One of the grand priorities of the New Testament is to show and tell us that the church is profoundly different from every other social, recreational, educational, and public service organization. The church is not a club, or a team, or a volunteer mobilization project.
So just what is the church? What does it mean to be a thriving local church fellowship? How should we stand out here in our Chester County community? And further, what temptations lurk around and among us, threatening to undermine our body-life?
To address these questions, we’re going to dive into Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in a series of messages over the next few months.
1 Corinthians is like a character with a dynamic personality—feisty, impressionable, fickle, quirky, passionate… The congregation has a lofty self-image and yet a sad blindness to their spiritual vulnerability.
Maybe you’re thinking, “All very interesting—but ancient Corinth is a million miles away from our modern world.” But commentator Gordon Fee points out: “The cosmopolitan character of the city and church, the strident individualism that emerges in so many of their behavioral aberrations, the arrogance that attends their understanding of spirituality, the accommodation of the gospel to the surrounding culture in so many ways—these … are but mirrors held up before the church of today” (First Corinthians, pp. 19-20).
And Anthony Thiselton sees “striking resonances with secular cultures of our own day: an obsessive concern about reputation and status in the eyes of others; self-promotion to win applause and to gain influence; ambition to succeed, often by manipulating networks of influence”—plus a greater concern for “audience-approval ratings” than for truth, and a fixation on autonomy and “my rights” (New Dictionary of Biblical Theology, p. 297).
Topics in the letter are exceedingly practical: factions, rivalry, celebrity, pride, lawsuits, sex, singleness, marriage, worship, gender roles, name dropping, social power, spiritual gifts, and love—to name a few!
God has a great deal to say to us via this inspired letter—words of comfort and correction, encouragement and warning. All in all, 1 Corinthians delivers a deeply realistic and penetrating gospel message to any local church ready to receive God’s good word.
(For info on the first several messages in this series, click HERE.)
