If you'll take out your Bibles and follow me now to our Old Testament reading this morning, Psalm 1, verses 1 through 6. It's a great opening of the Psalter, which shows us the way of righteousness and the way of wickedness. A key piece of background in the Old Testament for Paul's admonishment against sin and wickedness in 2 Corinthians, which we'll look at in our sermon text. Psalm 1, verses 1 through 6, if you're using a Pew Bible, you can find that reading on page 568. Page 568 of the Pew Bible. Psalm 1. First, let's go to our God that he would give us light from his word. Oh Lord, we do thank you that you are a God who speaks. You make Yourself known that You do that, showing us Your righteousness, Your holiness, confronting our sin, and yet You also do that in Your grace as You seek to remedy that sin and all that it has inflicted upon us. We thank You that that remedy is provided fully, completely, sufficiently in Christ, that we come and we meet Him here in Your Word. the one who is the word made flesh. So come Holy Spirit now and open our eyes that we might behold wondrous things out of your word. We ask these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Psalm 1. Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers, But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. The wicked are not so, but are like chaff that the wind drives away. Therefore, the wicked will not stand in the judgment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. For the Lord knows the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish." If we turn now to our New Testament reading, 2 Corinthians chapter 12, verses 19 through 21, our New Testament reading as well as our scripture passage for our sermon as we continue now the series in 2 Corinthians. If you're using a Pew Bible, you can find that reading on page 1,233. Page 1,233 of the Pew Bible, 2 Corinthians 12, beginning in verse 19. The Apostle Paul writes, have you been thinking all along that we have been defending ourselves to you? It is in the sight of God that we have been speaking in Christ. and all for your up-building, beloved. For I fear that perhaps when I come, I may find you not as I wish, and that you may find me not as you wish, that perhaps there may be quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder. I fear that when I come again, my God may humble me before you and I may have to mourn over many of those who sinned earlier and have not repented of the impurity, sexual immorality, and sensuality that they have practiced. Your word is a lamp to my feet. I am a progressive Christian. There, I said it. Now, before you rush to call up the Presbyterian of the Midwest and initiate an investigation into me, please let me define exactly what I mean. The term progressive has been commandeered in our culture and has become nothing more than a synonym for anything associated with leftist ideologies. And behind its usage lies the vestiges of the metanarrative, or the big overarching story and assumption of the Enlightenment. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Enlightenment taught that a supposed dawn of a new age of reason had broken out in Europe, which would inevitably lead the world into an ever-increasing state of progress. It was assumed that scientific discovery and reason would conquer eventually all superstition and human misery, ushering humanity into a golden age of reason and progressive improvement. And that worldview, of course, was shattered to pieces by the First and Second World Wars. And yet its underlying expectations die hard. To say that you are a progressive in our culture carries something of those same assumptions. but now they have been wedded to the sensibilities of the sexual revolution and the adaptations of Marxism which inhabit the critical theories of our time. And so hear me, that is not what I mean when I say that I am a progressive Christian. So much of what's presumed to be among the causes of progress are anything but that. Much of what's taken to be progressive does not, in fact, advance humanity, but rather seeks to disintegrate foundational principles of human life. This is true in Christianity as well. What most people mean when they declare themselves to be progressive Christians really amounts not to progress, but to deterioration. The deterioration of Christianity as it is neutered, tamed, and put on the leash of the proclivities of our culture. The great theologian of old Princeton, B.E. Warfield, he sounds an insightful warning against this. Warfield writes this, he says, let us assert that the history of theology has been and ever must be a progressive orthodoxy. But let us equally loudly assert that progressive orthodoxy and retrogressive heterodoxy can scarcely be convertible terms. Progressive orthodoxy implies, first, that we are orthodox, and secondly, that we are progressively orthodox. That is, that we are ever growing more and more orthodox as more and more truth is being established. And Warfield's exhortation puts us on the right track. This is what it means, truly, to be a progressive Christian. It's not that you're busy pruning the scriptures of all of the things that are objectionable to your culture, but that you're increasing in your conformity to the truth of God's Word. To be a Christian means to be one who is advancing. to be one who is growing, to be one who is progressing, progressing in your knowledge of the truth of Jesus Christ and the life of holiness to which that truth calls you. To be in Christ means for you to be someone who is being built up into something new and something marvelous. It means, as we see here in Paul's words, that you're being edified, that you're being built up. You're being developed and constructed into the splendor of what it means for God to come and to make you his home. And Christ has come to call you out of the decaying ruin of this passing age and increasingly