Corinthians - Crazy City Crazy Love

Father, thanks for today.

Thank you so much for bringing us all together.

Thank you for this time of year.

It's just such a great and beautiful time of year.

Holy Spirit, we just uh, oh Father, I thank you for adopting each of us as your children, for bringing us into your very own family.

And Holy Spirit, uh, thank you for being our teacher and counselor and guide.

And please teach us this morning that we would each walk away with something that we knew was for us and from you.

And Jesus, we just thank you for saving us, for paying the price for our sins, for showing us what the Father, what he's really like, and showing us how to live in the way that you've always created us to live.

And so we praise you and we trust you.

It's in your name we pray.

Amen.

We're gonna start something new this morning.

Um something we really haven't done before.

We're gonna we're gonna go through one of the letters in the New Testament to one of the young churches there.

And we've gone through books of the Bible.

We did Nehemiah about about this time last year, Jonah, um, earlier this year.

And I think this is really gonna be a cool and interesting time where Jesus is gonna help us get connected even closer to Him and connected to each other.

And so I was trying to decide which which letter to to look at.

And and Colossians is kind of an obvious, I thought, because in Colossians, he's he's telling the um the group there, hey, the Holy Spirit's really shown you how to love.

And now that you've got that, here's some other things that uh you can grow in.

And uh, but for whatever reason, and so that's good if you want to read that, and it's short, which is always nice, and um, but I keep just getting drawn back.

In fact, I spent half of, well, I spent last week and some time this week uh just kind of studying Colossians, but I keep getting drawn back to Corinthians.

And um, Corinthians is uh just an unusual letter.

It's to a very new church, kind of like us.

It's in the midst of a wild city.

Um it's a it's a kind of a wild, dysfunctional church.

Um we're not a wild, dysfunctional church, but I'm sure we can learn some things from from uh these folks and what they're dealing with.

And they're they're ordinary, everyday people.

Paul specifically says that they're not, you know, highbrow, they're not uh the intellect, they had a real class culture.

Uh this was in Corinth and Greece, and it was kind of the intellects and and uh the wealthy, and then it was the everyday ordinary working people.

Most people in Corinth uh were just normal, everyday working people.

And God had some work to do in their lives.

In this letter, Paul talks about sex, he talks about money, he talks about arguing, he talks about substance abuse, he talks about men, he talks about women's spiritual gifts, he talks about prostitution, the Lord's Supper, popularity contests between church leaders, he talks about lawsuits, he talks about what it's like to die and be raised from the dead, and he talks a lot about love.

It's like uh Jerry Springer and the 700 Club, all uh all in one.

Um but it's it's real and it's it's kind of raw and it's to the point.

And so we're gonna ask each week to the Holy Spirit just show us something that we can apply in our own lives, but because this is a letter to a group of people that we can apply together as a group of people.

And this morning I'm gonna take most of the time just to kind of get started and introduce ourselves to the city of Corinth.

And then there's a prequel to the church in Corinth, and uh we're gonna finish by reading that.

Now, the reason we need to understand the city of Corinth is because Paul is answering questions and he's correcting problems, and some of them are very specific to Corinth.

It was a unique city, and it'll be good for us.

I think it'll be kind of uh eye-opening uh to see how important context is when we're studying the Bible.

You know, that the New Testament's not a legal treatise that we go through like lawyers and we pick out the rules, and we turn those verses into rules, and then that's how we live our lives.

Um, in the Garden of Eden, there was there's two choices.

The the choice was the tree of life and a connection and life and relationship with God.

The other tree was the knowledge of good and evil.

It was the rules, and so that's what we chose, that's what we got.

It was the old law.

Jesus came and he said all that right.

We're now we're back at the tree of life.

We're in relationship with uh with God, and we're filled with his love and his life and his spirit.

And it's a new covenant, not a new law.

We're not going and looking for all the rules like in the old law.

And that's really important because if we look at the New Testament as just searching for the lists of rules, then we follow those, and then we can be holy.

It's all the same as the Old Testament, it's all the same as as the Garden of Eden, and we're gonna just miss it by huge margins.

Because these are letters.

The first four books is uh a history of Jesus' time on earth, then there's a a book that's a history of a bunch of churches getting started, and then there's letters, and then there's letters to different churches and different cities, and then finally there's a vision that the New Testament ends with.

But these letters are talking to specific people in specific situations and um maybe specific problems or specific great things.

