Hope Blog

▶ 0:31:11

This was the first Sunday of Lent, and Matt began where a lot of people begin Lent —
with the discipline he is worst at. Then he spent the rest of the message on a question that sounds
antique and turns out to be the one the church argues about constantly: what do you do when you are
right, and someone else’s conscience says no.

Lent, and the failure worth naming

▶ 0:32:47

Hope Chapel is not a heavily liturgical church, but it does read Seek God for the City
through Lent, and fasting sits in the tradition alongside it. Matt’s admission was blunt: “I think
out of all the pastors in the whole world I might be the absolute worst at fasting.” He gets hungry.
He eats extra meals for energy.

He tied it back to a challenge he had given months earlier on spiritual warfare — not naming
demons or repenting for what a great-uncle did, but asking what one thing God might want to declare
victory over in your life. His own answer at the time had been his phone: news, Twitter, unproductive
worry about current events. He had failed at conquering it, a sister gave him a prophetic word over
the phone, and he has walked free of it since. When he told that story at home, Mandy asked what
would be next for him. The answer came easily: fasting.

▶ 0:35:42

His counsel was unhurried. Forty days is a long time; historically many people fasted only from
Good Friday to Easter Sunday. It is not required. But if you have felt like a failure here, try it,
and ask God for help. “Is there an area where I could walk in God’s victory instead of a sense of
failure and shame.”

Why meat mattered more than a fringe debate

▶ 0:36:19

The series is in 1 Corinthians, and chapters 8 through 10 are where Paul handles food sacrificed
to idols. Matt noted how freely the modern church reaches for the weaker-brother argument — it came
up constantly during the pandemic, in both directions. It offends my conscience that you are in here
without a mask. It offends my conscience that you are putting a mask on me. “You can’t just call
weaker brother like you call shotgun,” he said. “I called it first, I’m the weaker brother, and I
said it first, and I feel stronger than you feel, therefore you should do what I say.”

So the first job is to feel the weight of the original situation. Converts out of paganism had
personally taken part in ceremonies where an animal was killed for a god. They knew they no longer
belonged to that deity. They still could not sit down to that meat without something turning over
inside them. This was not the Christian equivalent of arguing about violent video games or whether
believers can dance.

▶ 0:38:50

His evidence was the Jerusalem council, where the leaders settled what to ask of Gentile converts
— peacekeeping minimum standards, not a demand that they live like Jews:

Idols come first in that list, ahead of sexual immorality. And that ordering fits everything the
church had just been reading in the Old Testament, where the kings are graded not on revenue or
military readiness but on faithfulness against idolatry. “You should feel tense about this,” Matt
said. “They felt really tense about this.”

Knowledge that is correct and still destroys

▶ 0:41:39

The knowledge in question is that the idol has no power. Paul grants it flatly —
an idol
has no real existence, and there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ. Matt paused
on the phrase “for whom we exist”: not as employees, since God has no need and has angels besides,
but for his pleasure. Then the point that gives the whole passage its edge — this is not so-called
knowledge, it is real knowledge, “which just goes to show that real knowledge can still
destroy.”

Because not
everyone possesses it, and a right can become a stumbling block. Paul’s language escalates fast,
and it is aimed at the people who are correct:

Being right, Matt summarized, is not necessarily the end of the story. The question is whether
this right of yours is building anyone.

Chapter 9 is not a bunny trail

▶ 0:47:37

This is where Matt made his sharpest structural argument. Chapter 9 reads like Paul wandering off
into his own résumé, and it is not. He
has the right to take a wife, as Peter did, and the right to be supported financially by the church
he fathered — he even argues the Lord wants it that way. He takes neither. He works with his own
hands so the gospel stays front and center and he is no burden to them.

Then he circles straight back to idol meat and lands the whole section with
“Be
imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” Imitate what, exactly? A man declining rights he actually
holds. Paul is not bluffing when he says he will never eat meat again.

Back to the wilderness

▶ 0:48:09

Chapter 10 opens with another apparent detour —
our
fathers under the cloud, through the sea, drinking from the rock that was Christ — and Paul’s
point is the golden calf. They all had the same spiritual food and the same spiritual drink, and
most of them fell anyway.
Idolatry,
immorality, testing Christ, grumbling — Matt noted in passing that “put Christ to the test” in
the wilderness is an easily overlooked line about Christ’s divinity. The application is not that
those people were unusually weak:

We do not have new spiritual technology. Nobody is immune.

Communion is why the weak conscience makes sense

▶ 0:53:38

Then Paul asks the Corinthians to reason from their own table.
The
cup of blessing is a participation in the blood of Christ; the bread we break is a participation in
his body. We do not treat that as a ceremony performed for no reason. It is not just bread, and
it is not casual — it is communion with the Lord himself.

Which, Matt argued, is precisely why a former pagan cannot shrug at a feast in the temple of
Dionysus. He is reading that meal the same way we read ours: food as an intimate act of loyalty. “These
aren’t dumb thoughts they’re having.” The people with sensitive consciences here are not morons
sensitive about something dumb, and Paul’s warning that food shared at an altar makes you a
participant is the same logic pressed further:

Are we the alpha in this relationship, dictating terms? No — we fit into his schema. Two
loyalties is not on offer.

