Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Well, good morning, Park | Forest Glen family!

It’s good to be with you here today.

If we haven’t met yet, my name is Dan Osborn and I serve as one of the pastors here…I’m grateful you’re able to join us today!

Shout out to those of you watching online.

If you have a bible with you, open up with me to 1 Corinthians.

1 Corinthians, chapter 1. We’re starting a new series today through this New Testament letter that I am really looking forward to!

Over the next 9 months or so, we’re gonna be studying the book together, wrestling with some of these ideas, trying to make sense of what’s in this letter and what it means for us today.

But what we will find is that far from being a long, outdated, culturally insensitive letter, 1 Corinthians is fresh and timely for us!

In this letter, Paul, the author is going to be talking about some of the same foundational questions of what it means to be Christian and how christians are supposed to live and engage in a pluralistic society.

What does it look like for a church to be healthy and shaped by the same grace, Monday through Saturday, that it loudly proclaims on Sunday?

What does it look like for a church to represent and honor Jesus?

Or, simply put, question we will come back to week after week: How does the church follow Jesus in a world that doesn’t follow Jesus?

Introduction

And this is a decisive question for us…because the stakes are high.

What a church does or how individual Christians act, tells a very specific story about Jesus and what he’s like to the world around us.

I think author and theologian, Brennan Manning said it well:

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle.

That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.

Friends, the kind church we are matters.

What we give ourselves too...

How we engage with one another...

How we engage outside these walls…matters.

And that’s not just true for us, in 21st Century America…that is and has been true for every church throughout history.

And getting this right…seeing and righting wrongs…working on our issues (especially the one’s we’d rather keep hidden away)…that is what 1 Corinthians is all about!

So, if you’re not there yet, open with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 1. We’ll be looking at verses 1-17 today.

And I’ll start with a bit of background to this letter just so we get our bearings straight…and then we’ll look at first major idea, that followers of Jesus embrace their Gospel Identity.

Sound good?

Alright, I’ll pray and then we’ll get started.

PRAY

Background to the Letter

Alright let’s get started.

Through this series, I want this letter to come alive for us.

I want us to feel the tension the Corinthian church we was feeling…I want us to know what life was life for them so that as we look to this 2,000 year old letter, we can best understand what it means for us today.

Author and Recipients

First Corinthians is the first letter we have written by a man named Paul who started the church in the Roman city of Corinth…sometime around 46 AD.

Let me show on map where Corinth is.

Paul’s pattern was to go from city to city to share the message of Jesus and start churches in those cities.

He started the church in Corinth — and we actually have record of that in Acts 18, which describes Paul’s work there.

He was in Corinth for about a year and half.

Roman Corinth

History

And the city itself has a fascinating history.

Originally, Corinth was a Greek city…but it was almost completely destroyed by the Romans during an uprising in 146 BC.

It actually lay almost abandoned for about 100 years before it was rebuilt by Julias Caesar and was therefore a thoroughly Roman city.

And to populate this new city, he started sending over former slaves who had purchased or acquired their freedom.

They were not high class in the traditional Roman social order, but in Corinth people found the rare ability to climb the social latter.

It was a place where people could make a name for themselves and so it attracted people from all over the place…And, actually a lot like Chicago, it was proud city.

Religion

It was also a deeply religious city with temples to different Roman gods…it had a growing Jewish community around the time Paul was there.

And because of the temples and prostitution linked to the worship in the temples, it because known as a city with loose sexual morals…so much so that the name of the city was used openly as a euphemism so that in some places, prostitutes were called “Corinthians girls”.

It was a wild, growing, city of influence that was ripe for the message of Jesus to take root and expand!

Reason for the Letter

Again, Acts 18 tells us Paul was in Corinth for about a year and a half, pastoring and caring for the small group of people he’s come to deeply love.

But after a few years of being gone, he starts to get some letters from them and some concerning reports from other people that things are not right in the church.

And the letter neatly breaks down into two MAJOR sections.

In the first, which we’ll look at today, Paul will deal with the problems that have been reported to him.

And then, starting in chapter 7, he will shift to answering the questions they have asked him in a previous letter.

And he’s pretty direct!

At times, he’s sarcastic with them…at other times, he’s pretty bold in how he addresses what he sees as serious issues in the church…like there are some pretty messed up things going on there!

Gospel Identity

But I love how Paul actually starts this letter…because he doesn’t just dive into all the things they need to stop or start doing…he reminds them first of who they are and what is true of them as followers of Jesus.

In other words, he reminds them of their gospel identity.

Look with me again starting in verse one....and keep in mind…he’s writing to a group of people who’ve got some serious sin issues going and he knows it!

1 Corinthians 1:1–9 (ESV)

1 Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes,

2 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:

3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, 5 that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge— 6 even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you— 7 so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, 8 who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

And in all of these phrases, Paul is talking about is true of those who are followers of Christ.

He’s talking about the gospel accomplishes in us, when, by faith we trust in Jesus and his death and resurrection.

And I wish we could spend the entire time looking at this.

Instead it feels a bit like when you go to the Art Institute and have to spend like 30 seconds glossing over masterpiece after masterpiece…that’s exactly what we’re seeing in these first nine verses!

Sanctified in Christ

He says they are “...sanctified in Christ...” in v. 2 (1 Cor.

1:2).

That word ‘sanctified’ is crucial.

It means: to be made holy.

And Paul is saying that he’s writing this letter to those who have been made holy in Christ!

Theologians call this: Sanctification.

One author put it this way:

Sanctification is the ongoing supernatural work of God to rescue justified sinners from the disease of sin and to conform them to the image of his Son: holy, christlike, and empowered to do good works.

And we talk about the process of becoming more like Jesus.

As he was pure and blameless, sanctification means we become more like him purity and blamelessness.

And it’s not something that we bring about…but something that God makes happen.

Look at it again, they are sanctified in Christ…that by their faith in Jesus, and his death a resurrection…they are being made more like him by him!

Paul is saying to the Corinthian church…the church with issues…the church made up of messed up people who still struggle with sin…in fact he says to us…You are sanctified.

Called to be Saints

He goes on to say they’ve been “...called to be saints...”

And sometimes we get caught up on that word, “...saint...”, especially if we’ve grown up around the Roman Catholic or Orthodox church.

It feels like saint should mean something like “Amazing, superhero Christian”.

But what really quiet amazing about it is that it’s actually the normal word used to describe followers of Jesus in the New Testament.

It’s related to the idea of sanctification because it literally means, “Holy one”.

And again, the jarring thing about this is that, knowing the issues going on in the Corinthian church, how can Paul say this about them?

How is true that they have these issues and at the same time can be called saints?

Grace Given to you in Christ

He celebrates in v. 4 (1 Cor.

1:4) that God has given them grace…he’s given them something that have not earned on their own!

Enriched in Him

He says in v. 5 (1 Cor.