1 Corinthians 1:1-3

Hey there, my name is Josh Taransky.

I'm the pastor of Haven City Church.

We appreciate you tuning in to our weekly podcast of our sermons.

This sermon was given on December 5th, 2020, and we're starting the book of 1 Corinthians.

If you want more information about Haven City Church, you can go to www.baltimorechurch.com.

Thanks for tuning in.

God bless.

Okay.

So let's stand together.

Let's um read.

Now I know some of you can't stand, that's fine.

Don't stand.

Where's my clicker here?

Let's read together from 1 Corinthians.

1 Corinthians 1, 1 through 3.

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

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

Let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your word.

It's exciting to get back into a verse-by-verse study of a book.

And man, what an amazing book, 1 Corinthians is.

We're so grateful for the work of your Holy Spirit that you worked in Paul the Apostle to write this letter.

You were merciful upon a church that was messy.

And now we get to read it.

It survived through the ages, through the years of crazy persecution and fire that the Roman Caesar brought down upon the church.

And Lord, here we still have this letter as a part of our Bibles.

And we are so grateful for that.

Lord, teach us this morning.

Instruct us, we pray.

And we ask this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Amen.

You may be seated.

You may be seated.

And um one one quick thing.

So um one of the little gals here was was mentioning to me that um she had this and uh somebody else saw it, and they're saying, How can I get one of those?

And she said, Well, it's just three dollars.

I'll get it for you at my church.

So um that's cool with me.

If if you want to use this at work and you have it out, and it's uh it's a great little uh thing that you can uh give out, or maybe a great way to invite your friends to church and just say, hey, we're going through this book of the Bible.

Um I love that idea.

So um let's let's jump right in.

Um we're gonna we got uh some ground here to cover, and I want to be uh sensitive to your time.

We're beginning our study in 1 Corinthians.

This was a letter that was written by Paul to a new church.

This church had a number of problems, and in a moment I'm gonna list out for you the problems that were going on in this church, at least the ones we know of.

Now, before I introduce this book, I want to for you briefly explain why we as a church spend time going through books of the Bible.

So typically, most of our schedule this year, out of the 52 Sundays that we have, most of those Sundays, we're gonna be going through a book of the Bible.

And maybe that's been the practice that you've had in the churches you've been a part of for years, and maybe that's something that's new.

But for us, it's really important.

And here's why.

When a person becomes a Christian by turning towards God and placing their faith in Jesus Christ, at that point they are converted.

There are three things that happen when a person is converted, when they they surrender their life to Jesus Christ.

First of all, they're justified.

That means that they're no longer guilty of everything wrong they've done in their life.

That doesn't mean that they've been left off the hook.

It doesn't mean that God's given them a pass.

It means that the work Jesus did on the cross is attributed to that person's account, to your account, and you are no longer guilty because Jesus paid for your guilt on the cross.

So you're justified.

The second thing is that you're regenerated.

Regenerated means that you are given a new heart and God's Spirit is placed in you.

You're given the Holy Spirit.

So at this point, when you turn and you say, Jesus, I want to trust in you, it is at that point that a new heart is given to you and God's Spirit is placed in you.

And then finally, you're sanctified.

Now, this sanctification means that you're wholly devoted to God, that your attention is now, and your life orientation is all determined by God.

Remember when Bush was kind of talking about the axis of evil?

I love that word axis, because Jesus is our axis, right?

Not axis of evil, but he's the axis that our life turns on.

He's the axis of love, yeah.

He's and so we're devoted to him.

He's central in our life.

But sanctification also means that we're being set apart, set being separated from sin in our life.

This is a massive transition.

This change is so significant that Jesus calls this a second birth, or that you are born again.

When you turn your life over to Jesus Christ, it is as if you were born a second time.

This new person that has been born a second time is spiritual and needs spiritual nourishment.

They don't just need information on how to live a new life, they need nourishment for their soul.

God's word is the primary spiritual instrument that God uses to nourish, instruct, guide, and change us.

It's God's word that nourishes us.

In the book of 1 Peter, it says this like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk that by it you may grow up into salvation.

The metaphor is of a nursing mother.

And when you and I become Christians, when we turn our life over to Jesus Christ, we are born again and we need spiritual nourishment.

And the word of God is likened to that nourishment.

We see this over also in 1 Timothy 4, 6, where it talks about being nourished on the truths of the faith.

