Life In Christ Ministry with Pastor Flavio Carvalho

For three days now we have been walking through 1 Corinthians 1 — the saints in unlikely Corinth, the warning against divisions, and yesterday the cross as the wisdom and power of God. Today Paul does something deeply personal. He looks around the Corinthian congregation and tells them why God chose them.

Welcome to Life in Christ. I am glad you are with me today. We are beginning a brand-new walk through Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians — Christian Answers to Real Life. And today we open with the first verses of chapter 1 — Paul’s greeting and thanksgiving to one of the most remarkable, troubled, and gifted churches the world has ever seen.

Let me set the scene. Corinth was one of the great cities of the ancient world. It sat on a narrow strip of land that linked mainland Greece to the Peloponnese — every ship, every caravan, every traveler passing between east and west came through Corinth. It was wealthy, multicultural, and — let us be honest about it — appetite-driven. The city’s chief deity was Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love, and her temple on the Acrocorinth featured ritual prostitution. So notorious was Corinthian sexual immorality that, in Paul’s day, the Greek verb korinthiazomai — “to Corinthianize” — simply meant “to live shamefully.” That is a unique distinction in human history: a city that became a verb for sin.

And it was in that city that the Apostle Paul, during his second missionary journey, planted a Christian church. He stayed eighteen months. He left it as a working congregation. And then, from a distance, he wrote them this letter — the first of two we have — to answer their questions and correct what had gone wrong.