We come now to the reading and the preaching of God's Word. And so if you will, please turn with me in your Bibles to the book of 1 Corinthians chapter 3. And before we begin reading it, you'll take your bulletins with me. There's something I'd like to point out on the outline. The title of the sermon this morning is, Are We Babes or Builders in God's Building? And in the course of preparation, I'm going to be slightly amending the title to, Are We Babes or Builders in God's Building? Part 1. We'll be looking at the first and the second points this morning, the babes and the building. And then, Lord willing, we will come next week to point three, which will be a full sermon in and of itself, the builders. And so with this in mind, let us read from 1 Corinthians chapter 3. Here again, the word, the living word of our God. But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, I follow Paul, and another, I follow Apollos, are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything. but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, Each one's work will become manifest, for the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If that work that anyone has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy and you are that temple. Let no one deceive himself. If anyone of you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, He catches the wise in their craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile. So let no one boast in men, for 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 Christ's, and Christ is God's. May God bless the reading of this word. Let us pray together once again. Gracious Lord, as we come now to the reading and preaching of your word, we pray earnestly for your spirit to dwell within our hearts, to enliven this word, that it might not be seeds scattered upon hard soil, but that you might till the soil of our hearts, that this seed would fall upon ground that would bear fruit, soil that would bear fruit to your glory. We cannot do these things in our own strength, and so we pray that Your Spirit would attend to our hearts, and that Your Son would be exalted here in our midst. We pray these things in His name. Amen. Well, whether it was in church, or maybe at the grocery store or the post office, or worst of all, on a long airplane trip, we've all probably shared a similar experience. watching a distraught mother dealing with a fussy and a screaming baby. Maybe some of us have been those distraught mothers. And as much as we might be tempted to be angry with a baby, we know that that simply isn't an option. The baby is simply being a baby. It is natural, at least in this fallen world, it is natural for babies to cry. As a matter of fact, babies do many things that, though we may be tempted to frustration, we know that they are simply infants being infants. Infants constantly need to be fed. How frustrating. They can't feed themselves. Infants throw up on themselves, and sometimes on other people, and they don't even clean up after themselves. But as parents who are rejoicing over a new life that God has entrusted to our care, we rejoice, don't we, to feed the baby, to clean up the messes, and even though it is at times difficult, to endure the fussing with gentleness. But now imagine your teenage son or daughter behaving in the same way. you wouldn't be rejoicing anymore, would you? Far from rejoicing, you would find their behavior cause for great concern. And for good reason, because the behavior that we find so natural in infants, much of that behavior we expect for infants to mature into children, to mature into young adults, and for those behaviors to pass away with the maturation of age. That's the way things are expected to go, and when they don't go according to the way that we expect, you still love your child deeply, but precisely because you do love them, you are concerned for them, and you are concerned for their development. And this is the dilemma that Paul addresses here in 1 Corinthians chapter 3. You see, Paul had planted the Corinthian church, and he had rejoiced over the new life that God had brought about in these young believers. What a joy it must have been for him at first to feed them the milk of the word, to clean up after the messes as it were, and to endure the fussing. But then the days and the months turned into years, and the maturation progress of these new believers was not progressing as expected. And now Paul must write this letter to the Corinthian church and say there in verse 2, I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not ready for it, for you are still of the flesh. They were still, to use the language of the King James in verse 1, they were still babes in Christ. And that was Paul's intense preoccupation as a minister of the gospel to bring Christians to maturity. To the church in Colossae, Paul writes, Him we proclaim, that is Christ we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil, struggling with all His energy that He powerfully works within me. So this is the task that now Paul sets himself to in the Corinthian church. In this third chapter of 1 Corinthians, warning these believers and teaching them that he might see this church grow out of their spiritual infancy into greater maturity. And as Paul addresses the particular issues within this church that were manifestations of this immaturity, as is often the case in Paul's letters, as he addresses their wrong-headed practice, he brings us into deep theological territory. And it is into this territory that we will begin to venture this morning. I should add as a disclaimer as we begin that We're not looking at this text here on the first Lord's Day of Worship at Trilake's Reformed