Nourished on the truths of the faith.

Jesus told his disciples that man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

So all of that to say, this morning we're starting 1 Corinthians, but the reason why we as a church go through these books of the Bible and why I'm teaching you, my mode on Sunday mornings during our sermon time is primarily one of teaching.

I'm instructing you and explaining the text because the reality is that if you have a relationship with God, the Holy Spirit dwells in you, and the Holy Spirit can preach a better sermon to your soul than I ever can.

But he does that as you're enlightened to what's going on in the text.

So if I can open up the text and say, here is what's taking place, my trust is that the Holy Spirit takes that and he knows what you need to hear this morning.

He knew everything that happened to you this week.

He knows what you're frustrated about, what you don't like about people, what you don't like about your family, your friends, your work people.

He knows the angst in your life.

He knows your dreams, the things you aspire to, he knows your regrets, he knows all that stuff.

And so the Holy Spirit's sermon that he can preach to you is way better than me.

And the only thing you need to be able to receive that sermon this morning is just a listening ear, that you're ready to receive what he has for you.

I also, the reason we go through these books of the Bible is because I want to model for you a spiritual discipline of opening up the Bible and studying it.

We are called to not just be fed and nourished spiritually on Sundays, but we need spiritual nourishment throughout the week.

And so God's word is given to us as that spiritual nourishment, and you need to be learning how to study the Bible on your own and how to feed yourself in the same way that we go through the text.

And so I'm basically trying to set you up for spiritual success by going through these books of the Bible.

So, 1 Corinthians, we're gonna dive in, it's gonna be a blast.

Now, here's me teaching you, here's me teaching you how to interpret a text.

One of the things that you do when you open up your Bible tomorrow morning and you're trying to interpret that text, not just not first, what does it mean to me, but what does it mean, right?

When you interpret, the first thing you want to look at is the context, right?

The context.

Now, Bible verses in a scripture on a birthday card or a coffee mug, those are great.

But that scripture was in a context.

And it's important that we understand the context in which those verses lie.

And so when we talk about context, we're talking about a few different things.

I don't have a slide for this, but there's there's four primary contexts that you want to consider.

First of all, uh the the book as a whole, right?

The book that we're studying as a whole.

So when we look at verses one through three this morning, these three verses are written inside the context of 1 Corinthians.

And so they have particular meaning because of that.

We also want to look at the context of geography, the location.

Where was Paul when he wrote this?

Where were the original recipients when they wrote this?

And then you have culture.

What was their culture like?

There's a massive gap between the culture of Corinth and our particular culture.

And then finally, the context of relationship.

So let's talk a little bit about the city of Corinth.

Let's talk about Corinth.

First of all, we're talking about a city.

I'll let you see the map here.

We're talking about a city that is situated on a narrow strip of land that's called an isthmus.

The red arrow is pointing to that isthmus.

And it's connecting the Greek peninsula with the Peloponnese, right?

That thing that looks like a cow's udder sticking out below down there.

That is also known as the region of Achai or the Peloponnese.

And um, so this uh city was situated there on that port.

At its narrowest point, it's six miles across.

And for hundreds of years, the people in this region talked about a uh passageway being carved out of the um geography there so that ships could get through.

You see, if you pass south of the Peloponnese landmass there, it's very dangerous.

There's a lot of ships that got wrecked there.

And so um ships would actually dock at that isthmus, Corinth port, and their their um merchandise and what they're taking in their boats would be hauled up over those six miles to the other side rather than shipping it around.

And if you had a small enough boat, they'd actually drag your boat on these rolling logs across to the other side.

So this was a um for hundreds of years, before the time of Christ BC, this was a famous Greek city.

It competed, um, it rivaled Rome, but in 146 BC, a Roman emperor destroyed the Greek Corinth, leveled it, and it sat barren for a hundred years.

And then in 44 BC, Julius Caesar rebuilt Corinth.

And it became this, again, an amazing shipping port where people were passing through.

And there were freed slaves that were placed in Corinth to repopulate the city, and so it became truly a metropolitan city.

Um, all kinds of people were situated there because of it being a primary trade route.

Now, Corinth was the capital of Achai.

When we get to the book of 2 Corinthians, right at the introduction, um, the the letter is addressed to Corinth and the churches of Achai.

Because no church was meeting in a place like this.

