Excommunication-1 Cor 5:1-13

Will you confront, discipline and expel someone close to you in the church because they are “sinning” ️(1 Cor 5:2, 5, 7, 13)? Can you not waver and judge and pronounce judgment in the church (1 Cor 5:12b-13)?

Do you disregard what the Bible says about moral issues: sex, possesions and the use of violence (1 Cor 5:11)?

• Isn’t bearing with the person “in love” better than expelling them from the church? Wouldn’t they be more likely to repent if they were allowed to stay in the church? Don’t we all sin anyway?
• Would expelling him be imitating Paul (1 Cor 5:3; 4:16)? What is required to exercise discipline in the church (1 Cor 5:4-5)?
• What good would it do to expel him (1 Cor 5:5)? What does it mean to “hand this man over to Satan” (1 Cor 5:5)? Do you believe and embody salvation that includes “the destruction of the flesh” (1 Cor 5:5; Rom 8:13; Gal 5:19-21)?
• What is the consequence of doing nothing/not expelling him (1 Cor 5:6)? What is “the old yeast/old bread” (1 Cor 5:7, 8), which they are to get rid of?
• ** What does “as you really are” (an INDICATIVE) teach you about the command, “Get rid of the old yeast” (an IMPERATIVE)? What does the sacrificed Passover lamb do for you? How do you keep the feast/Festival?
• How do you reconcile “Do not judge” (Mt 7:1), “…judge nothing before the appointed time” (1 Cor 4:5), and “…judge those inside” (1 Cor 5:12)?
• What is Paul’s primary concern? The incestrous man? Or the holiness, integrity and counter-cultural influence of the church (1 Cor 5:2; 3:9, 16)?
• What would Paul say to the church today about sexual and moral issues (1 Cor 5:9, 11; 6:13b, 18, 20; Eph 5:3, 11; Col 3:5; Gal 5:19)? About church discipline and repentance (2 Cor 2:6; 7:10)?
• What is Paul‘s primary emphasis throughout (1 Cor 1:17, 23; 2:2; 15:3-4; Ac 20:24; Phil 3:10; Gal 2:20)?

Expel him is commanded 4 times (1 Cor 4:2, 5, 7, 13). They are to “judge those inside” (1 Cor 5:12). This is how they can “imitate” him and follow his “way of life in Christ” (1 Cor 4:16-17). Paul’s argument addresses the church and its arrogance and not the man himself or his sin. What is at stake is not just a low view of sin, but the church itself. Will they follow Paul’s gospel with its ethical implications? Or will they tolerate sin and thereby destroy God’s temple/church (1 Cor 3:16-17)?

With 1 Cor 5:1 Paul turns to a case of incest that’s either tolerated or condoned in the church. Their arrogance here (1 Cor 5:2, 6) ties in to their arrogance in 1 Cor 4:18-19. Paul challenges the lack of “power” among the arrogant (1 Cor 4:19-20) to expel the incestruous man by “the power of our Lord Jesus” (1 Cor 5:4-5). Primarily Paul reasserts his apostolic authority in the context of those who were arrogant about him not coming to them (1 Cor 4:18), but he will come to find out about their “power” (1 Cor 4:19).

5:1-13; 6:1-11 and 6:12-20 is the crisis of authority that lay behind 1:10-4:21, especially the authority of Paul vs. the “arrogant” who were responsible for leading the church in its new direction, both against Paul and theologically against the gospel. Paul threatened to come with a rod (1 Cor 4:21) if they do not change their direction back toward him and his gospel. This crisis of authority is what holds 1 Corinthians 1-6 together.

The Crisis of [Paul’s] Authority and Gospel (5:1-6:20): A Call for Community Discipline.

1. Incest (5:1-11).  “Drive out the wicked person from among you.”
   1. Paul’s judgment–he must be expelled (5:1-5).
   2. Argument by analogy–the passover (5:6-8)
   3. Correcting a “misunderstanding” (5:9-13)
2. Lawsuits (6:1-11). Legal disputes should be handled within the community.
   1. Shame on the church (6:1-6)
   2. Shame on the plaintiff and warning against the wrongdoer (6:7-11)
3. Prostitutes (6:12-20). “Glorify/Honor God in your body” (1 Cor 6:20). Your body doesn’t belong to you (1 Cor 6:19).

