This church is crazy, this church is out of control. How does a church that has more ‘worldly’ issues going on in its congregation stand up and make a difference in a community like Corinth?

You might have heard it said by some well-meaning Christian (or, perhaps, you said it yourself at some point) that the Corinthians were the worst of the worst of Paul’s churches; that if you look up the definition of “immorality” in the dictionary, there’d be a picture of the Corinthians; that they made the practices in Sodom and Gomorrah look like the shenanigans on an unruly youth night. Or something to that effect.

We are in the letter to the church in Corinth, and we learnt in the snapshot videos that this city was a large city with lots of idolatry and prostitution. The reputation of the Corinthians was unfortunately of a very low standard. So if I was writing a letter to this church, I’m not sure I would open it as Paul did. Look at what Paul calls the church in the second verse.

I suggested last time that in many ways we are like the Corinthians. I want to pick up that idea in this piece as we look at the letter of 1 Corinthians. But before we do, I need to finish telling the story of how the letter came about.

Paul addresses something in 2 Corinthians that I am very passionate about. What does a life, blessed by God look like? Most of us would say, married, two kids and a cute dog, perfect car, gorgeous house that God gave you at a bargain price, no sickness, blessed to be a blessing financially and nothing ever going wrong because if it does go wrong, you have done something wrong.

In the last blog, we finished with Paul sending what is known to us as 1 Corinthians. I say “known to us” because there was a previous letter to which he refers in 1 Cor 5:9. There isn’t space to comment on it as we actually don’t know anything about it. So, let’s pick it up from where Paul sent the second letter (our 1 Corinthians) to deal with a whole list of issues.

Have you ever brought a friend to church and that is the day that Brother Bob decides to go all out on the guilt of giving your tithe and you are cringing in your seat, praying that your friend has switched off or been sidetracked by something else and doesn’t hear it? You are now wondering why you brought them to church today, couldn’t it have been last week when the tithing message wasn’t so intense?

In the last blog, we saw that Paul and the Corinthians had had a major falling out, to the extent that Paul felt the only solution was to depart from the church. He had been accused of embezzlement over his handling of the offering for Jerusalem and general doubts had been raised over his status as an apostle. He dealt with the issue through a painful letter delivered by Titus.