INTRODUCTION:  

The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments posted in the courthouse is this – you cannot post “Thou shalt not steal” “Thou shalt not commit adultery”, and “Thou Shalt not lie” in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians…it creates a hostile work environment. 

Many times man has attempted to destroy the Bible. In A.D. 303 the Roman Emperor Diocletian issued an edict to destroy Christians and their Bible.  The persecution that followed was brutal.  Over a burned Bible, Diocletian built a monument on which he wrote these triumphant words, “Extincto nomene Christianorum” which interpreted means “The name Christian is extinguished”.  But twenty-five years later, Diocletian was dead and the new Roman Emperor Constantine commissioned that fifty copies of the Bible be prepared (hand written) at government expense.  In 1776, Voltaire, the famous French philosopher, announced, “in one hundred years from this day, there will not be a Bible on the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.”  But guess what?  One hundred years later Voltaire was dead and his own personal printing press and house were being used to print and store Bibles by the Geneva Bible society.  One hundred years from the day of Voltaire’s prediction, the first edition of his work sold for eleven cents in Paris, but the British government paid the Czar of Russia one half million dollars for an ancient Bible manuscript.  Jesus knew what was right when he said “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35). 

Today, I want to talk about God’s Word the Bible.  I’m in a sermon series entitled “The Ties That Bind” from I Corinthians.  Paul wrote to a Corinthian church that was fractured and divided. One of the problems was that some of the members had supernatural gifts from the Holy Spirit and others did not.  The “haves’ were acting superior toward the “have-nots” and the “have-nots” were envious and jealous of the “haves.”  In chapters 12 – 15 Paul gives this church some principles that would bind them back into a unified congregation.  I call those principles “The Ties That Bind.”  So far in this series we’ve seen that a church is bound together by teamwork (chapter 12) and love (chapter 13).  We also noted last week that the supernatural gifts of the Holy Spirit were temporary and existed only during the early childhood of the Christian church, during the lifetime of the Apostles and those upon whom the apostles laid their hands.  Today, as we turn our attention to chapter 14, I want us to see the third tie that binds a church together is God’s Word.  In this chapter Paul emphasizes the superiority of the gift of prophecy over the gift of tongues.  In so doing, he teaches the powerful binding influence of God’s Word on the church.  Let’s look at four ways in which God’s Word binds the church together from I Corinthians 14.