The practical rule: do not go asking

▶ 0:57:49

What follows is plain pastoral advice.
Buy
what is sold in the meat market and raise no question of conscience, for the earth is the Lord’s and
the fullness thereof. It is his meat. You need it for a recipe. Do not go poking around.

▶ 0:58:49

Matt worked the scene out loud, and it is worth following. Sit at their table, eat what is served,
ask nothing — and do not volunteer the information yourself either, because it is fine, it is just
meat. But the moment somebody says this is Artemis’s pork, we sacrificed it to her, the
situation has changed. You have been called on to make a statement, and now it is a hard no — not
mainly for your sake but for theirs, so that the gospel is not confused in front of the person who
told you. Anywhere a confession is requested, or compliance with something pagan, the answer is
simply: I am a believer in Christ and my loyalty is only to him.

Free to do, and free not to

▶ 1:00:39

Then comes the line that makes Paul look like he is contradicting himself, and Matt refused to
smooth it over:

“It feels like he’s arguing all over the place,” Matt said, “but really he’s fairly consistent.”
Both halves stand. Those with the strong conscience are correct, and no one else’s conscience gets
to become the rule for mine — and I will still put the fork down for the sake of the man who just
told me where the meat came from. The right survives; the use of it is surrendered.

▶ 1:02:02

That is also where the three guiding principles land, in verses 31 and 33: do everything to the
glory of God, do not seek your own advantage, and live so that others may be saved — there is an
evangelistic bent to all of it. And it is why the long bunny trail of chapter 9 ends where it does.
Paul simply did not take advantage of them, and “that’s part of what it means to be free actually. I
am free to do or not do.”

How to use this argument without abusing it

▶ 1:04:27

Here Matt made the point he most wanted the room to keep. In this passage the weakness of the
weaker brother is rooted in some of the clearest commands in all of scripture, not in a feeling.
Generalize it to every sensitivity anyone happens to have at any moment and life becomes impossible
to manage — and he named the reason it matters, which is that in the wider culture offense already
functions as currency. “The more offended you are, the more powerful you become.” We have pearl
clutchers on every side.

▶ 1:06:27

So if he were ever asked to adjudicate who the weaker brother is, he would expect the pricked
conscience to trace back to a sincere desire to obey Jesus from his word — not to a color preference
or a music preference. And the guardrail runs both directions: if we are going to be the kind of
humble people who lay down our rights, we cannot also let offense be used as a tool, or we will
spend our lives abusing the humble. “It should not be the case that being upset is power.”

▶ 1:07:45

His examples of the genuinely grey were pointed, and the best of them was aimed at his own stage.
What kind of music can we use in worship? “We use the kind of music that I guess 60 years ago would
have been thought as devil’s music” — drums and guitar, and Elvis shaking his hips was a scandal.
Now it is contemporary soft rock on a Sunday morning and nobody blinks. Same with dancing: Hope has
a dance ministry, and there was a time the question was whether Christians could dance at all, let
alone call it a ministry. Then the greyer ones that may actually bother you — what shows you can
watch, whether a Christian can drink in his own home, and where he would stop.

▶ 1:08:58

Where there is no clear command you are left with discernment, honesty and a desire to obey
Jesus — and Matt handed over the questions he uses. Go back to the three principles Paul ends with:
to the glory of God, not seeking my own advantage but another’s, so that people may be saved. Then
work it the way Paul teaches the church to weigh a prophetic word or a visiting prophet — the same
test John
puts to the spirits, and the one early Christian literature like the Didache applies to a
travelling teacher. Is this voice prompting godliness in me, or serving the advantage of self? Is it
based on anything scriptural at all? The weak person’s conscience is pricked — but is it pricked for
a reason, and what is that reason? Would laying this down be good for our community, and would it
promote godliness among us as a group? Why do I want my own way; why does this person want theirs;
do I actually need this, or could I lay it down anyway just for their sake? And apply the Lord’s own
test — you
will recognize them by their fruits. What is the fruit of all this?

The nativity with no baby in it

▶ 1:11:13

His test case was small and perfectly chosen. A friend had told him — news to Matt, and to most
of the room — that there are Christians who object to nativity scenes: sometimes a doll with no face
(“I don’t see how that’s much better, it’s creepy and weird”), sometimes just a crèche with hay and
no child at all. “But aren’t we celebrating the birth of a real baby?” We have zoomed backwards
fourteen hundred years, he said, and we are doing the iconoclasts all over again.

On this one he sides with the people who keep the baby, and his reason was that the church has
already digested this and moved on more than a thousand years ago — read Maximus the Confessor. When
the Son took on flesh it became appropriate to assume he looked like a human being, because he was
one: a nose, ears, eyes, real flesh and not fake flesh, an infant who cried and drank milk. He
embraced humanity, not in a pretend way. “So he had a face. Yeah, so you could put a baby doll in
there. Relax.”