You're primarily churches were meeting in houses, larger houses, and um and so you had all these churches spread out kind of around the Achai region.

Um in this one commentary it says this of this city.

Roman Corinth.

Remember, so there's Greek Corinth, that was destroyed, now we have Roman Corinth.

Um Roman Corinth was prosperous, uh cosmopolitan, and religiously pluralistic, accustomed to visits by impressive traveling public speakers, and obsessed with status, self-promotion, and personal rights.

Fascinating place.

Many of you have heard in sermons, if you've been around the church for any length of time, you've heard about Corinth that it was notorious for its degree of sinfulness.

And you may have even heard that there was a um temple to um Ashtareth uh that uh or Aphrodite, and it was, it had a thousand prostitutes.

But that's actually the case with the Greek Corinth, not with the one that Paul went to.

But it still was a sensual city.

Uh there was still an aspect of sex as a part of pagan worship.

Uh it was a, there was just debauchery that was there.

In fact, Paul will list out some of the most notorious sins as we go along.

Now, where does this letter, the letter that you have here of 1 Corinthians, where does it fit in to the Bible story that we're familiar with?

Well, in order to answer that question, we have to consider the person of Paul.

Now, we saw a few months ago Paul, who was originally named Saul, he was converted to Christ as he was traveling up to Damascus to persecute Christians.

He was a brilliant Jewish scholar.

He had access to some of the top Jewish education of his day.

He was zealous, he was passionate, and God converted him, uh, called him to himself to be a follower of Jesus.

And as Paul matured in Christ 10 years into kind of his walk with Jesus, he was recruited to go on these missionary journeys.

His first kind of outreach that he did, short-term missions outreach that he did, was to take a gift of money and resources from the church in Antioch down to the church in Jerusalem because Jerusalem was suffering.

He did that with Barnabas.

And then in Acts 13, which we haven't studied yet, Paul is a part of the church in Antioch.

He's a part of the teaching team that was there, he and Barnabas and some others.

And as they're praying together as elders, the Holy Spirit speaks to that team and says, take this guy, Paul and Barnabas, and send them out as missionaries to the Gentiles.

And so Paul is sent out by the church in Antioch to go and share the gospel in Gentile areas.

Then they go over to Cyprus and then they travel up into what you would recognize as Turkey.

See where you got the Greek lettering there?

They kind of went up into that region.

Um Paul probably, I need like a pointer, like with a laser, but he basically got um he got uh he got malaria probably on this first missionary journey up in South Turkey.

And uh he went up to uh four major cities in the center of Turkey there.

Crazy persecution.

You can read all about this in Acts 13 and 14.

And then he goes back to Antioch, right, which is over in Israel.

He reports back that in Acts 15, we have the church needs to get together because the church is in crisis, like the whole church is in crisis at this time because all these Gentiles are becoming Christians, and you have some Jewish people that think in order to be a good Christian, you need to keep the Jewish law, but then there's other Christians who are like, and including Paul and Peter, who are like, no, no, no, you don't need to keep the Jewish law.

You don't have to be circumcised, you don't have to follow the Old Testament Jewish rituals in order to be a good standing Christian.

You're Gentiles, you're not under that Old Testament law.

And so in Acts 15, they hash that out, they figure it out, and then the church sends Paul and Silas on the second missionary journey, and they deliver to these existing churches a letter that says, listen, you as Gentiles, you're free.

You don't have to worry about circumcision and sacrifices in the temple and cutting your hair in a particular way, and all the ceremonial laws in the Old Testament.

You don't need to worry about that.

You need to just love Jesus, essentially.

So Paul and Silas, they go on this journey together, encouraging the churches that Paul had helped plant.

This is all in Acts 16 and 17.

It's fascinating because he's in Turkey and he wants to go, he wants to kind of take a hard right-hand turn and go north up in Turkey.

And it says that that the Holy Spirit forbade him, right?

And then it says he wanted to go south, and it says there that Satan hindered him, right?

So Paul's like camped out in the middle of Turkey.

He's like, where do we go next?

And then Paul has this dream, and it's this dream of a Philippian guy saying, you know, come over here.

And so um with that, Paul's like, well, that's the that's God guiding us.

And so Paul goes over to Philippians at the top of the the uh what's Adriatic or Adriatic Sea or yeah, I think the Adriatic um sea there, there's Philippi.

So that's crossing over from Asia into Europe when you move into that upper Macedonian area there.