to adapt you to the new creation which he has secured. And in that light, you must realize then that there is no other kind of Christian than a progressive Christian. Jesus is in the business of advancing his work in your life, and he will not let his purposes be thwarted. This is true progress. So the truth I want you to see this morning is this. It's there in the notes for the sermon in the bulletin, along with the points. It's this. Flee the destructive path of sin for the edification of Christ. Flee the destructive path of sin for the edification of Christ. We'll consider just two points this morning, and that may be the most unorthodox thing you hear in my sermon today, that I have just two points. But here are our two points. First, the way of destruction, and second, the way of construction. The way of destruction, the way of construction. So let's begin with our first point, the way of destruction. Paul's closing in on the conclusion of this great epistle to the Church of Corinth, and here at the end of chapter 12, he reminds the Corinthians that he will soon come to them again for another visit. A key purpose in his composition of this letter has been to do some groundwork ahead of his visit so that his time with the Corinthians when he arrives would be more profitable. Hence, here in verse 20, he states that he's coming to them once more, but then he expresses this sense of apprehension about what he might encounter when he returns to this church. In verses 20 and 21, he gives two different, really, catalogs of sins, which he dreads that he might discover festering in this congregation when he meets them once more. The second of these two lists, which we find at the end of verse 21, that list has to do with sexual sins. And it may seem like this is kind of falling out of the sky here, because this is the first time in the letter of 2 Corinthians that Paul has explicitly addressed the question of sexual immorality. The focus of this epistle has been on other matters. And yet, the way that Paul words things here in verse 21 clues us into the fact that his concern does not just drop out of nowhere. He says in verse 21 that he fears that he may have to mourn over many of those who sinned earlier, sinned earlier, and had not repented. Paul has in view a history, a history that he has already addressed at great length. Though the epistle of 2 Corinthians does not devote much space, really, just this verse, to correcting sexual sin, we know, of course, that the epistle of 1 Corinthians does at great length. 1 Corinthians 5, Paul has to admonish the Corinthians to conclude a case of church discipline that involved a particularly heinous case of sexual sin, as Paul puts it there, that was of a kind not even tolerated among pagans. First Corinthians chapter seven, Paul writes extensively about marriage and singleness, and in a way that provides a framework for chastity, conjugal rights, and marital fidelity. And of course, in 1 Corinthians 6, at the end, we read one of the most significant treatments of sexual ethics that can be found in Scripture. And so even though Paul has not allocated much of his attention in 2 Corinthians to the matter of sexual purity, we see here he nevertheless has this sense of foreboding that the problems he had addressed earlier had not gone away. He fears that a number of the Corinthians had still not repented, still not taken to heart the call of the gospel and put to death the sexual immorality that they practiced in the past. You see, the Corinthians lived in a pagan world that had sexual sensibilities quite similar to our own. Not only were all kinds of sexual sins tolerated, they were even celebrated and even invested with religious significance. The Temple of Aphrodite was prominent in Corinth, and that temple incorporated into it the practice of cult prostitution as an element of its liturgical practices. And this is something that we do well to recognize in our own cultural moment, that idolatry and sexual immorality have had a long relationship with one another. It's always been the perverse instinct of fallen humanity to elevate its sexual obsessions to a kind of divine status. Though our current cultural obsession with sexuality does not always have overt religious underpinnings, they're still there implicitly. Certainly the manner in which sexuality is invested with a kind of ultimate significance in the way that our culture thinks about identity and self-fulfillment. Underneath of that impulse is something quite old, not something new. Merely the expression of a very ancient darkness. And though for many an overt connection between religion and sexuality is not there, there are many for whom it is. This is finding its way into the halls of the church. Those who want to baptize and celebrate sexual immorality is part of the religious worship of God's people. The sexualization of religion that was involved in the kind of cult prostitution that inhabited Corinth's world is not far removed from the attempts of modern churches to wrap the cross in a rainbow flag. I think about this every time I drive past a church and I see somewhere either on its lawn or on its sign a rainbow flag, and I think of all of the things that a congregation could broadcast to the world, it's one of the very first things it sees about it. Why would they choose a symbol of sexuality? Why would that have priority over everything else? It is really nothing more than an expression of the basic instinct that is at work in cult prostitution of the ancient world, and that is the deification of man's sexual obsessions. Such sexual obsessions, whether they be heterosexual or homosexual, are radically counter to the gospel. The liberation of the gospel brings to us this freedom that calls us to subordinate our sexual cravings to a more ultimate identity, a liberating identity, the identity that we are given in our union with Christ, the