There’s an old saying most of us heard somewhere along the way: don’t air your dirty laundry in public. The idea is simple — whatever problems exist inside the family, you keep them inside the family. You don’t drag them out onto the front lawn for the whole neighborhood to see.
It turns out the Holy Spirit had something very similar in mind when He moved the Apostle Paul to write to the church at Corinth.
We’ve been working our way through 1 Corinthians as God’s Blueprint for a New Testament Church — a letter that addresses, one by one, the real problems that real churches will face. In chapter 5, the issue was open immorality inside the congregation. Now in chapter 6, the Holy Spirit turns to a different kind of problem: what happens when believers start fighting over stuff — and then take those fights to the courthouse.
It may not sound as dramatic as some of the other issues Paul addresses. But the damage it does to a church’s testimony is just as real.
The Courtroom Problem: Don’t Air the Family Laundry
Paul opens with a challenge that carries the force of a rebuke:
Dare any of you, having a matter against another, go to law before the unjust, and not before the saints? — 1 Corinthians 6:1
That word dare — in the original Greek it is a single word carrying the weight of bringing yourself to do something you know you shouldn’t. Paul is essentially saying, Can you believe you’re actually doing this?
The believers in Corinth were dragging one another into secular courtrooms before unbelieving judges to settle disputes over material things. Paul’s response is not mild disappointment — it is pointed shame.
Here is why it mattered so much. A few chapters earlier, Paul confronted the Corinthian church about the damage that open immorality does to the testimony of Christ. The community watches. People talk. And what they remember about a church is rarely the good — it is almost always the bad. Public lawsuits between church members do the same damage. When one believer sues another, the world takes notice. And what they see is not a family that loves one another. What they see is a family that fights like everyone else.
The local church is God’s representative body in the world. It is through the local church that the gospel goes out. It is the local church that Christ has commissioned to bear His name in the community. A church in court is a church with a damaged witness — and that is not a small thing.
God’s expectation has always been that His people handle internal matters internally. Just as He expected Israel to govern its own affairs according to His law, He expects the local church to do the same. The courts of this world are presided over by men and women who do not know God, do not have the Spirit of God, and are not governed by the Word of God. That is no place to settle a family dispute.
The Heart Problem: What Fighting Over Stuff Really Reveals
Paul isn’t content to address only where these believers were taking their conflicts. He goes deeper — to why they were fighting in the first place.
Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. Why do ye not rather take wrong? why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded? — 1 Corinthians 6:7
When a believer is more consumed with protecting what he owns than with protecting the testimony of Christ, something has gone wrong at the level of the heart. The Holy Spirit calls this “utterly a fault” — a completely unsuccessful endeavor. Fighting over temporary earthly possessions in the light of eternity is, at its core, a losing proposition.
Jesus addressed this directly in the Sermon on the Mount:
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal: For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. — Matthew 6:19–21
Where your treasure is — there your heart will be. A believer who runs to a secular court to recover what he feels he is owed is, in that moment, revealing where his heart actually lives. It lives with the stuff. Not with the Savior.
This is not a comfortable diagnosis. But it is an honest one. Materialism is one of the great quiet sins of the church. It rarely looks like greed from the inside — it almost always comes dressed up as justice, as getting what you rightfully deserve. But when the desire to be made whole financially overrides the commitment to honor Christ and protect the body, it is materialism, plain and simple. Paul delivers this without apology, because the stakes are too high for soft words.
The Radical Command: Would You Rather Be Wronged?
If the diagnosis is hard to hear, the remedy is even harder.
Paul’s question in verse 7 is one of the most counter-cultural statements in the entire New Testament: Why do ye not rather take wrong? Why do ye not rather suffer yourselves to be defrauded?
In a culture built on rights — the right to be compensated, the right to be treated fairly, the right to have your day in court — this command lands like a bucket of cold water. Paul is not saying that injustice doesn’t matter. He is not saying that believers are doormats. What he is saying is that the pursuit of temporal justice at the cost of eternal testimony is a trade no believer should be willing to make.
There is a Judge coming. His name is Jesus Christ. Every wrong that has ever been done — every fraud, every theft, every injustice — will stand before Him. The believer who has been genuinely wronged by a fellow church member can release that grievance, not because it doesn’t matter, but because it will matter perfectly — at exactly the right time, before exactly the right Judge.
This is not passive resignation. This is active faith. It is the choice to trust God’s justice over man’s courtroom. It is the decision to value the unity of the body more than the recovery of a loss. It is, in the end, the posture of a person who actually believes what they say they believe about eternity.
Paul makes clear in verse 8 that the Corinthians had gone entirely the other direction:
Nay, ye do wrong, and defraud, and that your brethren. — 1 Corinthians 6:8
Not only were they unwilling to absorb a wrong — they were actively committing wrongs against one another. The very people they were called to love and protect were the ones they were defrauding.
Keeping It in the Family
So what does God’s way actually look like?
Paul points to it plainly. God has placed wise, spiritually mature men and women inside every healthy local church. When conflict arises between believers — over money, property, or anything material — the right move is not to the courthouse. It is to those men and women. It is to the body. It is to the wisdom of God’s Word, applied by God’s people, in God’s house.
Is it so, that there is not a wise man among you? no, not one that shall be able to judge between his brethren? — 1 Corinthians 6:5
The question is pointed and intentional. Of course there are wise men among them. God has provided everything the church needs to handle everything the church faces. Paul isn’t mocking them for sport — he is using their own obvious failure to see themselves clearly. The question is whether the church will trust that provision — or keep running to the world for answers God has already given.
The local church is not a social club. It is not a loose collection of individuals who happen to worship in the same building. It is a family — the family of God. Families handle their problems together. They don’t broadcast them to the neighborhood. They don’t drag them into public forums. They sit down, open the Word, seek the Lord, and work it out.
That is the Blueprint.
A Word Before You Leave
If you are in the middle of a conflict with a fellow believer right now — whether over money, property, or anything else — let this passage speak directly to you.
Before you call the attorney, call your pastor. Before you file the paperwork, open the Word. Before you protect your rights, consider your testimony. The Judge of all the earth will do right. You can trust Him with what you feel you are owed.
And if you are carrying the weight of a wrong done to you — something that genuinely hurt, something that cost you — know this: releasing it is not weakness. It is faith. It is the choice of a saint who knows that this life, and everything in it, is temporary. And that what is coming is worth far more than anything you could recover in a courtroom.