And so Paul goes to Philip, uh to Philippi.

And we've read in the past in our church about the conversion of Lydia and how the church is planted in Philippi.

And so Paul's basically, he's making his way around the horseshoe counterclockwise, and he's gonna get down to Corinth.

He stops off in Athens.

He plants a church in Thessalonica, and we have those books that are written.

Those are the first epistles that Paul writes, are the letters to the Thessalonicans.

We see the Bereans, right?

Paul comes and he he uh shares the gospel in the city of Berea, and it says that the Bereans were more noble than other cities because they really did their due diligence to go back and check out what Paul was saying in Scripture.

So, anyway, Paul makes his way down to Athens and then Corinth, and that takes us to Acts 18.

So let's read through this story of Acts 18, just so that we have this fresh in our minds.

Okay, this is Paul's original entry into the city of Corinth.

After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth.

And he found a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontius, recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had commanded all the Jews to leave Rome.

And he wanted to see them, and because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and worked for they were tent makers by trade.

And he reasoned in the synagogue every Sabbath and tried to persuade the Jews and the Greeks.

When Silas and Timothy Timothy arrived from Macedonia, Paul was occupied with the word, testifying to the Jews that the Christ was Jesus.

Do you see how that's written?

It says that the Christ was Jesus, because Christ is not Jesus' last name.

Right?

Christ is the Latin form of Messiah.

Christ was Jesus.

And when they opposed and reviled him, he shook out his garments and said to them, You blood your blood be on your own heads.

I am innocent.

From now on I will go to the Gentiles.

And he left there and went to the house of a man named Titius Justus, a worshipper of God.

His house was next door to the synagogue.

Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord together with his entire household.

Wow, so the guy in charge of the synagogue becomes a Christian.

And many of the Corinthians, hearing Paul, believed and were baptized.

And the Lord said to Paul one night in a vision, Do not be afraid, but go on speaking, and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.

And he stayed a year and six months, teaching the word of God among them.

But when Galio was proconsul of Achai, the Jews made a united attack on Paul and brought him before the tribunal, saying, This man is persuading people to worship God contrary to the law.

That would be the Jewish law.

But when Paul was about to open his mouth, Galio said to the Jews, If it were a matter of wrongdoing or a vicious crime a vicious crime, O Jews, I would have reason to accept your complaint.

But since it is a matter of questions about words and names and your own law, see to it yourselves.

I refuse to be a judge of these things.

And he drove them from the tribunal.

And they seized Sosthenes, the ruler of the synagogue, and they beat him in front of the tribunal.

But Galio paid no attention to this.

So this is the story.

Paul is in Corinth.

Isn't this amazing that he has this dream that God tells him?

I mean, because he went to, I mean, Paul went to a lot of different places.

But yet God gives Paul this dream and says, I have many people here in this city.

Now, the story continues a bit, and there's more that we could read, especially because the next part of the story gives the context for the letter being written.

This here is the account of Paul going in and establishing a relationship with these people and sharing the gospel with them.

But the story continues because Paul leaves here in Corinth and he goes back across the Adriatic Sea over to what we would call Turkey, to the city of Ephesus.

I'll go all the way back to that slide because that is what that blue arrow represents.

That's Ephesus.

So do you see how there's a sea basically that can be traversed?

And that's why the letter writing is going on.

It was fairly easy for Paul to communicate with this church and to send his messengers back and forth.

He sends Titus over there.

He sends he's got Sosthenes with him, which's Sosthenes?

Sosthenes just got beat, got beat up at the end of verse 17 here.

And now we read a letter that's written about four years later.

We read a letter that's written four years later, and Sosthenes writing the letter.

So it looks like you've got a Jewish synagogue, and the person overseeing that synagogue initially is Crispus.

But Crispus becomes a Christian.

So he's out.

Then you've got Sosthenes, and he's a part of like bringing Paul before this court, and then he gets beat up, and now he's a Christian.

So the gospel's winning, right?

It's converting these Jews over to Christ.

So you have a substantial Jewish community there, but this is primarily a Gentile community as well.

So the people that are becoming a Christian and being established in this church is a mix.

It's a mixed bag of all kinds of people.

There would be people in this church that are wealthy, that are patrons, and then you have slaves.

You have freed slaves, you have benefactors that are receiving from the patrons of Corinth that are that are Christians.

