You’re the God that’s working all things out.

You’re the God that we can count on. Not one that we deserve, but You’re the God that we can count on and we can know in Jesus. You are always working to draw us in deeper. You’re always working for Your glory. You’re always working through every discomfort, every adversity, through seasons of confusion.

Seasons when we don’t even know how You’re working and we’re not looking for You to work. You’re working.

We just bless Your name and we say that You’re very good this morning.

We thank You that You’re the God who saves and You’ve been saving.

Lord, You’ve been saving for thousands of years. You’ve been saving and drawing people to Christ. In the past, You’re doing it right now and You’re going to keep doing it. Lord, until You send Your Son to return, You’re a saving God and there’s no power that can withstand that. So we just say thank You for who we are in Christ Jesus this morning.

We just bless Your name. We just pray that in Jesus’ name. Amen. Amen.

Good morning. It’s good to see you. Kathy, thank you for sharing your testimony. That was a good word to me. I needed to hear that. So thank you. That was really powerful. So thank you so much.

We’re going to be in 1 Corinthians this morning. Chapter 1, verse 1.

1 Corinthians 1, 1-9. Starting a new series, if you want to call it that. We’re just working through the book of 1 Corinthians in the same way we did Matthew. No promises on how short or long it’ll be. Going off Matthew, it’ll be long. That’s okay.

1 Corinthians 1-1. I’ll start reading.

Paul writes, Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus and our brother Sosthenes to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus that in every way you were enriched in Him in all speech and all knowledge even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you. So that you’re not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ who will sustain you to the end guiltless

in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son Jesus Christ our Lord.

I don’t know if you’ve ever renovated a part of a house or if you’ve renovated a whole house. My parents, I think to their regret, are doing that right now. They’re renovating a house. It sounds fun. It sounds exciting. But when you get into a renovation and I guess a lot of people like to watch TV shows that do this and everything.

It’s not as simple and as fun as it seems. It gets quite a bit more messy and difficult and complex than you had hoped. Not only do you have like multiple things, things that need to happen at the same time, roof, floor, plumbing, all this stuff and you’re waiting on this guy to finish that so the next thing can start apart from just getting things done. There are problems. I didn’t foresee that. Oh, I didn’t foresee that. Oh, I didn’t foresee that. Oh, I didn’t foresee that. And it’s a ton of mess and it’s a ton of complexity. It’s not simple just buying a home and moving in. And I really think that’s exactly what the Christian life is like. We come to the Christian life and yes, the Gospel is wonderful and the Gospel message, the Gospel message is wonderful and we need to know the Gospel and constantly saturate ourselves in its truth. But the reality is if you press on in the Christian life, it gets really messy. It gets really difficult. It gets really complex. Following Jesus is not a cakewalk most of the time, any of the time. Following Jesus gets really difficult because we live in a sinful world. We have a sinful flesh. We have other people we have to live our lives with. And so the Apostle Paul, is content to go there, but he has to go there. He can’t just talk about big picture theology. The Apostle Paul’s got to get down into the weeds. He’s got to get down to the nitty gritty of church life, of what it means to be a Christian. And that’s essentially what Corinthians is. It’s Paul taking on a whole slew of unrelated problems, trials, questions. They’re flying around. They’re plaguing the Corinthian church. And chapter after chapter, he has to get real specific about, no, this is what this is supposed to look like in the Christian life. No, that’s actually sin. Stop doing that. No, you’re thinking about this wrong. It’s this letter of Paul gently, lovingly, helping the Corinthian church deal with a ton of really complex, specific problems, and he’s doing it all at the exact same time. He’s doing it all at the exact same time. That’s Corinthians. First and second, and another one we don’t even have that he makes reference to. So this is a messy church. So hopefully, it’s relatable wherever you are. I think that’s the grace in it. It’s like, hey, the Corinthian church, Paul wrote to them. He gave them encouragement. So surely for us, when we’re following Jesus and it gets messy and difficult, there’s a word for us here as well. So that’s what we’re doing in Corinthians as we walk through it together. I want to start, though, at the very beginning, obviously, but the very first word in 1 Corinthians. And it says Paul. It says Paul. Now, we think about Paul and we think church planter, wrote a bunch of scriptures, mighty apostle. But I think if we fixate on the authorship of this letter, you’ll be left kind of jarred and stupefied if you think about it long enough. When you think about Paul, he hasn’t always been the apostle Paul. This is…

