The Puffed-Up Loaf

In his Corinthian church, Paul
is dealing with a wayward, troubled body of believers. They had grown
so proud that they could no longer even see or sense their own sinfulness. In their pride, they were focused
on all of the wrong things. They were dwelling on minor technicalities,
all the while ignoring the simpler truths truths leading to godliness
as a testimony to the world. They’d completely set aside the
responsibility to genuinely care for one another, to watch out
for sin in one another’s lives, so as to deal with it graciously
but decisively. And so, in the opening Verses
of chapter five, as we have begun to consider. Paul brings the
Corinthian church back into a consideration of a very important element of
church life. Discipline. Church discipline. What John Calvin called the sinews,
that is the tendons of the body of Christ. Just as the human
body requires healthy tendons to function optimally, so the
church needs discipline in order to aid in the pursuit of the
holiness to which we are called as believers. We must be engaged
in the process of sanctification. Even as my brother prayed earlier,
we must be in pursuit of personal holiness. The problem is we falter. We stumble. We tire. We go off of the path of righteousness. And without the means to correct
and to call such wanderers back to the path of righteousness,
we stand to lose them. We stand to lose them at least,
and at worse, we stand to infect the rest of the church with their
attitudes, with their behaviors. That is the role and the purpose
of discipline. When we speak of church discipline,
we ought to think of two different kinds of church discipline, formative
discipline on the one hand, and corrective discipline on the
other. I usually get everyone’s attention in our church membership
classes when I announce to the class that you are all under
discipline. As believers, we are all under
formative discipline. And that’s because not a one
of us is yet perfect. We’re all learning. We’re all
growing. We are all constantly being confronted
and challenged by God’s Word, whether it’s in our own personal
time in the Bible, or in a discipleship setting, or absolutely from the
pulpit, such discipline is formative. It is little by little forming
us by the Holy Spirit’s application of the word to our life to form
us, transform us into the image of Christ. But there’s another
kind of discipline. And that discipline becomes necessary
when we become dull to God’s word, insensitive to the convicting
ministry of the Holy Spirit. It is corrective discipline.
Our consciences become hardened. We begin to make excuses and
even to justify our sin. Enter the need for corrective
discipline. Paul referred to it with the
biblical word, the biblical metaphor of the rod. With all the problems
erupting in the Corinthian church, he pointedly asked them, should
I come to you with a rod? Should I come to you with the
purpose of exercising church discipline among you? Paul didn’t
want to come to Corinth in order to administer discipline. No
pastor wants to do that. It’s not pleasant, but it is
necessary. Both kinds of discipline, formative
discipline and corrective discipline are necessary. That said, before
we turn to consider the passage at hand this morning, I would
remind you that the passage we considered last Sunday, 1 Corinthians
5, verses 1 through 5, is only one passage that addresses church
discipline. There are many others. For instance,
I briefly mentioned Matthew 18, last Lord’s Day. There is a passage
that addresses church discipline. And it really addresses the particular
steps of church discipline. There, Jesus lays out the fuller
process of church discipline, how it develops. Matthew chapter 18, verse 15.
If your brother sins, go show him his fault in private. There
is so much wisdom there. You take ego completely out of
it when you go to a brother in private. And then listen to the
hopeful sign here. If he listens to you, you have
won your brother. It’s over. He heard you. He was convicted by the Spirit. He repented of his sin. And you’ve
won him. The whole thing is over. But
it doesn’t always go so squeaky clean, does it? And verse 16
says, but if he does not listen to you, take one or two more
with you. In other words, get some brothers
who know the situation and go and make appeal to this man,
open up the scriptures again, and share your concerns with
him all over again. And I would suggest to you that
even though it’s not there in the text, it is implied If he
listens to you, you have won your brother. If he listens to
the two or three that are gathered there to appeal to him, to bring
him a confrontation of his sin, if he listens to you, you’ve
won. He comes to repentance. He turns from his sin. And we
know that that doesn’t always work. And so Jesus, verse 17
of Matthew 18, says, if he refuses to listen to them, tell it to
the church. Tell it to the entire body of
Christ. And if he refuses to listen even
to the church, if he still refuses to repent of his sin, let him
be to you as a Gentile and a tax gatherer. Now, that’s only one
additional passage on church discipline, and we could step
back and consider every possible passage with every nuance, every
measure of detail on the subject. We could effectively stand and
produce a theology of church discipline. It would take weeks
and months of study, let alone delivery. It would be truly painstaking
and tedious work Very difficult to deliver something like that
from the pulpit and probably unproductive in the long run.
