Tag: 1 Corinthians

Posted on

Stop Being Babies – 1 Corinthians 3:1-5

Paul had spent a year and a half in Corinth after founding the church there. Apollos had then taken the role of pastor there. A few years later, Paul receives a message that not all is well in Corinth. The intellectual, philosophical congregation there sought more complexity and the “next level” of Christianity.

Paul responds, though, that the simplicity is what they (and we) really need. The simplicity of the gospel is core to its purpose, power and truth. This clashed with the culture of the city and the congregation, which valued rhetorical skill and philosophical intricacies. Paul specifically brought a simple, unadorned message to counter this tendency.

Paul then in chapter 2 clarifies that there is no “next level” of Christianity. They are mature. They have the fullness of Christ. They have everything they need. There is no hierarchy or system of levels to scale.

But then in this section, Paul turns around and calls them babies. (Keep in mind, as Paul discusses milk vs. meat, that there were no bottles, so Paul is essentially saying that he is breastfeeding them.) So the question is, how can Paul call them mature in one verse and infants in another?

This is actually a theme throughout scripture. “Now but not yet.” We are “dead to sin” and yet we still must work to not sin. We are justified, but must still work out our salvation with fear and trembling.

We can also see this more generally in humanity. See the behavior of sums parents at their children’s sporting events. We have been given all the tools for maturity and salvation, but if we do not take up those tools, then we are behaving like infants. We “are not yet ready” as Paul says here. The term he uses here can be translated as “fleshy”.

That was Corinth. Instead of unifying around Christ, they splintered into divisive factions around human leaders. But why does Paul use terms around maturity here, instead of just calling out their behavior as sin?

In part, it is to specifically attack the philosophy of the culture around them, a culture they had imbibed and absorbed, and that was playing itself out in the church. Similarly, Christians today absorb the moral materialism or hedonism of our culture and live out their lives as if the material world was all that mattered. We live our lives to avoid or even alleviate suffering, rather than a relationship with God. We do religious things for the good feelings and experiences. If we are driven by intellectualism, we seek to learn more – a good thing, but not the best thing. Humanism, when we elevate humanity, or specific humans, possibly church leaders, to a level above Christ.
These behaviors can all appear wise and mature. They are all about advancement and performance, constantly seeking control. They get their power from earthly things.

The purpose of my Christian existence, though, is not experience, advancement or even maturity, but to live in relationship with Christ. We get our power from above, and that power expresses itself as loving actions towards other people.

If we do not get our power from Christ, then we get it from one or more of sin, Satan or the world. We will seek to control, rather than to love.

What is your purpose? Is it Christ, or is it ethics, morality, experience, pleasure?Where do you get the power to live out this purpose? Is it Christ, or is it sources below? What is the outflow of your life? Is it the love of Christ, or is it selfishness and a seeking to control?

-Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

First Corinthians 3:1-5
Something went wrong with the bible. Please make sure that you are requesting a valid passage! If this problem presits please contact joshuawiecorek@outlook.com

Posted on

The Foolishness of God

Go read "The Greater Trumps" by Charles Williams

​In theology, a distinction is made between two types of knowledge. General revelation is available to all – empirical knowledge obtained through the senses within the natural world. Special revelation is that knowledge that comes from beyond the natural world; that is, supernatural.

Paul here discusses the wisdom of the world – secular knowledge and wisdom, everything from engineering to psychology to biology to sociology to history. These are, on the whole, good things, but we must remember to keep them in their proper place. The prophet Jeremiah reminds us that it was the wisdom of God that created the world, while human wisdom cannot create anything, but only rearrange what God has already made. We must remember that secular wisdom is very limited.

There is one area in particular where secular wisdom is not just limited but completely inadequate. That is the realm of the spiritual, the metaphysical or the moral.

Paul has to talk about this because the Corinthians (much like us here in Seattle) were enamored of human wisdom. When secular wisdom attempts to move into the lane of spirituality, we get significant problems, and this was happening here, in a culture of debate and status. In this world of wise people, Christians were being told that their stories were primitive and childish. When you hear this from wise, intelligent, powerful, influential people, it can be damaging.

That’s where Paul comes in. You would think that he would jump in to this debate to provide powerful intellectual weapons with which to battle the intellectual culture. Instead, though, he refuses to fight on their terms.

He cites Isaiah, who was speaking to the people of Jerusalem as Sennacharib approached the walls with 200,000 men.  Isaiah counseled King Hezekiah that, despite all the empirical evidence that they should surrender, they should stand strong. The angel of the Lord then wiped out the beseiging army and Sennacharib was forced home with his tail between his legs.

We cannot know God purely through human wisdom. The closest we can get is a general sense that there is a god of some sort. And then, even when God Himself comes down to earth, He does so in a way that is scandalous to the Jews – hanging on a tree, which the Law says is cursed – and simple, rudimentary foolishness to the Greeks – Jesus loves me, thus I know. An itinerant preacher executed before the age of 35. A king with no kingdom.