Saul, who readily admits later in the book of Acts, he was approving when the religious leader stoned Stephen. He was making sure the jackets didn’t get dirty. Like, let me hold your coats so you all can brutally stone Stephen, the very first martyr in church history.

Paul is the one who after this, you know, he goes on further and he’s the ringleader in dragging Christians out of their house, persecuting them, throwing them in prison. Acts says he was breathing threats of murder against them. And it’s just a little bit of phrase, but when you think about what that would have looked like, it means Paul was doing what we see happening in Afghanistan today. He was doing Taliban stuff. He was ripping people out of their home, having them killed, throwing them into prison because they were Christian. He was a radical religious zealot.

If Paul had any confidence, it was in himself. It was in his worldview. It was in his success. It was in his merits, his accolades. He was the one that would have dug his heels into who he was, the way he thought about his life, what he believed religiously. He was not going to change. So when we consider Paul, it really becomes amazing that we see a letter written from Paul to anybody regarding the Christian faith.

And what’s more, Paul’s not even just a Christian, like, hey Paul, you’ve done some pretty horrible stuff. I guess we have to let you be a Christian. Sit in the back pew. Don’t ask to serve as a deacon or an elder. Don’t ask to do anything. Keep your head down. You can just be in the church. That’s not even what God did with Paul. Hey Paul, you’re going to be an apostle.

You’re going to be the apostle to the Gentiles. You’re going to have a legacy of going to unreached peoples and planting churches. You’re going to do miracles. You’re going to write Holy Scripture. You’re going to preach with authority. You’re going to be Paul, the apostle.

That is jarring. That is stupefying when we think about it. What do we do with that? I think we do the only thing we can do with it and say that’s God’s grace. God’s grace is jarring and stupefying when we try to fit it into the Bible. into the way that we think about things. God works for the good of His enemies, for His own glory, to the magnification of the cross of Jesus. That’s what He does. And Paul’s not unaware of that. Paul feels it in his bones. Look what he says in 1 Corinthians 15.9. We’ll get there much later. He says in 15.9, For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. I wonder if Paul ever caught himself.

What am I doing standing up here preaching about Jesus? I just healed this person. How could it be me healing people in the name of Jesus? How did I just perform? How am I writing letters? How is it that everybody’s looking to me for what the Christian life should look like? I was murdering these folks.

Here’s why, friends. In Paul’s opinion, this is the first one to tell us why. He says because God called him.

God called him. And it does not mean,

hey, Paul, the calling here means to be summoned by a royal authority. It means that the will or the inclination of God was, Paul, the apostle, you will do this. You will be so. You will have Christ. Paul, the apostle, running from me. You will do this. You will suffer this. God called Paul to himself. It was God’s unmerited favor at work in Paul’s life.

And that’s all we can say is it’s God’s grace. It’s just God’s grace.

And if we’re going to be amazed by the author of the letter, I think we have to go on and be just as amazed by the recipients of the letter. Because it’s not any different.

Corinth was a hub of Roman paganism. It had been controlled by the Greeks for a very long time. When Rome came to power, they completely wiped out Corinth. About a hundred years later, Julius Caesar, he made Corinth a prominent city again. So you’ve got influences by Greece and Rome. If you ever hear the phrase the Greco-Roman world, that’s the world in which Jesus lived because there’s heavy Greek and Roman. There’s a lot of Roman influences in the Greco-Roman world. There we find there were temples and shrines to Apollo, Athena, Aphrodite. There were Egyptian deities worshipped. Isis and Serapis. There were certain games held every year in honor of Poseidon.