identity that tells us you're not your own. You were bought with a price, and therefore glorify God with your body. And it's important for us to understand how these sexual sins stand opposite of the sort of up-building Paul talks about in verse 19. His goal is to build them up, but these things have the opposite effect. Our culture does not assume that, though. Our culture largely assumes that unbridled sexual expression and gratification are the pinnacle of self-realization. However, what the gospel calls you to recognize is that the opposite is, in fact, true. To give in to an unrestrained embrace of your sexual desires is a profoundly tyrannizing and dehumanizing experience. Certainly sex is a good gift from our good God, created by him to be at the center of the love and intimacy that define a marriage. But the way humanity has violently wrenched human sexuality out of those God-defined boundaries has amounted to anything but the realization of the self, at least the self as it has been created and defined by God. Sexual sin degrades the self. It reduces our body and the body of others merely to instruments of selfishness. and it provides us a fleeting experience of pleasure that brings in its train shame, degradation, and emptiness. So against the rhetoric of our culture, a rhetoric which sadly has invaded many corners of the church, this needs to be emphasized. Sexual licentiousness is not an earmark of progress. It is not progressive. It is destructive. But sexual sin is not the only concern Paul has here. The first of his lists of vices focuses on this different cadre of human wickedness. Verse 20, Paul catalogs a set of things that have been lurking behind the most prominent problems with which he has had to contend throughout this epistle. Quarreling, jealousy, anger, hostility, slander, gossip, conceit, and disorder. The central concern of 2 Corinthians has been Paul's defense of his ministry against the false apostles who called his authenticity as an apostle into question. The presenting issue has been this dysfunction, then, that exists between Paul as the apostle of the Corinthians and this church that he was the one who planted. However, Paul understands that what he has been experiencing in this relational dysfunction between him and the Corinthians is most likely a manifestation of a larger underlying web of sin that involved dysfunctional relationships within the broader body of Christ in this city. If we look at these vices in verse 20, we can see how all of them are clearly connected to the issues Paul's been confronting in the course of this letter. Surely the kind of quarreling hostility he was facing from some members of the church was displayed not only towards him as an apostle, but probably also towards other members of the body of Christ. The sort of jealousy fostered by the one-upsmanship of the false apostles, the self-promotion, their theology of glory, surely fostered among the Corinthians a wider environment of jealousy in their community. The anger directed towards Paul, the contempt some had for him, most likely came bursting out against other church members. slander and gossip that was being spread about Paul in accusations against his character and his legitimacy as a pastor and as an apostle. Surely that practice had spread through the wider network of relationships between the Christians in the city. The conceit that sat at the center of this theology of glory that the false apostles promoted, the self-promotion that majored in glorifying oneself and one's abilities and one's strength and one's accomplishments, that swollen sense of self-importance and pride in which these false apostles majored, it had to be running rampant across this church. And of course, the disorder that was fostered by their refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the authority that came with Paul's ordained office, most likely translated into a kind of anarchy in their midst. So all of these things are of a piece with this theology of glory that the false apostles were promoting. And this is no less true in our own day. Those who want to peddle a theology of glory, those who have no place for weakness in their Christian thinking, no place for suffering, no place for what it means to be gentle and lowly, are really just seeking to take these vices that are listed in verse 20 and try to baptize them into some sort of twisted Christian virtues. And this, too, is a great danger in our current cultural moment. As you stand amid the pressures of a world that is drifting further and further away from anything resembling a Christian worldview, the temptation is to adopt a quarrelsome, angry, boastful sort of posture. What is it that our Savior said? By this, all people will know that you are my disciples. If you post angry diatribes to social media, No. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Whatever the current cultural moment and its pressures call for, whipping out your flamethrower and indulging yourself in the vices that Paul lists in verse 20 is certainly not the scriptural answer. Knowing the times, involves more than an awareness of the threats which come to us from our left. Our adversary is a wily opponent. Cunning is Satan's strong suit. And he knows of more than just one point of attack against Christ's church. He can come at the church from the left of our culture, and he can come at the church from the right of our culture, and from both at the same time. This passage reminds us that there are manifold threats to the church. An adoption of the world's sexual obsessions is one avenue of attack. However, another comes from the sort of relational dysfunctions which fail to manifest the love Christ calls his people to practice. In an ecclesiastical environment that so often pits these two things against each other in its rhetoric, We should note how Paul weds them together. We ought not be sexually