That sounds harsh until you notice what he was protecting. Matt does not want a church of
docetists or Arians — people who say Jesus only seemed human. Is he all the way human, all
the way God? That question is such a big deal that he will interrupt for it: do not hassle the
people who have a baby in their crèche, because you will get in their heads and damage them
christologically. Paul does the same thing elsewhere — he tells people teaching fringe error to
stop. But it is their conscience. Stop anyway: you are not only wrong, it is damaging to the
community.

Why it is worth the trouble

▶ 1:14:12

Why care about any of this — we are in America, we are free in Christ, do what we want. The close
was the reason for all of it.

The gospel, Matt said, is more important than we are. That someone for whom Christ died might
never taste union with him — never feel a soul purchased completely by his blood — because we were
standing in the way pointlessly over something that does not matter is a serious problem. The gospel
takes precedence even over our rights. And it is a two-edged sword: sometimes you must risk giving
offense to preserve that same message, which is exactly why none of this is cut and dry and why
nobody gets to win by crying first.

▶ 1:15:24

He finished on what is actually at stake. We were enemies, he said — frothing mad in our hatred
toward God, wallowing in sin and celebrating it — and Christ died for us to give us not a fresh start
but his own: “his start, his middle and his ending.” Many of us long for a day when we will stand in
the courts of heaven. “Surprise — in Christ you are already seated in heavenly places, at the
ooey-gooey center of glory itself.” That is worth shouting from the rooftops, worth not being a
stumbling block over, and worth protecting once someone is there.

▶ 1:15:54

Then, before anyone could pick up the questions and aim them at someone else, he turned them
around. We do not want to be weird religious moralists either; it is all about the gospel, “and it’s
worth fighting over day in and day out.” So ask yourself: why am I doing this, why do I fight for
this, what is this based on, is this good for other people or just good for me — “am I sounding real
spiritual when I’m hassling people about their babies in the nativity scene? What’s going on on the
inside of me when I do that, and why?” He ended by praying that the church would take Paul’s
conclusions about laying ourselves down to heart and learn to walk in humility, and sent people
forward for prayer.

▶ 1:20:43

Matt opened by admitting how much of 1 Corinthians is still ahead of us — conscience
and food sacrificed to idols, money and giving, head coverings, communion, gifts and tongues — and
confessing that his original outline had put head coverings on the Sunday of the women’s retreat,
which he thought would have been “really hilarious trolling.” He also had a joke prepared about this
message being sponsored by the Men’s Ministry. He chose not to use it. Then he said he would be as
diplomatic as he could, and read the first verse.

One side of a conversation

▶ 1:23:28

That opening line is a quotation. Paul is repeating the Corinthians’ own slogan back to them
before he responds to it, and here he makes it unusually obvious. Matt’s first application was a
guardrail: none of this is about blame. If a spouse is unfaithful, that is not the other spouse’s
fault. It is about mutual help, with a concern for holiness on both sides — the pursuit of Christ
in a marriage, done cooperatively.

The church’s purity wing, and Paul’s concession

▶ 1:25:46

Where did a slogan like that come from? Matt pointed to Paul’s warning about teachers in later
times who forbid
marriage. Part of the early church was devoted to a purity so radical that the honest conclusion
was: if you are a Christian, do not marry at all. We will all be monks. Paul’s answer is that this
is a
concession, not a command — we do not have to pursue a purity so total that all we do is pray
and stand there.

He read a line from Theodoret of Cyrus, the fifth-century bishop born in Antioch: human laws
demanded chastity of women and punished them for failing, but never demanded the same of men, “since
it was the men who wrote the laws.” Paul, Theodoret argued, was the first to make the law of chastity
apply to men as well. Matt was careful — he is no expert in ancient law and would not vouch for the
history — but the point stands in the text. Chastity is asked of both parties, because the pursuit
of Christ is the umbrella category everything else sits under.

Singleness is not the lesser calling

▶ 1:28:03

Paul is normalizing marriage for a church that had made it suspect. But Matt would not let the
room stop there, because Paul is also plainly commending singleness, and “I think we
under-spiritualize singleness.” His test case was the leadership template. We read that an overseer
must be the
husband of one wife who manages his children well — and if we take that woodenly, Paul could not
have served as a deacon in his own churches, being husband to zero wives and managing no children at
all. Matt reads those qualifications as default templates rather than checklists. Plenty of people
have led the church without a spouse, or after being widowed, or with no children; even the Egyptian
monastics revered the leaders of women’s communities. Marriage and raising children are a real
discipline, and coming out the other side in virtue is impressive — but so, he noted dryly, is being
shipwrecked, stoned, left for dead, homeless, hungry and blasphemed. God has more than one training
program.

Stay where the call found you

▶ 1:32:09

On divorce Matt was brief and plain. Paul tells
the
married not to separate; the church has historically recognized three grounds — adultery,
abandonment, abuse — “but we never celebrate it. It’s a goal to avoid.” Then comes the abandonment
case itself: if
an unbelieving spouse consents to stay, stay; if they leave, let them go, for God has called you to
peace.

