Life In Christ Ministry with Pastor Flavio Carvalho

For two days now we have been walking through 1 Corinthians 2. We have heard Paul’s confession that he came to Corinth in weakness with a simple gospel. And we have seen him distinguish the world’s wisdom from God’s hidden wisdom — a wisdom mysterious to the powerful and reserved for the mature.

Today Paul answers the great question that should be on every reader’s lips: how does this hidden wisdom get from the heart of God to the heart of the believer?

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In chapter 2, Paul keeps going. If chapter 1 was the wisdom of the cross, chapter 2 is the source of true wisdom. And he begins with one of the most beautiful and humbling confessions in all of the New Testament: he tells the Corinthians how he came to preach to them. Not as a polished orator. Not as a philosopher. But as a weak, trembling man whose only message was Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

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For three days now we have been walking through 1 Corinthians 2. We have heard Paul’s confession of weakness, his teaching on God’s hidden wisdom, and yesterday his glorious description of the Holy Spirit who searches the depths of God and reveals them to the believer. Today Paul lays out a contrast that divides every reader of this letter — and every human being who has ever lived — into one of two categories.

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Welcome back to Life in Christ Radio. For two days now we have been walking through 1 Corinthians 1. We have heard Paul greet a most unlikely church as “saints,” and we have watched him confront the very first thing that went wrong among them — factions and divisions. Today Paul does something remarkable. He takes that surface problem — divisions — and traces it all the way back to a deeper problem — the way the world thinks.

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For three days now we have been walking through 1 Corinthians 1 — the saints in unlikely Corinth, the warning against divisions, and yesterday the cross as the wisdom and power of God. Today Paul does something deeply personal. He looks around the Corinthian congregation and tells them why God chose them.

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Welcome to Life in Christ. I am glad you are with me today. We are beginning a brand-new walk through Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians — Christian Answers to Real Life. And today we open with the first verses of chapter 1 — Paul’s greeting and thanksgiving to one of the most remarkable, troubled, and gifted churches the world has ever seen.

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Let me set the scene. Corinth was one of the great cities of the ancient world. It sat on a narrow strip of land that linked mainland Greece to the Peloponnese — every ship, every caravan, every traveler passing between east and west came through Corinth. It was wealthy, multicultural, and — let us be honest about it — appetite-driven. The city’s chief deity was Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love, and her temple on the Acrocorinth featured ritual prostitution. So notorious was Corinthian sexual immorality that, in Paul’s day, the Greek verb korinthiazomai — “to Corinthianize” — simply meant “to live shamefully.” That is a unique distinction in human history: a city that became a verb for sin.

And it was in that city that the Apostle Paul, during his second missionary journey, planted a Christian church. He stayed eighteen months. He left it as a working congregation. And then, from a distance, he wrote them this letter — the first of two we have — to answer their questions and correct what had gone wrong.

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