Their problematic conduct compromises holiness in the community. Paul reacts to alarming reports that have reached him [from “Chloe’s people” (1 Cor 1:11) or Stephanas, Fortunatus, and Achaicus (1 Cor 16:17)]. In 1 Cor 5–6 Paul calls them to discipline church members whose actions compromise the holiness of the community. Paul’s primary concern is not the sin of individuals but the health and integrity of the church as a corporate body. Those who commit sexual sins or pursue litigation against their brothers and sisters in the faith are damaging not only to themselves but also to the community; consequently, the community must act to preserve its unity and its identity as the sanctified people of God (1 Cor 1:2).

Strange through the lens of western individualism. Paul thinks of the church–mainly Gentile converts–as belonging to God’s covenant community. They bear the same moral responsibilities given to Israel in Scripture. This emphasis on the church as covenant community may appear strange to those in the traditions of Western individualism. Without Paul’s concern clearly in focus, we’ll find it impossible to comprehend either his specific counsel to them or the urgency with which he presses them.“Drive Out the Wicked Person from among You” (5:1–13). A man in the church is living in a sexual relationship with “his father’s wife”—not his own mother but a subsequent wife of his father. (There’s no way of knowing whether the father had died or divorced this second wife; the Corinthians of course knew the particulars of the matter.) The woman surely was not a member of the church, or she too would be subject to the disciplinary action that Paul orders (2–5, 11–13). Horrified, Paul labels it porneia (sexual misconduct) “of a kind that is not found even among the Gentiles” (1 Cor 5:1). The word translated [by NRSV and most English versions] as “pagans,” is Paul’s normal word for “Gentiles” (i.e., non-Jews). His use of this term here hints that he thinks of the Gentile converts at Corinth as Gentiles no longer (1 Cor 12:2, 13; Gal 3:28). Now that they are in Christ, they belong to the covenant people of God, and their behavior should reflect that new status.Unheard of. In this case, however, the offending church member is not only failing to live up to the standard of holiness to which Christ’s people are called; he is doing something that “even Gentiles” would find reprehensible. Cicero offers a vivid account of a similar case, though—for reasons related to the particular case—he places the moral blame on the woman rather than the man: “And so mother-in-law marries son-in-law, with none to bless, none to sanction the union, and amid nought but general foreboding. Oh! to think of the woman’s sin, unbelievable, unheard of in all experience save for this single instance! To think of her wicked passion, unbridled, untamed! To think that she did not quail, if not before the vengeance of Heaven [Latin vim deorum, “the power of the gods”], or the scandal among men, at least before the night itself with its wedding torches, the threshold of the bridal chamber, her daughter’s bridal bed, or even the walls themselves which had witnessed that other union. The madness of passion broke through and laid low every obstacle: lust triumphed over modesty, wantonness over scruple, madness over sense.” This certainly lends credence to Paul’s claim that Gentiles would find such incestuous alliances objectionable.Paul’s description of the scandal as “his father’s wife,” has its own particular rhetorical force, for it echoes the Scriptural prohibition of such relationships: “Cursed be anyone who lies with his father’s wife” (Dt 27:20; Lev 18:8; 20:11). The incestuous man’s behavior is a direct violation of God’s covenant norms for Israel. This is pertinent to understanding Paul’s directive to the community to expel the offender. But 1st, consider the theological framework behind these instructions.Paul rebukes the whole community for their complicity in the matter: “And you [plural] are arrogant [“puffed up,” the same word as in 1 Cor 4:6, 18]! Should you not rather have mourned, so that he who has done this would have been removed from among you? … Your boasting is not a good thing” (1 Cor 5:2, 6a). Did Paul mean that they are boasting in spite of the immoral man’s conduct or because of it? If the latter, they’d be flaunting their new freedom in Christ by celebrating this man’s particular act of defying conventional mores. This is not far-fetched, for Paul chides them for trumpeting that “all things are lawful for me” (1 Cor 6:12). If the former, on the other hand, they’d be heedlessly boasting in their own spirituality and wisdom while tolerantly ignoring a flagrant moral violation in their midst. Either way, the community has moral responsibility for the conduct of its members and the conduct of the individual members (even private conduct between “consenting adults”) affects the whole community. Later Paul explains this truth by using the image of the “body of Christ”: “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor 12:26).