▶ 1:33:52

The strange promise inside that passage — that the unbelieving spouse and the children are made
holy — needed a definition, and Matt gave the sharpest one of the morning. Holiness is not purity. A
sheep on a hillside with no defect is pure; it becomes holy when it is dedicated and given to the
Lord. Holiness conveys the sense of God’s presence, of being set apart for him and belonging to him.
Which is why the people among whom the Lord dwells are holy — and why you do not have to chase a
departing spouse down.

▶ 1:35:17

From there Paul generalizes:
let each
person lead the life the Lord has assigned. Some men at the time attempted a surgery to reverse
circumcision in order to fit in; Paul’s verdict is that neither state counts for anything, only
keeping the commandments of God — which he parallels elsewhere with
being a new
creation. Human religion zeroes in on the do’s and don’ts. Paul keeps turning the room’s face
upward. The same logic runs through
the
bondservant paragraph: take your freedom if you can get it, and know that the freed man and the
wealthy convert alike end up as bondservants of Christ.

The present distress

▶ 1:39:20

Twice Paul hangs his counsel on
“the
present distress.” Matt gave the historical reconstruction. Greco-Roman cities appointed a
curator of provisions — usually a wealthy volunteer with connections — only in times of famine, and
Corinth appears to have had one around AD 51, roughly when Paul was there. Add the church’s urgent
expectation that Christ was returning imminently, and the shape of the advice makes sense: this is a
hard season, marriage is an enormous commitment, so if you can stay focused, stay focused. Their
sense that everything was about to change was not wrong, either — Rome besieged Jerusalem and
destroyed the temple in the year 70.

Matt read that carefully — it is not permission to ignore your wife. It is a call to focus,
written by people who expected the Lord any day. And the motive survives the century: “one of the
inspirations for pursuing purity in Christ is the return of Christ. That remains true today.”

Undivided devotion, and who you are trying to please

▶ 1:41:40

Here Matt slowed down, because a definition is buried in the pastoral aside. If you are married,
Paul assumes your anxiety is aimed at pleasing your spouse — and treats that as correct. “I think
oftentimes we approach marriage as, I like her, I like the way she makes me feel, I like what she
does for me. Paul’s way of thinking about marriage is pretty different. Your focus should be on
pleasing her.” The rest of the chapter is Paul reassuring an anxious church that
the
engaged may marry and have not sinned. “You can tell that the Corinthian church is anxious — are
we allowed to get married, is this okay, is this okay. And he’s saying, yeah, it’s fine, you’re
gonna do fine. I still think being single is better, but you’re fine.”

▶ 1:44:15

Then Matt stepped back to say how strange both sides of this look from here. Paul finds abstinence
an advantage; the Corinthians treated chastity as a top priority even inside a marriage. “Yet in our
world both of those options are weird. Sex without commitment is seen as like a fundamental right, so
the idea that chastity within a traditional marriage is itself a concession sounds nuts.” These are
not two settings on one dial, he said — they are completely opposite approaches to the purpose and
value and dignity of human life. And he put the fence back up where Paul put it: we are
not
meant to judge the world, only what happens in the church. So the radical desire to please the
Lord with our purity is a question the church asks of itself, and of nobody else.

▶ 1:44:57

The chapter ends with the widow:
bound to
her husband as long as he lives, free to marry whom she wishes if he dies, only in the Lord —
though in Paul’s judgment she is happier as she is, “and I think that I too have the Spirit of God.”
Matt heard that last line as Paul saying this is not random-guy advice; he is an apostle, and this is
a proper judgment. The reasoning is the same one running under the whole chapter: with everything
happening in Corinth and the Lord’s return in view, she may be much happier with one less thing to
worry about. Matt liked the transparency of labelling a judgment as a judgment: this is a pastoral
letter, not Moses coming down the mountain.

▶ 1:45:35

Then he summed the chapter up himself, in this order. Singleness is great, and singleness is not
less — you are not less of a Christian and not less qualified to serve Christ if you are single or
have no children; in Paul’s mind you could be single-mindedly devoted to him with your whole heart
and all your energy. But if you pursue that and burn with passion and fail, then marry, and there is
nothing wrong with that either. Anticipating the coming of the Lord is a live factor in how you
decide to live. And the correct view of marriage is the one focused on pleasing your spouse.

A race to the bottom

▶ 1:47:24

Then the turn that held the whole message together. There is a parallel between how a single
person pursues pleasing Christ and how spouses pursue pleasing each other — so the way you picture
Christ decides everything downstream. “When we seek to please Jesus, we are not serving someone
whose feet in heaven are kicked up,” Matt said, “as if we were bringing him snacks and he’s just
watching TV.” You hate serving someone like that. We are pleasing one who is utterly humble and has
already out-served us. Heavenly couch-potato lord, or ever-present suffering servant — that choice
changes how Ephesians 5 sounds.

▶ 1:48:48

He read the
submission verses without softening them, noted they are often quietly left out of weddings, and
then read what follows.

▶ 1:50:18

Two asides before the hard part. Matt did give a reason for the pairing itself — it is natural
that the husband is the one associated with the head, “maybe among other reasons because Christ
himself is male and God revealed himself as Father.” And he named the standing argument that headship
and submission were largely cultural, then deliberately set it down: “we don’t need to go through
that argument, we will later.” Paul’s focus is the strong parallel to Jesus, and that is where Matt
wanted the room to stay.