Corinth, though it was destroyed, came back to be a greater trade city. It was the cosmopolitan hub. You wanted to go. They were the people. They were the people of affluence. They had luxury. They had a distinctive cult for Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty, and fertility. And on that mountain, her temple, they had a thousand prostitutes or slave priestesses. Moral degradation. That’s what Corinth was known for worse than even Roman paganism.

So you have a people neck deep in riches and pleasure and cultural promise. A multiplicity of false religions. And false gods. And you want to say to Paul, Hey Paul, nice try. Move on. No converts in Corinth coming, man. Okay? You’re not getting any converts in Corinth.

Yet what do we read? We read that this letter is addressed to who? It’s from tyrannical religious zealot Paul, once was, to the church of God that’s in Corinth. The church of God. That’s in Corinth. God did this. Despite their gross immorality. Despite the false gods. Despite the feeling of being successful and culturally affluent. It says, this is a letter to those sanctified in Christ Jesus. Now what does sanctified mean? Well, sanctified means set apart. It means it was a common thing and now it’s for a particular use. It’s for a particular person. It’s not what it’s for. It’s for one thing. So Paul says, you who were of Corinth, you’re the church of God, and you’ve been sanctified in Christ Jesus. You’ve been set apart in Christ to be saints. Saints. The Greek word, it literally just means holy ones. That’s what saints means. He’s saying you are holy ones. That’s why I’m writing this letter to you and it’s all because of what God has called them to be. He’s called Paul and he’s called the Corinthians to be saints.

Friends, when following Jesus is riddled with trial and difficulty and surely it will be for us,

we’ve got to recall the grace of the gospel call. Recall the grace of the gospel.

Because what gospel do we have as the Christian church if it’s not a gospel of grace? It’s not a gospel of second chances, like how you get one more chance. It’s not a gospel of, hey, you know, if you fit the right class, just maybe barely you can qualify. It’s not the gospel of try your best and your hardest and you’ll make it. It’s the gospel for undeserving sinners. It’s everything about who our God is and His wonderfulness and nothing about us. It’s not about our power. It’s not about our wisdom. It’s not about our goodness. It’s about the power of God to break the chains of sin and death. It’s about the wisdom of the gospel, which is the foolishness of heaven that saves men. It’s about the goodness of God, that sent the Spirit down to arrest my will so that I would hate sin and love Jesus.

One person refers to Christ as the hound of heaven. And He comes after us in relentless pursuit until He finds us and He has us.

That is the gospel of grace. Friend, is that so? You and I can look to Jesus knowing that Jesus began this good work. It doesn’t depend on me. So in my greatest discouragement in being a Christian, my greatest discouragement in being a part of the local church, I can look to Jesus and I can look to the cross and see this is not my thing. This is Jesus’ thing. And whatever is happening, there is so much power on Calvary. Every time I look there, I know that God is doing something great above and beyond what I can see and I can always move forward in steadfastness because of Calvary. It is the greatest thing. It is the greatest grace of what God has done in Christ Jesus, not me.

C.S. Lewis once wrote, I never had the experience of looking for God. That’s a thing to say. I never had the experience of looking for God. It was the other way around. He was the hunter and I was the deer. He stalked me like a red skin, took unerring aim and fired. And I’m very thankful that this is how this first conscious meeting occurred.

It forearms one against subsequent fears. That whole thing that it was just wishful thinking.

Something one didn’t wish for can hardly be that. Friends, you didn’t wish for it to happen. God came after you. It is His grace.

