1 Corinthians 1:1-9

Our scripture reading is 1 Corinthians verses 1 1 through 9.

Greeting.

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 in every place called 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.

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

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

And so reads God's Word.

If you're new or visiting, my name is Mark.

I'm one of the elders here at City Church, and you're very welcome.

Believe it or not, and only one or two of you will uh will remember this.

Um today's our birthday.

Uh we are 13 years old this Sunday.

Uh we now have a teenager for a church, uh, which means that it's just all going to be grumpy for the next few years and uh a little bit sullen and throw uh throw a tantrum every now and again.

But uh happy birthday, City Church.

Uh you're looking you're looking great.

Yeah, absolutely.

Let's go there.

I didn't buy a cake, sorry.

I should have uh should have got a cake for everybody.

But like I say, it's maybe probably me and one other person here in this room that remember our birthday.

Um, but it's nice to mark it uh none nonetheless.

We're uh we're starting a new series uh this morning in the the book of 1 Corinthians, which is a letter in the New Testament.

Be great if you have that open in front of you.

We're going to take really six months to go through the whole letter, except for a little break over uh over Christmas time, over Advent.

And uh I'm going to pray for us as we begin uh this series.

So why don't we pray together?

Our father, we do thank you for your grace and your kindness uh to City Church over the last uh 13 years.

And as we begin another year, uh another academic year of your favor, uh, we ask that you would go before us, give us the help of your spirit as we meet Sunday by Sunday, as we walk through this uh this rich and challenging letter to the church in Corinth.

Uh, would you help us?

Uh, change us by it, we pray, uh, focus our our hearts and our minds and our attentions now to to receive your word, give us soft hearts, we pray, and uh that we would know uh the gift of uh of your grace, for we ask it uh in Jesus' name, amen.

Uh the image on the the screen, uh which will be coming up over uh the next six months ago, uh, depicts a particular type of bull.

Does anybody know what type of bull this is?

Go for it, Jess.

Kitsugi.

It's a kitsugi bull.

Um and I am quite fascinated by uh kitsugi bulls.

If you don't know what they are, and I apologize to anybody who's just like, you are saying it wrong, come and uh tell me afterwards uh how I'm supposed to say it.

But it's a uh it's a Japanese pottery practice of uh taking a piece of pottery and deliberately uh breaking it, smashing it, and using the uh the shards uh to recreate a bowl that is joined together by a mixture of uh of lacquer and gold.

It's deliberately broken in order to be brought back together again uh something that is uh more beautiful uh than before it was was broken.

And usually in the West, I think, uh when we're repairing something, uh we we want the join to uh to fit precisely so that you can no longer see the crack.

I don't know if you've ever find that if you've broken a ceramic and you think, okay, does this fit back?

Oh no, the a tiny little bit chipped off, and so you can still see it.

It's lovely when you get a clean break and you want to put it back in because we like to cover over the cracks, uh, don't we?

We like to cover over the cracks uh in our in our own life.

But the beautiful thing about a kitsugi uh bull is that the repair doesn't pretend that it's not composed of broken pieces, the cracks aren't painted over.

You can see where the bowl was shattered, but somehow the the broken pieces, when they're brought back together, make something beautiful.

And when it comes to building the church, the community of people that God is bringing together, the only pieces available to him are broken pieces, right?

I know that because of my own life, and so I can confidently confess that on your behalf, that the only bits that God has to work with are broken bits.

And yet the good news of Christianity, the message of Jesus, is that by God's grace, he brings together broken pieces, broken people, and joins them to his son, the Lord Jesus, and to one another, and makes something beautiful in his people, the church.

And the church in Corinth is maybe the prime example of broken people being brought together into something beautiful in the church in Corinth.

We're going to see the extent of the brokenness.

Let me summarize it for you now by way of teaser trailer.

So next week we're going to be see, we're going to see that they're completely divided against one another.

They've broken down into factions, they've broken down into tribes.

They're basically picking their celebrity pastor and saying, actually, I really like that guy.

I really follow Paul.

I really follow Apollos, who's another guy, I really follow Kephas, who's another name for Peter.

They say, Oh, I'm after this guy, he's my chief influencer.

And then you have the really pious guys over in the corner and just say, I actually just follow Jesus, actually.

Um, and so they're broken down, they're they're fighting against one another.

And that's just the beginning of it.

They're not only, they're they are completely sexually compromised.

