Introduction: I Corinthians

We're going to take today to kind of do an introduction on the first letter of Paul's that we have to the Corinthians. How many of you were here? Everybody was here or most everybody was here when my dad went through 1st and 2nd Corinthians several years back. We've got some folks that weren't here for that. So it's been a while since we did that.

The introduction to that I listened to a few times to the recording on the website and it was one of those things where I wanted to kind of hear which things my dad emphasized. I did some of my own research on it as well and unfortunately I came to many of the same conclusions that my dad covered and that is that the people in Corinth were pretty jacked up. He didn't use the phrase jacked up, but I think you know what I mean.

It was not a healthy place for a church to be growing. So as we go through these things, I'm going to just suggest that if we actually look at what Paul wrote, this is not a very G-rated book of the Bible. There's a lot of wickedness that was in Corinth.

And so fortunately, hey, there's Bob. Fortunately, if you've ever watched news on the television, it's probably not too much different from that, so at least it won't be too shocking. So let's briefly talk about 1 Corinthians. It was written by Paul when he was in Ephesus in 54 AD, and so he was on his second missionary journey. He went on three, at least, that we have recorded. So Paul is on his second missionary journey and he goes to Corinth. My handouts have this on the outline. I'm going to wing it from memory since I've spent the time writing the notes. I think most of them are up here.

When Paul runs into the church there in Corinth and he gets to know them, he spends quite a bit of time with them. So he establishes relationships with these believers in Corinth and in doing so he creates a very interesting situation and a bond that he doesn't seem to have quite the same level of depth with some of the other churches. We know that Paul visited the church three times.

We know that Paul wrote multiple letters and we only have two of them. But what we call Second Corinthians appears to actually be not, I'm sorry, First Corinthians appears to not be the first letter to the Corinthians. So Paul visited them and then he wrote a letter to them. But after writing that first letter to them, they wrote him a letter. And so his response to that is what we call 1st Corinthians, but it's actually from what we can tell the second letter. So Paul writes, he's got his letter, his first letter he sent to them after having departed, he receives a letter from them, and then he replies back with his second letter, which is what we call canonically. We'll say canonically because it's part of the canon of scripture. Canonically, 1st Corinthians. And 1st Corinthians is sent with Timothy. Okay, so Timothy is the bearer of the letter and what does Timothy do when he gets to Corinth? Anybody want to take a stab at guessing what Timothy does when he gets to Corinth? He goes to sleep and takes a nap. Yeah, he probably gets some rest. Probably much needed rest.

With Timothy being an agent of Paul's, what do you think he's going to do representing Paul at this church? Paul spent so much time with. They're going to read the letter, but he's also going to be observing, right? He's going to be looking at what's going on in the church.

So when we get into the text of 1 Corinthians, we run into not only things that Paul writes in response to the letter that they sent back with Timothy, but he also writes in response to what Timothy observes. So Timothy will pretend that for the sake of modern movie inference that he was like a spy, right? But he was a spiritual spy and he was really just more of a shepherd, but it sounds cooler if he's a spy, right?

So Timothy comes and he brings the letter back and then Paul apparently is pretty disgusted with what Timothy writes and so Paul writes another letter which we don't appear to have which is a very strongly worded letter. And it's not just a strongly worded letter, but it's such a letter that he writes in what we call Second Corinthians, which is his fourth letter, that he was sorrowful that he had to write this letter.

So what we end up having is Paul then, in Second Corinthians, says, I'm coming for a third time. So we have four letters and three visits with Paul to the church in Corinth. So with Paul working on his relationship with his church, and Timothy being an agent and a letter carrier, we're set up for a context knowing that this is a second letter. And we're set up with a context knowing that Paul is very committed to these believers and he's going to carry this even further because he wants to establish them. So let's talk about the history and culture of Corinth.

I've got this as a subtitle here. Carnal is as carnal does. They're really quite a wicked community. I'm not I'm not surprised. So Corinth, when we look at the geography, so here's Corinth. Right there, this is called the Isthmus of Corinth. And this is the Gulf of Corinth. And I can't recall off the top of my head because this is another gulf, but the name of it is Humdinger. It's not something we've said in English a lot of times.