Church, because I think that this congregation suffers the same pitch of immaturity that is described here in 1 Corinthians, at least certainly not to the same degree that we see. But in addressing where the Corinthians have erred, Paul lays out for us, and Christ himself teaches us through his servant, deep and profound truths about the nature, the identity, and the growth of the Church of Jesus Christ. Truths about who we are as the Church and how we are to seek growth and maturity that we must understand clearly and embrace if we are to faithfully follow the Lord Jesus in a world where there are so many conflicting voices as to how to be the Church of Christ. To go straight to the root of the problem, the immaturity that had gridlocked the Corinthian spiritual growth was their worldliness, bringing the thought patterns and the behavior patterns of the world into the Church of Christ. And so this passage is of great concern to us inasmuch as the same worldliness that plagued the Corinthian church is alive and well in the church today, especially as we take a broad view of the church in America as a whole. Truth be told, none of us wants to think of ourselves as immature. And so we are ever spiritually prone and sinfully prone to think of ourselves deserving of a greater approbation of maturity than perhaps we should. And Paul instructs us here in 1 Corinthians 3 that spiritual maturity is not measured by appearances. But it's measured by the extent to which our thoughts, our words, and our actions are conformed to the wisdom of God found in His Word. No church is free, ours included, no church is free from worldly influence. And so let us pay careful attention to Paul's teaching and admonition, as we as a young and baby congregation, as it were, seek to be a congregation that faithfully and according to the Lord's blessing, fruitfully builds on our most precious foundation. For there can be no other foundation than that which was laid which is Jesus Christ. And so as we begin, we'll examine more closely those aspects of the Corinthian church that have led the Apostle to declare these believers babes in Christ. Look back with me at verse 10 of chapter 1. Paul is now taking up a subject in chapter 3 that he began to address initially right at the beginning of his letter. After he finishes his customary greeting and his giving of thanks, he says this in verse 10. I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment. For it has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there is quarreling among you, my brothers. What I mean to say is that each one of you says, I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I follow Cephas, or I follow Christ. And so when Paul takes up this subject again in chapter 3, he recapitulates these themes there in verse 3. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, I follow Paul, and another, I follow Apollos, are you not merely being human? The problem is clear enough that there are factions that have developed within the Corinthian Church, and that people have divided themselves up, that they are taking sides according to each of these factions. And Paul says that these factions are clear evidence of jealousy and strife. And that that jealousy and strife are again clear evidences of worldliness that has crept in to the Corinthian Church. And so for the first two chapters of this letter, Paul is teaching and stressing the antithesis and the incompatibility between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God, which Paul summarizes as Christ and Him crucified. And now in chapter 3, Paul turns back his attention to those factious tendencies of the Corinthians that he rebuked early on in chapter 1. And the basic sinfulness of these factions and these warring groups within the church seems clear enough. But there is another layer to Paul's rebuke here in chapter 3. You see, Paul perceives that the Corinthians have not yet been weaned off of worldly patterns of thinking and behaving. That is the root issue that Paul now addresses in his letter. Their idea of church, of what church is supposed to be and how it grows and how to conduct oneself within the church is still adjusted to the means and the methods of the world and not adjusted to those of the Word of God. And so in verses 1 and 3, Paul calls them people of the flesh and says in verses 3 and 4 that they are behaving in a merely human way. The Corinthians were still beholden to that same worldly wisdom that Paul declares in chapter 2, is doomed to pass away along with the rulers of this age. And so this diagnosis becomes most evident if you look with me at the end of chapter 3 in verses 18 and 19. Paul is challenging the Corinthians to become fools in the eyes of the world and according to the world's wisdom so that they might become truly wise and might come to that maturity of which Paul so strenuously labors in all of his ministerial activity among them. And to go deeper into the problem that arose this worldliness within the church, in Corinth, during Paul's ministry, sophistry was the trend of the day. It was the spirit of the age. And sophists were nothing if they were not debaters and intellectuals and orators. They were people who would gather together and they would discuss issues of philosophy. And within the sophists, you would have disciples. And each one of these groups would say, well, I am a so-and-so, or I am a such-and-such. And each of these groups would debate with one another, and the victor would arise from how well you could persuade your opponent of the position you were trying to argue. They were skilled in winning arguments with rhetoric, no matter what the cost, even at the expense of truth