These days I have been meditating on 1 Corinthians every morning. As I did, it occurred to me that unless 1 Corinthians is read through the gospel of the cross, the gospel of grace, our meditation can easily become legalistic. The Corinthian church was a church of endless problems: divisions and quarrels, sexual immorality and lawsuits, even the misuse of spiritual gifts. I realised that if we only follow those problems, it is easy to slip into a legalistic application, saying, “Yes, this is the problem,” until even problems we had never noticed start to look bigger.
Last week, as I began our first sermon on 1 Corinthians, what struck me most was Paul’s greeting to the Corinthian believers. The Corinthians were so divided that they did not even greet one another. Yet Paul describes the members of this troubled church as “those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people” (1 Cor 1:2). He saw them not as people who still had to become holy, but as people who had already been made holy. He goes on to say that through God’s grace “in him you have been enriched in every way” (1:4-5). It moved me deeply that Paul saw the Corinthian church as God’s church, enriched in every way.
I realised that my stress came from seeing our members as people I had to make holy, and seeing the church as my church, which I had to fill by my own zeal. So whenever I saw shortcomings or faced problems, my first thought was that I had to solve them by my own zeal. I also discovered that there is no rest in that kind of zeal.
I pray that through the Word of 1 Corinthians and our meditation on it, our perspective will change, and that you and I will experience God’s grace filling us through the gospel of the cross, in our church and in our house churches.
Word of the week
Next Sunday is Thanksgiving Sunday and our 49th anniversary. This year’s thanksgiving offering will go to mission fields in hardship, such as churches in Nepal suffering from a glacial tsunami and persecuted churches in India. Let us thank God for His grace this year and prepare our thanksgiving offerings.
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이동주 2026.11.07 14:11
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These days I have been meditating on 1 Corinthians every morning. As I did, it occurred to me that unless 1 Corinthians is read through the gospel of the cross, the gospel of grace, our meditation can easily become legalistic. The Corinthian church was a church of endless problems: divisions and quarrels, sexual immorality and lawsuits, even the misuse of spiritual gifts. I realised that if we only follow those problems, it is easy to slip into a legalistic application, saying, “Yes, this is the problem,” until even problems we had never noticed start to look bigger.
Last week, as I began our first sermon on 1 Corinthians, what struck me most was Paul’s greeting to the Corinthian believers. The Corinthians were so divided that they did not even greet one another. Yet Paul describes the members of this troubled church as “those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people” (1 Cor 1:2). He saw them not as people who still had to become holy, but as people who had already been made holy. He goes on to say that through God’s grace “in him you have been enriched in every way” (1:4-5). It moved me deeply that Paul saw the Corinthian church as God’s church, enriched in every way.
I realised that my stress came from seeing our members as people I had to make holy, and seeing the church as my church, which I had to fill by my own zeal. So whenever I saw shortcomings or faced problems, my first thought was that I had to solve them by my own zeal. I also discovered that there is no rest in that kind of zeal.
I pray that through the Word of 1 Corinthians and our meditation on it, our perspective will change, and that you and I will experience God’s grace filling us through the gospel of the cross, in our church and in our house churches.
Word of the week
Next Sunday is Thanksgiving Sunday and our 49th anniversary. This year’s thanksgiving offering will go to mission fields in hardship, such as churches in Nepal suffering from a glacial tsunami and persecuted churches in India. Let us thank God for His grace this year and prepare our thanksgiving offerings.