Corporate responsibility has deep roots in Scripture. One man Achan brought the Lord’s disfavor upon all Israel by his secretly claiming forbidden booty from the destroyed city of Jericho (Joshua 7). This is not an isolated case of such theological thinking. The Holiness Code of Leviticus stipulates that those who commit various sexual offenses must be “cut off from their people”; otherwise the land will “vomit out” the people of Israel as a whole (Lev 18:24–30; 20:22–24). The covenant blessings and curses of Dt 28 apply not just to the fate of individuals who obey or disobey the Law but to the nation as a whole. Thus, Ezra “mourned” over the faithlessness of the exiles (Ezra 10:6; the LXX uses the same verb that Paul employs when he says they should have mourned over the offense in their midst [1 Cor. 5:2]) and why the great prayers of national confession in Ezra 9:6–15; Nehemiah 9:6–37; and Daniel 9:4–19 all assume the reality of corporate guilt and the hope of corporate redemption. Paul understands that the church belongs to this scriptural tradition.

“No man is an island,” as the poet John Donne perceived; all in Christ’s church are bound together closely, responsible for one another, and profoundly affected by one another’s actions. Paul pictures this reality by using the proverbial image (Gal 5:9; Mk 8:15; Mt 16:6, 11–12; Lk 12:1) of the corrupting influence of leaven: “Do you not know that a little leaven [not yeast,’ as in NRSV and NIV] leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump” (1 Cor 5:6b-7). The explains Paul’s directive of expulsion: Allowing the offender to remain in the church will contaminate the whole community, which is conceived as a single lump of dough. When Paul says to clean out the old leaven, he’s not telling the individuals at Corinth to clean up their individual lives; rather, he is repeating in symbolic language the instruction of vs. 2–5 to purify the community by expelling the offender.

The heart of Israel’s story is the celebration of the Passover commemorating the Israelites’ liberation from bondage in Egypt. Paul’s Corinthian readers should understand this and identify metaphorically with Israel. Christ–the Passover lamb–has already been sacrificed (Exo 12:3–7), so they should search out and remove all “leaven” (symbolizing the wrongdoer) from their household (Exo 12:15). The function of the Passover lamb is not a sacrifice to atone for sin; rather, it symbolizes the setting apart of Israel as a distinct people delivered from slavery by God’s power. “And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this observance?’ you shall say, ‘It is the passover sacrifice to the Lord, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses’ ” (Exo 12:26–27). The blood of the lamb on the doorposts of the houses marks Israel out as a distinct people under God’s protection, spared from the power of destruction at work in the world outside. Thus, the blood of Christ marks the Corinthians as a distinct people.5:3-5 is clear: The’re to gather as a community and take solemn action to exclude the incestuous man from the church. While they have been ignoring the problem, Paul has “already pronounced judgment,” and he expects them to follow suit (1 Cor 4:16). For the expulsion, the community is to assemble—probably for worship—and act in the realm of the Spirit “with the power of our Lord Jesus.” Paul says that his own spirit will be present with them. In some mysterious way his spirit will be there with the community, efficaciously participating in their solemn action. Paul had strong mystical experiences and convictions, even though he wasn’t inclined to talk much about them. He was “caught up to the third heaven” (2 Cor 12:2), so he could be transported “in spirit” from Ephesus (1 Cor 16:8) to Corinth to take part in some mysterious but real way in the church’s crucial disciplinary action.