By the time we finished, we would have forgotten why we’re even
doing it. It obviously wasn’t Paul’s approach in the passage
that we considered last week. It obviously wasn’t my approach
to give a theology of church discipline. everything that could
possibly be said on the subject. With regard to the situation
at Corinth, we can only assume that Paul knew things that we
do not, that Paul was much more deeply immersed in this matter,
and that there were details related to the situation that Paul did
not disclose to us. We literally are dropped into
the middle of this situation in chapter five. And we can only
assume that gentler appeals had failed. Perhaps other brothers
had gone to the man and had taken the scriptures and shown him
his sin. And to this point, he refused
to repent. And this wretched sin so shocking
and so scandalous, Paul knew it must be dealt with indecisively
for the sake of the offender, for the purity of the church,
and for the glory of God. We must not criticize Paul. This passage, too, is God’s Word. We don’t know what other methods
or means have been attempted. We only know what Paul delivers
to us in verses one through five. But having dealt now with the
sinful man in verses one through five, Paul turns his attention
to the sinful church, a church that had effectively ignored
this sin under the guise of toleration. It’s a popular word in our day,
isn’t it? They’d ignored this man’s sin
under the guise of toleration and For Paul, they too must be
challenged. We are in 1 Corinthians chapter
5. We’ll take it in its entirety.
Read along with me if you would. It is actually reported that
there is immorality among you, an immorality of such a kind
as does not even exist among the Gentiles, that someone has
his father’s wife You have become arrogant and have not mourned
instead so that the one who had done this deed would be removed
from your midst. For I, on my part, though absent
in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has
committed this as though I were present. In the name of our Lord
Jesus, when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit with
the power of our Lord Jesus, I have decided to deliver such
a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh so that his spirit
may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Your boasting is
not good. Do you not know that a little
leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven
so that you may be a new lump. Just as you are, in fact, unleavened. For Christ, our Passover has
been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the
feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and
wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote you in my letter not
to associate with immoral people. I did not at all mean with the
immoral people of this world or with the covetous or with
the swindlers or with idolaters, for then you would have to go
out of this world. But actually, I wrote you not
to associate with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person. or covetous, or an idolater,
or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler, not even to eat
with such a one. For what have I to do with judging
outsiders? Do you not judge those who are
within the church? But those who are outside, God
judges. Remove the wicked man from among
yourselves. Paul’s inclination to come to
Corinth with the rod of discipline was not only to deal with this
wretched offender, but really the entire church stands in need
of corrective discipline. The Corinthians had stood back
and watched this disgusting affair unfold in their midst. And they
were actually proud of how accepting they were of this alternative
lifestyle. They should have dealt with such
a sin issue decisively. They had not. This too must be
addressed. And here in verses 6 through
8, Paul addresses the sin of the Corinthian church. Paul has
made much of this very creative use of this term puffed up. It
was a word that he used to speak of the attitude of pride that
was so prevalent in this church. And this arrogance must have
really been a problem in Corinth because Paul only uses this word
seven times, six of them here in this epistle. The Corinthian
church in Paul’s assessment was like a puffed up loaf of bread.
Paul knows that he must confront this church’s pride in order
to stop the spread of wickedness in their midst. To do so, he
employs an easily understandable metaphor, the effect of leaven
or yeast. And in these verses, Paul makes
a number of crucial observations. We want to look at these this
morning. I think there are four crucial observations toward the
goal of eliminating the spread of wickedness. First of all,
the first observation Paul makes is of Levin’s gateway. Levin’s
gateway. And we see it in the first sentence
of verse 6, your boasting is not good. Boasting is the gateway
for this Levin. It’s no surprise at this point
in our epistle that Paul was dealing with a very proud church. We’ve witnessed Paul dealing
with this confrontation of their factiousness in earlier chapters,
another manifestation of their pride. But in the opening verses
of this chapter, Paul has moved to address yet another manifestation
of the Corinthian pride, their tolerance of sin and effectively
their self-congratulation of that tolerance. There in verse 2, Paul called
it for what it was, yet another proof of their flat-out pride.
