Your Servants for His Sake

Transcript of the segment on on Corinth:
Paul is writing, of course, to a particular church, at a particular time in history and yet there are so many elements of what it was like to live in Corinth in the first century that are reflected in our society today. If you think of a society that was as obsessed with sex as ours is, so the church in Corinth was obsessed with sex, in every shape, form that you can possibly imagine. Although you shouldn’t imagine it in church this evening. It was a pluralistic society. It was a society in which there were multiple gods and goddesses. It was kind of a multi-variety pack of gods and goddesses there in Corinth. It was also, and it is interesting that these things often go hand in hand, it was also a rational, rationalistic society in which reason was held up and applauded as the way to resolve questions. You had reason on the one hand and you had superstition on the other. Similarly, we have these things in our society today. And it was a society in which the early Christian movement, just as it is starting out, finds itself misrepresented, mocked, rejected. By the Jewish population, a stumbling block. And to the sophisticated Greeks within the Corinthian society, it was utter foolishness, utter folly. It wasn’t as rationalistic as they wanted it to be. Preachers were not the great rhetoricians that were expected. Everything, it seemed, about Christianity seemed second rate or third rate; a kind of put together piece.