You've got all kinds of cultural dynamics.

So this is the context of the letter that we are reading.

Now, Paul is there in this city between 51 and 52 A.D.

How do we know that?

Well, we found a um inscription on the um uh on the oracle of Delphi that refers to Galileo.

And uh Gallio is the one that kind of uh gives place for this court trial to take place that's in um Acts 18.

And so we can basically place uh Paul's original visit to Corinth within 12 months of between 51 and 52 A.D.

But then Paul leaves Corinth and he's um he Paul goes through Ephesus, but actually he doesn't stop in Ephesus for too long.

He actually reports back in at uh Caesarea, visits Jerusalem, and then he goes on a third missionary journey.

And it's on that third missionary journey is where he spends a ton of time in Ephesus.

He spends, he does basically a two-year Bible college.

Somebody gives him a property and he teaches the Bible every single day, every afternoon, out of this guy's building, just Bible classes, Bible classes for two years.

And Ephesus becomes this amazing like ministry hub.

It says that the gospel sounded out throughout all of Asia through the work that God did in Ephesus.

And part of the one of the things that Paul does while he's there in Ephesus in 55 A.D.

is that he um is writing these letters back to Corinth.

Let's see if there's anything else that I want to say on that.

Yeah, two or three years he's in Ephesus.

Okay, so we get the letter of 1 Corinthians, and we have to, it's reading one side of the we have to basically kind of deduce here's what's going on in this location.

We we'll see early on within the next couple of weeks that there was a woman named Chloe, and uh or a man named Chloe.

I always think it's a woman because I had a friend when I was a kid, she her name was Chloe, with the same spelling.

But it may have been a man named Chloe, and his household reports back to Paul of the mess going on in this church, of the problems that are there.

They also send Paul a letter where they ask particular questions.

And so Paul writes the letter of 1 Corinthians as a response to the report and to the letter that he has gotten.

And it's just right across the Adriatic Sea that's right there.

He's letting, he's uh basically responding to these issues.

So let's look through some of the problems that occurred.

Problems that are occurring or that are happening in this church.

First of all, there's factionalism.

The reason for this means that the uh there's disunity in the church, it's there's different camps, different tribes.

The reason for that is because um you have um Peter has Peter the apostle, has gone through and and um he's probably visited with this church.

Um there's also people that were discipled by Peter that are now at this church because it's a port city.

Um you have people that have been influenced by Apollos, who's a great orator, shares the gospel, and you can read all about him in Acts 18 and 19 as well.

Um you have these different, you have some people that are like purists.

They're like, we don't really follow any human beings, we just follow Jesus, right?

So there's these different factions that exist, and the church is broken up, and that's not how Jesus wanted his church.

Jesus in John 17 prayed that the church would be unified.

He talked in in Ephesians chapter 4, it talks about the unity of the church, the bond of peace.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

God wants a church that is unified, that's cooperating, that's loving one another.

He doesn't want this tribalism.

The second issue was Hellenistic dualism.

This is the idea that you're both spirit and you're the physical body.

But um, the spirit would have higher priority.

And as a response to that, the physical what's done with the physical body may not matter.

Uh, depending on which direction you go with Hellenistic dualism, you may respond to the physical by saying, hey, do whatever you want.

Nothing matters about the physical body.

You can do all kinds of sin in your physical body.

Others responded to the physical body saying the physical body doesn't matter, and so I'm going to be an ascetic.

I'm not even going to please my physical body.

I'm going to live in a cave and you know eat mush or whatever.

I don't know, I don't know.

So you have uh that whole way of thinking is influencing uh the church.

Hellenistic dualism kind of just uh gave rise to some of these problems.

Triumphalism.

Triumphalism is the idea that that our spiritual maturity has been accomplished.

Look, I'm a Christian and I'm as good as it's gonna get, and I'm a great Christian, by the way.

Let me tell you about it.

It's this arrogance, it's spiritual arrogance, self-righteousness, um, triumphalism, uh just considering each other too highly.

And this manifests itself in exercising spiritual gifts in the church, but having no regard for morality, right?

Like just a total messy church that's divided and mean to one another, but hey, we're super spiritual because we can speak in tongues and people are getting healed, and man, we got that dynamite work of the Holy Spirit, but who cares about our life and what our life looks like if I'm sleeping with a temple prostitute or whatever.

You know.

So then you've got um divisions between the rich and the poor.

