Visual Commentaries. All Podcasts. Bible Reader. Croatian Hrvatski. Dutch Nederlands. Finnish Suomi. German Deutsch. Hungarian Magyar. Indonesian Bahasa Indonesia. Italian Italiano. Norwegian Norsk. Polish Polski. Swahili Kiswahili. Freedom in Christ, and Sacrificing Liberty for Unity Chapters Paul addresses the issue of eating food sacrificed to idols, lists his rights as an Apostle, and encourages believers to keep one another from stumbling.
Order and Love in Worship Gatherings Chapters Paul addresses the use of gifts and keeping order in worship and concludes that the greatest gift is love, using the analogy of the church as a body. Paul Confirms the Resurrection Chapter 25 Some in the church denied the resurrection was real or important.
Paul confirms that it not only is it historically real but the foundation of our faith. How should a Christian in the local church behave? The unifying element of this letter is instructing the church in what it means to live as Christians in a non-Christian world, ultimately bringing them to the idea that love itself is the primary driver and conclusion of how to live out faith. As believers, our behavior should set us apart to look different from the world around us. Paul had several purposes for writing this letter to the Corinthians.
His first purpose was to deal with moral problems and the divisions that had formed, as people had divided themselves into followers of Paul, Apollos, Peter or Christ His second reason was to deal with several questions that had been asked in a letter the Corinthians had sent to him This letter from Paul to the church at Corinth has astonishing parallels for us today, in that we continue to struggle with many of the same issues as they did.
The Corinthians experienced trouble with division amongst themselves, sexual sin, church discipline, application of spiritual gifts, interactions with the idol worship going on around them, and general disorder in the church. These issues continue to be seen in the church and deter our effectiveness in serving one another and the world around us.
We are to always live in a way that brings glory to Christ. It presents us with a faith grounded and expressed in love and commends Christian love as greater than any other spiritual gift we could possess. We are reminded that our spiritual knowledge, without love, amounts to little.
In a world filled with hate and selfishness, the sacrificial love of Christ should be clearly evident in us. Such a community clearly had a negative influence on the Corinthian church. Instead, he directed us to live out our commitment to Christ ever more faithfully in the midst of nonbelievers.
Paul expected that we Christians would shine our light into the dark places of their world by worshiping in a unified community that was accountable to one another. He expected that we would settle our problems internally, that we would encourage one another in the pursuit of purity, and that we would strive together by holding tightly to the hope of our bodily resurrection to come.
View Chuck Swindoll's chart of First Corinthians , which divides the book into major sections and highlights themes and key verses. First Corinthians. Who wrote the book? Where are we? Why is First Corinthians so important? What's the big idea?
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