There's lots of sexual brokenness going on in their uh in their midst, and there's an issue in the church where a man is sleeping with his stepmother.

And Paul is saying, you're actually so sexually broken that you're doing things that even non-Christians outside of the church would be would say that's a that's a little bit too far.

When you're sleeping with your stepmom and saying you love Jesus, there's something not quite right here, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5.

They have begun suing one another.

So they live in an honor-shame culture, and the way that you um achieved a higher status and the way that you got more stuff is you took your brothers and sisters in church to court.

You took them to the small claims court in order to get more stuff, in order to achieve a greater status by pushing your brothers and sisters in the church down.

They were uh going to the pagan temples and eating food sacrificed to idols.

The rich were humiliating the poor at communion.

So the rich would show up with a uh with a huge picnic hamper, and they would gorge themselves on food, they would get drunk on the wine that they had brought, and the poor person here with their lunchable is kind of looking going, well, I don't actually have have anything.

And so they were humiliating one another in the context of the church.

So you read the first the letter to the Corinthians and think, is is this what is this what God has purposed?

Like, welcome, welcome to church.

What are we gonna find at at city?

And so with all of these things that are going on that are gonna unfold over the next few weeks, you kind of wonder, well, where's Paul gonna begin?

How would you start a letter to a church like this?

Dear Corinthians, we need to talk.

Dear Corinthians, stop! What is wrong with you?

That's not how Paul begins.

For those of you who don't know who Paul is, Paul himself is a broken pottery piece.

He was a uh a persecutor of Christians.

Uh, you can read about that in the in the book of Acts.

In Acts chapter 7, he stands uh giving endorsement to the murder of the first Christian martyr, a man called Stephen.

Acts 7 · chapter mention

And he is on his way to throw more Christians in prison.

When Jesus wonderfully and dramatically changes his life, apprehends him on the road to Damascus.

You know, we can often think that uh that our journey towards Jesus is uh is some is like slipping into a warm bath, you know, where uh you just have this sense of of peace and tranquility as Jesus comes into your heart.

Uh sometimes Jesus comes to a person like that.

Sometimes he knocks gently on the door of your heart.

And sometimes, like Paul, he comes with a battering ram and says, You're mine.

Paul was apprehended by Jesus and it completely upended his life.

And he is the one who helped to establish this church in Corinth.

And he doesn't begin by saying, What on earth has happened to you guys?

He will certainly challenge them.

But before he does that, he says, Okay, let's clear the decks a minute here, Corinthians.

Let me remind you who God is and what he has done.

Because before we get into all of the morality changing that's necessary, the first thing that you need to remember, Corinthians, is that God has done things in your life.

God has shown his kindness to you.

He has changed who you are.

And then it's precisely the same for us.

It would be wrong for us to just jump to, right, what uh what are some of the broken cracks that you're trying to paint over in your life, your own uh uh relationship breakdown and sexual brokenness and all of those things.

Okay, you need to stop doing that and start doing these things.

That would just make me a morality preacher, somebody who's just bringing uh bringing law to you.

No, no, the the the place of real heart change, the place of real life change is to come this week and say, okay, let's remember who God is and what he has done and how he has changed you, and how he, by his grace, will continue to transform you.

That's where Paul begins this letter.

He isn't gonna ignore the cracks, but the church doesn't grow and mature just by focusing on itself.

Paul lifts their eyes and reminds them what God has done.

And so he shows them three things about the church.

The first is that the church is the community of people who have been called together by God.

God has brought them together.

That's the first thing.

And we're looking primarily at verses one to three, that opening greeting.

Paul says, Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and of our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, and called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon 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.

See twice in those three verses the language of calling.

Paul called, Christians call together.

How does God begin to build his kingdom?

How does God begin to gather a people to himself?

He calls.

God calls broken people into relationship with himself and with one another.

Paul is called to be an apostle.

An apostle means someone who is sent, a messenger sent.

Paul is called to be an apostle.

The Corinthian Christians are called to be his holy people.

And then if you cast your eye down, if you've got it open, and I hope you do, to verse 9, you see the language of calling at the end of our passage.

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

This means that your journey as a follower of Jesus, and maybe you're just exploring what it would mean to be a follower of Jesus, but Christianity begins with God's initiative, with God acting to do something.

He is the one who calls us to himself.

There's this mistaken idea that human beings create the institution of the church.

That the church is a thing that is man-made and used to control people, that it's used to as an exercise of power.

But that is not what the Bible teaches.