Paul’s major point is that the gathered community is invested with the power of the risen Jesus to declare this offender no longer a member of the covenant community. This sort of community action is akin to Mt 18:15–20: After due attempts to call the sinful member to repentance, the community is expel him or her (Tit 3:10). The community is given the authority to “bind and loose,” i.e. to exercise community discipline, because Jesus himself is present where his people are present in his name (Mt 18:20). If this sounds spooky to Christians in the 21st century, note that this letter is not addressed to post-Enlightenment rationalists, but to a community that understands itself as living and moving in a world where the power of the Spirit was a daily experienced reality. “…hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit [literally, “the spirit”] might be saved in the day of the Lord” (1 Cor 5:5; an echo of Job 2:4–6 in which God gives Job over to the power of Satan to “touch his bone and flesh,” the situation is not closely parallel). Job is not being disciplined for sin, and there’s no sense in which Job’s suffering either purifies the community or promotes his own salvation. 3 major problems to resolve in interpreting Paul’s command. What does it mean to “hand this man over to Satan?” Does “flesh” refer to the literal physical body or the “sinful nature” (NIV) of the man? And is the purpose of the action remedial, hoping to induce the man’s repentance? These problems interlock with one another.The best explanation of the “handing over to Satan” is suggested by the Passover metaphor (5:6–8). By excluding the incestuous man from the community, the church places him outside of God’s redemptive protection. He’s no longer inside the house [“God’s building” (1 Cor 3:9)] whose doorposts are covered by the blood of Jesus. He is hung out to dry in the realm of Satan [“the god of this world” (2 Cor 4:4)], exposed to the destructive powers of the world [“the destroyer” (Exo 12:23)]. Paul has said of those outside the church as “those who are being destroyed” (1 Cor 1:18). Paul didn’t expect them to explicitly curse the man. Rather, delivering him to Satan is a vivid metaphor for the effect of explusion from the church (1 Tim 1:20). In 2 Thes 2:9–10 Paul speaks of the powerful working of Satan to deceive “those who are being destroyed” (1 Cor 1:18).

What did Paul expect as the concrete result of this consignment to Satan? Did he expect the physical suffering and death of the excommunicated offender? Or does “destruction of the flesh” refer to a process of purifying him of his fleshly desires, perhaps through shaming him into repentance? Will this “destruction”–whatever it entails–somehow bring about the man’s eschatological salvation? In 1 Cor, the verb “save” refers to the eschatogical deliverance of human beings (1 Cor 1:18; 1:21; 3:15; 7:16; 9:22; 10:33; 15:2). So, the community’s discipline may somehow lead to the repentance and restoration of the sinner. “The flesh” (1 Cor 3:3; Rom 7:5, 18, 25; 8:3–8; Gal 5:13, 19, 24) would refer to the rebellious human nature opposed to God. The “destruction of the flesh,” then, is interpreted in light of Gal 5:24: “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” Paul hopes that the community’s censure and expulsion of the incestuous man will lead to this result: his fleshly passions and desires will be put to death. Thus, the eschatological fate of this man, after undergoing discipline and repentance, will be salvation.2 Cor 2:5–11 [a case different from that of the incestuous man] shows Paul’s belief that stern community discipline can lead to transformation and reintegration into the life of the community: “This punishment by the majority is enough for such a person; so now instead you should forgive and console him, so that he may not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow.” (“Godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation” (2 Cor 7:10).] All major NT passages on community discipline envision forgiveness and reconciliation as the ultimate goal of the community’s action. Mt 18:15–20 is followed by the teaching on forgiveness in Mt 18:21–35 (Gal. 6:1). In all cases, forgiveness doesn’t take the place of discipline; rather, it follows clear community discipline and authentic repentance.5:6–8. Paul returns the focus to the community’s spiritual state. Rather than boasting as they do (1 Cor 4:7), they should recognize where they really stand in the unfolding story of God’s redemptive action. Because they are being liberated from captivity through the death of Jesus, they should act like Israel on the night of Passover: clean out the old leaven and gather together for the feast that celebrates their deliverance. Paul may be foreshadowing the discussion of the Lord’s Supper (11:17–34), since that also deals with the theme of judgment in the community (11:27–32). In the present context, however, the Passover imagery is not primarily eucharistic; rather, it points to the necessity of community discipline and purity.5:9–13 deals with insiders and outsiders. Paul is not calling for them to withdraw from contact with their neighbors [cf. the Qumran covenanters withdrawing to live in the wilderness near the Dead Sea to avoid defilement]. The holiness of the church is a matter of its internal discipline and integrity, not of its separateness from the world. This point may have been misunderstood by them. Thus, Paul writes to clarify what he had said in an earlier letter (lost to us, though some suggested that a fragment of it might be in 2 Cor 6:14–7:1). When Paul had told them “not to associate with sexually immoral persons” (1 Cor 5:9; pornoi, cf. porneia 1 Cor 5:1), he meant members of the community, not outsiders. 1 Cor 5:10 is a wry commentary on the moral condition of society: In order to avoid contact with pornoi and the greedy and robbers and idolaters, you would have to leave the world altogether! (Rom 1:18–32). Paul regards this as self-evidently ridiculous, for his vision for the church is not isolationist. Churches are thriving cities, and must truly live as a prophetic counterculture in an unbelieving world, rather than become indistinguishable from the world around it. Thus, he instructs them “not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother or sister” if that person is discrediting the “family” name through immoral conduct. They are to “not even eat with such a one” (1 Cor 5:11), for table fellowship with nominal Christians living immorally would seriously blur the identity of the church as God’s holy people. Paul has no objection to eating with sinners out in the world. Rather, he is concerned about the discipline and integrity of the church as an alternative society in a world of idolatry and misconduct. God will judge the outsiders; the responsibility of the church is to exercise discipline over its own (1 Cor 5:12–13a).

