June 16, 2018 - Suggested Reading 1 Corinthians 1 for June 17th’s Father’s Day message on 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 in both services

“I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.”

1 Corinthians 1:10 (NIV)

It is natural for us as we read through 1 Corinthians to become myopic about certain passages like 1 Corinthians 11:2-26. We gaze at it, analyze it and fixate on specific words and arguments and lose sight of the big picture, or the big argument of 1 Corinthians. It is a necessary discipline for our Christian health to pull back from Paul’s teaching on gender differences in the leading of public worship in churches and cast our minds unto what Paul himself has said was the purpose of this letter to the Corinthians. In actual fact accepting that this purpose statement in 1:10 applies to the teaching of 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 should bring some clarity to a historically muddy passage. However you understand Paul’s argument, whether you use it to argue on one side or the other, to miss that Paul’s argument in chapter 11 is there to help a local church be perfectly united in mind and thought is to completely miss the mark of understanding the passage and therefore to miss out on the life giving message of the text. The great Baptist preacher of the 1800s Charles Spurgeon, once said that “The Gospel is like a caged lion. It does not need to be defended, it just needs to be let out of its cage.” In the Gospel and only in the Gospel are men and women declared equal - no other holy book contains this teaching. In the Gospel and only in the Gospel is the reversing of the curse of the garden and its effects on the two genders. In the Gospel and only in the Gospel can there ever be true unity between the genders, the type of unity the Paul describes in chapter 1 as being perfectly united in mind and thought. This is the goal of the teaching of chapter 11, and therefore this should be the result of us understanding the meaning of chapter 11. May God grant us the grace to get the door to the cage open tomorrow in our Father’s Day services at Parkdale.