Now, the Bible teaches that the church, which really just means the gathering, is as God gathers his people into one place.

The church is formed as he calls people into a new relationship with himself.

That's verse 9, into the fellowship of his son, and then draws them together into community with one another.

Similarly, Paul himself is not some self-made, self-appointed leader.

He has been called by God.

And in Corinth, you had to prove your status.

And the way that you proved your status was by your skill, by your wealth, by your beauty, by your excellence.

But here Paul is saying that the beginning of the Christians' identity, who they are, is that they have been called by God.

What this means for you, what this means for us, is that our story does not begin with our background or our achievements or even our failures.

But with God calling us to Himself.

With His initiative.

And maybe you're here this morning because you went to bed last night thinking, I really need to sort myself out.

And so you came to church this morning.

What I would say is that there's something happening further back, and that God is calling you to Himself.

God is calling you into a new relationship with Himself and with one another, drawing you into a new community.

And where has God called them?

Well, Paul tells us they are the church of God in Corinth.

There's kind of two locations there.

The Church of God in Corinth.

Two addresses.

Whose they are and where they are.

Whose are they?

Well, they're God's.

The Church of God in Corinth.

City Church is the church of God in Dublin.

It's not Mark's church, Ben, Peter, Jared, or anybody else's church.

Whose are we?

We are God's.

Where are we?

We are in Dublin.

And the tension of Christian discipleship is learning to live faithfully in both of those locations, in both of those addresses.

Because Corinth, like Dublin, had its own values, its own views, its own priorities, its own ideas about things like status and power and wisdom and sex and freedom and success and how to use your body and what makes somebody impressive.

Paul doesn't tell them, hey, stop being the church in Corinth, head out into the countryside and be separate from the city.

No, rather, he's going to stop allowing the values and the priorities of the city to continue to dictate how this new community that God is building should look, should operate, should be like.

To be a witness to his gracious initiative, to be a witness to his goodness in the city.

What has he called them to be?

He has called them, verse two, to be saints, together with all those who in every place call upon the name of Jesus.

To be sanctified or to be a saint is not a special category of Christian.

It's not a special upper class of Christian.

We often, in our kind of cultural language, even churches are named after, are named after you know Saint Mark's, Saint Andrew's, Saint Thomas's, Saint George's, and you think Saint Elizabeth.

Who were all of these people?

You think, well, they're actually the really special Christians.

Those are the Christians who, when their picture gets taken, they get a gold dinner plate behind their hand and kind of stand like that, right?

But again, in the New Testament, a saint is the term used for every believer.

Did you know that you're right now sitting beside a saint?

Saint Engel, Saint David, Saint Peter, Saint Luke, Saint Flandre.

That's a very particular saint.

A saint is somebody who has been made holy by Jesus, forgiven by God, set apart to live for him.

But notice what Paul says here.

And again, this is why it's so important to have it in front of you, because I'm gonna look at the tenses right now.

Let me read verse two to you again.

To the church of God that is in Corinth.

Listen.

To those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together.

Did you get it?

What's happened to the Christians in Corinth?

Something's happened in the past.

And then there's something going on in the present.

What's happened in the past?

They've been sanctified.

They have been made holy.

They have been cleansed of sin, forgiven, were clothed in the righteousness of Jesus.

When God looks at them, he sees his perfect, obedient Son.

In the past, objective, legal, moral reality to those sanctified through their faith in Jesus.

And then what does Paul say?

God's called you to be a saint.

Be sanctified right now.

Be sanctified today.

Be sanctified in your thoughts and your words and your actions, in how you conduct yourself at work and at home and in class and in private.

What's he saying?

Be who God has already made you to be.

Guys, if you don't get that, you'll miss Christianity.

Because the temptation will be to switch those two.

If I do holy things, if I am generous to others and uh, you know, help my classmates, if I work hard on being more patient and more loving, and uh and all of these things, if I try and kick those those sinful habits, if I work really hard at doing those things, then maybe one day God might look at me and say, Hey, you've been sanctified.

I'm gonna I'm gonna make you sanctified, I'm gonna make you holy, I'm gonna call you a saint.

That's not the gospel.

It's not due so that one day you might be.

It's God has already acted, he's called you, he's forgiven you in Christ.

You are a new creation, you are something different.

Now, in every way, in every day, in every sphere of your life, live out of that new identity that Jesus has secured for you.

You have been sanctified now.

God has called you to be a saint.

