The concept of a masquerade party is an interesting thought when it comes to the Christian life. As people gather together at a masquerade party, they mingle while at the same time conceal their true identity by keeping a mask over their face. It becomes a world in which everyone is the same-----a room full of people who are playing a game of “guess who I really am.” The idea is to remain as hidden, inconspicuous, and anonymous as possible by not revealing too much about the person behind the mask. Otherwise, once you’re discovered, you have to reveal the person who was hiding behind the masquerade. But what does this have to due with the Christian life? According to Paul, this is a very real scenario for believers to find themselves in the midst of the world they live.
The Corinthians were such a people who chose to live in the masquerade of the Christian life. Paul expressed that when it came to the difference between those who are experiencing life in the Spirit and those who remain in the world, that those without the Spirit were blinded or for our purposes, “masked” from seeing the truth. He writes, “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). The idea that Paul conveys when he suggests that those in the world are “spiritually discerned” is that they cannot make a proper judgment about the things of the Spirit. Much like a jury that enters a courtroom with no knowledge of what the details of a trial holds, so those without the Spirit have no clue as to what exists in the mind of God. God’s mind is hidden from them but the man of the Spirit has “the mind of Christ” (1 Corinthians 2:16). Like the Corinthians, we are probably thankful for the fact that we have the “Spirit” and we have been given the “mind of Christ;” however, does this mean that we are not ever “masked” from seeing the truth of God?
In the very next breath, Paul states to the Corinthians, “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly…” (1 Corinthians 3:1). In other words, Paul just explained that the “spiritual man” knows the mind of Christ while the man in the “world” does not and his rebuke tells the Corinthians that they are also blind to the things of the Spirit. This was the major reason for all of the dysfunction in the Corinthian church. There was fornication, division, disorder, power struggles, prejudices, and an inability to understand how the Spirit was to function in the midst of the church body. The real issue in Corinth was that although they were “Christian” they chose to dress themselves up with the culture that surrounded them and thus, entered into the masquerade! If you continue to read the Corinthian story, you will discover that although they began to address some of these situations, 2 Corinthians reveals that false teaching begins to enter into the church (see 2 Corinthians 10-12). How does this happen? Simple. If a people in a church do not refrain from worldliness, they are unable to discern falsehood from the truth and the result is the embracing of things that are not from the Spirit of God.
Have we ever stopped to wonder why week after week and month after month churches continue to merely exist in what feels like an endless cycle of familiarity and routine? Corinth, as charismatic as it was, continued to “do church” in a way that they felt they should and yet, the Apostle Paul recognized that things needed to change. In our day, if someone suggests that we are “off track” or that what we are doing in our churches is not “spiritual” we tend to dismiss that individual as being “judgmental” or “legalistic.” After all, how dare they suggest that we cannot understand what God wants us to do because we are being too worldly in the overall environment of the church! No one should have a right to challenge the “freedom” we have in Christ-----isn’t that what we say? Forget the fact that some of those “freedoms” we dearly hold on to are products of embracing the worldly culture around us. Forget the fact that those “freedoms” we relish in are patterned after the philosophies and attitudes of worldly thinking. We simply want to believe what we want to believe and unfortunately, even if we don’t have the mind of Christ in the mix, we still believe in our right to believe it!
The problem, however, is that we have forgotten an all too important truth: we can still grieve the Holy Spirit of God. We can try to rationalize or justify our worldly tendencies just as the Corinthians did and pretend that what we are doing is right on track with making us the most spiritual of people. We can continue to taint our reputation as followers of Christ by presenting to the world a Jesus who is into all of the worldly activities that we pursue. After all, Jesus being free, would definitely sit himself down in front of a violent sex-laden “R” rated movie or relish in the music of our culture that celebrates much of what breaks the heart of God. The Corinthians sought this pseudo-expression of Christianity by believing they could worship in God’s temple while also enjoying the worship at the cult temples. This is why Paul reminds the Corinthians that they are “the temple of the Holy Spirit” two times in the book (1 Corinthians 3:16 and 6:19). The context of his first usage includes that idea that we need to be careful as to what we build our lives upon as he warns the church that anyone who causes “division” in God’s temple, God will “destroy” him. Does worldliness cause division in the Body of Christ? Does an attitude that infects a congregation which suggests “don’t judge me and allow me to keep pretending that my sin is perfectly acceptable” bring unity to the Body of Christ? This is why perhaps Paul had to remind a second time in the context of engaging in the temple cult worship that God cannot be joined with the world---the two cannot co-exist.
The overall problem of the masquerade is that we have come to believe that “who I am” in Christ is the finality of the Christian life. While I believe that “who I am” in Christ stands at the foundation of my faith, it does not eliminate the importance of “what I do” as a believer. We have masked ourselves in the church for too long from the truth that “WHAT I DO” affects “WHO I AM”----because “what I do” affects my ability to hear from God, please God, and ultimately worship God. Jesus and the apostles have made something abundantly clear in Scripture: the worst place to be in life is in being someone who knows who they are in Christ and yet chooses not to live in a way that shows they are in Christ. We may be “free” but God still holds us accountable for WHAT we do (1 Corinthians 3:11-16, 6:9-19). If we want to continue to embrace the “ways of culture” over the “way of the cross” we will discover something when we come to the end of that journey. We will find that we have been caught in a masquerade that has hidden us from an abundant life in the Spirit. We will discover that we have missed God while attending the ball. We will experience the pain of realizing that “we thought” we were heading in the right direction only to end up lost in the woods when the passenger that was with us all the time was telling us where to go. It’s time to remove the mask and see ourselves for who we are. It’s time to stop hiding behind the disguise of a worldly faith and accept the truth of WHO WE ARE TO BE in this world-----a people who are holy, separate and commanded to “come out from among them” so that God can receive us as “sons and daughters” (2 Corinthians 6:14-18). If we fail to do so, we will never come to the place in our lives where we can discern the difference between the precious voice of the Lord and the voice of the world that seeks to deceive us.
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