You have become arrogant, he tells them. And having first
dealt with the sinful man, verses 1 through 5, Paul turns his attention
directly, specifically to the sinful church in verses 6 through
8. And here he reiterates the charge
that he makes against them in verse 2. With yet another characterization
of this church, not only were they arrogant, they were boastful.
He says, your boasting is not good. Boasting, as we know it,
is just the outward verbal expression of an inward attitude of pride
that has long been developing. Boasting, from the Bible’s perspective,
is not merely a matter of making a brash, self-promoting statement. The Word is oriented in the grounds
or the reason for such a bold declaration. What it is in which
we place our trust, what it is in which we glory, That’s the
grounds of boasting. And as such, the Christian has
only one ground for boasting. In reality, the Lord Jesus Christ
is our only ground for boasting. That kind of boast is no arrogant
statement based on some personal accomplishment. The prophet Jeremiah
set forth the standard when he said, he who boasts is to boast
in the Lord. And writing to the Galatians,
Paul seizes on that truth and affirms it wholeheartedly. May
it never be that I would boast, except in the cross of our Lord
Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me
and I to the world. Christ is the one source of the
believer’s confidence. Jesus Christ and Christ alone
is the Christian’s cause for boasting. But the Corinthians? To the Corinthians,
Paul says the very foundation of their confidence was faulty. It was misplaced. Their trust
was in anything but Christ. Their grounds for boasting were
worthless. Because they were boasting, they
were expressing their confidence in themselves, not in the Lord. So not surprisingly, Paul says
that their boasting was not good. That’s an understatement. Paul
was not, rather Paul says that it is unbecoming of them as a
Christian to boast in what they were boasting. Their attitude
was bad and their boasting only added to their list of offenses. By its very nature, this arrangement
was not good. It was inappropriate. It was
qualitatively bad. Any situation that brings dishonor
to the Lord, disgrace to the local church, and disrepute to
the individual inherently cannot be a matter of pride. Any prudent
person stepping back and evaluating this situation would agree. But as if this boasting were
not bad enough in itself, it gets worse. Because their misplaced
confidence and the sinful attitudes that stemmed from that is the
very thing that fostered this disturbing tolerance of sin in
their midst. Their toleration of this despicably
sinful situation and the subsequent boastfulness of this toleration
was just so utterly proud. But there’s another reason why
their boasting was not good. Paul observes yet another feature
of yeast, of leaven. And Paul moves to explain this
in the second observation that he makes in verse six. And so
we see not only leaven’s gateway in their boasting, but leaven’s
course. We know how it gets in. What
does it do once it’s there? Look at the end of verse six.
Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump
of dough? This is Paul’s primary argument
against the Corinthians boastful attitude. They were so smug in
their permissive thinking. And while they may not have actually
been engaged in this sin, the sin of the young man with his
father’s wife, Paul explains that it’s only a matter of time
before sin permeates throughout the entire church. The image
or the illustration that Paul uses to communicate this is a
familiar one. A little leaven leavens the whole
lump of dough. Paul isn’t talking about bread
baking here. He’s speaking metaphorically
of the spread of sin. As one described it, though it
is insignificant in quality, it possesses a real penetrating
force. In other words, he says, you
take a tiny little bit of leaven, a tiny little bit of yeast, and
you add it to a lump of dough, and it immediately permeates
through the entire loaf. Leaven, or as we would call it,
yeast, is used in Scripture to speak of influence. Not a bad
thing. Scripture uses it to speak of
influence that can be good or bad. Jesus used the illustration
of leaven in a good way to speak of the kingdom of God, remember?
