Read I Corinthians 1-5
I am the baker in the family, because I love to bake. No kidding, just ask my wife and children, who also love that I love to bake. Fruit pies, coffee cakes, cheese cakes, carrot cake, and the like, and all from scratch, or course. One of my favorite things to bake is bread. Bake a mountain white bread, which is my children’s favorite, and a seven-grain bread, which is my favorite, and the favorite of some of my friends.
One crucial ingredient for bread is yeast. I use Fleischmann’s Yeast because that’s what I find on the shelf at Safeway. I have learned over time that yeast is an incredible active ingredient in the dough. It produces enzymes that modify the physical properties of the dough, such that over the course of a few hours, the small lump of dough explodes into a large mass of bread dough goodness that, with some help from the oven, will bake into a delicious loaf. Yes, yeast is good.
Yeast also makes a good analogy to drive home a principle in this first section of I Corinthians. Members of this church had become prideful, boastful, and arrogant, (Ch. 4: 6,7,18) which led some of them to become caught up in sin involving sex, greed, idolatry, slander, drunkenness, and swindling (Ch. 5: 9-11). One always follows the other. To maintain or feed your pride, boasting, and arrogance, you will either swindle others, get caught up in greed, slander others, put other things before God, fall into sexual immorality, and look for relief in alcohol, or any or all of the above.
Here is the warning. 1 Corinthians 5:6 says in the same way, “a little yeast works through the whole batch of dough,” sin will work its way through the church and affect all in a very destructive way. The simple message is a reminder and a stern warning to live right, follow God with humility, knowing all good things come from him, and keep the yeast of pride, malice, boasting and the like out of your life, and instead live in sincerity and the truth that comes from God.
- Moses Mendoza serves at Resonoate and as a Small Group leader at Adventure Christian Church
