THE LEAVEN WE'RE PROUD OF, a Weekly Reflection by Pastor Lap Dinh on Psalms 16–18; 1 Corinthians 5

We have all learned to be proud of the wrong things. We call our compromises "being open-minded." We rebrand the sin we've made peace with as maturity, as grace, as not being uptight like those people. And the most dangerous rot is never the rot we're ashamed of—it's the rot we've learned to display like a trophy. A little of it, we tell ourselves, has never hurt anyone. Paul walks into exactly that self-satisfaction and refuses to play along. A man in the Corinthian church is in open sin, and the scandal that stops Paul cold is not only the sin—it's the church's posture: "And you are arrogant! Ought you not rather to mourn?" (1 Cor. 5:2). They were proud of how tolerant they had become. So Paul reaches for the kitchen: "Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?" (1 Cor. 5:6). Leaven doesn't stay in its corner. Malice spreads. Evil spreads. Pride, quietly, spreads fastest of all.

And then he names the reason it all has to go: "Christ, our Passover Lamb, has been sacrificed" (1 Cor. 5:7). The Lamb is already slain. The feast is already set. Who keeps spoiled bread on the table at a wedding?

Here the Psalms show us what feast we're actually invited to—and it makes the leaven look like garbage. "The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup," sings David; "in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore" (Ps. 16:5, 11). This is the same Lamb: the Holy One whom God would not abandon to corruption, whose portion now becomes ours.

Do we hear it? We do not cleanse out the old leaven to become miserable and strict. We clear it out because we have been handed fullness of joy, and we will not keep trading it for the stale crust of our cheap substitutes. "When I awake," Psalm 17 promises, "I shall be satisfied with your likeness" (Ps. 17:15). That is the feast. Malice and evil and our precious tolerance are the rot we keep smuggling back to the table.

And Psalm 18 has the last word for a proud church: "You save a humble people, but the haughty eyes you bring down" (Ps. 18:27). There it is. The leaven Paul feared most was never merely the immoral man—it was the haughty eyes of the ones watching, arrogant about their own broad-mindedness.

So let us stop pretending this is about those sinners. We are the lump. We are the ones clutching the spoiled bread and calling it grace. The Lamb has been sacrificed—cleanse it out. Not to punish, but to be saved; not with malice, but with sincerity and truth. Mourn what we have been proud of, and come back to the feast.

Lord, we have been proud of the very things You died to purge. Show us the leaven we've been displaying like a trophy. Kill our arrogance, and sit us back down at the table Your Lamb has already spread. Amen.

What have we been quietly proud of that the slain Lamb is asking us to mourn and clear out—and what feast are we missing while we clutch the stale crust? -Pastor Lap