What does that mean for you? It means this. It means that in the messiness of the Christian life, it means in the difficulty of being a part of the local church, you and I, we can do a few things. And I think in this order, we worship God because there’s always a reason to praise Him because nothing can undo the grace that He has shown us in calling us to saving faith. Nothing can undo what Kathy talked about. Nothing can undo what happened in that basement. God is worthy of procuring a salvation that cannot be taken away. And when we have that kind of worship in us for what God has done for us, what it does, is it more and more, it stirs our affections, our desires, our loves for the things of heaven so that I don’t want to worship myself. I don’t want to worship the things I did. I don’t want that. I want to because of what I worship and what I desire. I want to obey that God. So my worship to God is always followed by a pursuit, an affectionate pursuit of obeying God in the hardest stuff. And that’s what you’ve got to grab. If you’re wanting the Christian life to feel a certain way before you think, think you’re going to do something for God, think again.

It’s in the valley. It’s in that hard place. It’s in that difficult spot. It’s in that confusion where you say, no, God is worthy of my worship because God did save me so I’m going to move forward in obedience with joy in my heart. That’s how we have steadfastness. Our worship gives way to obedience and gives way to a steadfast obedience as we look back constantly to the grace that cannot be undone. It’s a grace that cannot be undone.

I want you to see though what Paul says further in verse 4. He says, I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus. That in every way you were enriched in Him in all speech and all knowledge even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ who will sustain you. to the end guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So if Paul was talking about what Jesus, what God had done he now looks forward to what God will do and he considers with him presently what God is doing.

And that’s the only way that Paul can give thanks. Because when you think about the craziness and it gets weird some things get weird. Some things that Paul has to address in Corinthians it makes you kind of wonder Paul why are you giving thanks to the beginning of this letter? What are you thankful for? You planted this church and it seems like it’s getting ready to die. What are you thankful for? You see he can give thanks even though we’ve got 16 chapters of messy, messy, messy sin because he knows this the God who has been gracious is the same God that supplies from that grace every single need that you and I have right now. Grace supplies for every need that we have.

Paul doesn’t say oh this pitiful group of believers what am I going to write to them? I mean I could probably say like hey guys nice try I mean I know you’re doing your best. He doesn’t do that. He goes ahead and he praises God because he knows God is able to get them through the complexity of every single situation. I think it’s the only thing that can make you pick up your pen and write these 16 chapters.

Division, tribalism, gross sexual immorality, infighting that leads believers to sue one another in court, issues regarding marriage and separation, food offered to idols, Christian liberties, appropriate conduct in the church for men and women, abuse of the Lord’s Supper, appropriate expressions of spiritual gifts, valuing one another’s contribution to the local church, orderly worship, issues regarding the very resurrection of Jesus. There’s so many issues. There’s so much wrong and broken in this church. Yet he says I thank God. I praise God in such spiritual tumult because I know that the God who was is and the God who is will always be. Every past sin is covered so it means God is able in His infinite wisdom and power to address every issue at hand. That’s his logic at least. He says you were believers. I saw it. The knowledge of God, your testimony, it was confirmed in you. So Paul says I was there and like I heard you all confess the gospel. I saw fruit. I saw evidences of it. So even though your lives look like 1 Corinthians and 2 Corinthians, I’m still believing that God is able. God can supply you in this horrible mess. What else can He believe?

John 14. Jesus says this. I will ask the Father and He will give you another helper to be with you forever. I think that’s the good news, isn’t it, for the New Testament church. Friends, when we come to Christ Jesus, it’s not like this hope, like alright, I’m saved and I just need to pull myself together and just hope I can pull this off or maybe I can just sort of figure some things out. That’s not the Christian life. The Christian life is you have been richly surprised. You’re supplied with everything you need. And in the Spirit, you are richly supplied with everything that you need. Paul says you’re not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I don’t think he’s lying at all. He said you actually will be sustained. You will be sustained until the end and when Christ comes, you will be in that day guiltless.

