Straight to the Heart of 1 & 2 Corinthians

60 bite-sized insights

Phil Moore

• Publisher: Monarch Books
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780857212177
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Commentary

If you think that 1 and 2 Corinthians are somebody else’s mail, then you need to think again. Paul wrote them for you and he wrote them for me.

Right from the outset, his goal was far bigger than the city walls of Corinth. He copied them to "all the saints throughout Achaia" and to "all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ." They are God's message to believers in any local church in any place at any time. They describe the kind of church God can use.

God inspired the Bible for a reason. He wants you read it and let it change your life. If you are willing to take this challenge seriously, then you will love Phil Moore’s devotional commentaries. Their bite-sized chapters are punchy and relevant, yet crammed with fascinating scholarship.

Welcome to a new way of reading the Bible. Welcome to the Straight to the Heart series.

1 Corinthians

Part One:

Remember Whose Church It Is

Seeing God Amidst the mess (1:1–9)

I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.

(1 Corinthians 1:4)

Two of my relatives are former church leaders who have stepped out of ministry and turned their backs on the Church. If you heard their stories, you probably wouldn’t blame them. They saw church life at its worst, and the disappointment crushed their spirits. Someone once said, “To dwell above with saints we love, well that will be such glory; but to dwell below with saints we know, now that’s a different story!” If you have ever found hurt instead of healing as part of a local church, you will know that it takes more than a sense of humour to survive.

That’s why the first verses of 1 Corinthians are so surprising and so challenging. Paul doesn’t begin his letter with complaint or rebuke or disappointed finger-pointing. Instead, he tells the wayward Corinthians that “I always thank God for you.”

Hold on a minute. Always thank God for you?! Always thank God for the sinful bunch of rebels who had betrayed his trust in Corinth? Thank God for the church that was riddled with division, pride and puffed-up human wisdom? Thank God for Christians who were suing one another in the law courts and shocking even their non-Christian neighbours with their acts of sexual perversion? Who were disorderly in worship, dishonouring the gifts of the Spirit, and drunk at the Lord’s Supper? Who were led astray by false teachers and had started doubting the reality of Jesus’ resurrection? How on earth can Paul begin his letter by telling the Corinthians that “I always thank God for you?” He explains in the second half of the verse: “because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus”.

I am not very good at Magic Eye pictures. Frankly, they look like a jumbled-up mess to me. My wife, on the other hand, can do strange things with her eyes and can always see a beautiful three-dimensional picture hidden behind all the mess. Paul did the same when he looked at the sinful church at Corinth. Instead of feeling angry and giving up in disillusion, Paul saw God’s grace at work amidst the mess.

Paul wasn’t just a wishful thinker. He didn’t try to pretend that the Corinthians were doing better than they really were. “I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches,” he tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:28, and his intense concern is what makes these two letters so passionate. He looked sin full in the face within the messy church at Corinth, but then chose to focus his eyes upon God’s gracious 3D picture. He learned to dwell on God’s grace more than he did on human failure, and he let the truth of the Gospel save his heart from disappointment.

The Gospel reminded Paul of God’s work in the past, and this more than offset the bitter pill of the present. Every single one of those believers had once been dead in their sins and enemies of God, until God’s grace sought them out and raised them to life through his Spirit.¹ They had not become church members because Paul convinced them it might help them to pray a sinner’s prayer, as Paul stresses by filling these opening nine verses with a series of passive verbs. They had been called by God’s initiative, sanctified through the shed blood of Jesus and given grace in spite of their sin. They may look like a sorry bunch of washed-up, has-been Christians, but in truth they had been enriched through the Gospel. Paul had learned to focus on God at work amidst the mess, and he refused to write off anyone whom the Lord had written in.²

The Gospel also reminded Paul of God’s promises for the future. He must have felt punch-drunk when he listened to Chloe, Stephanas and a long line of other visitors with bad news from Corinth,³ but one great fact kept him buoyant through it all. “God, who has called you… is faithful,” he rejoices in verse 9, confident that this means “he will keep you strong to the end”. The same God who had called the Corinthians to follow him in the past would also keep them following him right until the end, because human unfaithfulness does not nullify God’s faithfulness.⁴ That’s what stopped Paul from giving up at the start of 55 AD, from giving up in the spring when his emergency visit ended in heartbreak, and from giving up in the autumn when he wrote to them again. Ultimately, it was because Paul kept sight of God’s future grace for the Corinthians that he won them to repentance and helped them to see it too.

The Gospel also helped Paul to see God’s work in the present. Fault-finding is easy but grace-spotting requires faith. Paul needed it to see God’s fingerprints at Corinth, still at work amidst the mess. In spite of their sin, the Corinthians were still calling on the name of the Lord Jesus, and no one ever does that but for the working of God’s grace.⁵ Compared to their out-and-out paganism less than five years earlier, the changes to their speech and knowledge were living proof that the Gospel had saved them.⁶ Even the disorderly way in which they exercised the gifts of the Spirit bore testimony to the fact that God was present in their midst and had not given up on them. It is easy to focus on the negatives and disappointments, but those who understand the Gospel can see God at work in the midst of the mess.