Sins requiring exclusion from church fellowship (1 Cor 5:11) looks like a generic catalogue of vices. But 6 items in Paul’s list are closely correlated with 6 passages in Dt. that call for the penalty of death, followed by the exact exclusion formula that Paul quotes in 1 Cor 5:13b: “So you shall drive out the evil person from among you.” (Brian Rosner in Paul, Scripture and Ethics.) If Paul is implicitly following the outline of these Deuteronomic exclusion texts, he has moved sexual immorality to the beginning of the list because of their immediate problem. “Greedy” in Paul’s list, is placed 2nd because it prefigures the next issue: taking one another to court over financial matters (6:1-11). The last 4 items in the list follow the canonical order of occurrence in Dt. The actual terminology in Paul’s vice list is not derived directly from Dt, but the correspondences are suggestive.Paul translates and transfers the basic disciplinary norms of Israel’s covenant community over to the church. The command, “Drive out the evil person from among you” (1 Cor 5:13) is presented as spoken directly to them. [“Just as God told Israel to drive out the evil person, so should you.”] Paul in effect addresses the Gentile Corinthians as Israel. God’s word to Israel has become God’s word directly to them. The Bible command Paul closes the chapter in his treatment of incest and displays the fundamental theological basis for his directions to them. Sinful behavior of this sort CANNOT be allowed to corrupt God’s elect covenant community.

REFLECTIONS. It’s a confrontational way of dealing with an embarrassing local incident. For that reason, the Revised Common Lectionary omits it entirely except for a snippet (6b-8) taken out of context to be read on Easter evening. No one who hears the Scripture only through the lectionary readings would ever learn that Paul had castigated the Corinthian church for tolerating an incestuous member in their midst. How is this a word for Christians at the end of the 21st century?