It’s really strong language when you read about someone sleeping with their stepmom. Can I be honest? It’s really strong language when people are getting drunk at communion and marginalizing poor people. It’s really strong language. I couldn’t say, I don’t think what Paul is saying here, but obviously they need to be thrown out. They’re false believers. Excommunicate them. They’re gone. And Paul says, I’m going to thank God because I believe He can work through this.

It’s a lot of belief and the power of the Gospel.

What does the Spirit do but teach us more about Scripture? What does the Spirit do but help us understand more of Christ and apply? What does the Spirit do but convict us of sin so that we can turn? What does the Spirit do but continually apply the Gospel to us? So again, Paul’s not confident in their abilities. He’s not confident in himself even as a teacher, as a disciple maker. He’s confident in the grace of God that has called them and he’s sure it will sustain and keep them until the very, very end. He’s sure of God. That’s what Paul’s sure of.

And Paul’s sureness doesn’t foster laziness. I think you could read that if you wanted to and pull out laziness. Like, that’s great. This must mean God, God does everything so I can just sit back and the Christian life happens to me. It doesn’t happen that way. Paul says, I’m the least of the apostles, but he says, I worked harder than any of them. And what does Paul mean? He said, because I have such a faith in the grace of God, that means whatever I put my hand to do for God, it means His power is going to be there. So you better believe Paul was praying harder than anyone else. You better believe Paul was studying the Scriptures harder than anyone else. Paul was seeking to understand what it looked like to obey God. Paul was seeking what it looked like to make disciples. Nobody was besting Paul because Paul had faith in the God of grace who would do it through him. So it’s his encouragement to believers. It’s not lay down, take a nap, do whatever you want. God’s going to do this thing to you. It’s work harder and harder and harder because you can be sure God will sustain you to the very end. God will sustain you to the very end. I believe that it means this for us. So often, I think your trials, your troubles in your personal life, I think so often, so often, the friction, the broken relationships, the trouble, the turmoil that happens in local churches, which there’s a bajillion varieties of that that you could talk about. It’s not due to a lack of provision. It’s due, it’s due to neglect.

Great lack of these things is not because it’s not supplied. I think it’s because we’re not pressing it enough to see it and to want it and to know it. Because again, we have to decide, Paul, are you a liar? Or am I really richly supplied and every local church is richly supplied with what they need to thrive for Jesus until he returns?

Because that’s true, I want us to think about that for us in a 21st century context as Providence Fellowship. Church, if God’s gracious and let’s say that we’re together for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years and let’s say, I don’t know about grace, I’m doing everyone’s funeral someday. It means it actually is possible that we could abide together and help one another and fight together until we all get there because the Spirit will supply us with what we need. That’s what it means. And that’s incredible. Incredible if you think about it that way. Making it to the end because God will supply not just you, but us with what we need. I think that we’ve got to fight then to have the same mentality as Paul. Like, yes, I’m in this for me, but I’m in this for we. It’s bad grammar, but it rhymes. For us.

I want us to make it. I want us to be sustained. Like, in my personal sin struggle, I don’t want to just like let it win and I kind of brush it off. Like, no, there is supply in the Spirit for me to overcome my sin struggles. There is supply in the Spirit for me to fight through a valley of depression. There is supply in the Spirit for our broken relationships to be healed. There is supply in the Spirit for us to be a unified body doing God’s will. It is there. So that’s a question for your heart. And I can’t make your heart want that. Do you want to see the local church you’re a part of thrive? Are you willing to struggle?

And then secondly, are you with Paul and saying, you know, as bad as it gets in my personal Christian life, as tough as church life gets, I’m going to give thanks. Because there’s when we start to get back to worshiping and obeying and running is when it gets really bad and we don’t kick the dirt and say, God, how could you let this happen? God, don’t you care? God, where are you? And say, no, you know what? I’m going to worship you and I’m going to thank you because I know through all this you’ve got what we need to be sustained, sustained to make it to the end. That’s who you are. So I’m going to be patient through it. I’m going to be patient through it.