Why would God make this so difficult for the faithful and the wise to accept? Why is the cross so counterintuitive to human thinking? Paul here writes that it is so that we know that our salvation is not from ourselves. It is so that God’s power is revealed by bringing people out of their own worldly perspective and into His perspective, through no worthiness of our own.

As a whole, the Christian message is most readily accepted by the poor, the outcast and the simple. In Corinth, the notions of nobility and legacy were of utmost importance – but having those, in fact, makes it less likely that you would accept the truth. Paul goes on to out-boast the boasters. God takes on the persona of the boasting Greco-Roman patron, trashing their wisdom and bragging on His methods.

What’s more, God goes even further – not only is the message itself foolishness, the method of the message was foolish as well. Paul reminds the Corinthians that when he first came to them, he did not use the classical rhetorical methods of the day. Rhetoric focuses on the capabilities of the speaker. It manipulates people emotionally and says what people want to hear. It holds out the hope of prosperity and virtue in order to lead people into your side. It manipulates facts in order to sway opinion. We see this today – in politics, in the “prosperity gospel” and elsewhere.

Paul sets up another school of persuasion against that of rhetoric – preaching, serving as a herald of the King. Preaching is different than teaching and rhetoric. Preaching elevates Christ, not the preacher. Preaching lays out truth rather than attempting to manipulate or even persuade – preaching is not even apologetics. Paul is not against rhetoric, apologetics, logic or persuasion (see: the entire book of Romans). But there is a higher call, one that inspires “fear, trembling and weakness”, because there is no one who is truly adequate to the task of passing on the eternal truth of God.

So, God created a method that overcomes secular wisdom and expectations. Secular wisdom is a valuable thing, but it is, at its best, only a discovery of what God has already put in place. We can have faith that, ultimately the wisdom of God will be vindicated.

We should engage with logic, reason, knowledge, writing and rhetoric. We are not called to ignorance. However, we are called to follow the foolishness of God ahead of the wisdom of the world.

We also understand from this passage the importance of preaching as a key method that God uses to convey His truth to His people and to communicate the Gospel. Apologetics is a vital supporting aspect of Christianity, but people are not brought to the truth of Christ through logic and persuasion – they are brought by the work of the Holy Spirit.

– Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

Something went wrong with the bible. Please make sure that you are requesting a valid passage! If this problem presits please contact joshuawiecorek@outlook.com
Something went wrong with the bible. Please make sure that you are requesting a valid passage! If this problem presits please contact joshuawiecorek@outlook.com

Posted on

Against Tribalism

​Humans have two conflicting intense desires – first, to be accepted by a group, and second, to be distinct from the group. The combination of these two things creates tribalism, and a seeking of distinct identities as a piece of one community as opposed to another. We were made to live in community, and this “tribe-shaped hole” in our heart is meant to be filled by the community of Christ. But all too frequently, we treat the church of God as if it were a worldly tribe, as we create sub-tribes, cliques, schisms and divisions.

This was the situation in the Corinthian church. They had divided themselves up based on the leaders that they followed. Some identified with Paul, the founder of the church. Some identified with Apollos, the current pastor and an eloquent speaker. Some identified with Peter, the overall leader of the church in Jerusalem. Others were super-spiritual and identified with Christ. 

This was largely a spillover from culture. In Greco-Roman culture, it was entirely expected that you would seek to elevate your own rank by associating yourself with somebody of higher rank. Similarly, the Sophist philosophy was built around a student’s identification with and imitation of a teacher. Politics, similarly, was primarily about personality rather than ideas. In all these cases, it was the responsibility of the follower to defend the patron in their absence, and to boast in their successes and virtues.

In the church, this entire concept became tangled up with the concept of baptism. This ceremony originated with Judaism, and were in some ways a ceremony of connection between a rabbi and a follower. There were secular and pagan version of the same thing. So in the church, the person who baptized you became seen as your patron, and you would defend their positions abilities and status against the others who are defending their own patrons.

Paul goes after this whole concept by using rhetoric, asking three rhetorical questions. First, can Christ be divided? Can Christ be put alongside mere human leaders as one of many church leaders? Second, was Paul crucified for you? He reminds them that he (and the other leaders) are merely messengers. Third, were you baptized in the name of Paul? He seeks to strip the concept of baptism of its secular, patron/follower baggage. 

Paul emphasizes that he did not come to them to tick off followers or speak eloquently (with “wisdom of words”). He came to pass on the message of the gospel. That message is that Christ himself is our spiritual patron, and we, as followers of Christ, are called to unity in Him. We can have differences of opinion, but we must be unified as followers of Christ. We can and should treat Him as the culture expects – boasting about him and building him up. But all this must be done in humility about ourselves, knowing that our association with this particular important patron does not build us up to be better than others, but in fact does the opposite. 

The biggest danger to Christian unity is not that we elevate our own views above Christ. Rather, we elevate our views or our tribe as being on the and level as Christ. Too often, we see our conservatism or progressivism as being the natural extension of Christ’s teaching, rather than our own imperfect application. We set up our tribe or our leader as equal with or equivalent to Christ’s kingdom. We become more concerned with supporting or defending our side than with speaking truth. 