▶ 1:51:38

The worry people bring to this text is abuse, and Matt argued the parallel to Jesus removes it
before the conversation starts. Christ’s lordship looked like
taking a towel and
washing feet, sleepless nights of prayer, and a humiliating death. To
the woman who
washed his feet he did not bark that she ought to be doing more; he protected her reputation and
forgave her sins. And Jesus flatly forbade
lording
authority over people the way the Gentiles do, which takes a bossing spouse off the table
entirely.

What is left is what Matt called a race to the bottom. She submits to her husband in this allegory
of Christ and the church; he serves her in a humiliating fashion. From the outside you see two people
racing downward rather than clamoring for the top — and “clamoring for the top is quite ugly and
horrible to watch, and probably worse to be a part of.”

▶ 1:53:24

Headship itself he flagged for a later message; what he wanted now were the ways it is proper to
honor one another. So he pressed the point with Peter, and the pressing was pointed.

Matt reads “weaker vessel” as a quiet reference to the possibility of domestic violence. God wants
husbands not merely to avoid harming their wives but to honor them — and if they do not, the very
one they pray to will hinder their prayers. “We get stuck on submission, but we forget that we are
also told to honor our wives.” Then, to the men: do you like being honored? Then honor your wife.

Mostly about him

▶ 1:54:03

Paul says it himself: this is primarily a mystery pointing to Christ and his church. Matt’s
argument for why God would build that allegory into a household is simple and worth keeping. Many
believers across history could not read, and knowing God was never meant to be merely academic
anyway. A living, breathing picture of God in your own home teaches what a page cannot. “If you are a
child and you’re looking at your parents and you see your father taking care of your mother, you see
a preachment of the gospel even before you learn how to read.” Which is also why it would not be a
very good preachment if one of them were ruling the other. This is not a race to dominate and
establish the upper hand. It is the other race — difficult, profound, and not mostly about us.

▶ 1:56:03

And this is not moralizing. Paul was not telling the Greeks to be good, patriotic, upstanding
Greeks. He kept coming back to Christ, and to the way our identity has been eclipsed into his — the
grace of God in Christ forges who we are far more than personal preference or character flaws do,
until we are “so dominated by Christ’s death and resurrection that even the way we live in our home
becomes a play about it.” Because you have already been included, washed, cleaned and served by a God
who became a suffering servant, you can serve another person without being addicted to serving
yourself. Married, single, engaged, widowed, divorced, young, old: the same bridegroom, the same
freedom, the same reason. “This is mostly about him.”

▶ 1:58:01

Matt closed by asking the Lord to reveal himself to the room as our bridegroom, and to help us
walk in the truth of the gospel in our homes — “maybe especially in our homes.”

▶ 1:09:24

It was Super Bowl Sunday and Valentine’s weekend, the Girls of Hope had a bake sale waiting in the coffee room, and Matt promised to land the message early. Hope was still working through First Corinthians, and chapter 6 is short. It is also one of the more uncomfortable things Paul ever wrote to a church, because it takes an ordinary grievance — the kind everyone in the room has — and asks what a forgiven person does with it.

1. Keep it in the family

▶ 1:10:00

Paul opens with a question and, as Matt noted dryly, none of it is hypothetical: when one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? Then the strange part — do you not know that the saints will judge the world, and even angels?

Matt did not pretend to have that one solved. But he pointed out it is not out of character for God. In the Old Testament he convenes councils of spirits and asks their counsel when he plainly does not need to; Job 1 has them presenting themselves before him. God has every power to act alone, and he keeps including his creation anyway. Paul’s conclusion follows: if we are going to be included in that, surely we can handle a disagreement about a car or a debt.

And the church already does this, all the time. A couple in conflict sits down with another couple — not because that couple is holier, but because everyone struggles and it keeps the thing from escalating. Matt’s summary was that if you want godly advice and godly standards, it makes sense to stay where they are shared. “We want what’s best for one another, even when temporarily we don’t want what’s best for ourselves in our anger and in our bitterness.”

There is a second reason, and it is about the watching city. Jesus made the family resemblance the proof:

So brother going to law against brother before unbelievers is not just messy, it is a counter-argument. Matt’s illustration: imagine if every episode of a daytime talk show were Mormons throwing chairs. You would stop thinking about Mormon doctrine entirely and only think about the chairs. “Not because God is incapable of doing his own PR,” he said, “but because we don’t want to be a hindrance to people coming to the gospel.” Dysfunction in the church is real and God is patient with it — it just should not be the main thing we are broadcasting.

2. “Why not rather be defrauded?”

▶ 1:15:32

This is the verse Matt kept circling. Somebody mistreated you, you are out real money or a real possession, you went to them and the response was not what you hoped. Going to court is within your rights. “But Paul’s saying maybe not consider your rights,” Matt said. “Maybe consider the saints.” Paul is genuinely entertaining personal defeat as the preferable option.

He was careful to fence it. Paul is nobody’s pushover — he gets into a fighting mood about doctrine and theology, and this is not a call to have no opinions. It is a call to hold a bigger view of what is good for the church than what is owed to you.