This was a significant issue that we we see um arising in a couple of different moments as we go through the book.

Um there's an i there's an issue of incest that's um rebuked in chapter five.

Uh there's lawsuits.

This these people in this church are suing one another.

What a mess.

There's prostitution.

There's issues of people in the church going to prostitutes.

Um there's the issue of people eating the meat that was offered to idols, and then some people are like, you can't eat that meat, and other people are like, sure you can.

It's not like idols, nothing.

We serve Jesus, you know.

So you got people offended over diets.

I'm sure nobody ever in our culture ever gets offended over a diet.

Never, never.

Diets are not controversial at all.

You have disruptive women in the church that are um causing issues.

You have abuse of, that should say abuse of the Lord's Supper.

And I think that's it.

So this church, this church has all kinds of problems, all kinds of crazy issues that are going on.

And and kind of, in a sense, thank goodness, because we get to see how Paul, by the power of the Holy Spirit, responds to this craziness as a whole.

Now, let's look at the structure of the letter very quickly.

These are kind of the breakdown.

We have the divisions being addressed in the church in chapters 1 through 4.

So the factionalism is addressed.

In verses 5 through 7, we have problems related to sex and marriage.

We're going to talk more in this series about sex than any other book, maybe unless we studied Song of Solomon.

So that'll be interesting because that's a topic that's contemporary.

Marriage is very contemporary as well.

Um, chapters 8 through 10, problem the problem of meat offered to idols and diet restrictions.

That I can't wait for that when we get to that section.

That's gonna be a great series.

That that series, I'm I'm serious, that series is going to unlock for you.

When we do chapters eight through 10, that I think is gonna answer a ton of questions that you have about personal convictions.

And how come I can have my convictions and you can have your convictions and who's right, or can we both be right?

Oh, it's gonna be so much fun.

I can't wait.

I almost feel like we should jump ahead.

Okay, and then chapters 11 through 14 are problems related to the church getting together.

When the church got together, it was not good, it was a mess.

And um, and so he addresses the different issues there.

Chapter 15 is all about the resurrection, and chapter 16 is the final greeting.

Chapter 16, the final greeting from Paul and talking about the um the collection that's made.

Okay, so that sets us up.

Let's look just at these last three verses, and then we'll be done.

So this is the greeting, the greeting of the letter.

Paul called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, our brother, and our brother, Sosthenes, to the church of God that's in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.

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

So this follows a contemporary or a um, at that time a contemporary Hellenistic letter format.

Um they didn't, you know, when you're in fourth or fifth grade and they teach you to write a letter and you kind of sign how you put your name at the top and sign it off at the bottom.

Well, they had their format, and and this follows the format.

The name of the author would be given, then who the letter is addressed to, and then the greeting itself.

That is how a letter would be laid out.

So um we see Sosthenes, who's mentioned here.

I just want just for a minute to mention who the letter's written to, because Paul spends a um a lengthy uh a longer amount of time, and you could go and can compare the different letters that Paul wrote to Romans, to 2 Corinthians, to Thessalonians, Philippi, Colossians, and you can see this greeting.

You can look at this greeting, and um the amount of time that he spends in verse 2 of giving the address of who it's written to, you see, he says three things there.

He says, first, it's to the church of God in Corinth.

Second of all, he says it's to those that are sanctified in Christ Jesus.

So, yeah, it's to the church, but it's also you who are in this church, you're sanctified in Christ Jesus.

And in the Greek, when it says sanctified, this is written in the perfect um tense, which means that it has been completed.

It's not waiting to be done.

Here, sanctified is you've been set apart in Christ Jesus, you are sanctified sanctified.

So it saying the word sanctified takes on different Greek formats in different texts, but here Paul's referring to this idea of it's it's a completed work.

And those people that are sanctified in Christ, they're called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's you.

You're in this verse too, right?

Because do you call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ?

Yeah, you do.

I do.

And so here Paul is saying, you in this church, you're sanctified in Christ Jesus.

You're called to be a saint together with those in every place who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours.

Here's what's interesting.

You see, he's saying that you're called to be a saint.

Now, in the Catholic tradition, a saint, this is that's a special title for people that kind of check the boxes in a number of categories.

But in if you go back to the time of the apostles, they would use the word saint to refer to a Christian, somebody who doesn't hasn't accomplished anything, but they're a saint because they're sanctified in Christ.

