Week 1 Optional Bible Prep

This optional prep will

  1. Explain our year’s theme of “Trust the Story”

  2. Explain our CG’s sub-theme into 1 Corinthians

  3. Give you background of the whole book of 1 Corinthians

2024 Theme - Trust the Story

“Trust the Story” is a call to trusting our lives in the story of God. Our culture is increasingly teaching us to rely on ourselves. We each have a story of our lives played out in our head, yet a story without God will never satisfy our deepest longings for purpose + fulfillment. This year is an invitation to explore the biblical story, to find your place in it, and to discover how its perils and promises answer the greatest questions of modern life.

CG Theme - 1 Corinthians “Think Christian”


New Year Community Group Series: “Think Christian”

Cultural Compromise + The Cross

The Study + Practice of 1 Corinthians

 

Pride + Boasting: The Issue of Self-Esteem Culture

In the short book "The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness", it notes that there was an article in the New York Times magazine all the way back in 2002 by psychologist Lauren Slater called ‘The Trouble with Self-Esteem’. It wasn’t a ground-breaking article or a bolt out of the blue. She was simply beginning to report what experts have known for years. The significant thing she says is that there is no evidence that low self-esteem is a big problem in society.

She quotes three current studies into the subject of self-esteem, all of which reach this conclusion and she states that ‘people with high self-esteem pose a greater threat to those around them than people with low self-esteem and feeling bad about yourself is not the source of our country’s biggest, most expensive social problems.’1 It would be fun to explain how that works and why that works and so on. But, for now, let’s just say she is right when she says it will take years and years for us to accept this. It is so deeply rooted in our psyche that lack of self-esteem is the reason why there is drug addiction, the reason why there is crime, wife beating and so forth.

Slater says it is going to take forever for this view to change. You see, the thing about the ‘low self-esteem theory of misbehaviour’ is that it is very attractive. You do not have to make any moral judgments in order to deal with society’s problems. All you have to do is support people and build them up. In traditional cultures, the way you dealt with these problems was that you clamped down on people and convicted them and called them bad!

What is intriguing about this section of 1 Corinthians (3:21-4:7) that builds the foundation for dealing with the other cultural problems in Corinth, is that it gives us an approach to self-regard, an approach to the self and a way of seeing ourselves that is absolutely different from both traditional and modern/postmodern contemporary cultures. Utterly different.

Spiritual pride is the illusion that we are competent to run our own lives, achieve our own sense of self-worth and find a purpose big enough to give us meaning in life without God.

The three things that Paul shows us in this letter that informs our stories + how to practice the way of Jesus:

  1. OUR NATURE. The natural condition of the human ego.

  2. OUR SELF TRANSFORMATION. The transformed sense of self (which Paul had discovered and which can be brought about through the cross).

  3. HOW TO DO IT. How to get that transformed sense of self.

The book of 1 Corinthians is all about seeing every part of life through the lens of the Cross. To "Think Christian" is to practice this transformed sense of self. We'll start with our problem of hidden egos and pride of self, and then apply this to sex + biblical freedom, our heart's idols, and our confusing culture of worship today... We'll conclude this study + community practice leading to Easter and why the resurrection is the only way our identities can be transformed this way + give a hope not based on circumstances or accomplishment.

How to See the World + Your Place in it (God’s Story + Yours)

Following Jesus means developing the skill of seeing all areas of life and relationships through the lens of the Gospel.

Tim Mackey notes how in each section of 1 Corinthians, Paul defines a problem and responds to it with some part of the story of the Cross, illustrating how these church members were not actually acting or living out what they said they believed. This pattern of a problem followed by a Gospel solution shows us how Paul is teaching the Corinthians to think as Christians.

1 Corinthians is written to a local a church suffering from 5 problems of cultural compromise that is profoundly connected to our current moment:

  1. SELF

  2. FREEDOM + SEX

  3. IDOLS

  4. WORSHIP CONFUSION

  5. RESURRECTION + IDENTITY

 

Introduction to 1 Corinthians

 

The Corinth of Paul’s Day:

 

         Corinth sat right between the two most famous cities of ancient Greece––Athens and Sparta. Like Los Angeles, Corinth was a major trade city. People from all over the world moved to Corinth to make a better living; you could get food from anywhere in Corinthian markets. Consequently, Corinth had an enormous population so traffic was just like L.A., too. The churches Paul planted here were in affluent communities, people whose tastes and preferences had an outsized influence on the rest of the world. If it sold in Corinth, people wanted it in their home town. The Corinthian people considered themselves “more Roman than Rome,” a posture about which they were proud as a people. The details about what makes them “more Roman than Rome” are discussed in both letters––a set of cultural tastes and beliefs opposed to the message of Christ, and a cultural mindset that would natively laugh at the cross and viewed any who clung to it as weak, lowly, or pathetic. If it is not power, if it is not wealth, it is not Corinth.