1. It calls the church to claim its distinct identity as a people with a character and mission, a counter–cultural prophetic community, within which, the members take active responsibility for one another’s lives and spiritual wholeness. 1 Cor 5 shows a vision of the church NOT as one voluntary association among many, but as the covenant people of God–to be inside this community is to find life, and to be outside is to be in the realm of death. Cyprian’s dictum that there is no salvation outside the church—not because God pronounces damnation on non-Christians, but because, in the midst of a self-destructive and perishing world, ultimate wholeness is found only in the community rescued by God through Christ. To abandon such a community—or to be expelled from it—is like jumping ship, or being thrown overboard, in the midst of a storm. The church must recover its lively sense of vocation as a people set apart for God’s service and living in a way that exemplifies fidelity and grace (Mt 5:13–16; 1 Pet 2:9–10).
2. Discipline is necessary in such a community. This is the most fundamental challenge of 1 Cor 5 to the church today. Churches in the intensely private and individualistic ethos of Western culture find Paul’s call for corporate accountability disturbing. Our beloved canon within the canon is Mt 7:1: “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.” It’s misinterpreted to mean, “I won’t judge you if you won’t judge me. (This actually means, “Do not harbor private judgment against your neighbor so that you may not be judged ultimately by God”) Mt 7:1 is a warning against hypocritical self–righteousness, but it does not in any way preclude the church’s corporate responsibility, as sketched in 1 Cor 5, for disciplining members who flagrantly violate the will of the God for the community. The church that rarely exercises disciplinary function is unfaithful. Our failure to do so is often justified in the name of enlightened tolerance of differences, but in fact “tolerance” can become a euphemism for indifference and lack of moral courage.
3. Recently the church begun to acknowledge instances of sexual abuse of women and children by church leaders and members. 1 Cor 5 encourages us to name such violations and exercise swift and severe discipline upon the offenders. To fail to do so is to be complicit in a conspiracy of silence. We ought to mourn and remove the offender from our midst, hoping, as Paul did, that our disciplinary actions might have a transforming and healing effect for the offender. No healing is possible at all without clear public confrontation of the offense. We delude ourselves into believing that the “caring” thing to do is to be infinitely nonjudgmental and inclusive. This is a demonic lie, for it allows terrible cancerous abuses to continue unchecked in the community. Do we not know that a little cancer corrupts the whole body? Surgery is necessary; clean out the cancer so that the body may be whole.
4. We should not limit our concern to sexual offenses against the community. 5 of Paul’s 6 examples of sins that require community exclusion (1 Cor 5:11) have nothing to do with sex. It will be a great day when the church finds the moral courage also to confront and discipline the greedy, idolaters, and perpetrators of violence.
5. The church exercising disciplinary authority is a community with spiritual power, “the power of our Lord Jesus” (1 Cor 5:4). There is a self-perpetuating feedback loop between our failure to discipline our communities and our timidity about the life and manifestations of the Holy Spirit in our midst. Take seriously the promise of Jesus’ actual presence in our assemblies (Mt 18:20), and follow his teaching about how to deal with sinners in our midst (Mt 18:15–19). It’s not clear if Paul even knew about this teaching of Jesus—he does not allude to it—but his conviction about the presence of the Lord in the church was sufficient to authorize his insistence on community discipline.
6. The Passover image suggests that we must learn or relearn to understand our identity as heirs of the legacy of Israel. We “celebrate the feast” rightly only if we understand what this feast meant and means to the Jewish people who observe the Passover in commemoration of their liberation from bondage in Egypt (Exo 12). (Christian congregations should seek to enter mutually respectful dialogue with their Jewish neighbors and to learn all we can about the roots of our common tradition.) The Passover festival has nothing to do with atonement for sin and everything to do with deliverance from the powers of oppression. This fact has wide-ranging implications for the way we think about Christology and about our own communal identity. In the church we are protected from destruction by Christ’s death, set free from the power that held us captive, and sent out on a journey toward a promise. Paul does not develop all these implications of his metaphor here in 1 Corinthians 5:6–8, but they lie waiting to be explored in our theological reflection. The one implication that Paul does develop is that the church must be distinguished from its destructive cultural environment, so that those who disobey God’s commands must be placed outside the protective household of faith.
7. Paul treats Deuteronomy as a word spoken to the church. They didn’t understand themselves to be either addressed by or bound to Scripture. Paul had to teach them not to go “beyond what is written” (1 Cor 4:6) because they were so self–assured in their wisdom that they believed themselves to be above and beyond the limitations and norms of God’s written word to Israel. The immoral man either didn’t know or didn’t care that Deuteronomy forbids a man to “lie with his father’s wife” (Dt 27:20) or to marry her (Dt 22:30). His own experience of freedom in Christ assured him that he was either right or of no moral significance. Old commandments in the Bible and moral standards of his own Greco-Roman culture meant nothing to him, for “in the name of Jesus” he had transcended such fleshly hangups. Such an attitude easily arises in the context of the hybrid Christian-Cynic/Stoic “wisdom” that was flourishing in Corinth. It also explains why some of them might have been “boasting” about this affair, celebrating the transgressor as a hero of Christian freedom. But Paul punctures this puffed-up philosophical-theological speculation. He insists that with respect to the scriptural moral norms, the rules of the game have not changed. Deuteronomy still speaks—as it was designed to do (Dt 26)—to subsequent generations of the people of God and still calls them to walk in his ways and obey him. Paul makes this point by placing it at the climax (1 Cor 5:13b)–a direct quotation from Dt 22:21 that addresses them as God’s covenant people and commands them to act to preserve the integrity of their covenant relationship to him: “Drive out the evil person from among you.”

