Paul's corrective letter to a divided church in a pagan city — all 16 chapters
Paul planted the Corinthian church around 50 AD in a wealthy port city built on trade. Knowing what Corinth was like explains almost everything that follows.
Paul called himself an apostle, and plenty of people claim the title today. Here is what the New Testament actually attaches to that word, and what it does not.
One phrase, “the church of God,” ended up on a hundred denominational signs. What Paul meant by it in the Greek, and how far it travelled from there.
Paul is about to spend sixteen chapters correcting this church. He opens by thanking God for them, and that order is not an accident.
Many traditions mark faith with a rite called confirmation. Paul uses the same idea for something God does, and keeps doing, right to the end.
I am of Paul. I am of Apollos. The Corinthians had picked teams, and Paul answers with a question that still lands: is Christ divided?
Church splits and personal feuds are not a modern invention. Corinth had them first, and Paul's response to the drama is blunter than you would expect.
Paul thanks God he baptised almost nobody, then keeps remembering more people he baptised. Behind the comedy is a serious point about who your loyalty belongs to.
The cross looks like foolishness to a clever world. Paul is not being anti-intellectual here; he is telling us where real wisdom actually comes from.
Jews wanted a sign, Greeks wanted an argument, and God gave them a crucifixion. Why the least impressive option turned out to be the powerful one.
Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble. Paul tells the Corinthians to look around at who God actually chose, and explains why that is the whole point.
Paul spent eighteen months in Corinth making tents and preaching the gospel. How he carried a trade and a ministry at the same time without dropping either.
Young preachers learn delivery, polish, and stage presence. Paul came to Corinth in weakness and trembling, and says that was entirely deliberate.
Paul determined to know nothing among them except Christ and Him crucified. One message, preached everywhere, and he never once apologised for repeating it.
There is a wisdom God settled on before the ages began, and the rulers of this age missed it completely. Had they seen it, Paul says, they would never have crucified Him.
Who are the rulers of this age who crucified the Lord of glory? Roman officials, Jewish leaders, or something standing behind both? Scholars are genuinely split.
Paul writes “as it is written,” then quotes a line you cannot quite find in the Old Testament. What he was drawing on, and what he wanted it to stir in us.
The Greek word Paul chooses for revealed points to a single past event, not a slow drip. What God unveiled, He unveiled once, and it holds.
Paul names the Father and the Son constantly. Here he turns to the Spirit, and what he says about how God becomes known reshapes the whole letter.
In three short verses Paul uses the word spirit in three different ways. Sorting out which is which is the difference between reading and skimming.
English hands us one word, world. Greek handed Paul several, and the one he picks decides what he is actually warning us about.
The natural man cannot receive the things of God, Paul says, because they are spiritually discerned. What that means, and just as importantly, what it does not.
“He who is spiritual judges all things.” That sentence has been badly misused. Four points that put it back where Paul actually had it.
Paul calls the Corinthians babies still on milk, and points at their envy and factions as the proof. Growth, it turns out, shows up in how we treat each other.
I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. Paul takes apart the personality contest by describing what a worker actually is.
Gold and silver, or wood, hay and straw. Paul says fire will reveal which one you built with, and that the builder is saved either way.
“You are the temple of God.” Is Paul speaking to you, or to all of you together? English hides the answer. The Greek does not.
Become a fool so that you may become wise. Paul's advice sounds backwards until you see what he thinks the world's kind of wisdom actually costs.
Paul says he cares very little how the Corinthians assess him, and he does not fully trust his own assessment either. Judge nothing before the time.
What do you have that you did not receive? Paul's question takes the legs out from under spiritual pride in eight words.
You are already rich. You are already reigning. Paul's sarcasm here is aimed squarely at a way of thinking that is still being preached today.
Hungry, poorly clothed, beaten, homeless, working with their own hands. That is Paul's own description of apostolic life, and it is worth sitting with.
Ten thousand instructors, but not many fathers. Paul draws a line between the people who teach you and the rare one who actually raises you.
Absent in body but present in spirit, Paul renders a verdict from hundreds of miles away. What that phrase meant, and how the early church handled discipline.
“Deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh.” It is one of Paul's hardest sentences, and the goal at the end of it is rescue, not ruin.
The Corinthians were not merely tolerating the sin in their midst. They were proud of it. Paul's answer begins with a lump of dough.
Some read “let us keep the feast” as a command to observe the Jewish festivals. A close look at what Paul is actually asking the Corinthians to do.
Paul says not to keep company with the immoral, then immediately clarifies he does not mean people outside the church. That distinction gets missed constantly.
Seven questions in a row, each sharper than the last. Paul wants to know why believers are dragging each other before courts instead of settling it themselves.
Paul lists who will not inherit the kingdom, then adds five words that change the whole passage: and such were some of you.
All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful. Paul saw early how easily Christian freedom gets bent into permission.
Your body is not a container you happen to live in. Paul calls it a member of Christ and a temple of the Spirit, then draws the obvious conclusion.
Paul's teaching on marriage gives husband and wife the same claim on each other in the same breath. For the first century, that was startling.
What a first-century letter about marriage still says to couples now, including the parts that sound strange until you see why Paul wrote them.
Paul carefully separates what the Lord commanded from what he himself advises, then turns to the believer who is married to someone who does not believe.
An unbelieving spouse is sanctified by the believing one, and the children are holy. Paul means something by that, and it is not what most of us assume.
Circumcised or not, slave or free, Paul tells each person to remain where they were called. What he is protecting there, and what he is not endorsing.