So, for instance, if the apostle Paul wrote a letter to his hands church, he would probably say something, man, I love it the way that you can bring coffee into the big room.

Because he'd be writing to us.

And what he'd be writing about is, you know, that's kind of real and that's normal, and it's and you're not uptight and relaxed, and I like that.

Okay, if he'd written that to one of the churches in Greece 2,000 years ago, then there'd be a rule that ever that you can only meet in a big room, that you have to drink coffee to please God.

You know, and and uh Christians all over the world wouldn't sleep and uh caffeinated all the time.

But but that's what we do.

We we take a specific letter to specific people, commending them or correcting them on specific things, and we say, okay, that's the rule, that's the law, that's how we please God.

And it and and the thing is, if we understand the principle behind what he's talking about, then the whole thing comes to life.

And now it does apply to us because it's not so much a uh a rule as um principles on how we can love and how we can serve and and and how we can help.

So hopefully through this letter, the Bible will come alive a little bit for each of us.

An example is in Corinthians, he talks about hairstyles.

Now, I promise you Paul could care less about hairstyles.

Um, but in this situation, in this city, there was something important that had to do with hairstyles.

And so he he he talks about that.

Corinth is 45 miles from Athens.

It's on the coast of Greece.

It has a population of about 30,000 people today.

Um, this is an arrow view of what Corinth looks like today.

Beautiful city right on the Mediterranean Sea.

At the time that Paul wrote this letter, he wrote this letter 18 years after uh Jesus had ascended and gone back to heaven.

Um at that time, Corinth had 300,000 people.

It was one of the fastest growing, it was one of the most prosperous cities in the world.

It was a major seaport and it was a major business center.

And it was also a center of Greek religious culture, Greek mythology and their religion.

It was famous for its temple of Aphrodite.

Aphrodite was the Greek goddess of love, beauty, and sexuality.

And not coincidentally, the most popular goddess amongst most of the men in Greece.

Um the temple was on top of a large rock.

It was like Stone Mountain.

It was called the Acrocorinth.

So they had this temple of Aphrodite on top of this rock.

And uh people would come from all over Europe and all over Asia Minor, and they would take a pilgrimage to Corinth to visit this temple of Aphrodite.

And there were over a thousand temple prostitutes that were associated with this temple on this hill just outside of Corinth.

Now, this is gonna be important because again, we're gonna look at some of the context.

And some of the things that Paul says to women in this letter is gonna have a lot to do with this temple to Aphrodite's and this specific culture at this time.

It's also why Paul talks so directly about prostitution in this letter, because it was a big part of their everyday life in Corinth.

There was a large temple to Apollos.

Um, he was the Greek god of truth and prophecy.

And this is going to give us some context on some of the things that he says about prophecy.

They're directly related to the experiences they've had with this uh Greek mythological god Apollos and his temple.

Here's a picture of the ruins of that temple.

In fact, the stone hill uh behind it's that AcroCorinth, where Aphrodite's temple is.

Um, if you want, there's a 20, there's a website, it's called ancientCorinth.net, and they've got 24-hour live webcom uh live web cameras on uh both the Paulus and uh the top of the AcroCorinth.

And so you can check it out.

Maybe maybe next Sunday we'll uh do that and just see what's going on in Corinth while we're here in um Woodstock.

Okay, well, these temples are gonna be poor.

There's temples all over the city.

There's a big temple to Poseidon, um, you know, they're a coastal town, and and uh he was the Greek god of the sea and of earthquakes, and earthquakes was a big problem over there, and the sea was a source of uh a lot of their uh prosperity.

So there's a huge temple to Poseidon, and so it was gonna be at the at the source of another controversy Paul's gonna talk about that's whether or not you could eat meat that had been cooked at one of these altars, because there are restaurants in that day where you'd go and you'd buy meat that had been cooked at one of these altars and in these temples all over town.

So they're gonna um talk about that.

Corinth was famous for being uh a very important sporting town.

It it hosted the second most the second most important sporting event in the world next to the Olympics at that time.

And it was like an Olympics games, and it was held every other year.

And uh it was at the it started at this Temple of Poseidon, and um the winners got a crown, and it was woven out of a type of uh celery.

And Paul's gonna talk about that.

Paul is a really big sports fan, he uses sports metaphors uh different places in the Bible.

In fact, if he were alive today, he would definitely be a Falcons fan.

