Knowledge Puffs, But Love Builds

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info visit us at thrive-fl.org. So Pastor John has passed the baton to me. Pastor John, I just don't have an H in my name, so glad to be with you this morning as we continue to take a look at this incredible letter that the Holy Spirit inspired the Apostle Paul to write, which is First Corinthians. And as you know, over these past several weeks, Pastor John has been unpacking that letter to those believers in that city and the cities around Corinth in this Holy Spirit inspired wisdom for us who are believers in and followers of our Lord and Savior Jesus. And so this morning we want to take a look, if you have scriptures available to you, First Corinthians 8 or write that down, take a look at it later. And the theme that we want to gather under this morning is simply this, knowledge puffs up but love builds up. Now I'm gonna kind of take a running start at this, so hang in there with me, all right. A number of years ago there were a couple of books out that were entitled, how many of you remember this, Real Men Don't Eat Quiche. Anybody remember that? Yeah, all of us over a certain age. Yes, and Real Women Don't Pump Gas. Well those books described, the authors felt, what real women and real men do or do not do. So maybe we could, you know, kind of develop a list of, you know, what real pastors do or don't do. For example, real pastors don't heat the baptismal water, real pastors don't say dearly beloved, they don't wear plaid shorts to the church picnic with dark socks and tennis shoes, and they don't wear I'm a German Shepherd under their shirts. Well in a similar way I guess we could develop a list of what real Christians do and don't do, and these kind of vary depending on the background that people come out of. For example, if you came out of a conservative Bible Church you would know that in those circles real Christians love organ music, they love the King James Bible, love sermons delivered with a southern accent, you also know that real Christians don't play cards, they don't wear makeup, they don't drink, don't smoke, don't chew, and don't hang around with those who do. If you came out of a Pentecostal or charismatic background you'd say that real Christians worship with their hands raised, they swing back and forth a little bit, and they go to church at least twice a week, and if you were raised in a traditional Lutheran Church tradition you would say that real Christians use page 5 and 15 and even know what that means. How many of you even know what that means? And even though they would say that a real Christian would know Silent Night in German, it's God's language, they still say Holy Ghost in the Apostles Creed, and they would never be caught hugging someone during the greeting time or laughing at anything that resembled something humorous in a message. Now all of these are kind of inside extra biblical unwritten rules that started to be formulated in various churches as the church grew, but they're different from those biblical rules, those inspired and recorded in the scriptures that spiritual leaders talk about, and literally that we as followers of and believers in Jesus strive to follow. These others are just again these unwritten extra biblical rules that have developed, and so they were about fashion, they were about styles of music, about proper forms of recreation, or lifestyle kinds of things, and so what happens is that people in communities of faith and congregations, they started making value judgments as to who the real godly spiritual people are in their church, not so much based on their relationship with their Savior Jesus, and their desire and striving to conform their life to God's Word, but the value judgment was made more on the basis of whether or not their life was beginning to conform to these unwritten extra biblical kinds of rules. Well both in the passage that we're looking at in 1st Corinthians, which is 1st Corinthians 8, and again if you want to write this reference down, Romans 14, the Apostle Paul is concerned about these things going on in the church. So write this down and again you can look at it later. Romans 14 verse 10 Paul writes this, you then why do you judge your brother or sister? Verse 13 of Romans, therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. What the Apostle is talking about is checking to see whether or not their lives are conforming to God's Word. We need to obviously be concerned and encouraging fellow believers about that, but here he's talking about those extra biblical kinds of things, and what Paul is saying is look, this is a big church. There are many people who come from diverse backgrounds who make up the family of faith here, and there are biblical laws that certainly we all strive to comply with as we're compelled by the love that we have for our Savior Jesus who first loved us, but there are also these all kinds of t...