But there was a critical trade route that came from Athens down to Corinth. Okay, so you got that going on. And then there was a paved stone road that went from the Gulf of Corinth across the Isthmus. And so what would happen is people would come in with their ships and they could either, if they were small enough, they could either have the ships hauled across the Isthmus on the paved stone road. They would lay out logs. and use slave labor to pull the ships. Somebody's awesome job was to grab the log off the backside and run to the front of the ship and put it down so that it behaves sort of like wheels and they would roll the ships all the way across. Or you could pay to have the materials on your ship, your portage, put on a cart and have that rolled across and then put on another ship coming on the other side, whichever direction you were traveling.

So you had trade going through the Isthmus, coming down out of Athens or up out of the peninsula here, the Peloponnesian Peninsula, and or going the other direction across the water. But either way, there was lots and lots and lots of trade that was going through the Corinthian Isthmus and city.

What are sailors known for? Wholesomeness, right? Wholesome sailors, wholesomely traveling, sharing the wholesomeness of sailordom to all the world that they arrive to, right? No, actually not so much. So you have sailors coming in and they're not necessarily the cleanest crew.

And then on top of that, you've got multiple, multiple temples to multiple pagan gods that are established in Corinth. And unfortunately, one of the things that was common in the pagan idolatry was also temple prostitution. So sexual perversion was not uncommon. And so these people are constantly surrounded by it. It's almost like they had the internet, only it was instead of over dial-up or broadband, you just walked down the street. So the perversion that was there was very real. Paul writes to the Corinthians, such were some of you, and he lists before that, such were some of you, all kinds of sexual deviancy.

So super exciting to be in Corinth because of the perversion, but one of the things, and I'm being sarcastic when I say that, but one of the things is that being at a crossroads they have a very real cultural mess that's going on because of so many cultures that are being blended there. So in 146 BC, due to war, Corinth was mostly destroyed. But in 44 BC, Rome made Corinth a colony.

And Rome sent in tons and tons of Roman citizens, because that was a good way to ensure that your colony was established. You're going to have a strong military presence, and of course soldiers are known for wholesomeness as well. My brother-in-law is a soldier, he's wholesome, but that's different, he's a believer. So the Roman colony is established there, and so you have a Greek language, and you have a Roman language, or Latin, right? that are the common languages that are being spoken there. But who else is going to be in the Mediterranean that's going to be a very serious both religious and military and trading power?

Known for making large buildings out of rock shaped kind of triangularly. The Egyptians, all right. I knew if I gave enough hints we'd get there. But the Egyptians would also have been heavily influential both in religion as well as their cultural and linguistic influences. So what happens when you are in a city and you've got so many religions that are promoted?

I don't know. Look around us today. I think you can almost guess based on American culture what tends to happen. You get confusion. You get this idea that everything must be true and you just do your own thing. How many of you are familiar with the Roman mystery religions? The mystery cults? So the Roman mystery cults that would have been part of what the soldiers and the colonists brought in would have been that you have your religious sect that is based on what you do. So Aaron, may I pick on you real quick? Aaron would be part, if he was a Roman citizen who was not a believer, would be part of the furniture religious cult and they had their own furniture deities. Literally, I'm not joking.

So that would be The Shutt family was like, oh yeah, they've got their own mystery religion. And Roger can't tell us what he does, but if he did, it would be a mystery. It's even more mysterious, mystery religion. And Cheryl. And Cheryl, that's true. They work in a mysterious government role. So they're like extra mystery religion. So you have the mystery religions. You've got to worship Caesar.

And that's okay, because there's multiple gods and you can just pick one. Everything's going to be okay. And then you have a strong contingency of Jewish people. All right, who are the Jews? Where do they come from besides Israel? Why are there Jews there? Oh, the dispersion. The dispersion, okay, very good. I'm glad he knows the answer to that. The Pharisees. were very evangelistic.

