Some people talk of Christianity as a spent force, an irrelevance in the modern world. Sometimes as Christians we can even believe them. We look at modern Britain that in many ways has turned its back on God, and on Christian values. We bemoan our small numbers, and we can wonder if the gospel is relevant still.

The book of the bible that we are beginning to look at this morning, is a reminder to us, that yes, the gospel is relevant to us today because it shows us how the Christian gospel changed and transformed lives in a city in the Roman Empire that was not so different from our society today.

The book is known as 1 Corinthians. The apostle Paul wrote it to the church in Corinth. Corinth was a notoriously immoral city in Greece. It was famous for its temple to Aphrodite the goddess of love that was built on a cliff that towered almost two thousand feet above the city, and the thousand prostitutes who operated there facilitated worship to Aphrodite.

Yet God had guided Paul to preach the gospel there, and the gospel had a transforming effect on the lives of those who had come to believe. They had found God’s grace and forgiveness; they had received the Holy Spirit and experienced God’s power at work in their lives. But the working out of their faith was often a slow and complex business, living as they did in a pagan society.

It is very relevant to us in the 21^st century here in Britain, because we live in a society that has similarities to those characteristics that existed in Corinth. Figures for sexually transmitted disease in Britain today indicate what an immoral society we live in. Corinth was also a multicultural society, full of people from across the Roman world. Britain is certainly like that today.

As we see what affect the gospel was having in ancient Corinth, it will encourage us to believe that the gospel still can and does have a transforming effect on people’s lives in our society today. But also I believe this ancient letter will help us as we seek to grapple with the issues and complications that believers face today in our contemporary world. I believe that through these scriptures we will receive the guidance and confidence to persevere in our faith, and our sharing of the gospel.

Paul had been in Corinth for a year and a half. First he had preached the gospel in the synagogue to the local Jewish community as he usually did on his missionary travels. As was usually the case this in time aroused resistance from the synagogue authorities and he had to leave the synagogue and instead preached to the gentiles, people with little or no basic knowledge of the scriptures.

Yet these were people whom God wanted to reach with the gospel, people Jesus had come to die for. And God had confirmed the reality of their salvation by the gift of the Holy Spirit. Yet they had a long way to go.  There was so much for them to learn, so many things in their lives that would need to be changed. It is the same reality people face today when they become Christians but have no background knowledge of the bible.  Paul writes his letters to these new Christians to help them as they seek to live out their faith in a pagan city.

This book we call 1 Corinthians was not the first letter Paul had written to them as he mentions in ch5 v9 that he has already sent them a previous letter. We also know that the church at Corinth had written back to Paul. It seems that he had actually received a letter from them as well as news of what was going on in Corinth just after he had written the first four chapters of this letter, and so he made his letter longer to answer the questions they had put in their letter, as well as giving instructions about putting right some of the things that he had heard were going wrong at Corinth.

There is much we don’t know about the situation at Corinth, but we have enough from the apostle’s pen to teach us much about Christian behaviour, about discipline that sometimes needs to be employed in the church, and how to avoid some of the pitfalls that Christians are prone to fall into.

Paul starts off his letter affirming who he is, and who he writing to. That is always important with any correspondence. When we sort through our mail or our emails, we often find some that we can immediately discard without even bothering to read. These are the junk mail letters or the email SPAM. What we look for are the messages from the people we know and respect and have significance for us.

Paul announces himself: ‘called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus’. Paul as an individual had no right to advise or instruct or make demands on the Corinthians, except that he had been called by God to preach the gospel of Christ. That made all the difference. It was through Paul that these folk had heard the gospel and had their lives transformed through encountering Jesus. He is a person who commands their attention. Notice too how Paul addresses the people at Corinth.

‘Those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be holy.’ Now when you look at some of the things that those folk were up to as you read later in the chapter and the letter as a whole, you wonder that Paul addressed them in that way. Yet Paul knew that they had received the reality of Gods grace and forgiveness. Christ had died for them. They had been forgiven and accepted by God.

More than that, Paul could think of them and see the potential in their lives. He could see what they could become by God’s grace. Do you look at Christians in that light? We live in a cynical world that often suspects and expects the worst of people. But there is another factor at work in the believer of which the world knows nothing. There is the reality of God’s Spirit at work. That should give us grounds for optimism and hope when we contemplate our fellow believers.

It gave Paul grounds not only for optimism but also for thanks. He could say to the young Christians ‘he will keep you strong to the end so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.’ When we get pessimistic about the church and about other Christians it is so often due to our lack of faith. Paul’s confidence in the young church at Corinth rested on his belief in God’s faithfulness. God who has called you into fellowship with his son is faithful. In that we have real grounds for thankfulness and for hope.

Paul then begins with an appeal for unity. The problem seems to be that the church is dividing into cliques or factions, each no doubt thinking that their group is the one that has got it right. Some said they were followers of Paul. They seem to possibly have put great store on who baptized them. But Paul plays this down. Now Paul might have said ‘yes you are the ones who have got it right.’ But he did not. Rather he tells them that it doesn’t really matter who baptized them. He admits that he can’t really remember exactly whom he did baptize. He had come to Corinth to tell them about Jesus, not about himself.

It’s still a tendency today for people to put too much store on personalities for cult followings to develop around Christian leaders when it should be Christ we worship and follow. There is another group that say they are followers of Cephas; that’s another name for the apostle Peter. Now it had already been agreed and it’s recorded in the New Testament that Peter was the apostle to the Jews, while Paul was the apostle to the gentiles and there were tensions between the Jews and Gentiles. The Holy Spirit had guided the church to see that God did not require non Jewish Christians to embrace the Jewish regulations regarding clean and unclean food or circumcision. The ones who said they were followers of Peter were probably the Jewish believers who thought that they were superior to non-Jews.

Others said they were followers of Apollos. He was a very eloquent speaker, so they were probably connoisseurs of impressive preaching. Others said they were followers of Christ. There is nothing wrong with that at first sight. But it is quite likely a case of people who had received the spiritual gifts such as tongues or prophecy feeling that they had direct communication with God themselves and rejecting any need for the apostolic teaching that had enabled them to believe in the first place. The trouble with such people is that their pride makes them regard themselves as infallible, they know better than everyone else.

Paul tells them all to look again at Jesus. Jesus as preached to them through a human messenger, according to the teaching that Jesus passed on to the apostles and that the truths that they had witnessed with their own eyes. Above all, Jesus crucified on the cross, and the power of the cross to save and redeem.

Just as it does today, the message of the gospel works in a very different way to popular culture. Greek and Roman culture admired and emulated strength, success and worldly wisdom. Our culture admires these things as well, we worship football stars and pop idols, and we rate beauty highly. Those who want to be popular must project the right public image.

But the gospel is contrary to all of that. The gospel is about one who was despised and rejected. The gospel is about one who came not to be served but to serve. The gospel is about one who laid down his life on a cross. But his death on the cross was the event that changed the world. In Jesus suffering and death, God revealed human pride and sin and sham for what it is. It is through the death and resurrection of Christ and the gift of the Holy Spirit that men and women can be freed and transformed into a new humanity, into the likeness of Jesus. It takes a while, there are pitfalls on the way, but there is hope and there is light for the world, for those who put their trust in Christ.

Amen.
 

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