itself. And what Paul perceives is that what was so common in the age in which the Corinthian church lived, what was so common in the culture, had crept its way into the church, and that the Corinthian church was still enamored with the ways of the sophists. Look with me at chapter 2, beginning in verse 1. And I, when I came to you brothers, did not come proclaiming the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom, for I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not implausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God." And here Paul is cutting straight to the heart of this wisdom of the world that the Corinthians had learned from the sophists that they were bringing into the church. And he says that the true persuasion is the work of the Spirit. through the straightforward clarity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. That men and women aren't converted or saved simply because someone can speak eloquently or pull together an argument of beautiful rhetorical skill. But rather, conversion is the work of the regeneration of the Spirit as the Spirit works with the simplicity of the Gospel to convict men and women of their sin and cause them to flee to the Lord Jesus Christ and find in His crucifixion the remedy for all of the sins that stand against us. They were true believers. Paul says that they are in Christ. They are babes, but they are babes in Christ. But nevertheless, they are still behaving, as Paul says, in a human way. In both style of rhetoric and the method of their disputation, they were still thinking and acting like children of the world, rather than children of their Father above who had borne them by the work of the Spirit. They had yet to break free from the values and the concerns of the world. And here is the crux of the issue. Look with me in verse 2 of 1 Corinthians 3. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not ready, for you are still of the flesh. It's the worldliness of the Corinthians that has stunted their spiritual growth. The jealousy and strife evident in the life of the church was blinding and stifling to these believers and it kept them from seeing the glory of what God is doing in their midst. the glorious building that God is constructing for His own glory in this age. Paul has made it clear in the opening chapters of this letter that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of God revealed in Christ Jesus. They cannot be mixed to any spiritual prophet. Use the world's methods and the world's wisdom and chances are you'll get the world's result. that men, rather than God, will be exalted and receive the glory, and that jealousy and strife will be the sure result of that exaltation of men. And this is exactly what is happening in the Corinthian Church. Factions have formed, their tendency is towards the exaltation of men, and of course there will be jealousy and strife depending on whose faction you belong to, as each one strives to exalt one over another. And of course, we don't know anything about the formation of personality cults in America, do we? There are no personality cults in American churches, right? This is a message for the Corinthian church that we've progressed since then. We could never fall into the same trap of spiritual immaturity. Well, the message that the Corinthians so desperately needed to hear is a message that we still desperately need to hear in our own churches. That the wisdom of the world plus the church equals a worldly church. Period. Many churches think that they can harness worldly methods and wisdom in order to reach a certain audience. But what they fail to realize is that they are the audience that's being reached by the wisdom of the world. We cannot act as though the ends justify the means and that we can bring in worldly wisdom in order to reach a certain end that we have in mind, because the means are not neutral. And over time, it will not be a certain means that we can control to a certain end, but it will be those very means that shape and control the end to which we may not want to be brought. that we may wake up and find that the end that we are left with by the means of the world's wisdom is an end that we never intended when we first began. The subtlety of Satan is most apparent in this regard. If he can corrupt the church slowly through the introduction of worldly thought patterns rather than by the open contradiction of the message, all the better. The church will imbibe the world's method of propagation and the world's method of self-identification And over time, she will destroy the message herself. After she has bought into the world's wisdom, there is nothing left than to play that out to its final end, and to receive the fruit of those ways, which is the exaltation of men, and the subjugation of the glory of God to the interests of man. It has happened in multiple ways in our own generation, in our own time. the prosperity gospel, the post-modern gospel of many emergent churches, the personality cult gospel of televangelism. In all of these cases, it's not the church dictating the mode of the culture, but rather it is the culture that is dictating the tenor of the church. Yet Jesus declares to us that my kingdom is not of this world. The church must be the savor and aroma of otherworldliness in terms of the wisdom that leads to salvation that can be found through the revelation of God alone. That the rulers of this age, had they understood it, would not have crucified the Lord of glory. And so when we imbibe the wisdom of the world as Paul here describes it, we are playing with fire. The danger is not so much that the gospel can lose its saving power. The danger is that we wake up one day and