So they're going to go wherever they're sent. If Rome comes in to Israel, they take over. And Rome promises certain financial benefits to people who will move for Rome to be in a colony. So being in a colony is good. And if you're already an attacked nation, it's probably not a bad idea to get on the good side of whoever is invading. So there's a strong contingency of Jews there in Corinth. So when Paul is writing to the Corinthians, and visiting the Corinthians, where is he going to go first? Based on what he writes elsewhere. Where does he go? He goes to the synagogue.

That's my phone whistling at me. the Jewish culture that's there is going to be the minority. How much righteousness did Jews get to bring into that culture? Well, it turns out not a lot. Once you've established this this dark wickedness of sexual perversity and idolatry. Let's talk about some of the other high quality standards that the Corinthians brought to the table. The Corinthians loved social standing. How do you think it would be to be a slave in Corinth?

Your job is probably to work hauling ships and portage. until you die, unless your family can buy you out of slavery. So that's a pretty extreme state of poverty, right? You're probably barely eking by, barely alive, and if a ship rolled over you because somebody didn't manage the logs right, that probably didn't sound like the worst way to go out. So you've got extreme poverty, but then on the other side of that you have the Donald Trumps, and I don't mean that as a political statement, I just mean it as an iconic figure. You've got the super wealthy people who are now, because of all the shipping and the trade and the portage, they're actually doing really well.

So social standing was actually a really important element that was inside of the Corinthian community. And you'll notice when we study through this that Paul continually addresses this attitude of superiority that various people are supposedly embracing from a secular cultural mindset and taking and bringing it into the church. So with the idea of social standing, what's the New Testament doctrine of social standing?

What would we say based on what we know at Holly Hills that we talk about all the time? There is no difference. If we were to go to Colossians 3, we'll see that there's no Jew, no Greek, no slave, no Scythian, no free man. I said that was out of order, but you know what I mean. But all are one in Christ.

We also would know that our position is heavenly, right? So it doesn't matter what our standing is with the secular world around us, there's a heavenly position that we find our confidence in that, not in our wealth and our financial well-being. And then, so I mentioned the idolatry already, and sexual immorality, that's exciting.

So let's talk about the key arguments of the book. When I say arguments, everybody's familiar with arguments. I don't mean, like, let's argue about it. technical term for main themes. So the key arguments of the book are rooted in again this idea of surveillance that Timothy did in correspondence.

Now let me just briefly ask an important question. What is the big deal about correspondence? in the New Testament time? There's probably multiple answers to this and it's a wide open question, but what are the key elements of correspondence that we have today in contrast to 2,000 years ago? Email, text message, my phone just whistled at me to let me know I had a message. The cost of communication is pretty trivial and the speed is pretty trivial. Even though stamps have gone up in my lifetime pretty substantially, it's still less than a dollar to send a letter across the country in a couple days and have pretty high confidence it's going to get there.

What about Timothy carrying these letters? The idea that Timothy is carrying this letter and delivering it is because Paul is entrusting him and risking Timothy's life. Your ship could sink, if you're by land you could be robbed and everything you have could be stolen and you could be killed.

So correspondence is a big deal. We kind of think about these letters from Paul in a modern mindset unless we're reminded that This was kind of a rough and tumble environment. Think more Pony Express than Federal Express. So Paul is responding to both the written and the verbal communications that are there.

Paul really wants to tackle two very critical issues doctrinally about Christ. Fundamentally, He addresses them as believers, so he's not doubting their salvation, but he's wanting to make sure they understand the importance of both the cross and crucifixion, as well as the resurrection. He says, we preached Christ crucified. Why does the crucifixion matter? We'll, of course, get into that in the next couple weeks, but the crucifixion matters a lot. Is there a gospel without the crucifixion?

How many of you are familiar with the St. Francis of Assisi quote? I'm going to butcher this a little bit. Where he says, I always preach the gospel, and if I have to, I use words. Have you heard that one before? It's gained popularity due to Catholic mysticism, even influencing Protestant Christianity. And I hate to use the word Protestant, but you all know what I mean. We preach the gospel of Jesus Christ. What does 1 Corinthians 15 say? Who can tell me the gospel?

Uh-oh. If you get it wrong, then I'm going to die your salvation. Here we go. Woo-hoo! Something printed out. Will you say that again, because I interrupted you. He was crucified, and then he was buried, and then he was raised from the dead. On the third day. According to the scriptures. 1 Corinthians 15. We get that at the beginning there.