Um, unlike some of you Eagles fans, Dante, Kyle.

But uh but he loves sports.

And uh and so in 1 Corinthians 9, he writes, don't you realize that in a race everyone runs?

But only one person gets the prize.

So run to win.

All athletes are disciplined in their training.

They do it to win a prize that will fade away.

But we do it for an eternal prize.

Okay, so that would be something special.

That would create an imagery.

That was something unique for these people in Corinth.

Because they had these Olympic type games that were were always uh hosted there.

Um, Corinth in their world was a little bit like Atlanta in some ways.

You know, compared to other major cities in the U.S., Atlanta is a really new city.

All the buildings are new, and and um it's it's because Atlanta was uh was destroyed 150 years ago, and so it's been rebuilt and is growing and everything is new.

Well, same for um Corinth.

It had been destroyed in 146 BC by Roman forces.

It laid in ruins for about a hundred years, and then Julius Caesar, just before he died, um, made an edict that uh Corinth would be rebuilt into a Roman colony.

So Paul first visits Corinth in 49 A.D.

and the city, and we'll read about that first visit in a minute, but the city's 93 years old.

And so it's gonna be new, you know, and it's vibrant, and there's a lot of young people, and there's a real mix of cultures.

You've got your Greek culture because it's in Greece, you've got a Roman culture because it's a Roman colony, and then there's a Jewish culture that's thrown in because uh they had just uh Claudius Caesar had just deported 2,000 Jewish people from Rome forcibly and relocated them um to Corinth.

So there's a mix of all these uh cultures in the city, and all these cultures are also mixed in in the church.

Corinth was most widely known as the most immoral city on the planet, um, especially sexually.

You know, we have uh slang words and and curse words and all that type of thing.

You know, if you were wanting to um to call a woman a negative name, you would call her a Corinthian woman.

Would mean that she uh had no morals.

And that's how they thought of the city of Corinth.

Um a very sexually immoral uh city.

It's a crazy city, and what we're gonna see is that God has crazy love for people.

And he loves these people in Corinth, and he has a plan to reach them and help them and reconnect them with him, and it's gonna involve Paul, and it's gonna involve starting a church there.

So we got this unusual opportunity we got this unusual opportunity when we're looking at uh uh at the church in Corinth.

And that's that we get to see how the church was started, because in Acts it's talking about this these journeys of Paul and and these different cities he went to, and it records uh the first time he went to Corinth and how the church got started there.

So this morning, in the rest of our time, we're just gonna quickly look at um at that trip and that first visit to Corinth.

It's in Acts 18 and verse 1.

Then Paul left Athens and went to Corinth.

There he became acquainted with a Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, who had recently arrived from Italy with his wife Priscilla.

They had left Italy when Claudius Caesar deported all Jews from Rome.

Paul lived and worked with them, for they were tent makers just as he was.

And so Aquila and Priscilla are in this group of people that get deported from Rome to Corinth.

They naturally hit it off with Paul, because Paul's a tent maker, and uh and they're all believers, and so they get together and they work together, and Paul ends up uh living with them.

You know, the when I picture stories in the New Testament, I know we've already described this a little bit, but when I picture stories in the New Testament, for some reason I picture these uh sleepy rural towns.

You know, even when I'm thinking about a uh a New Testament city, most of which were in Italy, Turkey, Greece, I'm still thinking of uh a small town outside of Israel.

You know, but but I mean here God's taken it right to the city.

I mean, this is a big city, the marketplace that that they're selling tents at was 250 yards long, 150 yards wide, one of the biggest markets in the world at that time.

They had a theater in the city that seated 14,000 people.

So each Sabbath found Paul at the synagogue trying to convince the Jews and Greeks alike.

This is something we're gonna see about Corinth, is they really perceived themselves as intellectuals, and they were debaters, and they really prized orators and good speakers.

And so they were open until listening and they wanted to hear new ideas, and so they would, that would be one of their pastimes.

So the Greek people would do this outside the synagogue while Paul is trying to talk with the Jewish people.

And at and after Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia, Paul spent all his time preaching the word.

He testified to the Jews that Jesus was the Messiah.

But when they opposed and insulted him, Paul shook the dust from his clothes and said, Your blood is upon your own heads, I am innocent.

From now on, I will go preach to the Gentiles.

And then he left and went to the home of Titius Justus, a Gentile who worshiped God and lived next door to the synagogue.