That's why the way that they're living makes no sense.

That if God has changed who they are, why are they divided and backbiting?

Why are they trying to achieve a greater status by taking one another to court?

Why are they doing whatever on earth they want with their body?

Don't they know that they now belong to God?

That God has acted to change them, to make them a new creation?

So Paul's, why are you living like this?

The gospel is never live a holy life, and if you're lucky, Jesus will make you a saint.

No, it's you are holy, you are a saint.

And because God has called you from death to life, because God has called you from darkness into light, now live out of that new identity.

Brothers and sisters, as we mature as a church, as we seek to grow as Christian believers, the first thing that we need to know is that we have been called by God, that he has made us his own.

If you are trusting him, if you're trusting Jesus, he has given you a new identity.

And then the second thing is to ask yourself: am I living out of that new identity that I have received by faith?

Have I forgotten who I am?

Who God has made me to be?

Growing in holiness begins when you remember that God has made you his own, that he has made you holy by his son.

And that is a gift, that is a gift of his grace.

And so the second thing that God has done for this church and for us here in city is that he's equipped us by his grace.

Verses 4 to 7.

I give thanks to my God always for you, because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you're enriched in him by all speech and knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ has been confirmed among you, so that you're not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This morning I imagine that you you got up and at some point, either getting out of the shower or cleaning your teeth or whatever it was, uh, you you glanced at a mirror.

I hope that you glanced at a mirror at some point.

And as you looked at your reflection in the mirror, what did you do?

Did you stand like me simply beholding your magnificence?

Or did you focus on the things that were wrong?

That's not right.

Should lose a bit of weight.

Focus on the things that are not good.

What about when you come to church?

Do you look around and say, hey, God's doing something here.

God's at work amongst us.

Or do you look around and say, Why is that like that?

Why did they talk to me like that?

Why is that happening?

Shouldn't that be better?

Paul has much to challenge the church on.

And it makes it even more amazing.

That Paul sees grace at work in the church before he addresses their failure.

In verse 4, he begins, I thank God for the grace that he has given you.

You know what grace is?

Grace is God's undeserved kindness.

It is his favor poured out on people who don't deserve it.

He's saying, You got it.

I can see it.

I can see it benefiting your life.

I can see it benefiting your your community.

And so he looks at this messy, broken church and he says, I can see God's grace at work in you.

This grace has been given to them as a gift.

It would not be grace otherwise.

It would be it'd be a wage, it'd be something earned, something deserved.

But it's given to them as a gift because they did not earn it.

They do not deserve it.

Paul says that through this grace, through this undeserved kindness and favor of God, they have been enriched in every way, verse 5.

So they lack in no gift, verse 7.

Paul is saying God has been extraordinarily generous to imperfect people.

Are you aware of that in your own life?

Are you aware of that amongst us?

I'm aware of it in today's today when I look back over the last 13 years.

God has been extraordinarily generous to imperfect people here in the city of Dublin.

The church in Corinth isn't impressive because the Corinthian believers are impressive, but because God has been lavish in his generosity towards them.

Paul particularly picks on the fact that they have been enriched in speech and in knowledge.

It can be easy for us to think that the gifts and abilities and talents, and there are many extraordinarily gifted, talented, professional people here sitting this morning.

But it can be so easy to think that those abilities and talents and successes come as a result of things that we have cultivated from within ourselves.

That we own them and that they are for our own success and glory.

The Corinthians, for example, put a high value on eloquent speech, on knowledgeable spiritual insight and wisdom.

And Paul says, as a gift.

It's a gift from the grace of God.

It's a gift that you did not deserve.

Later on in chapter four, he will ask them, he said, What did you have that you did not receive?

If you're sitting here this morning and you're thinking, I really want to continue to grow as a follower of Jesus, I would like to grow in maturity as I'm trying to follow him.

Start of the year, putting your best foot forward, I'd love to end this academic year feeling as though I have grown in my love for Jesus and grown in my maturity as a Christian.

Well, if that's you, then that's a question to ask yourself.

What do you have that you did not receive?

Your intellect received.

Your beauty received.

Your skill received.

The opportunities before you received.

Your money received.

Your ministry received.

Your salvation.

Let me hear you.

Right.

You're getting it.

What did you have?

What do you have that you did not receive?

That didn't come as a gift from on high.

The maturing believer realizes that actually they ain't got nothing in their hand except for what God has put in it, and He's lavishly generous and kind to you, and actually fills your hands with opportunities and ministries and finances and health and relationships and friends, but they all come from his gracious hand, don't they?