So the gospel matters, and the crucifixion matters, and the resurrection matters a lot. And so Paul is emphasizing these details, not because he likes to just belabor these points, but because this was a situation that the church in Corinth had misunderstandings or bad ideas about, and he wanted to counter those. If you're dealing with religious syncretism, where you've got all these religions coming in and pushing together, the idea that the religions were all being meshed together means that a lot of the people probably came together with a great amount of confusion coming together dealing with all these different religious ideas, and then not wanting to rock the boat because that would impact their social standing. And so Paul has to remind them, this is the gospel.

And I'm glad he did, because we got the gospel articulated very specifically in 1 Corinthians chapter 15. But he has to tell them very specifically about salvation. and root those things in there, why does the death, burial, resurrection, ascension and seeding matter to the daily life of the believer? Who wants to give me a good answer on that? Or an answer on that one?

Well, if it wasn't true, we'd be most miserable. Okay, so we have both a position that becomes true, that impacts our condition, but also we realize that we are eternal The Sadducees, the people that were the less evangelistic of the two dominant Jewish groups, didn't believe in a resurrection. They thought, when this life is over, this life is over, and there's no eternal life.

Well, eternal life matters. According to Paul, and we'll get into this in much more detail, it should impact our daily walk. He wants them to stand out as a consequence of those things. So Paul definitely is focused on the crucifixion and the gospel message. Then he talks about wisdom, God's wisdom versus man's wisdom.

The human wisdom in Corinth and I think it's important to recognize when you're talking about social standing in a Greek culture, who are some of the Greek names that we can think of that were influential? Before Corinth. So this is going back several hundred years before Corinth. Any philosophers come to mind? Plato, Socrates.

Okay, so philosophy and earthly wisdom and earthly thinking were part of how you could show cultural standing. How exciting and cool it is that I know this truth that you don't know. And so they prided themselves in human understanding and human wisdom. And so Paul is going to address very strongly the idea of God's wisdom. Now let's just ask this very important question. What does your perspective on who God is lead to in your thinking? I just didn't hear the last part of what you said. What does how you think who God is do to the way that you think? How does who you think God is impact your thinking?

If I were to restate that a little bit more succinctly. Wouldn't it be too because we believe that God is all-knowing. Okay, God is all-knowing. There's no way we know more than God knows. We accept that as the truth. This is my working definition of wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge applied. If God has all knowledge, then he can know how to appropriately apply it. It's funny how, when we look at man's wisdom, in the Greek culture, just knowing something was adequate.

You didn't have to appropriate it in any way. If you were to go upstairs into how to study the Bible class, they're talking about the theological term as hermeneutics, they're going to actually have a section that's going to talk about appropriation. How do we take what we learn from the scriptures and appropriate it in our lives? But for the Greeks, and frankly most Americans, just knowing something doesn't have to change your behavior.

Right? Oh, that's really cool. How about this one? And this is something I suffer from sometimes. How many of you know that texting and driving is probably dangerous? Right? I've got some hands. Gary's confident he's safe. No, I'm just kidding. The texting and driving. We know that's dangerous. How many people still every day are texting and driving? Or Twittering and driving? Or Facebooking and driving? whatever it is that your social interaction is over your smartphone. When you used to have the rotary dial phones, it was really hard to text and drive.

So we have this God-given wisdom that Paul is confident in that the Corinthians are not confident in. The Corinthians are confident in their human wisdom. So Paul is going to combat that very specifically, and he's going to take that on with strong confidence and strong language. Because we've got the handouts now, and I have my verse references now back easily in front of me, let's open our Bibles, because that's a better place to spend our time than on my recollection of what I put in the handout. Let's take a look at 1 Corinthians 2, verses 6-13.

