1 Corinthians 3 is a very familiar and in many ways a very famous chapter. I think these things go in cycles, but there was a time, at least when I was listening, it seemed that preachers loved to preach this chapter or cite it. And they were forever dragging the Christians to whom they were preaching before the judgment seat to see if they were building wood, hay and stubble or gold and silver and precious stones. And so 1 Corinthians 3 did not really become much of a favorite for most of the people who had to listen because that was the message that always came from it. Or perhaps there would be a slight variation on it and there would be a message on the carnal Christian. And that in turn led to a big discussion, a very rampant theological debate for a while. In fact, it spawned some literature on the subject, whether there is such a thing even as a carnal Christian. And I have to say the answer is yes and the answer is no. The answer is yes in a biblical sense. The answer is no in the sense that it has come to be used in many, especially dispensational circles, where you have a notion of carnal Christians and people who were never Christians to start with. So for these reasons, 1 Corinthians 3 has been for a long time a pretty, sometimes controversial, but certainly a very familiar, famous, or to some people perhaps infamous, chapter, at least as to how it was used. Tonight, what I want to do, I'm not going to expound the chapter. This is a prayer meeting, not a preaching meeting. But to get to the three points I want to make, and just to make them, not really to preach on them, about prayer, I want you to take an overview of the chapter. The chapter deals first with the marks of a carnal Christian. And I said there's a view of a carnal Christian that's not right. The idea is, well, I I came to Christ, received Him as my Savior, didn't cry to Him as my Lord, but I've lived in sin ever since then, and I'm a carnal Christian. No, you're not. You're just never saved. You can't be saved if you don't have Christ as Lord. That's all there is to it. But there is a sense in which there are Christians who are carnal. And Paul identifies it. And I'll just run down the list. They are babes when they should be mature. Verse 2, they don't grow. Now, he's not talking about people who have a mental incompetency. He's not being harsh on people who simply cannot ever get beyond a very, very childlike or childish. Let me change the word because there's a world of difference theologically between childish and childlike. We should all be childlike, but we should not be childish. Anyway, there are some people who can't ever get beyond the level of thinking of a child. And the Holy Spirit is never harsh on people who cannot. This is not dealing with mental incompetency. And we should never attach that label of carnality to people who cannot proceed to any of the deep things of God. This is spoken to people who have every ability and every opportunity to grow in grace and in the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. who have an open Bible, have the Holy Spirit within them, have instruction, and should be maturing, but they stay at a baby level. They may not ever go out and get drunk. They may never swear. They may never blaspheme. They may never live in open sin. They may never be counted by the world, quote, carnal. They may, in fact, live by all the rules. But Paul is speaking to people. He says, I should be able to talk to you as grown-ups. I want to be able to talk to you as grown-ups. It would benefit you and it would benefit the church if I could talk to you as grown-ups, but I can't because you're still babes. Hebrews 5, the same thing. In a time when you ought to have proceeded to manhood, maturity, you're babes. That's one mark of a carnal Christian. It's not the only mark. In verse 3, you have the idea of importing the values and the practices of the world into the church. You see at the end of verse 3, you walk as or according to men. That's walking by the standards of the world. Doing things in God's work because that's the way they're done in the world, the business world or whatever world. And he says here, you are yet carnal, verse 3, because whereas there's among you envying and strife and divisions, are you not carnal and walk as men? These things you see, he's saying, these are the things you find in the world. It's natural in the world for people because they're in a competitive atmosphere. So you've got envy. You've got people striving and each man for himself, ultimately. That's what the world's all about. If your business succeeds and I'm in competition, mine's going to fail to the extent yours succeeds. We're going after the same clients. We're going after, you know, we have the same aim for ourselves, but we are in somewhat of a competitive, sometimes even antagonistic mode. And this is what he's saying. This is what you expect in the world. But in the church, no place for that. We're all on the same