Hope Alliance Bethlehem

As the Israelites moved from the Exodus to the Promised Land, they found significant struggle in the wilderness. Paul relates the Christian life in many ways to the wilderness - a place where our heart is divided in its allegiance to God and our former life. And his urgent plea to the Corinthians and to all Christians is to not look back to where we've come from so as not to be tempted into our previous way of life.

Paul loves to use the metaphor of a race to describe life. And for him the race well run is the gospel-centered life. How do you live this kind of life? You have to prepare now for the future and learn from the past. Knowing that not everyone makes it to the finish line, it is imperative that we put in the hard work of discipleship now.

Paul is a truly remarkable testimony. His heart is centered on pursuing the glory of God and as a result he engages in ministry by embracing his sent-ness and sacrificing his rights and preferences to make the gospel known. Why does he do this? He has a deep love for God and a deep love for those who don't know God's love. How might are lives be different if we shared the passions of Paul?

The Bible gives us plenty of direction, but what about the ares it doesn't speak directly to - places where we don't have a right and wrong? In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul is helping them deal with this reality. His urge is to say "no" to license and "no" to legalism, while embracing liberty. Liberty won't acquiesce to legalism, but it values the glory of God above all things.

The Corinthian church had lots of questions for Paul. Is sex bad? Should we get divorced? Should we not bother with marriage at all? Paul uses his experience and the teaching of Jesus to effectively answer these questions. But his greater purpose is to show them that true identity comes from the gospel, not a marital status or lack thereof. In fact, it is our identity defined by the gospel that should inform us in how we engage life as married and single people.

The beauty of the gospel is that even though we have built an identity as sinners, we have been joined with Christ. This means we have a re-newed identity as sons and daughters of God. It also means that we have access to the wisdom of God and are quite literally the dwelling place of the Spirit of God. Therefore, we have the ability to choose well. In fact, the gospel not only gives us a new identity, it gives us the responsibility to proclaim and protect it with every action of our lives.

The resurrection is not just a nice ending to a good story. It changes everything! The resurrection means that God has accepted Jesus' sacrifice and therefore gives hope to the entire world that they can be accepted too. It assures us of the power over death and offers us the freedom of life now and in the future.

The church today tends to value intellect or the Spirit over the other one. This unfortunate binary reality is smashed by the gospel which demands intellectual belief and a dependence upon the Spirit. Likewise, the life of Christian faith must engage in the mind and be dependent upon the Spirit. Personal experience is not normative, nor is personal intellect. However, the gospel and the Spirit absolutely are.

The primary aim of the Spirit is the proclamation of Jesus and the primary product of the Spirit is love. This poetic chapter on love which is often referenced is really a reflection on God himself. God is love and our only hope to live into this reality of love is through the gospel - the reality that he loved us first. This is the product of the ministry of the Spirit: to become a people who love in response to being a people who are loved.

Sometimes we end up valuing gifts more than the giver. This unfortunate reality was prominent in the church at Corinth and is prominent in our church today. The gifts of the Spirit are good, but they are secondary to the Spirit himself who works primarily to make Jesus our Lord and to affirm us in our uniqueness while pulling us together as a church, the body of Christ to the onlooking world.