Yet we do speak wisdom among those who are mature, a wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age who are passing away, but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God predestined before the ages to our glory, the wisdom which none of the rulers of this age has understood. For if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

We'll stop there because he goes on. Whose wisdom are they preaching? They're preaching God's wisdom. And he calls out the human wisdom. He said that the foolish earthly human wisdom crucified the Son of God. Then let's flip over to chapter 3 verses 18 through 20 where we'll see a further strengthening of his position 318, let no man deceive himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must become foolish so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God. For it is written, he is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness. And again, the Lord knows the reasoning of the wise, that they are really cool, really smart, really clever.

No, that they're useless. So, no mincing words there. Paul is not going to make any friends in the secular arena with this kind of language, right? But he wants to call out and draw attention in contrast to the Corinthian culture where earthly wisdom so that you could get more merit. and more social standing would be there. Do you have something, Bob?

I'm just pondering on God's wisdom versus man's wisdom a little bit further. In terms of God's wisdom, it's something that we respond to by faith, isn't it? We don't understand it, the whole issue of eternity and how we place that into our human existence. and it's all based on the resurrection. I mean, it's entirely placed in the sun as an exemplary pathway of our eternal salvation. And eternity itself is so poorly defined. I mean, again, human wisdom can't define God's wisdom in any sense. And anything that's of man is really of the earthly existence and not that of the heavens. where we had in fact our position was placed forever.

I mean again, God's wisdom is profound and we accept it by faith. In that faith we have trust and humility, right? We have to humbly go down and say, I don't know, but you do. And we walk in trust. What is it when we walk in human wisdom? It's all temporal. It's temporal and it's often overly confident and overly arrogant and probably overly simplified in many cases, right? But that's a really important thing. Thanks for bringing that out, Bob, where we have this contrast of God's wisdom that we continually seek to understand more deeply, and human wisdom often is short-lived and easily understood and then moved past, and we move on to other things.

I do look forward to actually talking about the wisdom element when we talk about these passages. In part because I hope that we can contrast... So this 2016, I think it would be foolish for us to ignore that the political arena is just going to be charged around us. And I don't want to talk about politics, because I really...

I did that last week, if you listened to last week's Sunday School Classroom Polemics. But we as believers, as we're abiding we can be having God's discernment to listen to the rhetoric, to listen to the things that are said, and listen, and we can have discernment, and listen, does this match up with God's wisdom versus man's wisdom? What do we know that's revealed from God versus what do we know that's popular today? And that's the wisdom versus wisdom with the silent B on the end, right? Then, and this is definitely also going to be fun and exciting to teach, sexuality and gender roles.

I think at Holly Hills I don't think there's a lot of division on this topic, but I think it doesn't hurt for us to have a very biblically based understanding of both gender and biblical sexuality to contrast against sexual deviance. We're not actually going to study sexual deviance. That's not the point of the class. That's not what that slide means.

But Paul is going to counter that with biblical sexuality. And so I think that's one of those things that sometimes when we look at the world around us and you watch the news and there's the last year's decision by the Supreme Court about the legal impact of homosexual marriage And as a church body, I know in multiple conversations and what I've seen in the elders' response to that, that there is a lot of attention that has gotten put into sexuality, but when we look at the biblical context, we can rest in what God has done, and we can rest in the clarity of what's there, and it's not my opinion versus your opinion. In fact, One of the issues that Paul's first going to hit is division. And where does division come? It comes from my opinion versus your opinion. Well, we can do away with our opinions and rest in the scripture. And then those divisions go away. And what's left is agape love and benevolence and grace and unity.

That's a strong place, Bob. wisdom in terms of the Supreme Court decision that relates to the smartest people. Talk about a contest between the two types of wisdom. But the Corinthians had that same wisdom. So Paul was coming against the same earthly wisdom of saying, hey it feels good, it must be good. Sounds like the hippies, right? I know that you think I'm too young to know about hippies, but I came from their homeland of Mendocino, so I know hippies. I say dude and I say y'all, because I lived in Texas for five years.

The reality is that as we look at this from an introductory standpoint, we've got some really big topics we're coming into. We're going to see arrogance and division and social standing addressed over and over again, but they're going to be focused on these different topics that the Church of Corinth was wrestling with, that Timothy was observing. We're going to get to talk about spiritual growth, and we're going to get to talk about just a broad number of topics that I can't wait to get to. They're really, really cool. And they have a very day-to-day impact as well as an eternal impact.