Paul says so much just in the introduction. I once heard someone say at a conference, people that caught up on the introductions or what did Paul mean by that? He means a lot by everything, he says, and the spirit means infinitely more if we look at every little part. And just in the beginning, just in the beginning, I want you to think about that. If you’re the Corinthian church, you’re like, man, if Paul writes us a letter, it is going to be a brow-beating. If Paul writes us a letter, I’m going to call in sick that Sunday when they read the letter because it’s going to be rough. But Paul with the tender tone of a father, and truly he is a spiritual father to them, he says, hey, I thank God for you. I thank God for you because of His grace given to you. And man, I know that God called you and I know that God’s going to sustain you and I know God’s going to see you to the end. Wow. That’s faith and grace, isn’t it? That’s faith and grace. Secondly, on all of that, from a completely different perspective, and again, Kathy, I’m so thankful for your testimony this morning, never give up on anybody. And I was condemned. I felt very convicted this week because you have that person and you’re like, they’re never coming. And you’re just like, you’ve tried and you’ve prayed and you’ve shared and they’re not coming. And wow, what a spit in the face it is when we read about the Corinthian church and we read about Paul. Man, you don’t know when and how God can call anybody in the most impossible situation. In fact, isn’t that why Paul said I was called to show the world like, hey, look what God can do with this kind of mess. Like, God can do it. So keep believing. Let’s keep believing. God, you do save and you want to save what we consider as people the worst of humans for your own glory.

And God, well, yeah, God, but Paul,

Paul writes, verse 9, God is faithful by whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

How can we survive and thrive as a church? How can you survive as a Christian through all sort of messiness?

Not by looking at the mess.

Not by looking at a mirror and seeing yourself. By looking at God and saying, oh, God, you’re faithful. This is your gospel. This is your grace. This is your supply for me and everything. You called me into this fellowship. You called me into this fellowship. The fellowship of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord. And I think that’s a wonderful word to end on. Because isn’t there a difference

between fellowship and maybe what you would call cordial friendship? You know, like, hey, I know you. Like, we know one another. Like, anybody can pay their money and buy an entrance fee into this club. Like, I have no real, like, hold on you and you have no hold on me. That’s not koinonia. That’s not fellowship that he’s talking about. This is, you are a part of me and I am a part of you. So Paul’s not, he’s not ending by saying, hey, you guys are technically in the church, so we have to figure this out for you, don’t we? He’s saying, you deeply, deeply, deeply matter to the Father and the Son. You are precious to the Father and the Son. Even in your worst sin, even in the mess you create as local churches, you are precious to the Father and the Son. He cares deeply for you. As a father cares for a son, as a friend cares for a deep friend, you are in that fellowship. You are deeply loved. God will see you through to the end. Your Lord and Master who is powerful over all, Jesus, who is your friend and is your Savior, He will see you through. To Corinth, to Providence, to every local church. And that’s amazing. So we can follow Jesus together in all faith and grace. Amen. Amen. Let’s pray together.

We just want to

say there’s no one like you this morning, God. We just want to say you are blessed in the heavenly places. We bless your name here. All the earth, all the universe cries out to you and says that you are great and greatly to be praised.

Jesus, there’s no one like you. And your love, Father, there’s no one like you in your care. Oh, Spirit of God, how you lead and guide us. We just ask, Lord, one more time that you would stir our hearts and minds to just enjoy, relish in the grace of the Gospel or tune our heart to yours. Turn our hearts from the things of this world that keep us from pursuing you.

Would you root out

fleshly ungodly attitudes,

thoughts.

Lord, would Christ be fully manifested. Would Christ be in us until we are sanctified with you in glory, Lord. And we’re going to have to say we believe it to be so because you have said so. And we’re believing your word, God. So thank you that all that has been, all that is, and all that will be, your grace is sufficient. We love you. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen. And why don’t you stand with us as we worship.