Don't they?

Yes.

Everything is received, everything is a gift of grace.

And so you cannot take that something, you cannot take something received as a gift and turn it into the grounds of you feeling superior over someone else.

Imagine a child opens an enormous Christmas present on Christmas morning, and he or she looks across at their siblings and says, Look how impressive I am.

What exactly are you taking credit for, you might say to that child?

You didn't make it.

You certainly didn't buy it.

You didn't wrap it.

You did one thing.

You received it.

That's the Corinthians boasting.

They were proud of the gifts that somebody else had given them.

Grace shows the absurdity of seeking your own glory, of boasting in these things.

Grace says, I am a recipient ever before I am an achiever.

They have received so much that Paul says that they lack no gift.

What a church Corinth must have been.

The musicians, so gifted.

The preacher, so gifted.

The kids workers, the guys on the hospitality team, the people who are welcoming you with a smile, so gifted.

But then you read on through the letter and you begin to discover something.

They're gifted, but they're divided.

They're gifted, but they're sexually compromised.

They're gifted, but they're selfish.

They're gifted, but they're proud.

They're gifted, but they're unloving.

And do you know what all of that means?

You can be gifted and immature.

You can be gifted and immature.

Do not confuse giftedness for Christian maturity.

You can be a great leader, a natural evangelist, an excellent musician, an extraordinary theologian, and deeply immature.

Why?

Because you have mistaken God's gifting of you for your maturity in him.

This is exactly what had happened in Corinth.

They confused evidence of God's generosity for evidence of their maturity, and Paul, eventually at the end of chapter 12 and into chapter 13, will show them in time that the measure of their maturity is not their giftedness.

It's their love for one another.

It's their love for one another.

God has given them these gifts lavishly, generously, Paul says in verse 7.

And is given to them for a particular time, he says, as they wait for the return of Jesus.

What that means is that your giftedness are not trophies to be put on display of how much God loves you.

They're tools to be used to serve one another, to serve the body, while together we wait for the return of the Lord Jesus and the full establishment of his kingdom.

And so reflect on these questions then as we transition into point three in just a moment, final point.

When you look at the church, when you come to city, for example, do you mainly look around and see the things that aren't quite right?

Do you just look and see the stuff that's missing?

Or can you look around and say, I can see God's grace at work here?

God has been kind to this community and I'm I'm grateful to be part of it.

I know look, we can have a conversation about things to grow in, but can you see God's grace at work?

Or ask yourself, what has God given you that you're tempted to start taking credit for?

And then ask yourself, are you more concerned about appearing gifted or being mature?

Are you using what God has given you to build yourself up, a trophy in the cabinet on display to others?

Or is it a tool in your hand as you seek to serve others?

The final thing that this beautiful, broken, messy church needs to know is not just that they have been called by God, not just that they've been equipped lavishly by his grace, but that they will be sustained by Jesus to the end.

So this is our third and final point.

That the church is a community that will be sustained by Christ.

Verses 8 and 9.

It picks up the sentence in verse 7.

He says, Who will sustain you to the end?

Guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

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

See the link through this passage.

God calls the Christian, he equips the Christian, and then he keeps the Christian to the end.

That is an unbroken chin through your life that is affirmed continually through the Bible.

If God has called you, he will equip you, he will keep you to the end.

So Paul might say at the start of his letter to the Philippians, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus.

Paul says in verse 8 that he will sustain you to the end, guiltless, that's blameless.

And you kind of pause and think, even if you've never read the letter and just going off some of the things that I've said, and you think, this church, these people, with everything that is going on, how on earth will he do that?

How can you be confident that this bunch of misfits is going to make it to the end?

Well, Paul tells us it's because of God's faithfulness.

Verse 9, God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his son.

Paul's hope of the church does not depend on their wisdom, their consistency and holiness, their consistency and maturity, their discipline, their ability to get themselves together.

If it did, then yes, we would have reasons for doubt.

But Paul says that his hope that God will keep them to the end is based not in them, but that God is faithful, even when we are faithless.

Brother or sister, where is your confidence that you will be kept going to the end?

Is it in your wisdom?

Is it in the consistency of your obedience?

Is it in your maturity, your discipline?

If it is, then my goodness, no wonder you have reasons for despair.

Paul's confidence in the Corinthians' future rests not on the Corinthians' reliability, but on God's unwavering commitment to them.

