Providence Church

Jesus uses water to talk about our deeper thirst for God, and how he alone can quench it. We drink from the wells of money and success and relationships and approval, but they are all broken cisterns that leave us empty, and thirstier than before. Jesus came to give us living water. 

After reading the extraordinary chapter 15 about the resurrection of Jesus and all its implications, chapter 16 seems so ordinary. And yet the ordinary life and ministry of the church is where the promises of the resurrection get lived out now.

The message of Easter is that Jesus died and came back new. The hope of Easter is that what happened to Jesus will happen to us. We will be raised up to new life in new bodies on a new earth.

Some in the Corinthian church were claiming there was no resurrection of the dead. They saw it as a sort of foolish superstition—a belief for unsophisticated Christians. But in our passage, Paul wants us to see that the resurrection is central to everything we believe as Christians.

The gospel is not something we believe once and then move on from. It is something we hold fast to, daily. This passage gives us three handles to hold onto: the gospel is historical, theological, and personal.

Paul concludes this section of the letter about the worship life of the church (ch. 11-14) by focusing on the need for order in the worship gathering. Even though our worship gatherings today differ from the Corinthian gatherings, there is much for us to learn here about how to glorify God and edify one another in worship.

The Corinthian’s zeal to experience God took the form of elevating certain spiritual gifts and seeking heightened spiritual experiences. Paul does not dismiss these things, but in the context of gathered worship, he calls us to focus our desire on that which builds up the church. The main work of the Spirit is to exalt Jesus and build up his body.

The truest mark of God’s work in a community is not spiritual gifts. The truest mark of God’s work in a community is love. Because, unlike the gifts, love never ends.

A church can be gifted and growing, but without love, it has nothing. Love is the mark of spiritual vitality, and love is how people will know we follow Jesus. It is important to cut through the vague ideals of love in our day and get some clarity on what this kind of love looks like in everyday life.

One of the main problems in the Corinthian church was division. They were even dividing over spiritual gifts. So, Paul introduces this metaphor of the human body to illustrate what the church should be like and to show the beauty of membership in the body.