It was a very interesting start to the service this week. Everybody seemed to have something going wrong prior to the service. Lost keys, forgotten phones and videos that refused to work were all the setbacks that were trying to stop the worship team putting together the songs and activities they had planned. Abbey and Yvette led events today. The songs for the first half of the service for Young Church and the young at heart were the kids version of the Blessing, Blessed be Your Name, God of Wonders, and Shalom My Friend. Songs for the second half were Did You Feel The Mountains Tremble?, Knowing You Jesus and Thine be The Glory. The song that we did not manage to play was Lost In Wonder (You chose the Cross)
Yvette brought us the message from 1 Corinthians 18-31. She set the scene for us. Corinth is in Greece West of Athens between two seas. It was a major trading hub with two ports and a really bad reputation for corruption. It has a temple dedicated to Aphrodite where people end up in sex inside the temple with the temple servants and so called priests. Paul sent around 18 months in Corinth, he wrote his letters to the Thessalonians and 4 letters to the Corinthians although only two survived. Christians in Corinth faced many of the same dilemmas we face today, surrounded by corruption and sin and under pressure to fit in with the society around them.
Unlike us, they had no Bible to follow, no New Testament blueprint. Paul preached a plain and simple gospel to the early Christians of Corinth. This was a struggle for Jews. They were looking for a sign in the sky whereas Jesus gave them the sign of Jonah. They did not believe in resurrection, no person worth anything would let themselves be crucified. They had no answer for death.
When you look at the Bible from a worldly point of view it does seem a bit mad. Born in a stable, dismissed by religious leaders, killed by the people He created. Corinth was full of philosophers, people interested in broadcasting their own brilliance. Paul’s message was very different, he brought glory to God, not to himself.
People today struggle with being interested in a gospel that isn’t about them, focussed on them alone, broadcasting their brilliance. Yvette outlined the importance of things not being about the person but being about God. She listed all the unsuitable people that God chose to help with what he needed to be done, liars, murderers, cowards, tax collectors, adulterers…the list goes on. If he can use all of them he can use us. All we need to do is what we are asked. Check out what happened to Ezekiel, called to be a prophet, delivering a lot of bad news, losing his wife but still being faithful to what he was called to do.
We need only do what Jesus asks us to do and trust him to sort out the rest of of our mess. This is primarily so that we have nothing to boast about, nothing that involves us taking his glory for ourselves. Let God do what only God can do. Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice and it looked like Jesus lost. His disciples went back to their day jobs .One man’s desire to obey His father saved us. The ordinary people who followed him changed the world often at great cost themselves. Boast only in Him.