“Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, be courageous, be strong and let all that you do be done in love.” 1 Corinthians 16:13
At the end of Paul’s letter gave the solution in simple language for all the problems in the church at Corinth. What were the problems?
The Church at Corinth was Dysfunctional.
How was it dysfunctional? It was overwhelmed with factions and divisions. It was immature, worldly, and carnal, acting like babies, spiritually. They were yearning for the approval of the world in very inappropriate ways, they were rife with sexual immorality and even of a kind that doesn’t occur among pagans. And they were unwilling to perform church discipline in those cases. They struggled with temple prostitution or dealing with going to temple prostitutes. Christians were taking other Christians to court. Because those Christians had defrauded them in business. Terrible, all around. They had improper views of marriage and of singleness. They had problems with meat sacrificed to idols at every level. They had problems with the Lord’s Supper. Even the Lord’s supper.
They had problems with spiritual gifts, they gave primacy to certain gifts and denigrated others, and they had a fundamental problem loving each other, they didn’t love each other as they should have. Some were even saying that resurrection from the dead cannot occur, does not occur. And in all of this, they were forgetting the two reasons why God leaves all Christians on earth. The internal journey of holiness and the external journey of witnessing to a lost world, they weren’t doing those things as they should have done. It was a terrible mess much like what we see today.
Let’s learn from the church in Corinth. Let’s not repeat their mistakes.
