Aim: Teach christian morality.
Many Christians and their contemporary churches are just as worldly as the surrounding culture, except that they practice their worldliness in the name of Jesus -- thinking and saying one thing while doing another. This is not how things should be. Christians are to be actively involved in the centers of human culture, influencing those centers with biblical values and practices. Christians are to influence the centers of culture, not be influenced by them. The difference is critical and has proven to be difficult to accomplish.
The classic formulation is for Christians to be in the culture but not of the culture, to live in its midst without being caught up in it, without being defined by it, without finding their identity in it. Unfortunately, too many people today are in the church and of the world. They have it backwards. They are caught up in a baptized version of popular culture through without realizing that there is not much difference between those who covet sin a little and those who covet sin a lot.
This is the primary mechanism that drains Christianity of its strength in our day. People think that they are Christian because they "walked the aisle," or because they go to church, or because they grew up in the church. The world and the church are awash in a kind of logical disconnect, where people say they believe in something but act as if they don't -- except possibly sometimes at church. At church they dress their secular beliefs in Christian clothes. They believe those who teach that church and God and religion are fine, but must not mix with government, politics or the work place, that it is wrong to practice Christianity if someone objects to it. But this flies in the face of the biblical created order.
In God's culture Adam was created before Eve, and she was created differently, by a different process, a derivative process, and to function in a different role. Adam, the man, had greater responsibility because he was created first and given a job. Eve was to be his helper. So, his greater responsibility required greater authority. Sinful women have envied Adam's position of authority over the years, thinking him to have been more important or of a higher status in God's eyes. That's not the way that God sees it, but it is the way that sinful people see it. Women (and others) have striven for equality without understanding that their claim to equality is based on the presumption that they know more than God, who created them, or that they are more moral than God, who did not institute the kind of equality that sinners want.
The following facts are evident in 1 Corinthians chapter 5:
It was common knowledge that there was sexual immorality going on in the Corinthian church. Vs 1-2.
Sexual immorality had been pretty much a way of life for these people before they were converted, and they evidently didn't see anything terribly wrong with it.One church member was living in sin with either his mother or step-mother, and the brethren were tolerating it.
• At times, tolerance can be downright treason.Paul rebuked them for not mourning over this tragedy. See James 4:9 and Psalms 51:17.
• Paul's heart had been broken by this corruption, 2 Corinthians 2:4. Paul judged the man guilty, as his sin was common knowledge and orders him to be dismissed from the church.
Work cited-Herny Matthews commentary, Hoffmans commentary on 1 Corinthians, New International Version Bible.
Watch for part 2 on: The Disorder of Mixing the World with the Church – 1 Corinthians 5:9-13