I've got an outline here, and outlines are not the most exciting thing to go over, but we're running out of time. This is a condensed outline. I got one that I thought looked pretty good on the surface, and then I modified it to make it what I think it is. more terse, and maybe a better representation of some of the passages. So we'll hit some high notes on this, and we won't go through all the nuance. But this will kind of show off the structure of 1 Corinthians. You'll notice that a lot of the topics we just talked about as cultural and historical elements, and things that Paul was writing against as arguments, are outlined within the text here.

So we have his greeting. And what does Paul always start his greetings off with? I love to emphasize this, because I think it's really cool. Grace. Sure, that was a Roman greeting, right? So he's a grace. But Paul gets to redefine grace in a biblical and Christian context that's even greater than what the Romans imagined.

So he greets them and immediately dives in, in verse 10, and for chapters at a time here, is going to start talking about division that the church in Corinth is facing. The church in Corinth is facing this division and You already have a church that's battling secular ideals and secular problems. The last thing you need is for it to collapse on itself. It's just not where the energy of the church needs to go in the arrogance of who's right. So he strikes on division and he talks about the cause of their division.

I really think that's an important thing that Paul does. Paul is a logician. If you read Romans, I will say that I foolishly thought I would rewrite Romans in programming syntax because it's so logical. It just looks like programming code to me when I read through Romans. But it got really complicated so I had to bail out early. But Paul is very logical so he immediately goes to the cause of their division and outlines their faulty view of the Christian message, their faulty view of Christian ministry and ministers, because I'm of Paul and I'm of Apollos. How cool is that? I get to wear this guy's brand, Christianity. And then he talks about the cure for their division in an immediate, quick response with a longer rest of the book talking about other nuances of that.

Disorders in the church, failure to discipline an immoral brother. I actually remember the first time as a teenager I read 1 Corinthians chapter 5 where he talks about the immoral brother. And I had to read it a couple times because I was like, wait a minute, he's doing what? A guy and his dad's wife? That's like, it's not his mom, but that's like, whoa, that's like a Jerry Springer episode.

Just in the Bible. So we're going to get to hit that exciting topic. But then we're going to get to talk about sexual purity, which is not going to mean we're going to talk about promise rings. That's a different issue. As a father of a teenage daughter, I've seen all kinds of those things. Your daughters will be more likely to be pure and stay with the faith. You give them a purity ring, probably a bad idea. that didn't fix anything for anybody. What does? Abiding. Failure to exercise sexual purity. Difficulties in the church concerning marriage. I think the conjugal duties are being concerned with celibacy. is actually really important in today's culture.

When I go through the checkout stand at the grocery store or Target or somewhere, all the headlines are on those magazines and they're trash. It's not like I look at that and go, there's probably wisdom in there. But they always talk about how to make some kind of sexual thing better or more intense. It turns out, It ignores utterly the moral foundation that sexuality belongs inside of a marriage between a man and a woman. And a lot of those other issues are not rooted in spiritual truth. They're rooted in the idea that I need to feel something more.

Okay, so we're going to get to hit on that exciting topic How about concerning Christian liberty, and we're going to get to talk about vegetarianism and animal sacrifice, and that's exciting for me. I am literally, this week while I was off, working on a smoker to smoke meat, so I'm a big fan of meat. But we'll talk about what the Bible says instead of my opinion about meat, although I'm a brisket guy, not a pork butt guy. So we've got Christian liberty and then coming back around in chapter 11 we're going to get to hit on gender roles. There's apparently a woman or women leaving temple prostitution and so we're going to get the head covering issue. Then we're going to get to talk about every... How many of you love when we do communion? You're allowed to, I'm not looking to trap anybody. I love communion because communion is always a time of remembrance.

But we always read this passage in 1 Corinthians, and one of the things that makes me chuckle every time we do it, quietly, because I don't mean it disrespectfully, is the church in Corinth was having a raver party. They're having this crazy party, and Paul's correcting them. And his correction is always the part that we read, because it's actually putting the focus on Christ. It's putting it in the right place.

