This past Sunday, we were continuing our studies in 1 Corinthians and hit chapter 5. A hair-raising form of sin being tolerated within the church. A form of sin that even the pagans of Corinth found detestable. When you reckon with the fact that adultery, sleeping with slaves and visiting temple prostitutes was deemed a respectable, ordinary part of life, you know what is going on is pretty heinous. In this case, a man sleeping with his father’s wife. Probably not the man’s biological mother, but still pretty gross by most standards.

This passage comes off the back of four chapters in which Paul tries to show the Corinthians they are not quite as spiritually mature and superior as they think they are. By chapter 5, he castigates the church as arrogant and proud. Paul doesn’t seem to be suggesting that they are proud the aforementioned sin is being committed within their ranks. He doesn’t spend any time convincing them it is wrong because they seem to know full well how wrong it is already. Paul is essentially saying: how can you think yourselves spiritually superior when you’ve got this outrageous sin in your midst and none of you are doing a thing about it!

We know the church in Corinth was very status driven. It’s entirely plausible that the man in sin is a particularly wealthy individual of some standing in the community. Rather than removing him from the church as they should have done, they are tolerating his sin potentially because of the associated status he brings, the wealth he brings to the church, the people whose businesses he patronises or other such things. Rather than do what ought to be done, sin is allowed to slide because the Corinthians have higher priorities than their faithfulness to Christ.

The truth is, if anything is a higher priority to us than our faithfulness to Jesus, there is almost no sin we won’t tolerate in order to get it. How does a church end up in a position where it is happy to tolerate incest-adjacent sin? When they have an idol that takes priority over faithfulness to Jesus. In the Corinthian’s case, it was status. We know not many of them were wise or of noble birth, which probably explains their status-driven desire. Most of them had no status so wanted to grasp on to what status they could get. But when their desire for status overtakes their desire to be faithful to Jesus, tolerating the sins of those who might bring them status by association is what results.

The real problem is, it is hard to determine whether we have allowed our desire for one thing to overtake our faithfulness to Jesus. That is, until doing what is right demands that we give up that thing and we start to think about whether doing the right thing is really worth it. When we start bartering away our faithfulness, when we start quibbling about whether we really need to do this thing because it would mean giving up what we really want, then we might know that we have an idol on our hands. We definitely know we have an idol on our hands when we determine our faithfulness is less important than keeping or gaining this thing.

It isn’t hard to see how things like money or status might drive this sort of thing. This is particularly true when houses (manses and vicarages), stipends, pensions, school for the children and a multitude of other things will be impacted. None of these things wrong of themselves, but all of them evidently and obviously not ultimate things. I suspect for many of us, a more subtle temptation – a plausibly-sounding spiritual reason – take precedence. Much gets swept under the rug ‘for the good of the ministry’ or ‘for the sake of the gospel’. That is to say, maintaining this particular ministry or that particular minister is the most vital thing. Often, sadly, to the detriment of their actual faithfulness to Jesus, which is ironically, to the detriment of the gospel and the damage of that particular gospel witness. It appears to lie behind many of the bigger scandals that have broken across the Anglophone evangelical world in recent years.

The bottom line is, if faithfulness to Jesus is not the main thing almost anything will be. If faithfulness to Jesus is not our top priority, there is almost no sin that we won’t find ourselves tolerating for whatever our main priority happens to be. If you’re not being driven by faithfulness to Christ, sin will reign.