find that we have an altogether different gospel than the one that alone has the power to bring life to men and women, wherein Christ is all in all. The more the Corinthians inculcated this wisdom of the world the more that they were stunted and prevented from progressing in their faith, and the less influential the gospel was in their lives and in the life of the church. Their worldliness had frozen their spiritual growth in a state of infancy. We cannot hold both the wisdom of the world and the wisdom of the cross close to our chest. One or the other must give way. And so do we desire greater spiritual maturity as individual believers? Do we desire as a congregation that this church would be marked by a mature Christian faith? Let us endeavor all the more to subject all of our thoughts, all of our actions, all of our words to the wisdom of God found in the scriptures alone. that this church might be one marked by a rigorous faithfulness to the teaching of Christ in His Word. May Tri-Lakes Reformed Church be a place where our only boast and our glory is Christ and Him crucified. And when we emerge from spiritual infancy in whatever stage we are in our Christian walk, We discover that we are part of a glorious work that God is about in this age. That when we leave behind the exaltation of men, we find that God is about the business of exalting His Son. in the midst of his people, and that this work involves us in a very intimate way, and that the results and the consequences of our participation in this life have great consequence, either for gain or for loss. And this now brings us to look at the building of which Paul speaks. If you look with me in verses 5 through 9, there are two images that Paul uses to describe the church. One is agricultural, and the other is architectural. You can see them side by side there in verse 9. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. And earlier in verse 6, Paul spoke about himself as the one who planted, and Apollos as the one who watered. Drawing out this agricultural imagery he's using to describe the Church of Christ. And then in verses 10 through 15, Paul heavily emphasizes the building imagery, the architectural imagery of a building being built with all of these different building materials according to their kind. And then climatically in verses 16 and 17, Paul declares to the Corinthian church that they themselves are the temple of God and that God's spirit dwells in them. And the first thing that would come to mind to a believer who is familiar with the Old Testament was how deeply rooted Paul's imagery is in the language of the Old Testament. We can go all the way back to the Garden of Eden. We read about the creation of man from Genesis 1 this morning. And we see a place wherein God dwelt with his people, and wherein Adam was given the commission of both planting and building, a planting of a garden and a building of a kingdom for the glory of God. He was commanded to be fruitful and multiply, to tend and expand that garden paradise to the glory of God, even to the ends of the earth. And after the fall, in accordance with the promise of the covenant, that I will be your God and you will be my people, God showed that he was about the work of commissioning his people to build places wherein he could dwell with them as their God. Beginning with the tents of the Patriarchs and proceeding to the tabernacle in the wilderness after the Exodus, receiving a more permanent form in the building of Solomon's Temple, God was gradually expanding the idea of what it meant for him to dwell with his people, for he to be their God and for them to be his own possession as his people. If you'll look with me in verses 10 through 17 of our text, Paul's language draws on several Old Testament passages regarding the building of the tabernacle and the temple. And turn back with me to Exodus chapter 35, There in those early days of the church after the exodus when God had saved them and they were sojourning in the wilderness on the way to the promised land, God gave instructions as to how to build the tabernacle, as to how to build that place wherein he would dwell with his people. And in Exodus 35 and verse 30, we read this, Then Moses said to the people of Israel, See, the Lord has called by name, Bezalel, the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah. And He has filled him with the Spirit of God, with skill and intelligence, with knowledge, and with all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold and silver and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood for work in every skilled craft. And He has inspired him to teach both him and Aholiad, the son of Ahasumac, of the tribe of Dan. And if you look at the end of verse 35, by any sort of workman or skilled designer. And in the Greek text of the Old Testament, that same word that Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 3 as he describes himself as a master worker, as a skilled master laborer, a master builder of the house of God, that same word is used here in Exodus to describe those who are given the Spirit of God in order to construct the tabernacle. And if you'll turn ahead to 1 Chronicles 29, we'll find that Paul draws very heavily on another explicit reference from this passage in 1 Chronicles 29. Remember that Solomon was given the charge to build the Temple in Jerusalem. And here in 1 Chronicles 29, David is preparing for his son to build the temple, and he says in verse 1, David the king said to all the assembly, Solomon my son, whom alone God has chosen, is young and inexperienced, and the work is great, for the palace will not be for man, but for the Lord God. So I have provided for the house of my God