Magic Eye pictures may not come naturally to you, but make sure that you see the 3D picture of God’s grace in the Church. If you don’t, you will find yourself complaining, church-hopping and falling out of love with the Bride for whom Christ died. Your heart will eventually grow cold towards God’s People, and your joy in Christian ministry will begin to falter and die.

But if seeing God at work could give Paul strength to love, persevere and give thanks for the troublesome Corinthians in 55 AD, it is more than able to give us strength to cope with our own setbacks and disappointments today. I am amazed at how Paul won back the church at Corinth when they realized that he was more aware of God’s grace than he was of their failure. I am still amazed at the potential released in churches today whenever people learn to see God at work amidst the mess.

Your Call (1:2)

To the church of God in Corinth… together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ – their Lord and ours.

(1 Corinthians 1:2)

Paul never uses the word “Christian” in his letters. It’s not just that the word was used as a label of contempt back in 55 AD.¹ He had a theological reason to avoid it as well. Paul understood that a noun like “Christian” was simply not enough to convey what it means to follow Jesus. It means far, far more than deciding to tick a box on a census return or an evangelist’s response card. Paul needs a verb to describe what following Jesus really means. It means calling on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul was not stating anything new here. Right from the very first chapters of Genesis, the followers of Yahweh were those who called upon the name of the Lord.² Great Israelites such as Samuel, David and Elijah followed suit.³ Therefore Peter and Paul were simply quoting from the Jewish Scriptures when they preached in Acts 2:21 and Romans 10:13 that “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”⁴ The Gospel is a promise that if we call upon the name of Jesus then God is sure to answer.

One of the reasons we find God’s grace so surprising towards the sinful church at Corinth is that we forget the power unleashed by those who call on Jesus’ name. When we say that God forgives people’s sin because he is merciful, Paul tells us that we are only stating half of the picture. Mercy alone cannot triumph over justice unless someone turns mercy into an action which justifies. God cannot simply give us grace, Paul reminds us in verse 4, but can only give us grace “in Christ Jesus”. The Old Testament believers were not forgiven when they called on the name of the Lord because they regretted their sin and set their hearts on self-improvement. They were forgiven because they offered blood sacrifices as God commanded, which pointed to a day when the Son of God would come to earth and die for them. Paul tells us in verse 2 that Jesus is the Lord of the Old Testament, the promised Christ, or Messiah, on whose name God’s People must call. “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”⁵

Now Paul takes this teaching one step further. It may not be obvious in our English translations, but Paul actually uses a “present participle” here in verse 2. That was how the Greeks spoke of repeated activity and it talks literally of “all those everywhere who keep on calling on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”. Paul doesn’t want us to be fooled that the normal Christian life is in any way different from Christian conversion; it simply means carrying on in the manner in which we started. It means calling afresh on the name of Jesus every single day.

Recently, I went to the British Houses of Parliament in Westminster. Security was high and they were closed to the public, but I have a friend who works on the inside. I stood at the door and rang up to his office, and he in turn phoned down for the guards to let me in. I “called on his name” and he answered me, which is what Christians do at the gates of God’s throne room. Paul tells us in verse 9 that we have koinonia – fellowship or partnership – with Jesus and that we can lay hold of the blessings that are ours through him simply by calling on his name.⁶

Suddenly we begin to see how God could use a church like Corinth and how he can still use churches like our own. If we treat “Christian” as a noun, things don’t look very hopeful for us. How could they be, when we fall so far short of the Christ whom we follow? But if we understand that “Christian” means calling on the name of the Lord Jesus, then we grasp with Paul that God’s blessing is only natural. When we call on the name of Jesus, God’s true blood sacrifice, then of course he doesn’t hold our sins and weaknesses against us. When we call on the name of Jesus, God’s true Passover Lamb, then of course he sets us free from the stranglehold of sin in the same way that he freed the Hebrews from the tyrant rule of Pharaoh.⁷ Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how little we deserve God to use us. What matters is whether we call on Jesus’ name, the name which has authority to overcome our weakness.

When I first became a Christian, I was advised that “the Holy Spirit only fills clean vessels.” I needed to spruce up my act, I was told, if I ever wanted to see the Kingdom of God come in power in my life. I can understand what those ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• About the Straight to the Heart Series
• Introduction: The Kind of Church God Can Use
• 1 CORINTHIANS, PART ONE: REMEMBER WHOSE CHURCH IT IS
• 1 CORINTHIANS, PART TWO: SEX IN THE CITY
• 1 CORINTHIANS, PART THREE: REMEMBER WHOSE WORLD IT IS
• 1 CORINTHIANS, PART FOUR: CHURCH IN THE CITY
• 2 CORINTHIANS, PART ONE: REMEMBER WHOSE MISSION IT IS
• 2 CORINTHIANS, PART TWO: CASH IN THE CITY
• 2 CORINTHIANS, PART THREE: REMEMBER WHOSE POWER IT IS
• Conclusion: The Kind of Church God Can Use
• OTHER BOOKS IN THE STRAIGHT TO THE HEART SERIES