team. We're all serving the same master. We're all prosecuting the same business. We all have the same aim. Far from it being competitive, I can't succeed spiritually without you, and you without the one beside you. In other words, there's an interconnection among God's people that you don't get in the world. And he's saying it is a mark of carnality when you walk in the church as if you were still in the world. You walk as men and not as saints. So this is a second mark of a carnal Christian. Verse 4, another mark is, divided when they should be united. Verse 5, more focused on human leadership than on the Lord's headship. These are the things that mark carnality in the church. Now, the next part of the chapter, he gives the mark of a spiritual preacher. And Paul himself is the great pattern here. The first mark of a spiritual preacher is he deals with these sins. His ministry deals with sin. The second mark of the spiritual preacher is that he makes little of man, and he makes much of Christ. Here's Paul and says, who is Paul? Now, I don't think Paul was being humble in anything but an absolutely sincere way. Many of you have read Charles Dickens and have read and seen the character Uriah Heep. Uriah Heep, who was always rubbing his hands and saying he was ever so, as he pronounced it, humble. He was ever so humble. And of course, he was not a bit humble. We have a fellow who doesn't deserve this, by the way. We just keep it going on him just for a laugh. Ulster Humor, and you have heard us say it many a time, this particular preacher who wrote a very famous book called The Ten Most Humble Men in the World, and how I trained the other nine. And that's the kind of humility that you normally expect. It's false humility. But Paul's was not false humility. Paul says, Who is Paul? Now, you and I could answer that. Paul's just the greatest preacher in the world. He's just the greatest missionary in the world. He's just the greatest soul winner in the world. He's just the greatest church planter in the world. He has just had closer walk with God than any man on earth. He has had greater revelations of God than even any of the apostles. Who is Paul? A great man. But Paul says he's nothing. Who was Apollos? Apollos was a golden-tongued orator, charmed people with, first, a great knowledge of the Scripture and a fantastic ability to preach it. Paul says he's nothing. You see, the mark of the spiritual preacher is, make much of Christ. I've told you before of the visit of an American to London in the middle 1800s, last half of the century, middle of that really. That was a day when London had giant preachers, tremendous preachers. And he went around hearing them. One Sabbath day, he went to hear Dr. Parker and he came out absolutely blown away by one of the great pulpit orators of the day, a man who was faithful and biblical in his ministry. He came out saying, my, what a preacher, what a great preacher. That night he went to hear C.H. Spurgeon and he came out in tears and he said, what a great savior. Don't misunderstand me, Parker did exalt Christ. But there is this mark, and when you read Spurgeon, you'll always find it. There's this mark of always making much of the Savior, making little of man, making much of the Lord Jesus Christ. The mark of this preacher like Paul is that he'll stick to the great foundation. Paul said, as the wise master builder, he led no other foundation than Christ, the only foundation for any hope of salvation, the only foundation for any manner of Christian living, the only foundation for hope, for peace, for joy, for life. Everything is directly fastened to Christ. That's the mark of a spiritual preacher. And you can go on down. One thing that stands out about Paul and what he's saying here, that he does a work that has an enduring quality. And it's going to stand the test of the judgment day. Now he moves from that to the marks of a carnal preacher. And the carnal preacher has the same foundation. He's talking here now about a safe man, not talking about an apostate. But this man goes wrong in that he's building on Christ. That's his profession. But it is in a way that is unworthy of Christ. And most of all, I think what Paul is saying about this man whose work is ending up as wood and hay and stubble, is that this is a man who is more interested in quantity than quality. You will know that it's much easier to get a whole lot of wood chips or hay than it is to get a bag full of gold or silver or precious stones. I mean, if gold and silver and precious stones were just as plentiful as wood and hay and stubble, they wouldn't be precious anymore, would they? So here's the picture of a man who's building for quantity rather than quality, which means ultimately he's building for time rather than eternity. Now, I don't want to get off my track tonight because there are three things I want to say as we wrap this up and get to prayer. Things we have to pray about in the light of this chapter. I don't want to get