Luke 13, he says that the influence of the gospel is like leaven
which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it
was all leavened. So there Jesus is speaking positively
of the spread of the gospel throughout the whole world. Do you realize,
this is so cool, Do you realize how true that is as you sit here
this morning? In a Christian worship service,
worshiping Christ for who he is, for what God has done through
his son, what he has accomplished on the cross, and as you sit
here some 7,000 miles from where Jesus conducted his ministry,
you see the gospel has permeated. throughout the world. It continues
to do so, doesn’t it? It’s functioned as leaven does
in a lump of dough. But leaven can also be used to
speak of evil influence, and Jesus provides an example here,
too. As recorded in both Matthew and Luke, Jesus warns, beware
of the leaven of the Pharisees, beware of their attitudes, beware
of their legalism, because that too will spread. In addressing the heretical doctrine
of the Galatians that the Galatians were imbibing, Paul used it negatively
as well. Paul says, a little leaven leavens
the whole lump of dough, the exact same sentence as here in
1 Corinthians. Paul urges the Galatians to forsake
this teaching. Legalism. And so here Paul uses
the illustration of the permeating nature of leaven to speak of
sin in the church, in the Corinthian church, this ungodly influence
and this stain which comes by way of living in, being associated
with the world. Now to finish out this developing
metaphor, we should observe that the whole lump of dough here
is representative of the church. So as you take a little bit of
leaven and you add it to a lump of dough, it’s going to permeate
it. And already you have sin in the church and it hasn’t been
dealt with. That’s Paul’s concern. By the way, Paul is not making
light of the sinful situation of this young man who has his
father’s wife when he says a little leaven. It’s not a little sin. This is
a gross, vile sin, one of the worst in all of Scripture. What you could say is that Paul
is arguing from the lesser to the greater. We already know
his assessment of this man’s sin as monstrously evil. When he speaks of a little leaven
here, he isn’t speaking of that man’s sin, but rather of any sin. Any sin tolerated will spread. It becomes commonplace. It becomes
okay. No big deal. Even a tiny pinch
of yeast will eventually permeate through an entire lump of dough,
and so we can only imagine the horrible influence of this man’s
much greater sin If it were to continue to be tolerated in their
midst, the magnitude of its influence would be incalculable. But further,
their permissive attitude as well would have the same leavening
effect. If they tolerated this sin, what
would they tolerate next? Soon, they would be just as the
heathen about whom Paul wrote in Romans 1. Although they know the ordinance
of God, that they who practice such things are worthy of death,
they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to
those who practice them. That’s very nearly what the Corinthian
church was becoming. This is Paul’s great concern. The sin, yes, but also the tolerance
of it. And soon they would have no ability
to exercise that mature biblical quality of the ability to discern
from good and evil. Charles Hodge said one tolerated
evil deteriorates the whole moral sense of the church. Did you
get that? One tolerated evil deteriorates
the whole moral sense of the church. Once sin is introduced, if it’s
tolerated or ignored, its influence will spread throughout the whole
church. And we are watching this. We
are watching this with great alarm in the greater church,
not this church. But with regard to homosexuality
and transgenderism, we’re watching the church tolerate this sin. We’re watching the church allow
for these kinds of sins, actually lowering the bar and conveniently looking aside at their own sin. When we lower the bar, when we
look at some of the more sordid versions of sin, and we lower
the bar to say that those aren’t sin, then certainly our sin is
not so bad. Paul makes a third observation
in verse seven. What if? What would it look like? What would it be like if leaven
was eradicated? That’s what he addresses in verse
7. Levin’s gateway, Levin’s course. Thirdly, Levin’s purge. Clean
out the old Levin so that you may be a new lump, just as you
are, in fact, on Levin. For Christ, our Passover, has
been sacrificed. Well, the illustration of Levin
It would have been immediately understandable to all, both Jews
and Romans or Greeks. But the latter, the heathen,
would not have readily understood the whole historical religious
significance of it. And so Paul, patiently as a good
pastor, explains the metaphor to them. He urges them first
to clean out the old The root word here of that verb
is cathiro, to cleanse. It’s the word from which we get
our word catharsis. Now when Paul speaks of old leaven
here, it’s not a matter of its freshness or of its literal age. He doesn’t say that it’s been
on the shelf too long or that that leaven is stale. His concern
is for the presence of any leaven. Just as the Jews would have been. In other words, it is leaven
that should no longer be a part of a Christian’s life. Old in
that sense. It’s 11 that Paul would go on
to speak of as representative of the old life. This word old
is used a lot of times in scripture to speak of our former lives
before salvation. Jesus. Jesus cautioned against
putting a new patch on an old garment. Remember? Essentially
the same illustration, he says. Similarly, he warned about putting
new wine into old wineskins. Paul, in Romans 6-6, says that
our old self was crucified with Christ. In Ephesians 4-25, he
tells us to lay aside the old self. And even a young believer
can do those things. Paul will go on in verse 8 to
equate leaven with malice and wickedness. Paul says, clean
them out. Get rid of this old, corrupting
influence in your life personally and in the church corporately.