pure and yet rageful and combative, nor ought we be kindly open-hearted and yet sexually immoral. We cannot allow ourselves to be fixated on one point of the enemy's assault to the neglect of the other. You could be sexually pure and avoid the vices that are listed in verse 21, and yet tragically become the sort of angry, prideful, quarrelsome ogre that lurks behind the vices of verse 20. You can also be kind, charitable, and placid, avoiding the vices of verse 20, and yet fall into the dehumanizing sexual impurity of verse 21. The road to destruction is broad, And it includes many different ways for you to deteriorate into something monstrous and subhuman. Paul dreads that he will come to Corinth and have his heart break to find all manner of destructive sin festering in this church. Paul fears this and he hopes for something different. He hopes for something better. And that brings us to our second point, the way of construction, the way of construction. In verse 19, Paul wants to clear up a potential misunderstanding of what he has been doing in the course of this epistle. He asks them, have you been thinking all along that we have been defending ourselves to you? Certainly it would be easy to read what Paul writes in the course of his defense of his ministry in 2 Corinthians and to draw the false conclusion that Paul had been appealing to the Corinthians as though they were judge and jury of his status as an apostle and judge and jury over the quality of his pastoral ministry. Paul wants to disabuse them of any sort of misguided conclusion to that effect. He does not speak as though the Corinthians themselves were a court who would render a verdict about his legitimacy and faithfulness. He wants to persuade them, yes, but not because their opinions about him have any sort of ultimate significance for who Paul is as an apostle and how he discharges his ministry. Paul's defense is made before the only tribunal that matters. He says in verse 19, it is in the sight of God that we have been speaking in Christ. Paul understands that in the end, of course, what matters most is that he has lived his life with this kind of ministerial authenticity towards the church before the watchful eye of the only one who is the Lord and Master of the church. He lives his life coram Deo, in the sight of God. And as he has spoken, he has spoken in Christ. That is to say, he has discharged his ministry out of the vitality of his own union with his Savior. The Corinthians' response to his defense is certainly not the real court of judgment. However, there is something crucial that is on the line in how they respond to what Paul has been saying. And it's there at the end of verse 19. This has been Paul's goal. He adds that it is all for your up-building, beloved. It is all for your up-building. This is what the term edification means. Edification and up-building, they are synonyms. As I said before, the word edify literally is a structural notion. It comes from the Latin term edificare, which means to build. We can sense the structural connotations of the verb edify when we think about its relationship to the noun edifice. And that's the import of what Paul is saying in verse 19. The Greek word he deploys there literally refers to the process of constructing a building. And Christian edification is this. It is about participating in an ongoing construction project. And when you realize that, you can see then that Paul has something grand in mind here. In speaking of his hope of up-building the Corinthians, he's talking about his own participation in this grand architectural project in which Christ is engaged. Jesus is the one who is building his church. And we know from Paul's other letters, as well as from what Paul has said to this very group of Christians in 1 Corinthians and in this very letter of 2 Corinthians, that what Christ is building his church into is his temple. Christ is building his church into his temple that's underneath the tip of the iceberg of Paul's verb. This is what true Christian edification is all about. It is about you being built up as you are a piece of this great construction project of the temple that Christ is engaged in building even now as he sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven. He's continuing there from his position of exaltation what he promised to do while he was on earth. He is building his church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. So your life and your growth as a Christian are taken up into this great reality. All of your spiritual progress is really in the end about what this means, about you being part of the brick and mortar of this grand edifice that is the final temple of the Lord, the place that the most holy God has chosen to come and to make his home. This edification, then, is the opposite of the destructive patterns of sin that Paul lists in verses 20 and 21. If those vices implicate you in the rot and decay of this passing age, the edification which the gospel brings to you implicates you into this progressive up-building that's involved in this grand construction project over which Jesus stands as the master builder. There is only one kind of Christianity, and it is progressive. It is a Christianity that seeks to repair and restore all that sin has defaced and deteriorated. And we should note that scripture pinpoints, in other places, two central facets of what it means for us to experience this progress, this edification. First, maturation as a Christian involves you growing in knowledge, wisdom, the knowledge and wisdom that comes from God's word. And second, Christian maturation involves increasing holiness in how you live, faith, life and doctrine, life and doctrine. The two things are inseparable from one another. And when Paul writes his epistle to his pastoral protege Titus, he opens his letter in Titus chapter one, verse one, identifying himself as a servant of