But people were getting drunk, and it was like Thanksgiving and drunkenness. When I say Thanksgiving, I mean like November, Thanksgiving, eating way too much food and you gain 20 pounds. So drunkenness and feasting versus remembering Christ. So a big difference there. So carnality at the Lord's table and then also talking about worship roles and spiritual gifts.

Spiritual gifts are an awesome thing. in my junior high and high school years went to a charismatic church, and so I had a really, really warped and broken perspective on spiritual gifts. And my uncle, who was part of the correction of my family back into biblical understanding of spiritual gifts, made me sit down and actually read this text, instead of quoting one verse at a time and going off and going, whoo, this thing is out of context. You made me read the thing end to end, between 12, 13, and 14.

And there's some really cool truth in there, but it's not the charismania stuff. So I hope no one's disappointed by that. And then we get to talk about love. And my favorite thing about 1 Corinthians 13 is love is actually, this is not about marriage. You can apply it to marriage, but it's not about marriage. So we'll take a look at 1 Corinthians 13, in light of this broken body. This body that's all messed up and is surrounded by perversity. Paul's going to put love in the proper light. Then we're going to get to talk about priority of prophecy over tongues and church service order. Oh boy. Hitting on gender role issues again as well briefly in there.

And then we get to the gospel in chapter 15, correct doctrine regarding the resurrection. And so that's going to be a really, really cool chapter because I think the resurrection is one of those things that we always talk about it, death, burial, resurrection, ascension, and seeding. But we always jump from his death and his burial. We say he's resurrected and then get all excited about the ascension and seeding.

But I think it'll be good to slow down and just hit resurrection And then the last chapter, which is always in Paul's letters, almost always is this content of, say hi to this person and do these things, although there's a little less of this in Paul's letter, but he's going to talk about travel plans and things like that, which is why we know it's actually a letter from Paul and not a mishmash of anything else. It's consistent in his writing style, right? We see, oh, it's Paul again, talking about going here and doing that and say hi to this person. And so we get that, that's consistent there.

And the last thing, the closing thought here is that much of what the church at Corinth was facing is alive and well in the American church and culture. We're facing the same things today. And it turns out That when you look back through the history of the world, even though there are periods when a lot of that got subdued a bit more than it is today, those are still problems that people were facing. There was still culture and class and people being highfalutin.

I appreciate a good historical biography when I can get my hands on one. I've been listening to one of Abraham Lincoln and I've listened to one of John Adams. And what surprised me in the John Adams biography is how much information the author actually put in about Thomas Jefferson. And we all have great respect for Thomas Jefferson as a founding father, but it turns out that Thomas Jefferson would have fit in real well in Corinth.

He was very much about social standing and building up. He had a home that he was renting, renting a home in France that he renovated on his own borrowed dime so that when he died he was penniless and broke. He would have been a good Corinthian. He was a good founding father but for various reasons. Good thinking, no application. Wisdom versus wisdom.

But we're going to take a look here and when we walk away from this book in 52 weeks, this is the first of 52, when we walk away from this book. It'll be temporarily walking away because we'll keep coming back to 1 Corinthians as believers, as readers. We're going to see that there's a lot of practical biblical theology that we can chew on and think through and meditate on throughout our weeks and grow and will have grown together. Any divisions, small as they would be at Holly Hills, a lot of those things could be ironed out. if we look at 1 Corinthians. Any misunderstandings of culture and sexuality and priority and biblical teaching and thinking. Lots of good stuff in here.

All right, so that's the end of my prepared notes. Any other thoughts, questions, things you wish I didn't say? There's always got to be somebody who's got to think, man, you shouldn't have said that out loud. That's on the recording. Well, let's close in prayer. The bell is going to ring in a second now, probably as soon as I start to pray. Heavenly Father, we ask that you would just bless our time together as Sunday School class with intense focus on you, intense focus with your spirit bearing fruit in our daily lives and as our corporate lives together as a body. We just pray that our our care for one another would be deepened and increased, that our care for the gospel and preaching that would be deepened and increased, and that as we go through these things together, we would just encourage one another as daily as possible with the eternal perspective that you have put forth. In Jesus' name, amen.