Get rid of it. And he’s hereby calling for holiness
in the church, moral purity. Now, again, the Jewish readers
would have immediately understood the image that Paul presents,
referring to their preparation of the Passover meal. The whole
Passover process is laid out for you in Exodus 12, but specifically
regarding leaven, it says, verse 15, Exodus 12, 15. On the first day, you shall remove
leaven from your houses. See, prior to the Passover meal,
the Jewish family was to purge the entire household of leaven. The Passover meal, as you know,
celebrated in memory of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, was attended
with the eating of unleavened bread. That bread symbolized
the haste with which Israel departed their captivity. And Moses explains
there, since they were driven out of Egypt and could not delay,
nor had they prepared any provisions for themselves. It was symbolic,
this unleavened bread. And the leaven symbolized the
ungodly influence of the Egyptian culture. And so to purge the
house of leaven, And then to bake only unleavened bread was
a living illustration of purification from sin. And this was often taken to great
excess. Zephaniah 112 says of God, I
will search Jerusalem with lamps. And so the rabbis interpreted
that verse that it was to be employed in the Passover meal,
the preparation where families would take a candle and go about
and look in every nook and cranny, even as one described it, even
in the mouse holes to look for any sign of leaven. Lest the
meal and the family be defiled. Well, Paul isn’t literally instructing
the church to crawl about on all fours on their knees, holding
a candle in search for leaven. But the illustration is clear.
Clean out the old leaven of sin. Clean it out. And his reasoning
is simple. Look at the next line, verse
seven, so that you may be a new lump, just as you are, in fact,
unleavened. Paul explains the first line
by his addition of the second, be a new lump, just as you are,
in fact. That’s basically what he says.
Effectively, he says, become what you are. When he reminds them, you are
unleavened, he’s speaking of the great truth that they are,
in a very real way, already holy. That’s what believers are. If anyone is in Christ, he is
a new creature. Believers are justified. They are declared righteous. You are a new, that is, unleavened
lump, Paul says. So clean out the old leaven.
so that you may be or become holy. Become what you are. Become in reality what you are
by profession. That’s what we do when we come
to the Lord’s table. This is why Paul can tell the
Ephesians in 424, put on the new self. Become what you are,
which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness
and holiness of truth. Become what you are. When a person
comes to faith in Jesus Christ, he or she finds her sins to have
been already paid for by Christ’s sacrifice. Such a person is forgiven. They now face no condemnation. Do you realize that? They’ve been declared righteous,
holy. But in reality, we’re a long
way off, right? But sanctification is that process
of becoming what we are declared to be. In one sense, they were
already holy, but in another sense, they were in process. So that you may become in reality
what you are. And his justification for that
is in the final clause of verse seven. Would you glance down
at it? For Christ, our Passover also has been sacrificed. Please
stay with me here on this final point. Christ’s death is indeed
a motivation toward the pursuit of sanctification. So horrible
a death for so wonderful a savior. That should move us to the pursuit
of personal holiness. After all, it was my sin, your
sin, that put him on the cross. But it’s so much more than motivation.
It’s not just a motivation for the reader. It declares the great
means by which our sin was covered. Paul reverts to a reference to
the Passover. Watch this. He reverts to a reference
to the Passover, that meal commemorating the exodus of the children of
Israel out of Egypt. Remember. God. That very night in his righteous
wrath was preparing to strike the firstborn of all of Egypt.
It was Pharaoh’s curse. God commanded Israel to celebrate
a special feast, a celebration of the Passover meal, which was
complete with the sacrifice of a lamb. Or what Paul calls here,
in short, the Passover. The Jews were to kill a lamb
for this meal, and remember, They were to take the blood of
that sacrifice and paint the doorposts a sign guaranteeing
them protection from the plague of death. Remember? The lamb died in place of vicariously
for the people. And so when Paul speaks of Christ,
our Passover, he’s certainly not speaking of Christ as the
Passover meal, as if Jesus merely represents a celebratory meal. Rather, he speaks of Christ as
the lamb, the Passover lamb, which was frequently referred
to simply as the Passover. because he took the same role
as that innocent lamb in the Passover feast. He was sacrificed
for us. He took our penalty. He took
our place. And just as that sacrificial
lamb was the provision for sin for an entire household with
the painting of that blood, Christ’s atonement was for the sin of
the world. Christ has paid our debt of sin
and we are cleansed and purified by his shed blood. Paul makes a fourth and final
observation about leaven and its influence. What happens when
it’s removed? Verse eight. And so we have in
these, the fourth of these observations of yeast or leaven, In the attempt
to eliminate the spread of this wickedness, we see Levin’s gateway,
Levin’s course, Levin’s purge, and finally, Levin’s absence.