▶ 1:19:32

He put a sharp edge on it with an illustration from the back seat of a car. Later in this letter Paul deals with food offered to idols and with not wounding a weaker brother’s conscience — but Matt noted how easily that gets used “almost like calling shotgun.” Every family has its own rules for when the call counts. Claim weaker brother first and the other person now has to do it your way. Even there, the question stands: do I need my way so badly that I will use a spiritual argument to coerce you? Could I just prefer to be wronged?

3. What is actually driving the quarrel

▶ 1:18:20

Matt stepped over to James for the diagnosis, because Paul is treating a symptom and James names the disease.

Underneath the money or the words is usually a fear that we will not be taken care of unless we take care of ourselves. Matt’s answer was not to minimize the loss but to relocate it: there is a shepherd over us, and we have not because we ask not. Then the practical step — take it to an elder, take it to a brother or sister, and say plainly, pray with me for wisdom, I do not know what to do. “This is not only acceptable,” he said. “This is good behavior.” It may be embarrassing. It is still walking in the wisdom of God rather than within the parameters of your rights.

4. “And such were some of you”

▶ 1:21:01

Matt would not let the room read that list as being about other people. That is us — the church, the people in the pews. And it is past tense, because our identity moved. The same cross that moved it also supplies the power to fight: Paul is not only saying stop living in the old false self, he is saying that by the power of Christ’s broken body we can actually contend with these things. “We don’t fight sin for acceptance and freedom,” he said. “By Christ’s death and resurrection and faith in him, we are able to, because we are free.”

▶ 1:22:14

Which is why the lawsuit question is really a memory question. If we have been forgiven all of that, why do we go back into justice mode — strategically, and only sometimes, and generally when it benefits us?

A record of debt with legal demands, nailed up and abandoned. That, Matt said, is the advertisement — enemies of God receiving total forgiveness by grace through faith. It cuts both ways, too: his death became ours, so we died to the world and the world died to us. And it sits oddly beside a congregation that files suit over a grievance. When the free and open invitation is what the city is supposed to hear and all it actually hears is complete chaos, that becomes “a stumbling block to faith.” Matt refused to make it heavier than it is — but he would not let it go, either. “It’s just the point remains. Let’s not make this all about us. It’s not an us show, good or bad.” Paul says it about himself as plainly as it can be said: “I have been crucified with Christ… I do not nullify the grace of God, for if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose.” We are not under the law with its demands; we are under the care of a great shepherd who corrects us and forms character in us. Our motivation is not earning favor by legal obedience. It is living out of favor already given.

5. Simon’s light file

▶ 1:25:22

Then the story that carried the rest of the message. Jesus is at a Pharisee’s table when a woman with a reputation comes in behind him with an alabaster flask, weeping, washing his feet with her tears and drying them with her hair. Simon watches and concludes that a real prophet would know what kind of woman this is. Jesus tells him about two debtors, one owing five hundred denarii and one owing fifty, both forgiven, and asks which will love the lender more. Simon answers correctly and reluctantly — Matt heard a man stuck mid-sentence, seeing where this is going: “The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt.”

▶ 1:26:30

Then Jesus turns toward the woman and audits the host to his face. “I entered your house and you gave me no water for my feet, but she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You gave me no kiss, but from the time I came in, she has not ceased to kiss my feet. You did not anoint my head with oil, but she has anointed my feet with ointment.” By his own accounting Simon had done nothing wrong. That is precisely the trouble — he had also done nothing at all.

And it does not stop at the lesson. Jesus says it to her, not about her — “Your sins are forgiven… your faith has saved you; go in peace” — while the rest of the table mutters about who this man thinks he is to forgive sins at all.

Matt’s line on it was the one to keep: “When we’re pretty sure we’re pretty good, his grace seems okay.”

▶ 1:27:39

He set it next to the servant forgiven an unpayable debt, who walks out, finds a man who owes him petty change, grabs him — pay me back what you owe me — and has him jailed when he cannot. Matt was willing to grant the man his motives: maybe fear, maybe he still felt he owed the original lender somehow. It made no difference. The lender heard about it. “I forgave you all this. You couldn’t let go a little bit.” And in he went. The point is not that the second debt was imaginary. It is the proportion.

6. Which mood do you want him to be in?

▶ 1:28:57

Here Matt staged a small comic prayer, and it landed harder than the laughs suggested. Father, I want to talk to you about somebody. Brother so-and-so called me a jerk, just thought you would like to know. I love your mercy, Lord — but your justice side is cool too. Hasn’t it been a while since you smote somebody? Remember, he stole my bike ten years ago; I still haven’t forgotten that. If you pull his file I’m sure there is plenty more in there. Stealing, lying to a relative — say, about how much he put in on grandpa’s gift. Whose file did you just pull out?

The exit line writes itself: first of all, it’s all about context. Second of all, I’m the home team, remember. Behind the bit is whatever measure we use being measured back to us. So when someone grieves him, Matt said, he thinks about what mood he wants the Lord to be in for himself. “On my account, I don’t want anything to do with their prosecution. Not for me. Release them.” You can still be irritated. You just decline to press.

