Grace to You and Peace

This message was the closing chapter on the Thessalonian letters and an opening look at First Corinthians, placed in their historical setting as Paul moves into his third missionary journey. The contrast between the two churches drove most of the sermon, with the Corinthian church's factions, sins, and pride standing in sharp relief against the faithfulness of the Thessalonians. The passage covered was 1 Corinthians 1:1-17.

What was said

Pastor Carl walked through the broader timeline the series has been following, from the Gospel of John through Acts and into the letters Paul wrote along the way. First and Second Thessalonians were written from Corinth during the second missionary journey, which made the contrast between the two churches all the more striking. Paul was sitting in the middle of Corinth's chaos when he wrote back to Thessalonica thanking God for them.

Corinth itself got a fair amount of attention. It sat at the narrowest point of land between two seas, about five kilometers wide, and every ship crossing from Asia to Italy had to unload its cargo there and haul it overland. That made Corinth enormously wealthy, cosmopolitan, and morally chaotic. The Temple of Aphrodite sat on top of Acrocorinth above the city, and the whole place has been described as New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas at the same time. That is the world Paul was writing into.

When Paul opens the letter by calling himself "called to be an apostle," that is not a throwaway phrase. He was using it deliberately because some in Corinth were already questioning whether his authority was real. The word "called" carries the same weight as the calling of believers out of the world into the body of Christ, so Paul is framing his own identity the same way from the very first line.

The greeting "grace and peace" was not a standard salutation of the ancient world. Pastor Carl had gone back through writers like Philostratus and Epictetus and found they simply did not say that. Grace and peace come from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, named together as equals, and you cannot arrive at one without the other.

The section on factions hit the church's current situation directly. Some Corinthians were claiming to be of Paul, some of Apollos, some of Cephas, some of Christ. Rather than treating that as an ancient oddity, slides of Billy Graham, James Dobson, Mark Driscoll, Joyce Meyer and others made the point that Christians still sort themselves this way. Paul's response was a string of rhetorical questions the grammar itself demands be answered with a no: Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in his name?

Paul's statement that Christ sent him to preach and not to baptize was read not as a dismissal of baptism but as a clear-eyed understanding of his own particular gift. He was not saying baptism does not matter. He was saying he understood his lane, and that not everyone in the body needs to do everything. The service included a baptism, and the invitation was left open throughout.

The section ended on the sophists, the professional teachers of rhetoric and oratory who could argue either side of any question for a fee. Paul was working in an environment that prized verbal dexterity over truth, and his refusal to dress up the gospel in that kind of eloquence was itself a theological statement. Making the cross impressive by making it clever would empty it of its power, and that is where the passage stopped.