so far as I was able, the gold for the things of gold, the silver for the things of silver, and the bronze for the things of bronze, the iron for the things of iron, and wood for the things of wood, besides great quantities of onyx and stones for setting, antinomy, colored stones, all sorts of precious stones, and marble." And goes on to speak about the quantities of gold and silver that he was going to give for the construction of the temple. And it's very clear, as Paul writes this chapter 3 of 1 Corinthians, that he is thinking back to the building of the tabernacle and to the building of the temple. And then in verse 16 he declares that the Corinthians themselves are the temple of God. And so the connection in his mind between Solomon's temple and the church is clear enough that all of redemptive history has been working forward to that day where through Christ and by the Spirit God would reveal to his people the spiritual glory of the dwelling place that he was creating for them to reside together as a God and his people together. That there is still a temple and that there is still an edifice upon which the church is being built, but that that edifice is a spiritual one wherein believers are those living stones the Apostle Peter speaks of that are being built up as a spiritual house. And so Paul begins to draw these believers out of their spiritual immaturity by pointing them to the glorious reality of what God is accomplishing in this age. What great works He is working in their midst. That she is a temple of God. That the Corinthians, as a body of believers, are the place wherein God has placed His Spirit to dwell in their midst. And if you look with me again at verses 16 and 17, it's important to recognize that in these verses, all of the U's that we read are not singular, but they're plural. And Paul here is not referring to individual believers as a temple or as the dwelling place of the Spirit, but rather the church as a corporate body. Now it's very true that later in chapter 6 he will in fact call the individual bodies of each believer temples of the Holy Spirit. But that is not Paul's thought here. Paul is pointing people to who they are as a corporate body. Remember, the problem of these divisions involved the church as a whole. The Corinthians were splitting up into factions and thereby dividing this temple. And Paul says, no, you need to look in the mirror and realize who you are. His cure for their spiritual immaturity is to say to them, be who you are. God has made you into a temple for His dwelling. He has placed His Spirit among you, and so these divisions and these factions are utterly contrary to your identity, to what God is doing in your midst, and the glory of how God is building the unity of this temple to the praise of His grace. Would you want to walk into a building wherein different parts of the building were warring against each other and trying to tear each other down? That sounds awfully dangerous, doesn't it? And so Paul uses the image of a building for good reason. For we are not to war amongst ourselves as though there are no spiritual consequences, but that as the temple of God is the dwelling place of the Spirit, we are to seek in all things unity and peace, so that we might dwell together with the Spirit in the peace and unity of the fruits of the gospel. Grow up pulses. Realize that your worldliness is at odds with your identity, with who God has made you to be in the Lord Jesus Christ. God's holy temple is to be a unity. And so from the very beginning of the life of this congregation, let us endeavor to grow up into this unity of peace, to preserve at all costs this unity that Christ has purchased with His own blood. There will no doubt be times of struggle, times where division may be imminent. But as far as it concerns us, let us be at peace and let us seek in the Gospel to find that unity and common ground that is surely powerful enough to bring healing where there was once division. God's building is to be a unity because we are all built upon the same foundation. Look with me at verse 11, this precious foundation on which the whole structure is built. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. And as we close, thinking about our foundation, It shouldn't be surprising for us that Paul proclaims Christ as the one true foundation of the church. Look back at chapter 1 verse 30. Paul says that God has made Christ to be our wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. And then just a couple verses later in chapter 2, he declares that he resolved to know nothing among the Corinthians except Christ and Him crucified. But this is precisely what the Corinthians had failed to grasp in all of their exaltation of men. That in all their emphasis on personalities and gifts, they had failed to major and to focus and to put all of their energy into exalting the one for whom all of those personalities and gifts were given, that Christ might be the one who is exalted and glorified. Remember the rhetorical questions that Paul asked in chapter 1. Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? The answer to all of these questions being a resounding no. Christ is the one in whom all the spiritual blessings of the heavenly places reside. From the very beginning of the church this was true. When God gave the promise of redemption to Adam and Eve after the fall, the promise was not that they would have to reverse the effects of the fall in their own strength, but the promise was that the seed of the woman would destroy the works of the devil. And so there is only one foundation to this spiritual edifice, because there is only one who has conquered sin and death, who has delivered up for our trespasses and raised for our justification. And this is echoed in that common Old Testament confession. We sang it in Psalm 19, that the Lord is the rock of salvation. Christ is our rock, our fortress, and our deliverer, as David writes in Psalm 18. And as we think about the rock on which the church is built, we cannot separate the Lord Jesus from that which he has commanded us to observe and to teach. Remember how the Sermon on the Mount ends. Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall because it had been built on the rock. And of course the house that was built on the sand is destroyed when adversity comes. Our foundation is Christ as He is the incarnate Word, and as He is revealed to us in the written Word, we must therefore cleave ourselves to the Word of God. Only the Bible reveals to us the glory of the Savior, and only the Bible gives a clear and unequivocal alternative to the pale and fading glory of man. Remember from our call to worship this morning, All flesh is grass, and all its beauty is like the flower of the field, but the Word of our God will stand forever." In other words, when our foundation is Christ as He is revealed in the Word, then the foundation that we are built upon as the Church is as firmly fixed as the Word of God itself. But if something other than Christ is admitted into this foundation, the edifice as a whole can no longer stand. Many, many people claim the name of Christ, but the more human elements and the more human wisdom that is allowed into the foundation of those churches, the clearer it becomes to the eyes of those who have eyes to see that when the rain falls and when the waves will buffet that church, the house will fall and great will be the fall of it. We cannot change the message we have been given to preach to fit the audience. Rather, we cleave ourselves to the purity of that message in order that the audience might be changed to the glory of God. And so there is a fixed foundation, but at the same time there is a dynamic up-building to this church. And it's crucial to understand that as we seek the expansion of the Kingdom, just as the foundation should be ever sure that we might cleave ourselves to protecting it from all admission of worldly wisdom, so too there is a dynamic aspect to the way in which that structure is built up from the ground on top of the foundation. Jude tells us to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints. And so there is a fixed aspect to the expansion of the kingdom. But at the same time, we are commanded to go, therefore, into all the nations of the world preaching this foundation. And so there is also a very dynamic aspect to the expansion of the kingdom as well. Both of these dynamics are set forth in their proper relation in the Great Commission. Does Christ say to us, all authority in heaven on earth has been given to me. Stay put therefore, and hope disciples will come to you, teaching them whatsoever you think will best suit the spirit of the age. No, right? It's teaching them whatsoever I have commanded you. hence the fixed foundation of our faith. And it is go, therefore, into all the nations of the earth, hence this dynamic expansion that we are to be about as the people of God as well. So much trouble in the Church today has been caused by the attempt to mix these two concepts. If we apply the fixed nature of our foundation to the expansion of the Kingdom, We run the risk of putting our lamp under a basket and smothering the power of the gospel to change men and women even to the ends of the earth. But if we apply the liberality of the expansion of the kingdom to the fixed nature of our foundation, then we may well wake up one day and realize that we have a faith of our own making that has no power to save. And so the more we desire to see men and women saved, the more ardently we should contend for the faith once delivered, for the immutable foundation of our faith, which is the Lord Jesus Christ alone. And the more we see the grace and the glory of that same Lord, the more ardently we should apply ourselves to preaching the message of His gospel, even to the ends of the earth. And so the foundation remains forever fixed while the dynamic up-building of the Church will progress day by day until it is completed to the glory of God and our Lord Jesus Christ comes again to receive us to Himself. And so by God's grace and for His glory, May this church, may Tri-Lakes Reformed Church be a place where many babes are born in Christ to the glory of the Father's grace and where all of us press forward to spiritual maturity in Christ, forsaking the wisdom of the world and cleaving ourselves to Christ alone, the only foundation of our faith and the rock of our salvation. Let us pray. Gracious Father, we pray that we would never think ourselves immune to the wisdom of the world and so become complacent and allow ourselves to be subtly fooled into using the world's means to accomplishing the ends of the kingdom. Lord, may we cleave ourselves more and more to Your Word, to the glorious Christ that is revealed to us in this Word, that our foundation may remain ever fixed, and that this message would expand to all the nations of the earth, and this building, this glorious temple would be built to the exaltation of You, not to men, to the exaltation of the Son, that name which is above every name, to which one day every knee shall bow. We pray that by your grace you would make us a humble and a faithful people, that we would dedicate ourselves to this foundation and to no other, that we might see your grace magnified in all the nations of this earth and in this place where you have placed us to exalt the Lord Jesus Christ. We pray in his name. Amen.