Matins Devotion: August 7, 2025

1 Corinthians 1:1-25

A few times in my years as a pastor, I’ve had visitors show up on Sunday morning who are from an Evangelical or Reformed background, and when I’ve told them that they couldn’t commune with us, they asked why. I then referred them to 1 Corinthians 11 where Paul says that we aren’t to come together with divisions when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, and I’ve told them that we’d need to resolve our doctrinal divisions before we commune together. In response, they’ve insisted that the divisions Paul is speaking of in 1 Corinthians 11 are divisions of the heart, not doctrine. It’s the rich shaming the poor kind of stuff. So as long as we’re all Christians, and as long as we’re not shaming each other or angry with each other, we should be able to commune together, even if we don’t believe the same things about holy communion or a host of other issues. That’s what they’ve said.

But this very much misses the overarching point of 1 Corinthians, something we see established in the early verses and then throughout the epistle. Saying “I follow Paul” or “I follow Peter” as though the apostles are divided is the result of believing that you’re not really a sinner and that the apostles are just stepping stones to your own glory. Tolerating a man having a sexual relationship with his step mother is the result of failing to understand how, exactly, Christ has set us free from the law. And in the same way, treating the Lord’s Supper as a means for rubbing your own perceived glory in the face of those you see as inferior is the result of not believing that the Son of God who has the authority and power to melt the flesh off your bones is actually giving Himself to you in the bread and wine.

In the end, divisions over love happen because we’re divided over doctrine. And we can’t heal the former without first healing the latter. So if we all want to commune together without divisions, as Scripture commands, it’s not enough to say we love each other. We have to love each other by diligently studying the Scriptures together and by purging false doctrine from our hearts until we can all say “once I was a lifeless sinner, but then Christ gave His life for me, destroying my sins upon the cross. Then He rose from the grave, gave me eternal life, clothed me in that death and resurrection in the waters of my baptism, and now that same Savior comes to feed me with the very body and blood that made me God’s own.”