Sermon Tone Analysis

Corinth

Opening

We’re embarking today on a study of a letter penned by the Apostle Paul to the Church which was located in the cosmopolitan city of Corinth in Greece.

It was a city of about 500K inhabitants.

And in Paul’s day it was the 3rd largest city in the Roman Empire.

It was a wealthy city renown for 3 things above all: Banking, Trade and Immorality.

Boasting 2 major east-west sea ports it truly was a major crossroads of the empire.

And it was both a challenging and a strategic place for Christianity to be planted and thrive.

One writer noted the culture or climate of Corinth this way -

‘The people of Corinth…[were] familiar with every device and invention of an over-stimulated civilization, essentially a worldly and material set of persons, seeking money and pleasure and success.’

W.M. Ramsey

I think we’d be hard-pressed to find a place with more in common with the United States today in terms of its cultural trends and atmosphere.

Politics was HUGE.

And politics was built almost entirely around personalities rather than principles.

Whether or not they liked someone was more important than what they actually stood for.

As long as they could win the crowd by their communication skills and their bigger than life personae - they had power.

Mere fame or recognition gave you clout.

Much like we see today where famous people - often famous only for BEING famous, or notorious (the Kardashians come to mind) - end up giving Congressional testimony on any range of topics.

And their Tweets and other social media platforms give them a voice on virtually every given topic - where it is given weight as though they are somehow super-experts.

There was a social elite which - as long as you were in that club - your voice mattered.

And the rest of society - not so much.

There was a near obsession with self-promotion.

If you didn’t brag on yourself, something was wrong.

And everyone was clamoring for their “rights,” clogging the courts with lawsuits.

People using the courts to oppress each other - supposedly to get “their rights.”

The cult of personality was everything.

Such was the state of things in Corinth.

A condition, again, so much like today.

A condition, again, so much like today.

And as that atmosphere prevailed in society, so it bled over into the Church.

Something we wrestle with even today in the Church.

Take just the issue of Church celebrities; it’s rife among us today.

With the result that people who are not very Biblically literate let alone Biblically faithful, write books, make videos, have TV and Radio shows and garner huge followings.

Speaking to spiritual matters and things of great theological and eternal importance, as though they are experts to be heeded apart from any true fidelity to the Scriptures.

Now don’t get me wrong, that’s not an indictment on large ministries simply because they are large.

Or popular preachers and teachers simply because they are popular.

Many a sound and faithful preacher has a large or popular ministry.

But it IS an indictment against the present day tendency among Christians as consumers whereby we make celebrities out of some of these people, whether they are sound or not.

All this makes this particular NT letter powerfully appropriate for our generation and our cultural setting.

Now this is titled 1 Corinthians in our Bibles, but in the letter itself, Paul alludes to a previous letter (5:9).

Then there was this letter, then a “severe” letter mentioned in , and then what we have as letters in all.

It is called 1 Corinthians in our Bibles, but in the letter itself, Paul alludes to a previous one (5:9),

Let me give you a somewhat simple outline of the letter.

We’ll be breaking it up in more detail as we go, but broadly:

Present text

SIMPLIFIED OUTLINE:

I. 1:1-3 Greeting

II.

1:4-9 Opening/Thanksgiving

III.

1:10-6:20 The Problem of Disunity in the Church and the problems it brings.

IV. 7:1-11:1 Questions they had written to Paul about (Singleness, Marriage, Divorce & Remarriage; Eating food offered to idols; Rights; Idolatry)

V. 11:2-14:40 Practices in the Church (Head coverings; Lord’s Supper; Spiritual gifts)

VI. 15:1-58 The Resurrection

VII.

16:1-4 Collection for the Saints

VIII.

16:5-24 Closing Comments (Travel plans; exhortation; Apollos; Paul’s situation; greetings from the other Churches)

But to simplify it even more - we might look at the letter’s major theme - for everything he says to the Church there is tied back to it:

THEME: Christian Unity

The theme or backbone of the letter jumps out at you when you read it.

a.

What constitutes true unity in the Church.

b.

What challenges true unity in the Church.

c.

What corrects true unity in the Church.

Love

Why is Christian unity so important?

Because this is part of God’s overall plan for redeemed humanity:

This corporate concept runs through all of Paul’s letters and ministry - as well as all of Scripture.

While the Gospel is preached and heard and responded to individually, we are not redeemed to be a disassociated mob of saved individuals.

We’re saved to be part of a unified whole as the Church - even as the Trinity is a unified whole - 3-persons in one God.

We are many persons joined together to be one Body and reflection of Christ Jesus.

But where there is pride, competitiveness, self-promotion, and emphasis upon personalities, rights and personal spiritual gifts - this grand corporate reality can get tragically lost in the shuffle.

As a result, the Church fails to become what she - what WE - are meant to be.

Christians have to survive, and hopefully thrive - in whatever culture or environment they find themselves.

So it is Christians in China right now find themselves somewhat on the run from Government persecution - often forced to meet in underground groups.

Christians in Muslim nations - depending on various strains of Islam must remain quite under the radar altogether - as must those in North Korea where mere possession of a Bible is a capital offence.

Christians in most South American nations right now are enjoying an unprecedented time of growth and public presence that we can only hope will increase to the furtherance of the Gospel everywhere.

Christians in France and other parts of Europe are tolerated, but considered intellectually inferior, relics of a distasteful past.

Societal pests.

And all lumped together with virtually every other religious group - no matter how faithful to Biblical truth or how deviant from it.

And then there is Christianity in the United States - which due to the size of our nation manifests itself very differently by regions, and has diversified itself - splintered into an almost uncountable number of self-identifying clusters - large and small.

A. The Call of Christ

And so as our text this morning begins - Paul hits the first of the 3 things he brings before their minds in these opening verses:

A. The Call of Christ

And it is vs. 2 where he puts down his foundation so to speak:

A. The CALL of Christ: To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours .

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), .

One of the dangers to which we are susceptible in coming to the saving knowledge of Jesus Christ - is to see our salvation wholly in terms of our own personal justification or standing before God, without any concept that we were saved FOR something, not just to BE saved.

And here Paul teases that out in 3 phrases found here and in vs. 9 - the first being:

Called to be saints

The average, everyday Joe and Jane Christian is no less “called” than the apostle himself is to his apostleship.

He is no more called than all of them - us.

And we, no less called than Paul.

But called to what?

To be SAINTS!

Holy Ones, if we were to translate it more literally.

For that is what the word for saints here implies.