] Hebrews 10:25 (KJV).

[5] John Calvin, commentary on 1 Corinthians 3:16. Paraphrased.

[6] Romans 8:9 (NIV 1984).

[7] Hebrews 13:15 (NIV 1984).

[8] John 4:24 (NIV 1984).

[9] Matthew 5:11–12 (KJV).

[10] See Colossians 1:24.

[11] Matthew 18:6 (NIV 1984).

[12] Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, et al., “The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto.

[13] Quintilian, quoted in William Barclay, The Letters to the Corinthians, rev. ed., The Daily Study Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1975), 35.

[14] C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (1955), chap. 14. Paraphrased.

[15] Psalm 14:1; 53:1 (NIV 1984).

[16] John Calvin, The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, trans. John W. Fraser, ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1960), 81.

[17] Matthew 17:5 (NIV 1984). See also Mark 9:7; Luke 9:35.

[18] Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, “We Are the World” (1985).

[19] Maltbie D. Babcock, “This Is My Father’s World” (1901).

[20] George W. Robinson, “I Am His, and He Is Mine” (1876).

[21] 1 John 5:12 (NIV 1984).

[22] Philippians 1:21 (paraphrased).

[23] 1 Corinthians 13:12 (KJV).

[24] Romans 8:31 (NIV 1984).

Copyright © 2025, Alistair Begg. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations for sermons preached on or after November 6, 2011 are taken from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

For sermons preached before November 6, 2011, unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version® (NIV®), copyright © 1973 1978 1984 by Biblica, Inc.TM Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Alistair Begg
Alistair Begg is Senior Pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bible teacher on Truth For Life, which is heard on the radio and online around the world.