▶ 1:31:26

And he sat in Simon’s chair himself before putting anyone else in it. “Mine was a light file, you know. I probably would have gotten a wink and a nod into the paradise anyway. Just a wink and a nod. I mean, those people though, like brother so-and-so — that’s a different story.” The correction is arithmetic: we have been forgiven a lot, a lot, a lot, and by comparison the ways we harm one another really are a lot smaller.

7. A smaller shame, for a joy set before you

▶ 1:32:03

Paul describes the apostles as fools for Christ’s sake — homeless, hungry, slandered, treated as the scum of the world, and blessing when reviled. Matt was careful here: they do not take pride in the pain. The pain is not the point. The joy of the grace and the calling is.

What shame are we actually being asked to endure? Being thought wrong. People finding out we were wrong. Having to apologize. Or simply being defrauded and letting it stand. Set against the warm welcome of a Father who gave us everything in his Son while we were still actively opposing him, these are, in Matt’s framing, smaller shames — endured in a kind of worshipful imitation of the one who endured the great one. He left it as a question rather than an order: “Can we endure some shame for the joy of our warm welcome in his presence set before us?”

8. Free to forgive

▶ 1:24:06

The application was concrete and unglamorous: church conflict, family drama — “other people, not us, we don’t have that” — marriage trouble. When something looks unresolvable, bring in another saint with wisdom — it does not have to be a pastor — and pray for wisdom together. And if that third party helps you get to the bottom of it but your pride takes the hit, take the hit anyway, “for the joy and the honor of being able to release and forgive, because we’ve been set free.” The payoff runs in both directions he has been working all message: “This will reduce stumbling within the church. It will also reduce the city around us being scandalized by our weird message.”

▶ 1:35:19

Matt closed on the danger of selective law. When we are angry we run back to the law, because the law is where our rights live. But you do not get to dig up part of it some of the time. If we exhume it to win a war against one person, we are choosing to be related to on those terms across the board. Better to decide in advance which we want: the whole law, or Christ put on through faith — “immersed in his love and grace, embracing grace for us, but that also means for others.”

That is the sentence the title comes from. We have been freed from so much and given so much, and that, not willpower, is where the ability to forgive comes from. “It’s going to be hard,” he said, “but it’s his grace all the way. It’s the motivation. It’s the end goal. It’s the blueprint. And the power behind it is his very person and his grace.”

Then he prayed the message rather than restating it — fill our minds with your grace, fill our hearts with your affection, give us the freedom and the power and the love to forgive others, and give us wisdom as we settle disputes among ourselves, so as not to bring shame to the community in front of the city. Amen, bake sale in the coffee room, prayer teams down front. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.

▶ 1:14:03

It was the week of the Austin ice storm. Power had been out, branches had come down across the church playground, and Matt opened by thanking the people who had cleared them and opened their homes. Then he named the text and the topic — 1 Corinthians 5, sexual immorality and the gospel — and told the guests in the room that no, Hope does not always talk about this. It came up because the series is walking through 1 Corinthians and this is chapter five.

Why preach the hard chapter at all

▶ 1:15:00

The alternative, Matt said, is to preach topically on the things you are comfortable with, forever. He sets himself the discipline of covering as many topics as he can in a year so that nothing gets avoided for the sake of comfort — and 1 Corinthians supplies plenty of opportunities.

He also named two opponents he would be arguing with all morning. The first is moralistic religion — an approach to God that is behavior-based and centered on earning favor rather than on Christ. The second is natural theology: watching a flock of geese, or the stars, and inferring backward what the maker of geese must be like. “Christianity isn’t based on a moralistic religion approach or a natural theology,” he said. Christ is the foundation, the blueprint, and the lens through which even the scriptures are read.

1. The man, and why Paul removes him

▶ 1:17:45

Paul then tells the assembled church to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved. Matt was honest that nobody is entirely sure what that phrase means. What is clear is the shape of it — something like a baptism in reverse, a removal from the fellowship — and the stated aim: the man is saved in the end. Some read “destruction of the flesh” as sickness and death, though Matt noted the obvious problem with that reading, since it is hard to see how a dead man gets restored to the congregation. More likely it means: you are outside the protection of God’s people now. You may walk with Satan if you insist, but we will not make it comfortable.

▶ 1:20:54

Confrontation, in Paul’s mind, is preservative — and it is a mercy twice over. “It’s actually ultimately an act of cruelty to help someone drink the poison that destroys them and make it taste sweet as it goes down,” Matt said. The elders would rather this man be uncomfortable than have him believe he can walk with Christ and in total rebellion at once. And it is a mercy to the room, which is full of people being rescued out of slavish places: bringing the sin back in is like bringing napalm into the helicopter evacuating people from a war zone, or booze to a recovery meeting while lecturing everyone on your freedom.

▶ 1:21:54

The Corinthians had misread an earlier letter as an instruction to avoid immoral people generally, which would mean leaving the planet — or at least never going to HEB. Paul corrects them: the boundary runs inside the church, not around the world. And the list is longer than sex. Greed, idolatry, reviling, drunkenness, swindling all sit in the same sentence.