God, an apostle of Jesus Christ for the sake of the faith of God's elect. And he adds this, and their knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness. A knowledge of the truth, which accords with godliness. That is the great aim of Christian edification. And in that aim, we see these two things coalesce. Growth in Christian knowledge and growth in Christian holiness are meant to walk hand in hand. God is building you up then in these two interrelated ways. He's causing you to know more and more of his word and its truth. He's furthering that work of illumination in you as the light of his word progressively shines into your soul. But he's also working in you to will and to do what pleases him. He's growing you in godliness and in character. That's what progressive sanctification is all about. You more and more dying to sin and more and more living to righteousness. The Christian life is not static. It is moving forward. It is progressing. But of course, it doesn't always feel that way, does it? So often I'm sure that you sense what I sense, that at times you seem to take one step forward and two steps backwards. But dear Christian, do not be discouraged. Remember this, the progressive edification that Christ is accomplishing in you, it's like all construction projects. The work of renovation always involves some measure of demolition. That's what Paul's been about in the course of this letter. His correction and confrontation during his defense of his apostleship in this epistle has at times knocked down things in the Corinthians' thinking and hopefully things in their lives. He has been, as he says in chapter 10, laying siege, destroying strongholds. However, it's all been towards this one aim, building up the Corinthians. The work of renovation always involves some measure of demolition. This is how God operates in our lives. C.S. Lewis captures this very beautifully. Lewis writes, imagine yourself a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps you can understand what he's doing. He's getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on. You knew that those jobs needed doing and so you're not surprised. But presently, he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of. Throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage, but he is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. Now Lewis' beautiful analogy, it captures well what we so often feel as we are in the middle of this grand construction project that Christ is effecting in our lives. It's not a construction project over which we are the masters and therefore the steps forward in the designs of this renovation are not always something the Lord lets us in on. So often his purposes are hidden from us. And so often in the moment, they do not look like construction, but demolition. They look like him knocking you about. But this is the way of progressive sanctification. God cannot renovate without destroying. His aim is to search out every compartment of your heart where you have enshrined an idol, to smash that idol, and then to devote that space to him in its place. And thus this construction project often looks a lot like destruction. It harnesses pain and trial, sanctifies them for his purposes, and deploys them for your growth. But rest assured, it is always what Paul is saying here in verse 19. It is all for your up-building, beloved. The Christian life is progressive. It is about increasing in holiness, increasing in the knowledge of Christ, increasing in your love of God, your love of neighbor. It is about a life that is moving forward and all that it means to have Christ formed in you. It is about this edification of which the apostle speaks, this progressive up-building of the temple of the Lord. Eliza and I, several times a year when we would go on these road trips, we would drive past this unfinished and abandoned house, I think somewhere in Ohio. And some man started building this house and then for one reason or another, he did not have the money or the resources or something happened, he did not complete the project. And so there it sits in a field. bare concrete wooden skeleton as a monument to some poor man's failure to follow through and finish the house that he started. And perhaps you fear that this is what your life will be like. Unfinished, decaying, abandoned, a failure. It can be easy to foster this nagging sense of doubt that maybe in the end, God will just give up on us, leave you to rot in the field alone and incomplete. But rest assured that if you are in Christ, that cannot be. This construction project, it is the edification of his church. And the church in the end is something that Christ himself is building with his own hands. and nothing can bring his construction project to ruin. He who began a good work in you, he will bring it to its completion. And so the progress of the Christian life does not end in decay and death, but in glory and life. No matter how painful it may seem at times, No matter how much it appear that for you things are not moving forwards but backwards. No matter how much your faith and your life cut against the sensibilities of this world, keep your heart and keep your faith stayed upon the master builder. He does not start what he will not finish. Flee the destructive path of sin for the edification of Christ. Let's pray. Lord, you do call us not to walk in the way of sinners, but to walk in the way of the righteous and to so experience maturity, growth, progress. Lord, we confess that we are a conflicted people at war with ourselves. We know that within us still dwell the remnants of our sin. But we do thank you, Lord, that we have the hope that as we are in Christ, those remnants will not prevail, that your work will prevail. And so lift up our eyes that we might see you, Jesus, and have our hope filled with who you are and what you are doing. We ask these things in your name, amen.