1 Corinthians 7:17-24

May 20, 2018

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

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The sermon starts at 18:50 in the audio file.

Or, How Salvation Transposes Our Earthly Callings

Some motivations work on themselves, as in, certain feelings produce more of the same feeling. The more they eat, the more hungry they are.

Two such motivations are guilt and discontent. Once they start they are hard to stop. Both have in common a misapplied standard and a focus on self.

There’s a great line in Moby Dick, when a man has fallen overboard in the middle of the ocean and all the boats are getting further away, and the man is left to think about himself. “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” (Melville, 453). He consumes his own thinking; he’s the center of his little universe; he’s all he’s got.

Because we are sinners we can mess up even the best things. Jesus died on the cross for our sins. He paid our penalty so that all who believe in Him can be free. The word of the cross is the power of God in us, it creates spiritual life in us while also uniting us with the spiritual body of fellow believers.

But, with our new spiritual life we start to think that if certain things changed, then we could be even more spiritual. Here is where the sanctification train often derails into sand. When we look around in the church we start to compare ourselves with others and suppose that they are more spiritual. They may even tell us that, yes, they are more spiritual, and then explain that we could be like them if only we were in their situation. We feel guilty for not being more spiritual, and we feel discontent at not being in another situation.

This means we are judging by the wrong standards and focused on the wrong things. It also means that we should better understand our calling.

In 1 Corinthians 7 Paul addresses the guilt among some of the believers causing them to consider certain lifestyles that may be more spiritual. In particular, married people considered that celibacy might make them better Christians. Single people thought they could be better Christians than married people. Other married people thought they should divorce their spouse to be single, and those Christians married to unbelievers thought distancing themselves would be better. Paul corrects all these errors, and he follows up with more examples.

Verses 17-24 are the general principle and exhortation that verses 1-16 are built upon, and that verses 25 through the end of the chapter depend on. In the first part of the chapter Paul explained that the ideal marital state is being content in the state God gave. In the last part of the chapter Paul will explain more about how to live in light of the present distress. In this paragraph he shows how it works: the better calling is not a certain earthly station, but being called to salvation transposes every earthly station.

“Call” or “called” comes up eight times in this paragraph. Most of the time it refers to the call of salvation, God’s supernatural work to regenerate and give faith to His elect. We also know that God calls men and women to various roles, assignments, jobs. The word voco in Latin means “I call,” and in English a vocation is one’s calling.

Our earthly and our spiritual calling comes from God, and He likes where He wants us. It’s we who start ranking better callings. It’s we who start dividing based on superficial differences. But salvation is the better calling, and it puts all the other callings into perspective.

Three times Paul says to remain (verse 17, 20, and 24). We’ll see two examples (ethnic and economic) that depend on this imperative and then a summary.

Ethnic Calling (verses 17-19)

Being single or married, in and of itself, doesn’t determine spiritual standing. Neither does being Jew or Gentile. What c[...]