 

Paul in Corinth:

 

         The Apostle Paul spent significant time in Corinth, hoping that planting the seeds of the Gospel in such a culturally vibrant and globally influential area would amount to the message of the crucified Messiah transforming the world from that staging ground. In fact, Corinth is the location Paul spent the longest amount of time in any one place during all of his travels and ministry. He was only in Ephesus for a few months but he was in Corinth for nearly two years. The church in Corinth had access to the greatest preachers of their time: Not just Paul, but Apollos, who was educated in the Oxford and Harvard of their day––Alexandria (Acts 18). This church was also served by Peter, who had sat and spoken with Jesus for years. As Paul puts it in Chapter 1, “… in every way you were enriched in Christ, you are not lacking any gift.” You would think a church planted by the Apostle Paul, a man who knew the Bible backwards and forwards, someone who had spoken with the resurrected Jesus and was personally appointed by Jesus as an Apostle, someone who had performed incredible miracles like raising a young boy from the dead (Acts 20), you would think a church pastored by someone with that resume, and regular guest preachers like Apollos and Peter’s disciples, surely with all of these advantages this church would be a shining beacon to all other churches, right? But the opposite is true; everything is going wrong.

        

         Examples of what’s wrong in the infant Corinthian church are plenty: The men of the church are chauvinistic towards the women, not just to their own spouses but toward women in general, according to chapter 14. The Corinthian church had no concern for the poor and less fortunate, according to chapter 11. Most slaves in Corinth rose at dawn and worked until evening; while they slaved, the wealthier members of the church enjoyed a buffet of imported delicacies for communion. The wealthy in the congregation regularly finished off the entire banquet before the working slaves could attend service; on more than one occasion, not even bread or wine were left for them. When you realize that within the underground, urban development of early Christianity the largest demographic was women and slaves, you begin to see how awfully things are going in Corinth. Christians generally sought to educate, feed, clothe, and welcome anyone made in God’s image and for whose sins Christ paid, which was deeply endearing to both the women and slaves of the ancient world. But not in Corinth. Unwittingly, the Corinthians are turning away their most interested candidates for service in their churches; They’re not even trying that hard to turn people away, it just comes naturally to them and they’re totally blind to it. This is how bad it is, and we haven’t even touched on the sexual scandals that surface in this church.

 

Like Modern American Church:

 

         We don’t have slaves or buffets of delicacies in modern American church, so how is it fair to compare the modern American church to Corinth? The Corinthians were an affluent people. They have abundant resources at their disposal and not only do they not realize how wealthy they are, they’re preoccupied with using their wealth and influence to gratify their own interests. They believe they can buy spiritual maturity and spiritual growth by the look of their church and in the eloquence of its preachers. Like the Church in America, they have immense influence over the development of Christianity across the globe, and yet they don’t see this as the reason God planted deep roots in their territory in the first place. They’re happy to soak-in all of the wonderful gifts and blessings––world-class preaching, an abundance of spiritual gifts and miracles, and the economic benefits just for living where they live––and they keep most of it for themselves. 


They think this deposit of gifting and blessing from God belongs just to them; that it was given by God solely for their pleasure and benefit rather than entrusted to their stewardship for others. But what makes Corinth most like the Church in America today is the rampant divisions and factions among different groups of Christians. In 1:22 Peter is called “Cephas.” That’s Peter by his Aramaic name, but he isn’t normally called by that name at the time this was written (c. 54 A.D.). People in this church held to him as the representative of the Jewish heritage of Christianity and its Messiah, that’s why Peter is the true authority. But there’s also Apollos, he studied at Oxford and Harvard, that why he’s the true authority. And there’s a group called the pneumatikoi, the “super spiritual ones,” they receive divine words from the Spirit (2:6, 12) and that’s why they’re the true authority. And then there’s Paul, the one whom the Corinthians blame for their problems. This factionalism was tearing the church apart and rendered its missional influence, for all practical purposes, dead and ineffective for God’s Kingdom. They needed to learn how to think like Christians so they could learn to live like Christians, just as Paul instructed them.