How does all this pertain to us? Today, within the church people claim that their enlightenment or wisdom sets them free as Christians to disregard Bible teachings and tradition on moral issues (sexual conduct and also possessions and the use of violence). They boast in their liberated transgression of what they regard as outmoded norms. What would Paul say to the church today? Should we not mourn? Does not Scripture continue to speak directly to us?

Reference:

1. Richard B. Hays. First Corinthians. Interpretation. A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. 1997.
2. Gordon D. Fee. First Corinthians. The New International Commentary on the NT. 1987.
3. Richard B. Hays. The Moral Vision of the N.T. A Contemporary Introduction to N.T. Ethics. 1996.

Sermon Divisions:

1. 7/12/20: Always Thank God (1:1-9) [1 Cor 1:4].  Cosmic Epic Calling [1 Cor 1:2].
2. 7/19/20: The Devil Divides, God Unites (1:10-17) [1 Cor 1:10]. All Agree. No Divisions. Perfect Unity.
3. 7/26/20: The Cross—God‘s Way—is Dumb (1:18-25) [1 Cor 1:18]. The Cross Stumbles. The Cross is like a Cop Out. Foolish Cross.
4. 8/2/20: What You Were, Who Christ Is (1:26-31) [1 Cor 1:26, 30]. The Necessity of Lack. No Boasting  [1 Cor 1:31].
5. 8/9/20: Nothing but Jesus (2:1-5) [1 Cor 2:2].
6. 8/16/20: Wise vs. Stupid (2:6-16) [1 Cor 2:6]. True Wisdom is Only for the Mature. The Mind of Christ [1 Cor 2:16].
7. 8/23/20: You‘re NOT Spiritual (3:1-4) [1 Cor 3:1].  Spiritual, Yet Not Spiritual.
8. 8/30/20: Merely Servants (3:5-9) [1 Cor 3:5]. Field Laborers.
9. 9/6/20: Build with Care or Be Destroyed (3:10-15, 16-17) [1 Cor 3:10-11]. God’s Temple.
10. 9/13/20: Deceived by Wisdom (3:18-23). All Belongs to Christ and God. Wisdom doesn’t boast.
11. 9/20/20: When You Are Judged (4:1-5) [1 Cor 4:4]. Go Ahead…Judge Me!  Judged Only by God; Accountable Only to God.  Judging Others Blinds You.
12. 9/27/20: When You Are Scum (4:6-13) [1 Cor 4:13]. Become Scum. Puffed up Corinthians and Suffering Apostle amid Others’ Boasting.
13. 10/4/20: Imitate Me (4:14-21) [1 Cor 4:19]. Fatherly Admonition. Final Warning to Boasters. Fatherly Admonition to Paul’s Corinthian Children.
14. 10/11/20: Expel the Wicked Man (5:1-13) [1 Cor 5:13]. Drive out the wicked person from among you.
15. 10/18/20: You Were Washed/Cleansed in the Name (6:1-11) [1 Cor 6:11]. You will Judge the World [1 Cor 6:2]. I Say this to shame you [1 Cor 6:5].
16. 10/25/20: Your Body is for God (6:12-20) [1 Cor 6:13]. Glorify God with Your Body.
17. 11/1/20; 11/8/20; 11/15/20: Marriage, Divorce, Sex and Singleness (7:1-40) Wives, Women, WL Wise Men.