God who called them into the fellowship of his son will sustain them to the end.

Do you believe that?

And that doesn't negate any of the calls when he says, called to be saints together, live out of the new identity that you have.

There is an obedience and a maturity to be done in the Christian life.

But the ground of your perseverance is not on the strength with which you hold on to Jesus.

And that's such good news.

If you're here this morning and you feel like you're just clinging on to the ledge of God's grace by your fingertips, I have good news for you.

It does not depend on the strength with which you hold on to Jesus, but the strength with which Jesus holds on to you.

Christian, you may feel weak.

You may stumble.

You may have enormous areas in your life still in need of transformation.

So did the church in Corinth.

And yet Paul looks at this mess and says, God is faithful.

That's hope.

That's hope without complacency.

And Paul doesn't merely tell them that Christ will sustain them through life.

He tells them that Christ will sustain them for something, for the day of the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Corinthians had become, and this is so relevant to us today, the Corinthians had been so obsessed with the now, with the present, with what can be seen and felt and touched and Experienced, that they had forgotten any sort of vision of or preparation for or journeying towards tomorrow.

It was all about the present status, the present experience, the present gifts, present freedoms.

And Paul lifts their eyes and says, Guys, Jesus is coming.

He's returning.

And Christian maturity is living in the light of that coming day.

The day when all of our labors in him will be put to the test, when all of the motives of our hearts will be laid bare and everything kept in the darkness will be brought into the light.

And then finally, Paul comes full circle and reminds them that the Christians have been called into the fellowship of his son.

Fellowship.

Fellowship's a weak word.

You might have been in a church that has fellowship groups, or you might hear a church leader say, okay, the service is over now, we're going to go and have fellowship time.

And what they mean is we're going to have a time of small talk with hot drinks.

And you can think that the biblical idea of a fellowship is small talk with hot drinks, and it's not.

To have fellowship with someone is to have a deep sense of participation and belonging with them.

And Paul's saying that they have fellowship with the risen and reigning Lord Jesus.

He's saying, that's who you belong to.

You're his.

This impacts profoundly all of the issues that are that this church is facing.

The divisions and the rivalries that we'll look at in the next couple of weeks don't make any sense if they all belong to Jesus.

Boasting in their own strength makes no sense because they belong to Jesus.

The sexual immorality that's going on in their church or in your life makes no sense because you belong to Jesus.

Idolatry and false worship make no sense because you are Christ's.

Lovelessness makes no sense because you belong to the one who is love.

You belong to Jesus.

Because you belong to Jesus.

Maybe it's the resentment that you're carrying, maybe it's the sexual behavior that you're hiding.

Maybe it's the pride and the ambition that you're masking.

Maybe it's the way that you're using your money, or the way that you're treating and speaking about other Christians, and it makes no sense.

Because together with the people in this room, you belong to Jesus.

You are his.

Together we have been brought into fellowship with Jesus, and so with one another.

Despite our differences, we are united to him.

And he is the one who will sustain us until the day that he returns and we see him face to face.

Have a look at the bowl again.

It's really fractured.

It's really broken.

Real broken pieces knit together into something beautiful.

And over the next six months, as we journey through this letter, we're going to see lots of ways in which this people, this church, is broken and in need of grace to knit it back together into something beautiful.

And as we read, it's going to offer our mirrors to our own life, to our own life together as a church.

And we're going to see that we're broken people whom God has called together, equipped by his grace, joined us in fellowship to Jesus.

And through us, he is creating something more beautiful than we ourselves could achieve alone.

The beauty of the church isn't that the cracks were never there.

And the beauty of the church isn't that the cracks don't matter.

The beauty is that God has taken broken people and joined them to his son, joined them to one another and committed himself to making them holy and holy his.

Corinth is not a finished church, and neither is City, 13 years on.

But God is faithful.

He is not finished with them, and he is not finished with us.

If you're here and you're visiting, if you're considering joining us this morning, then frankly, this is the kind of community we invite you into.

A community where people have been called by God, equipped by his grace, and sustained by his son.

And who are by the grace of God becoming more and more holy.

More and more like the people that God has already made us to be.

And we pray that grace would flow to us lavishly.

Through these weeks that we look at this letter, would we know your love and your kindness towards us?

Strengthen us, we pray, as a community.

Make us into something even more beautiful that might reflect your beauty, your kindness to the world uh around us.

We ask these things for Jesus' sake.

Amen.