What happens when it’s completely gone? Therefore, let us celebrate the
feast, not with old Levin, nor with the Levin of malice and
wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Well, having humbled themselves
as a church, Paul pictures them as having purged the leaven from
their midst. And there remains one important
thing for this church to do. Worship. Or, as Paul says it,
let us celebrate the feast. He’s not talking here about the
Passover. As if Christians should once again take up the celebration
of a Jewish feast. Nowhere does scripture command
that the feast of unleavened bread, the Passover, be celebrated
by Christians. I was sharing with someone last
Lord’s Day that I remember in high school, my dear longtime
Jewish friend invited me to his home. Some of you met him at
my mom’s funeral. He invited me to his home for
a Seder supper. I knew little about it. It was
a celebration of the Passover. And it was fascinating. And looking
back now, I have a better perspective of some of the imagery of the
Passover, especially once I became a Christian. But Paul isn’t arguing
here for a reinstitution of the Passover feast. He’s not talking
about the literal Passover celebration, and he’s not even talking about
the Lord’s table. Let’s be clear about that. He’s
not talking about communion. He’s continuing with his use
of the Passover as a metaphor. He’s continuing here to talk
about the feast as a day, a meal, a celebration that was consecrated
to the Lord. The feast was a day for the Lord. And so what Paul is referring
to here is a celebration of life. It’s a celebration of life in
Christ that every believer is called to exercise. It’s the
living out of the declaration of the words of that old hymn,
isn’t it? Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee. It’s not just a once a year or
even once a month kind of celebration, it’s a mindset. It’s a perpetual
awareness that what Christ has done in this sacrifice and how
we are to live in light of that. To truly consecrate our life
for the sake of Christ means that we cannot import what Paul
calls here old leaven. Can’t do it. You can’t. Celebrate the feast as God would
have you to celebrate it while importing the leaven of your
old life. Paul, by referring here to old leaven,
speaks of our dabbling or maintaining those elements of our corrupt
life of which we’ve been forgiven. Paul says it this way in Romans
6, how shall we who died to sin still live in it? We died to sin. We died to sin
when we turned our back on our former life, when we repented
of our wretched condition in sin, If we died to sin, how can
we import any of that back into our new life in Christ? Paul
further describes that old life, the sin of that former life,
as old leaven. He calls it the leaven of malice
and wickedness. The word translated here as malice
speaks of something, thought or attitude, that is just objectively
bad. It can be understood as a heart
of cruelty, an evil mindset that desires the harm of others. It
rejoices in another’s calamity. How could a Christian bring even
a pinch of that kind of bad thinking into his relationship with Christ
and his church? Knowing the pervasive nature
of sin. The second word, wickedness.
Not only malice, but wickedness, as you might imagine, is a stronger
Greek word even still, because it goes beyond the thought life.
This is where it gets applied. It’s the word Poneros, evil,
worthless, vile. Satan himself is called the evil
one. These are those who savor their
sin. Who also relish a malevolent
desire to harm other people. One described it as a vicious
disposition of spite, deep unkindness of the self-centered, Christless
heart. This leaven, the leaven of malice
and wickedness cannot be rolled into our new life of Christ,
can’t. Instead of importing this old
leaven, the Christian is called upon here to celebrate the feast
of life by breaking the bread of sincerity and truth. Sincerity
here, the virtue of genuineness, a transparency that reveals no
dissimulation. The closer you inspect this individual,
the more genuine he appears. It’s the Christian with a sincere
heart. He is what he is. Truth, you know, is that virtue
that just speaks of being conformity with God’s laws and standards. I love the way one described
it. Inflexible firmness, constancy in maintaining all that is revealed
to the conscience as good. Your life squares with scripture.
So many words here, Paul issues a call to the Corinthians and
a call to all believing readers to a life that honors the Savior
who bought them with his own blood. If the leaven of malice and wickedness
has been purged from your life by the spirit’s application of
the finished work of Christ on the cross. Then leave that forsaken
leaven out of the recipe for your new life in Christ. Celebrate
the feast. Worship your Savior, the Lord
Jesus Christ, in sincerity and truth.