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The Wisdom Of joshua hartwigsen, 7.4.21 (pm) THE WISDOM OF GOD Paul’s Jesus-centered approach to church life in 1 Corinthians 1 Corinthians 11-14 – questions about worship (the message of the cross deserves thoughtful worship) 1 Corinthians contains Paul’s cross-centered approach to the various problems plaguing the Christians in Corinth (1 Corinthians 2:2). “Cloe’s people,”1 representatives from the household of a member in the church community in the city, made Paul aware of those problems but also brought with them questions troubling the church (1 Corinthians 1:11; 5:1; 7:1; 8:1; 12:1; 15:12; 16:1, 12). 1 Corinthians chapters eleven through fourteen contain Paul’s response to the Corinthians’ question regarding worship. “When you come together as a church” Paul, in 1 Corinthians 11-14, address three issues related to worship: women’s head coverings when praying or prophesying (1 Corinthians 11:2-16), the disregard of the poor by the wealthy at the Lord’s Table (1 Corinthians 11:17-34), and the place of miraculous gifts in the assembly (1 Corinthians 12:1-14:40). Paul encouraged the Corinthians to “not be children in [their] thinking” (1 Corinthians 14:20) by thoughtfully considering the relationship between their worship and their culture’s standards and carefully thinking about how miraculous gifts can be used to serve worship’s purpose. Worship requires thoughtful engagement of cultural standards (1 Corinthians 11) • Paul opens 1 Corinthians 11 addresses two issues – head coverings (1 Corinthians 11:2-16) and the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:17-34) – that he used to introduce the important principles of submission and unity to the Corinthian Christians, principles he used as the foundation of his answer their questions about worship matters (1 Corinthians 11-14). • Paul first addressed submission, which expresses the love he encouraged the Corinthians to pursue (1 Corinthians 12:13-13:13), by writing about some of the Corinthian women’s disregard of the normal, social custom of women covering their heads (1 Corinthians 11:1- 16). o While Paul did not explain what exactly he meant by head covering (his audience understood), his wrote about an accepted, social practice that the Corinthian women rejected and that was causing them shame (1 Corinthians 11:6). o Their shame came from the disrespect their behavior showed to their husbands, which revealed a disrespect for God Himself (1 Corinthians 11:3-7). 1 All quotes from the Bible come from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (ESV Permanent Text Edition, Crossway, 2016) unless otherwise noted. 151st Street Church of Christ 13875 W 151st Street, Olathe, KS, 66062 151cofc.com joshua hartwigsen, 7.4.21 (pm) • Next, Paul used the Corinthians’ practice of the Lord’s Supper to point out the divisions in the congregation (1 Corinthians 11:17-34). o Some of the Corinthians gathered to eat a meal before taking the Lord’s Supper. During that meal the wealthy followed their society’s economic divisions and did not share their food with the poor, which revealed divisions in the church that undercut the purposes of the communion (1 Corinthians 11:17-22, 29). o The Corinthians’ divisive attitudes ‘despised’ the church by disregarding the unity Jesus creates among Christians and thereby revealed their unworthiness to partake of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11:22, 27-29; 1:2, 9-10; 3:16-17). Questions • How can we learn to be aware of the cultural standards that influence us? • What cultural standards do you think we need to observe in our worship and why/how should we observe them? • What would make observing cultural standards wrong? • How do you think the gospel (the message of Jesus’ death and resurrection) relates to this issue? _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ Worship should be orderly and focused on teaching so that it can “buildup” its participants (1 Corinthians 12-14) • Chapter twelve begins Paul’s response to the Corinthians’ questions about “spiritual gifts” by focusing on the need for united diversity in the organized body of the church (1 Corinthians 12:1-30). o The Corinthians’ focus on the spiritual gift of speaking in tongues motivated Paul to remind them about the need for diversity in their spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12:4- 26). ▪ Diversity characterizes God’s interactions with people (He gives a diversity of spiritual gifts) and, Paul wrote, the Corinthians should therefore strive for diversity in their spiritual giftedness (1 Corinthians 12:4-11). ▪ But Paul added an important caveat to the issue of diversity – it must be unified. He illustrated the idea of unity in diversity through his illustration of the diversity of parts in a body that function without division (1 Corinthians 12:12-26). 151st Street Church of Christ 13875 W 151st Street, Olathe, KS, 66062 151cofc.com joshua hartwigsen, 7.4.21 (pm) o Paul returned to his comments about the need for diversity by clarifying the implications of his body illustration through his deliberate application of the metaphor to the Corinthians’ focus on speaking in tongues (1 Corinthians 12:27-31). • Paul responded to the Corinthians’ debate about spiritual gifts by telling them love offers “a still more excellent way” because it motivates the protection of the church’s ordered unity (1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13). o Paul’s comments about love imply the Corinthians so focused on spiritual gifts that they failed to cultivate a proper love for one another, a failure already revealed in Paul’s previous comments about their divisions (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:11-12; 3:1-3; 6:1- 8). o Their struggles with love and their overemphasis upon spiritual gifts led Paul to remind them why love is “a more excellent way”. Love is better because: ▪ Its absence removes the value of otherwise valuable things (1 Corinthians 13:1-3). ▪ Love’s character makes it “a more excellent way” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). ▪ Love endures forever while spiritual gifts “pass away” (1 Corinthians 13:8-13). • Having established the need for unity in diversity (1 Corinthians 12) and for love as the controlling motivation (1 Corinthians 13), Paul addressed the problems the Corinthians were experiencing with their spiritual gifts by offering the two worship principles of building up and of order (1 Corinthians 14). o Worship should “build up” the church (1 Corinthians 14:1-25). ▪ Paul began by encouraging the Corinthians to focus on prophecy rather than speaking in tongues because speaking in tongues does not edify unless it is translated while God specifically designed prophecy for building up worshippers (1 Corinthians 14:1-12, 20-25). ▪ The goal of teaching and encouraging in worship, Paul wrote, reveals God’s overriding educational purposes that motivated him to write that he would rather speak five edifying words than “ten thousand words in a tongue” (1 Corinthians 14:13-19; cf. Ephesians 5:19; Colossians 3:16; Hebrews 10:24-25). o Worship should be orderly (1 Corinthians 14:26-40). ▪ Paul opened his second principle for the church’s worship by noting that the Corinthians’ chaotic, individualized assembly worked against the “building up” of the church (1 Corinthians 14:26), which led him to remind his readers that, because “God is not a God of confusion”, their worship should not be confused (1 Corinthians 14:27-33). ▪ Paul addressed a particular issue affecting the order of the Corinthians’ worship - some women were disrupting the worship (1 Corinthians 14:34-36). • Although Paul wrote that “women should keep silent”, in other places he wrote about women’s active involvement in worship (1 Corinthians 11:5, 13; Colossians 3:16; cf. 1 Timothy 2:11-14). • Given the context of 1 Corinthians 14 and of Paul’s other comments about women’s roles in worship, it seems that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 addressed wives of men prophesying who interrupted the worship to 151st Street Church of Christ 13875 W 151st Street, Olathe, KS, 66062 151cofc.com joshua hartwigsen, 7.4.21 (pm) question their husbands, or who sought to participate in the evaluation of the prophesies in a way that violated 1 Timothy 2:11-14 (1 Corinthians 14:29). Questions • How does God’s definition of unity compare to our society’s understandings about it? How might differences between those definitions impact the way we ‘do’ church? • How does the gospel provide a foundation for the church’s unity? • What purpose does Paul give to worship and how do you think that purpose should shape our worship? _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________ _____________________________________________________________________________
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