off the track, but now it is, it's getting more and more difficult to find people who are willing to stick to trying to build God's work in God's way and put quality and the things that Paul's talking about here before mere quantity. Somebody sent me an email just the other day. They were thinking I would do one of my radio commentaries on this. I haven't really felt any great inclination to do so as yet. They sent me this, that there's a church that's running a church growth conference. It's called a Bonfire Conference. And various pictures are sent along on the website of this thing. And a lot of preachers there, some of them, one in particular, I see his name is a very brilliant speaker and a brilliant scholar. But the whole thing is how to build churches. This guy who's running it has 6,000 people. Somebody else in two years has 3,000 people. And this is how you're going to do it. Now, I don't know what they're going to say. But I have to say, I wasn't altogether enamored with the presentation. When you look at the picture and you've got a sports car all covered up with a tarpaulin or car cover of some kind, and this is the grand prize in a drawing for senior pastors. I said to John Wagner, you and I ought to go. It cost $159 to get in. This is how they could afford to have these things. You don't get this car, but what you do is you get the lease of it free for a year. You're the lucky pastor that gets his name drawn out. You may win a computer. You may win an iPod. You may win whatever that new Apple phone is. You may win one of those things. You may win a cruise. And I wonder, and of course you have to have the what will I say, the inevitable, the necessary rock group there to provide the music. And they're all slouching around in their particular, you know, the way they've got to slouch to, I mean, you couldn't stand up like a Christian and look happy. You've got to look, yeah, in that sort of thing. They're there. The way to build a church is to incorporate that sort of thing into the church building, and I'd rather have a small church. That's all there is to it. If that's the way to do it, I don't find it in the Bible. I don't find it even remotely connected with the Bible. Now, don't get me wrong. I am not saying that all that those men will say is unbiblical, for I think that would be going too far. As I say, I know at least one name on there and I know that that would not be true But I'm saying it's harder and harder to get people to get down to serious business to do God's work in God's way And that's what we've got to set about What do we pray for in the light of this chapter? Talked about the march of a carnal Christian the marks of a car of a spiritual preacher in the march of a carnal preacher So what do we pray for? Number one, we have got to pray for maturity in our membership. That's you and me. We have got to pray for spiritual maturity. Number two, we have got to pray for fidelity in our ministry. And that's particularly me. anybody else who comes to preach. Pray for fidelity in the ministry. And then the big thing that overrides this whole chapter is to pray that eternity will be stamped on our vision. That whatever we do, it will be in the light of God's eternity. This morning, I finished my first semester. I would like to say my last semester, but Dr. Barrett, in his intransigence, has declined my offer. But I finished my first semester back teaching systematic theology. I have to tell you, it was a very frustrating experience in a way. in that the last week I had to deal with a whole semester's work in three morning lectures. And they're only mini lectures anyway. They are only allowed to last for less than an hour. They usually steal 15 minutes of Charlie's time, but you can do that when you're old. Can't read the clock. So it meant that we came to, of course, the guys have been studying and they have been doing a lot of collateral reading. I'm only filling in the gaps here and there in the lectures. But we came to deal with the eternal state, heaven and hell. The literature they're reading on it will teach them a lot. As we came to the end of that, I just closed the book and I looked at these young men, some of whom are going to be graduating and going out into God's And I told them what I'm telling you tonight. You're going to have to serve in the light of God's eternity. The souls you deal with are souls that are going to live forever with Christ or separated from Christ in the torments of a lost eternity. Willie Nicholson used to pray that God would stamp eternity on his eyeballs. It's not a very pretty turn of expression, but Nicholson didn't worry about prettiness of language. When Nicholson preached, he preached for eternity. And I think that's something in our churches we have got to recapture. the urgency, the immediacy of preaching for eternity. The old preachers used to say that they wanted to preach as if every message would be their last message. I think that is missing in an awful