So this is Paul's really clever.

Because he leaves the synagogue and he goes right next door, and they live in open-air houses.

And so now he's teaching right next door to the synagogue, and everybody in the synagogue can hear him teaching.

And so he's still teaching to the Jews, and he's still teaching to the to the Gentiles.

And in fact, while he's in this neighbor's house, the leader of the whole synagogue is going to end up being saved.

Him and his whole family.

His name is Crispus, the leader of the synagogue.

And everyone in his household believed in the Lord.

Many others in Corinth also heard Paul.

They became believers and were baptized.

So this ratchets up the tension a little bit between Paul and the people still in the synagogue.

They name a new leader, Sosthenes is his name.

And there becomes tension, and Paul starts getting fearful.

And so Jesus speaks to him in a vision.

One night the Lord spoke to Paul in a vision and told him, Don't be afraid, speak out, don't be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack and harm you.

For many people in this city belong to me.

See, Corinth may have looked bad on the outside.

This actually kind of reminds me of Jonah in Nineveh, where Jonah's like, Why would anybody want to go to Nineveh?

And here's the same situation.

This this huge city, known for immorality, and uh, but it's really important to Jesus.

And so he tells Paul, you know, don't be fearful.

I'm with you, I got a plan.

These people um belong to me.

And so we're mostly looking at the city, but there's something in this story that I think we can find encouraging this morning.

And that's that Paul's at the same place as many of us.

He believes God, he's trusts God, he's trying, you know, to to uh do things in partnership uh with God, but he's fearful.

You know, he's got this little crisis of faith, of trusting God.

Paul's not a Christian superhero.

None of these people in the Bible are Christian superheroes.

They're people just like us.

Paul describes how weak he was, he he describes how uh difficult his struggle was between doing right and and doing wrong, describes himself as uh um the chiefest of sinners uh at one place.

And so Paul's a a person um just like us, and his faith is gonna get tested.

Jesus has told him nothing's gonna happen um to you.

And so Paul stayed there for the next year and a half, teaching the Word of God.

But when Galileo became governor of Achaea, you know, Gallio is kind of a famous uh person in Roman history, and he got this uh plumb position of being governor over Achaea, which was the the region that that Corinth was in.

And his, if you study philosophy um at all, his younger brother was Seneca, who was a famous Stoic philosopher and who was the personal tutor to Nero and would end up being the advisor to Nero.

And Nero would become emperor in just a just a few years.

But Galileo was uh was a pretty important figure in Rome.

But when Galileo became governor of Achaeus, some Jews rose up together against Paul and brought him before the governor for judgment.

Now, by judgment, that means at least beating and almost for sure jail time.

They accused Paul of persuading people to worship God in ways that are contrary to our law.

Now, this is where Paul's gonna face doubts.

God told him, or Jesus told him, that no one was gonna harm him, but here he is.

He's got the leader of the Jewish synagogue furious at him.

They got this mob together in the courtroom.

He's facing judgment, he's probably gonna get beaten, he's probably gonna get uh get jailed.

But just as Paul started to make his defense, Galeo turned to Paul's accusers and said, Listen, you Jews, if this were a case involving some wrongdoings or a serious crime, I would have a reason to accept your case.

But since it is merely a question of words and names in your Jewish law, take care of it yourselves.

I refuse to judge such matters.

And he threw them out of the courtroom.

The crowd then grabbed Sosthenes, the leader of the synagogue, and beat him right there in the courtroom.

But Galio paid no attention.

See, Paul can trust what Jesus told him.

Even when things didn't look good, even when it looked like everything was gonna go the other way, there's this surprise turn of events.

And in a moment, not only does he not get beaten, but the guy who started the whole thing ends up getting beaten in the courtroom by his own crowd.

So there's a lot of us this morning, I'm sure, that are hanging on to a promise from Jesus.

And it might be looking for you like it looked for Paul at that moment in the courtroom.

You know, that it's not going well, that it's not gonna happen.

But uh Jesus made promises to us, just like that promise he made to Paul.

He said, He said to seek him first and he will provide for you.

You can trust him.

He said that he will never leave or forsake you.

So the fact that you're still struggling or you have a problem or a crisis in front of you does not mean that he doesn't love you.

It doesn't mean that that he has forgotten you.

God's timing is hard to figure out.

But it's perfect.

I don't know why he waits to the last minute.