We certainly see this in the culture today. If Paul were here, he would demand that we keep all that nonsense out of the church. “Did Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump die for you? Were you baptized in the name of conservatism or progressivism?”

How do we know when I am falling into this? When we disagree with another believer and this leads to a feeling of contempt for them, that is a key indicator that something is wrong in our outlook. 

We cannot imitate what is acceptable in culture. Within the church, we must be able to acknowledge our differences but focus on our unity in Christ. Recent years have made this increasingly difficult in the realm of American politics, so we must redouble our efforts to seek love and unity within the diversity of the community of Christ. 

–Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

Something went wrong with the bible. Please make sure that you are requesting a valid passage! If this problem presits please contact joshuawiecorek@outlook.com
Posted on

Introduction to First Seattleites

Paul had grown up upper-middle class in Tarsus, a center of tent-making, where he learned that trade. He also studied religious law under Gameliel and was a Roman citizen, so this gave him notable status in the community. He was among the many Jewish leaders concerned about the followers of this Jesus – from his perspective, one in a long line of false messiahs who was twisting the scriptures and putting all of God’s people at risk.

So he became essentially a bounty hunter, tracking down and capturing Christians for execution. At one point he asks for dispensation from the high priest to go up to Damascus and bring the Christians back to Jerusalem to face justice. On the way, he is confronted with the living Christ and blinded. When he is healed, he becomes a zealous follower of Christ, and his preaching causes a riot. From there he went briefly to Jerusalem, where he causes trouble once again, and has to be smuggled out. He returns to Taursus and spends ten years there. We don’t know exactly what happened in those years, but presumably they were spent largely in contemplation of the implications of Christ’s coming. Eventually, a man named Barnabas is sent out to find Paul. Paul comes back to Jerusalem, meets with the apostles, and is sent out again, becoming a missionary for the church.

Eventually, he comes to Corinth, where he partners with Priscilla and Aquila and eventually shifts his focus from preaching to the Jews to preaching up the gentiles. He spent a year and a half there building the church, which he then left in the hands of co-pastors Priscilla and Aquila. This letter was written a number of years later to that church.

Corinth was a center of trade, located on an isthmus where ships went overland rather than sailing around Asia is. It was a center of entertainment, hosting the Isthmian Games every two years. It was a center of religion and sex, as the temple of Aphrodite also served as a city-wide prostitution business. The city naturally had a pretty significant underbelly, and had become a Roman byword for debauchery and dissolution. So the church in Corinth had a lot of baked-in issues, issues Paul would not have been able to deal with in his short time there. This meant that the church there was probably the most dysfunctional church that Paul wrote to, riven by factions, infighting, selfishness, and not a little of its own debauchery and dissolution.

Because of these issues, people were actively leaving the faith. The central message of this book, then, was the reminder that a diverse church can only survive and thrive when it is centered around the simplicity of Christ. The thinking of the people of Corinth is remarkably parallel to that of the average Seattleite, so we have much to learn from this book. (It does mean that going through it is not going to push against legalism, but against license).

Like Seattle, Corinth was regionally proud and technologically advanced – they had Corinthian bronze, we have Amazon and Microsoft. They took pride in their sports and sports culture. They were proud of their intelligence and education. They were proud of their wealth and strong economy. They overall felt superior to the rest of the Greco-Roman world. Aristotle himself wrote about this superiority complex. There are a few similarities here.

And when this sort of superiority complex enters the church, we get significant problems. Factions, boasting, judgmentalism – even judging Paul (who, naturally, responded with great heaping piles of sarcasm). This intellectual elitism led to an elevation of their own reason over the truth of scripture. Paul continually has to remind them that the message of Christ was specifically built to be foolishness when looked at with cold reason. Corinth also had an overall distrust of authority, including church leaders, leading to treating of Paul with extreme disrespect, because he’s not treating others with enough respect.

Corinth was more concerned with individual rights than with love. They were more concerned with spiritual experience than with sound teaching and doctrine. They preferred Greek rhetoric to preaching (TED Talks vs. sermons). They preferred unfettered tolerance to holiness and gospel. All these issues are mirrored in Seattle and constantly validated by everyone around us. Rather than self-righteousness and hypocrisy growing out of legalism, we get self-righteousness and hypocrisy growing out of license. Paul usually writes against legalism, but here he writes against license.

There are a number of controversies in this book, mostly stemming from the existence of another letter sent before this one that we do not have (called “Corinthians A”), and another one after this one but before 2nd Corinthians (called “Corinthians B”). These letters are not included in the canon and were clearly not inspired or meant by the Holy Spirit to be passed down. It does help explain some of the very specific-seeming instructions Paul gives.

Overall, the letter is a call to incarnational unity, shedding the divisions and factions created by intellectual elitism and pride in favor of the unity that Christ calls us to and gives us the power to attain.

–Sermon Notes, Brent Rood, Seed Church, Lynnwood, WA

1 Corinthians 1:1-3

Something went wrong with the bible. Please make sure that you are requesting a valid passage! If this problem presits please contact joshuawiecorek@outlook.com