Um, and and so Paul here is saying, you guys, as a church, this messy church, this messy church that's going to prostitutes and suing one another, they're saints.

They are saints together with those who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's not an endorsement of their sin because the hammer is about to come down on this church.

He's about to rebuke them for their sin.

But he's saying, you need to understand your position.

When you become a Christian, when you give your life to Jesus Christ, you immediately are given the position of sanctified in Christ.

That you are a saint not because of what you've done, not because you've cleaned up your act.

You are a saint because of the work Jesus Christ did on the cross, on your behalf and on mine.

And as an exchange, we call him Lord Jesus Christ.

You could do just a sermon on Lord Jesus Christ, right?

His name is Jesus, which is the name of Joshua.

It means in the Hebrew, the God who saves, the one who saves, that God saves.

Christ is the Latin form of Messiah.

The fact that the Messiah was the promised one for Israel.

But now he's the Lord.

What's Lord?

He's the governor, the one who has all authority over our life.

So Paul's just right off the bat, he's reminding this church that listen, you've given your life to the Lord Jesus Christ.

You have this position of sainthood.

You have been sanctified, you're a church.

And then his formal greeting in verse 3, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, if you're doing your inductive Bible study on this text and you're just kind of looking for your structural laws, the primary structural law that comes out in this text is repetition.

And it's the repeating of Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.

Here's the point in this text, Saints.

Here's the point.

The whole idea that Paul wants to communicate to this church from the beginning, from the very beginning to the end, is that Jesus Christ is the anchor of the whole thing.

He's our identity, he's the one that calls us, he's the one that changes our life.

Jesus is the anchor of the whole thing.

Now, this morning, you may feel like your life is untethered, splintered.

Maybe you have your life is going in a hundred different directions.

You may feel like you're floating in the open ocean without an anchor.

One minute you think you've got direction, the next minute you're beating your head against the wall, absolutely confused.

You're not sure what you should do, how you fit in, where you're going.

And the world around us is sending you all kinds of messages.

Be strong, find your identity, be looking deep within you.

Come find your identity within our group.

Head in this direction.

No, wait, go in that direction.

I've been realizing, just in my own spiritual journey, that one of the effects of social media on me, now this may not be you, but on me, is that when I open up Instagram and I'm scrolling through, it's a hundred different narratives competing for my attention.

You know, one minute it's like, here, buy this bike.

The next minute is like, buy this house.

And it's like, oh, you know, you need to be an artisan, oh, you need to get in shape, oh, you need to go like just live out, you know, on the Appalachian Trail.

And I'm literally like, I'm just reading through my Instagram here.

It's like all these different stories, all these different narratives, right?

And it's like, as I'm going through this, I'm just competing, like, oh, do I want to be this person?

Oh, this is cool.

I want to be this hipster.

And then the next week it's like, no, I don't want to be the hipster.

I want to be this athlete.

No, I don't want to be that.

I want to be the chef.

We live, we live in an age where there's all these competing narratives that are put out there as um, they're they're put out in front of us as a recruitment tool to come join that narrative.

Narrative and find meaning in your life.

And the idea, the Christian message is this invitation for you and I to surrender our effort to find identity in anything else other than God.

To turn our life over to God and realize that his grand story is a story that I've been invited into and that gives me meaning.

Let Jesus be the anchor of your life so that you are not being tossed all over in the waves.

Let Jesus be the author of your calling.

Do you see?

Paul starts this letter by saying, I'm Paul, and I'm called to be an apostle.

That's a really emphatic thing to say.

And here's what I want to suggest to you this morning.

As you grow in your relationship with the Lord, more and more of your identity comes into focus.

Even your calling and vocation comes into focus.

And I would encourage you to just allow the Holy Spirit to strip you of those other competing narratives, give you a contentment in your relationship with Christ, that he would be the author of who you are.

Because he's going to put in place all those other, all those other puzzle pieces.

He's going to unify them.

He's going to show you what belongs and doesn't belong in your life.

He's going to show you what relationships belong and what don't.

He's going to guide you.

He's promised to guide you.

He's promised to be with you.

And so Paul starts this letter off in a really with just strength, saying, here's who I am.

And here's who you are.

And I'm excited as we go through this letter further.

I think we're going to see more of those notes being hidden, hidden, hit along the way.

And uh and it's gonna and the Holy Spirit's gonna speak to us.