I would say some of the time, but personally it seems like most of the time.

You know, you get to that point, you know, but then then God turns it around.

And I know it's good for us because it grows our faith and and and he does other things with the timing.

And one thing he does is somehow he makes good come from whatever situation we're in.

Not just for us, but he uses it to make good in other people's lives as well.

But he can turn it around just like this.

You know, that's what I was thinking about when we were singing the shout unto God.

You know, it's just like it doesn't take much for a wall to come down.

It doesn't take much for a bad situation to turn the opposite way, just like it did here with Paul in this courtroom.

In Proverbs 13, 12, it says, unrelenting disappointment leaves you heartsick, but a sudden good break can turn life around.

And if you're seeking God, trusting in him, he will make that happen.

It will turn around.

And your current struggles and your current pain and fear and those types of things will turn out for your good.

And then God will use them for someone else's good as well.

For Paul, the good was starting this church in Corinth.

You know, it's going to change a lot of lives.

But there's someone else that would benefit by his struggle too.

Did you know that Paul had a co-author when he wrote the letter to the church in Corinth?

It was mostly Paul's thoughts, but someone else wrote down every word.

1 Corinthians starts like this.

This letter is from Paul, chosen by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and from our brother Sosthenes.

Sosthenes, the leader of the synagogue, the guy that had brought the mob against Paul, the guy that ended up uh being beaten instead.

Somehow God used this whole situation, not only for Paul's good, not only for the church's good, but even for this person, Sosthenes.

It's his perfect time.

And I don't know how he did that, but um I could guess.

I can see Sosthenes sitting on the floor of this courtroom beaten, bloodied, and everyone leaving except Paul.

And Paul going over and helping him up, and he and Aquila and Priscilla and Crispus and their whole family taking care of him until he was healed.

And maybe that's how Sosthenes knew that Jesus was real.

Because one of his followers showed his love to him.

However, it happened, it happened.

And this new church is starting to grow.

And in a couple of years, and a couple years later, Paul and Sosthenes are going to write a letter and they're going to send it to this group in Corinth.

And next week we'll see what they had to say.

So if the worship team wants to come up, we'll finish here.

We're going to finish with uh one last song.

In fact, we can stand, if you will, we'll get ready for that.

Hey, we got a God that that loves us.

We've got a Savior that loves us.

Not somewhere up in ancient books in the clouds.

I mean, real life, real situations, real problems, real struggles.

We'll see a lot of those in Corinth, and we'll be able to take the principles and we'll be able to apply a lot of it to things that we're going through today.

In 1 Corinthians verse 9, it says, God who got you started in the spiritual adventure shares with us the life of his son and our Master Jesus.

He will never give up on you.

Never forget that.

The point of this whole letter, with all the controversy and all the uh wild and interesting things, the point of this letter is for people to get more closely connected with Jesus.

And for as a group, for them to get more closely connected with each other.

And the way we get connected with Jesus is just to believe in him.

You know, to turn our hearts to him, to trust him in our own way, in our own words.

You know, it's Jesus, I need you.

Jesus, I love you.

Help me.

I'm sorry, my life's a disaster.

Whatever it is, you know, we're different places sometimes when we when we turn to Jesus, but recognizing that he is God's Son and getting reconnected with our Father.

And then He brings us alive inside.

If you have a Spirit, He has a Spirit, and our Spirit comes alive, and He strengthens us, and we can feel His love, and we can start to feel His presence, and our life starts to change.

And He brings, He strengthens us just from the inside out.

He brings people into our lives.

And then He preserves things like this letter to the people in Corinth that teaches and help us to be what He created us to be.

So you can do that now.

And I promise you, you will fill Jesus.

Your life will change, and you'll become connected with Him, the Father.

So let's finish with a prayer.

Father, we praise you.

Thank you for being such a great God.

Thank you for using everything that Paul went through in this city to teach us and to help us.

And thank you for preserving it to now, and so we can apply it to our lives.

I ask the Holy Spirit that you would stir up in each of us a desire for your word.

Just a strong desire to see what you have written in your word.

And so we can it can be food for our souls and it can help change our lives.

I ask you to be with each person here today, and whatever someone might be going through, that you would, we all have needs in some ways.

We all have concerns, we all have things going on in our lives.

And God, I just pray that you would give every single person here everything that they need.

We thank you and we love you and we trust you.

In Jesus, it's in your name we pray.

Amen.