2. The externalizing trick

▶ 1:23:39

This, Matt argued, is where the last twenty years have gone sideways. The culture’s fixation on homosexuality externalizes the whole subject — it becomes somebody else’s problem, over there, and the room can be glad the pastor is addressing it for their sake. Statistically, what the church struggles against is premarital sex among Christian couples, pornography, and affairs — and there is no victimless crime in any of it.

He stated the position plainly and without hedging: sex belongs within marriage, between one man and one woman who are not close relatives and who have made a public covenant until death. “It’d be hard to come away with a different view unless you’re really trying hard to find it.” And then he spent the rest of the message on the sentence that follows — knowing what the Bible says is not how this battle is fought.

3. Knowing makes it harder

▶ 1:25:55

Matt reached for Smurfs: The Lost Village, which he has seen because he has young children — the moment where Clumsy is told whatever you do, don’t push this lever, and can now think of nothing else. The commandment is holy and righteous and good, and the very commandment that promised life proved to be death. Which means the current debate — pinned entirely on what is and is not sinful — has an aggravating effect. It does not make the struggle easier.

4. Christ first, not the last chapter

▶ 1:28:06

Here Matt warned the room he was about to get mystical, and that he could not avoid it. Natural theology builds upward from what makes sense to us: the laws of logic first, then the stars and the birds, then Greek philosophy’s first principle, then the attributes stacked on top. Conservatives tend to start from a cold, distant power source; liberals from an idea — what does love mean to you — and induct from there. Both are guesswork from the bottom up.

Nor is it a mirage out ahead of you, reachable if you someday learn to pray longer — intimacy with the Father filed under things that are for Mother Teresa and not for you.

▶ 1:30:44

“That last one’s kind of intense,” Matt said. “I think if it weren’t in the Bible we wouldn’t believe it.” God’s own holy law cannot reform the fiery passions of the flesh. The mind set on the flesh is hostile to God and cannot submit — and it is right here, he said, that people quietly slide back into natural theology. This matches my experience, therefore this must be what Christianity is: struggling as a slave, knowing you cannot please God, feeling only hostility. Paul’s cry of wretched man that I am gets treated as the mature Christian address. But Paul knows perfectly well who rescues him.

5. The flesh is already crucified

▶ 1:34:14

Matt made a point he said he could not find anywhere contradicted: scripture never tells us to mortify the flesh. It tells us to put to death the deeds of the body by the Spirit. The flesh itself is already dead in Christ’s crucifixion — not because we managed it, but because it was his death and it became ours.

Not slowly put to death by other means — crucified, past tense, at a particular hill. And “I have been crucified with Christ… the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God” is gobbledygook, he admitted, without a risen Lord actually interacting with us.

▶ 1:37:00

Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch. Matt granted that Paul is addressing a different controversy there, but the question it leaves is exactly his: what can stop the indulgence of the flesh? “The restrictions themselves aren’t bad, but that’s not where the power for fighting comes,” he said. “The yeses and no’s that we find in scripture are always for our benefit, but they are never the power source.”

6. Christian paganism

▶ 1:39:24

He voiced the objection in mock-clerical register: without behavior control and sin mitigation protocols, what is left? If you take away discipleship programs aimed at behavior management, is there anything in the box? “But if we think that way, I think we’re pagans,” he said — “because there’s a Christian way of doing paganism.” The moral pagans of the ancient world held that you had to be moral in order to be illuminated about who God was. Put a Jesus sticker on that and it is not much of an improvement.

The sad version of this is a person walking the do’s and don’ts faithfully, learning the law well enough that it arouses what it forbids, with a Jesus-shaped hole at the center of the whole arrangement. “That’s the best we can do without the real risen Lord. Okay, well, starting tomorrow, do better. The rally cry of dead religion.”

▶ 1:45:33

He anticipated the sharpest objection himself: people are genuinely suffering under temptation — is preaching the gospel at them again any comfort? His answer was that the alternative is worse. To meet real suffering with more tips and management is the actual mockery of it. The gospel is not a promise of ease; the Christian claim has never been that life gets easy. It is that Christ enters into our misery and sets us free from the power of slavery to sin.

7. Cleanse out the old leaven

▶ 1:47:15

The Greek behind new creation, Matt noted, is not the word for an updated version of the same thing. It is the word for something never seen before — a prototype. Principles and general jesusiness do not count. A new creation counts.

▶ 1:52:00

And that sent him back to where he started. Cleanse out the old leaven that you may be a new lump — not because you were a good boy and simply hadn’t noticed, but because Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Underneath strong drink and sexual company, he said, is usually loneliness, boredom, confusion and hurt. People are numbing because they do not know the true medicine. What they are looking for out there — to be acknowledged, to be accepted, to belong — is what is already true in Christ. The congregation had eaten the bread and drunk the cup an hour earlier, which he pointed out as evidence that Hope is already fine with a little mysticism.

He closed by asking the Father to fill the room afresh with revelation of Jesus — to let them dance in his glory with no shackles, no slavery to sin, because in him they really are unleavened.