lot of modern pulpiteering, Free Presbyterian and other ways. A lot of it is missing. The idea of just getting up to fill people's head full of knowledge, or to make little points, or whatever, if it were really burned into our hearts as preachers, that we're laboring for eternity, and that this, for me, could be the last sermon I preach before I go to meet Christ. And this could be the last message these people hear before they go into eternity. I tell you, if that were stamped on our hearts, in Nicholson's phrase, if eternity were stamped on our eyeballs, it would change how we look at everything. But this is something that has to be true not only of the preacher, it has to be true of you. Let us look through as it were, the lens of eternity. And if you're looking and seeing eternal values, what does that do to how we live? What does it do to how we serve? What does it do about our feelings, our attitudes, our witnessing? What does it do to it? Here are the three things that 1 Corinthians 3 finally demands of us. And this is what we're here to pray for. We need maturity in the membership. We need fidelity in the ministry. And we need eternity to be stamped on all our vision and all our work. And I believe if we pray those things, God will answer. And that we will see a move of God. And that God will give us to see people saved. I was talking to the boys this morning. It's very easy to get used to seeing nobody saved. You get very easily used to that. And it's very easy then to start inventing other things. that will satisfy us as preachers or as people. And I was saying to them what I say to myself constantly, what I say to you tonight in all sincerity, in God's name, and I say that very reverently, in God's name, let us never allow ourselves to become satisfied with not seeing people saved. I told the guys this morning, they didn't know the name, but then they haven't, most of them grown up in this church, you will know the name and you'll know the story. I asked them if they'd ever heard of C.T. Studd and they looked at me blankly. Hadn't heard of Studd. If you haven't read the story of C.T. Studd, please get his biography and read it. Thrill your heart. I said, here's a man who gave up a fortune in today's dollars, be millions of dollars, gave it up to go to work with Hudson Taylor in China. When that was done, to go and open up India, go in and preach in India. And when he came back broken in health and not a missionary society would think, dream of touching him. He set out for Africa under his own steam. Left his wife behind to look after the homework. I think it was 13 years, would that be right, Joan? They didn't see each other at all. While he plowed his lonely course through Africa. What drove him on? Of course, he's made the two great statements. He made a whole lot of great statements. But two, you've heard the one quoted again and again and again. If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him. That's the one thing that drove him on. But the other was this. Studs said, the tramp of Christ's feet on the road to hell is driving me mad. The tramp of Christ's feet on the road to hell is driving me mad. The kind of madness that throws away a fortune to go to the mission field. Is that really mad? The kind of madness that sent him to India when he could have said, I've done my stint. The kind of madness that mocked the medical diagnosis and said, even if it kills me, I'll go and I'll open up the heart of Africa for Jesus Christ. The kind of madness that out of that spawned two of the greatest missionary societies and greatest missionary movements in the 19th and 20th centuries, still working today. What drove them? Eternity. Eternity couldn't bear the thought of people perishing and Him doing nothing about it. We're serving for eternity. I'm serving, and I tell you, I'm an old character now. And I don't say this in any lighthearted fashion. I think more now than ever before. I always tried to keep it in mind, but I think more now than ever before of what it will be to stand before God and give account of my ministry. And I'll be honest with you, I fear that. The question is, what will stand the test? What will stand the test? What is going to be wood and hay and stubble? What are the things that have been so important in life and they'll not mean that much in the light of eternity when we stand before God? That's the same thing you've got to face. I know this is peculiarly addressed to preachers, but it is also applied to all of God's people. What about it? If you went out to meet the Lord today, have you anything, anything that you can think of that would not be wood and hay and stubble? Fearful thought. And I don't say that to put you down. I send it first and foremost to me. I say it to you that we may pray maturity and fidelity and eternity. These are the great issues. God answer us in these things. We will be individuals, we will be homes, and we will be a church that God will bless and God will use.