Fruits of the Spirit Printed on Stones Held in a Man's Hands
Daily Devotions

1 Corinthians: Epistle of the 21st Century

We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God's secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. (1 Corinthians 2:6-7)

This letter is especially written to those who live in a sex-saturated, wisdom-loving atmosphere and are trying to live as Christians in the midst of all the pressures that constantly come from these two areas.

  1:  Called Into Fellowship 1 Corinthians 1:1-9
  2:  Behind Divisions 1 Corinthians 1:10-17
  3:  God's Nonsense 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
  4:  Not Many 1 Corinthians 1:26-31
  5:  God's Wisdom 1 Corinthians 2:1-5
  6:  God's Teacher 1 Corinthians 2:6-16
  7:  God's Servants 1 Corinthians 3:1-9
  8:  God's Builders 1 Corinthians 3:10-15
  9:  All Things Are Yours 1 Corinthians 3:16-23
10: Stewards of the Mysteries of God 1 Corinthians 4:1-7
11: Complacency 1 Corinthians 4:8-21
12: Scandal in the Church 1 Corinthians 5:1-13
13: The Wrong Way to Right Wrongs 1 Corinthians 6:1-11
14: What are Bodies For? 1 Corinthians 6:12-20
15: Sex in Marriage 1 Corinthians 7:1-9
16: With God 1 Corinthians 7:10-24
17: The Time Is Short 1 Corinthians 7:25-40
18: For Love's Sake 1 Corinthians 8:1-13
19: Duty and Delight 1 Corinthians 9:1-23
20: No Temptation 1 Corinthians 9:24-10:13
21: Idolatry 1 Corinthians 10:14-11:1
22: Headship 1 Corinthians 11:2-16
23: The Lord's Supper 1 Corinthians 11:17-34
24: How the Body Works 1 Corinthians 12:1-31
25: The Supreme Priority 1 Corinthians 13
26: The Value of Prophecy 1 Corinthians 14
27: Of First Importance 1 Corinthians 15:1-4
28: What If...? 1 Corinthians 15:5-19
29: Then Comes The End 1 Corinthians 15:20-58
30: The First day of the Week 1 Corinthians 16:1-9
31: The Care and Feeding of Fellow-Workers 1 Corinthians 16:10-24

A devotion introduction for October

Paul is writing this letter from Ephesus in about 56 or 57 A. D. He had founded the church in Corinth about five years before that, when he had come alone, driven out of Macedonia by the persecution there. He had left Timothy and Luke behind and gone to Athens, and then from there to Corinth. After the founding of the church (which took a period of about two years during the apostle's ministry), he left and went on other journeys. Now he is in Ephesus, and word has come to him that there is difficulty in the church at Corinth.

Paul wrote a letter to the Corinthians, referred to in the ninth verse of the fifth chapter, which has been lost to us. All we know of it is what the apostle says there, that he wrote the letter to the Corinthians telling them that they should not keep company with those who had fallen into immorality. Subsequently, a group of men had come from Corinth to visit him in Ephesus (their names are given in the final chapter of this letter, Fortunatus, Stephanas, and Achaicus), and they had brought word, evidently, of further troubles there. With them they also brought a letter from this church asking the apostle to answer certain questions that they had. This letter that we now have, First Corinthians, is his answer to that letter, and to the reports that he had received from the Corinthian church.

In some ways, most remarkably, this letter is different from all the other letters the apostle wrote. Most of them began with a rather lengthy doctrinal section in which he is teaching great truth, and close with a practical section in which he applies what he is teaching. But here, right from the very beginning, he plunges into the problems of the church, and intersperses a kind of practicality of doctrine with revelations of truth throughout the letter.

This is certainly the most practical of all Paul's letters. Even in this opening greeting, his concern for the church in its various problems is very clearly reflected. It begins with an emphasis upon his apostleship. Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle. That was necessary because there were certain ones in Corinth who were ready to challenge that fact because he had not been part of the original twelve disciples. His apostleship was called into question, and some were wondering if he were not even a false apostle, so Paul has to defend it in the letter. Therefore, he puts his apostleship first as he writes.