Luther said he lost Christ the Saviour and made Him the jailer of his soul. If God has ever felt like a judge waiting for you to slip, this one is for you.
Paul offers judgment rather than commandment here, and is careful to say that marrying is no sin. Why he still leaned the other way.
Weep as though not weeping, buy as though not possessing. Paul is not asking for detachment from life, but for a grip that can be loosened.
“The form of this world is passing away.” The New Testament writers plainly expected something imminent, and it is worth asking carefully what they meant by it.
Paul says he is not putting a leash on anyone. He is asking which arrangement lets you serve the Lord without being quietly pulled in two directions.
Knowledge puffs up, love builds up. This verse has been used to warn people away from study altogether, which is almost exactly backwards.
“If anyone loves God, this one is known by Him.” After years of debating theology across a dozen belief systems, that verse still does the most damage to my pride.
Paul would rather never eat meat again than trip up a brother. Freedom that wounds somebody else has stopped being the point.
Paul's apostleship was being questioned in Corinth, so he defends it. His defence tells us a great deal about what that title did and did not mean.
Who ever goes to war at his own expense? Paul builds a careful case that gospel workers may be supported, and then declines the support himself.
The Lord commanded that those who preach the gospel should live from it. Paul agrees completely, then explains why he never took a penny of it.
Paul would rather die than have his boasting made void. Why he kept his ministry financially independent, and what that decision cost him.
All things to all men. Paul bends himself a long way to reach people, but there is a line he never crosses, and it is worth knowing where it sits.
Paul disciplines his body so that after preaching to others he is not himself disqualified. Decades into ministry, that verse reads differently than it once did.
“I do not want you to be unaware.” Paul stops answering their questions and hands the Corinthians a shared history that reaches back to the wilderness.
That Rock was Christ. Paul reads Israel's wilderness years as more than history, and shows why the Old Testament is not optional reading for Christians.
Paul tells the Corinthians these things were written for people “upon whom the ends of the ages have come.” What that phrase would have meant to them.
God will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear, and will make a way of escape. A closer look at a verse that gets quoted more often than it gets read.
Sometimes Scripture looks like it is contradicting itself. Paul said an idol is nothing, then warns about the table of demons. Both statements stand.
Some hear grace and conclude that sin no longer exists. Paul's “all things are lawful” is the verse most often used to get there, and it does not go there.
Eat what is set in front of you and ask no questions, Paul says, unless someone tells you where it came from. Then the issue stops being food.
The head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, the head of Christ is God. Working through one of Paul's most argued-over passages, carefully.
Head coverings, angels, and long hair. Paul's reasoning here feels foreign until you understand what a covering signalled in first-century Corinth.
One goes hungry while another gets drunk. The Corinthian gatherings had become a place where the poor were shamed, and Paul refuses to praise them for it.
This cup is the new covenant in My blood. What Paul received and passed on about the Lord's Supper, and what examining yourself actually means.
Paul turns to spiritual gifts, and begins somewhere unexpected: with a test for whether it is really the Spirit of God speaking at all.
Diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. Every spiritual gift named in the New Testament, listed and briefly defined in one place.
If the foot says it is not a hand, is it no longer part of the body? Paul's answer reframes what belonging to a church actually means.
Forty-five years shaped by Pentecostal and evangelical thinking, and a good many convictions now held more loosely. Where I actually stand on the gifts, and why.
Are the gifts of the Spirit still for today? The question behind the question is usually about authority, and it deserves a straight answer.
The parts of the body that seem weakest are the necessary ones. Paul's picture of the church leaves nobody spare, and then he turns to love.
Tongues of angels, mountain-moving faith, everything given away, and without love it counts for nothing. Paul's definition of love is far tougher than the wedding version.
For this reason, I have sent Timothy to you, who is my beloved and faithful son in the Lord, who will remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach everywhere in every church. (1 Co 4:17).
An uncertain trumpet gets nobody ready for battle. Paul's argument about tongues in the assembly rests on whether anyone can understand what was said.
Paul says he speaks in tongues more than all of them, then says he would rather speak five words people understand. Public and private are not the same thing.
Order in the gathering, two or three at a time, and one of the hardest verses in the letter about women keeping silent. Working through it without flinching.
Died, buried, raised, and seen. Paul hands over the gospel in four facts and a list of witnesses, most of whom were still alive to be asked.
If Christ is not risen, Paul says, the preaching is empty and so is the faith. He leaves no room for treating the resurrection as a metaphor.
Christ is the firstfruits, which means a harvest is expected to follow. Paul's argument for the resurrection of our bodies, laid out in order.
He must reign until every enemy is under His feet, and the last enemy is death. What Paul means by the Son finally being subject to the Father.
Baptised for the dead, fighting beasts at Ephesus, eat and drink for tomorrow we die. Paul stacks up arguments that only make sense if resurrection is real.
With what body do they come? Paul answers with a seed, and the answer is neither a ghost nor the same body you have now.
“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” Paul is not ruling out a body. He is describing what has to change before we can carry one that lasts.
Paul ends his hardest letter with travel plans, a building fund, and a list of names. The ordinary details turn out to carry the weight of the whole letter.
Pursue love, and desire spiritual gifts. Paul ranks prophecy above tongues in the gathering, and his reason is entirely about who else is in the room.
"Now some are puffed up, as though I were not coming to you. But I will come to you shortly if the Lord wills, and I will know, not the word of those who are puffed up, but the power. For the kingdom of God is not in word but in power. What do you want? Shall I come to you with
It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles—that a man has his father’s wife! And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from amon