Welcome back to the third episode of our study of 1 Corinthians in Series One. I hope that many of you will have listened to the first two episodes, so that you can get a feel of what Paul is saying, as he is developing his arguments here and explaining the way he is going to help the church in Corinth.

Recap and Background

Corinth was a church that Paul loved very much, but a church that was struggling. There were many problems in the church. This started with division into different factions, and that was what Paul explained in our first episode. Then in the second episode, we looked at Paul drawing the attention of the church back to the fact that whatever their problems were, they were joined together by being born again into the same Kingdom through the same gospel, the same power of Jesus. This is something we should always remember. Sometimes we feel in tension with other Christians, we feel in conflict with them, but if they are true believers, we are still part of the same broad Christian family. That is something that Paul wanted to emphasise.

When he came to Corinth to preach the gospel, he didn’t come with a sense of confidence and power and authority. He came with weakness, fear and trembling. It was very costly for Paul to preach the gospel wherever he went. Although he was excited by the fact that people believed and joined church communities; there was always plenty of opposition, and sometimes it was very forceful opposition - sometimes it led to violence, or imprisonment; sometimes he got beaten and sometimes he came close to losing his life. He bore on his body the marks of injuries that he had experienced for preaching the gospel, which he mentions in other places in his writings. But in the last episode, we saw Paul’s deep and passionate conviction to preach the gospel in all circumstances. So, he came to Corinth and even though it was an unpromising place to start a church, he formed the church community during an eighteen-month period. There were many people who were saved.

The Person of the Holy Spirit

In this third episode, Paul introduces to us another very important dimension of his understanding of the work of God - the person of the Holy Spirit. This issue will be very important throughout this letter, notably when he talks about public worship between chapters 11 and 14, and when he talks about the church being the temple of the Holy Spirit, and in other places the individual being the temple of the Holy Spirit. He is introducing us to the fact that it is not just the preaching of the gospel that matters; it is the fact that God comes and lives in our lives. What is he doing in our lives once we have come to believe? This is something that he is going to explore in this episode.

“We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that’s been hidden, and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written: ’What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived’ - the things God has prepared for those who love him – these are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit.”

1 Corinthians 2:6-10a, NIV

Paul introduces the Spirit, using the name of Holy Spirit about ten times. 

God’s Big Plan

The Spirit makes known to us not just our salvation, but God’s big plan, which Paul describes in verse 7 as God’s ‘wisdom’ - a ‘mystery’ that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. The word ‘mystery’ is very important. Paul uses the word quite often, and it describes something that was previously hidden, but is now revealed. For example, in Romans 16: 25 and 26, he says,

“Now to him is able to establish you in accordance with my gospel, the message I proclaim about Jesus Christ, in keeping with the revelation of the mystery hidden for long ages past, but now revealed and made known through the prophetic writings by the command of the eternal God, so that all the Gentiles might come to the obedience that comes from faith.”

Romans 16:25-26, NIV

In the past, God had a plan that wasn’t fully revealed; God has had a plan for a long time, but now it is all in the open; everybody can see what the plan is because it is all about Jesus. God had been preparing the way for Jesus’ coming for a long time. We can find the beginning of this plan very clearly in Genesis 12. Paul would have spoken about this at length to the Corinthians when he was with them face to face. In Genesis 12, we see a remarkable story. God wanted to save the nations of the world because they had all fallen into sin. He decided to use an individual person as the foundation and the beginning of this process. That person’s name was Abraham and his wife, Sarah. The ‘mystery’ is in these words that God said to Abraham thousands of years before Paul wrote to the Corinthians.

“I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you. and whoever curses you, I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

Genesis 12:2-3, NIV

There are three things here that God promised to Abraham – ‘a name’ meaning a son, that Abraham’s name would continue. That special son was Isaac, who came miraculously some years later. God then promised Abraham that Isaac and his descendants would become a nation, and that nation are the Jewish people. In that moment God was promising to Abraham that a race - the Jewish people - were going to be gathered together as a special people for God’s purposes, and they would be the descendants of Abraham. From our point of view, the significance of this lies at the end of this passage where God says, ‘and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’ The purpose of that single race, the Jewish people, is to give something to the rest of the world - to every other ethnic group, to every tribe and race in Africa, India, China, Latin America, Europe, and everywhere in the world. Abraham had no idea exactly what that meant. Over the centuries, prophecies came, and it became clearer and clearer that the gift that was going to be given to the other nations of the world, by the Jewish people, was a person, and that person was the Jewish Messiah, and that Jewish Messiah was Jesus. Jesus gave a gift to the world through his death and resurrection, which we spoke about in the last episode.

God’s ‘Mystery’

That didn’t become fully clear for 2000 years or more - from the time of Abraham up until the time of Jesus and the time of Paul. But suddenly it becomes clear: God had a plan a long time ago, and only when Jesus came was it clear. This is the moment that the Jews are going to make a gift to the world. The gift of a person, the Messiah and the salvation that he brought; all peoples of the earth will be blessed. They will be blessed because they will experience salvation. The Corinthians were amongst the first people who were experiencing that incredible blessing. It was a mystery.

An example of what we might describe as a ‘mystery’ could be to imagine a man who had a business, and he had two sons. They are twins. At the age of 11, when they were starting to work in the business, he told them he had written a will for both of them. The will would be opened on his death but in order to help them plan for the future, when they are 18, he would open it with them, if he was still alive. Then they would know what was going to happen in the future: who was going to have the house; who was going to have the land; who was going to have the business; how it was all going to be done. Between the ages of 11 and 18, there was a ‘mystery’ that had already been decided but they didn’t know what it was. Then, when they come to the age of 18, they open the will and they realise that one boy is going to receive the house and the land, and the other boy is going to receive the business when the father dies. In the same way with the gospel, the Jews didn’t really understand what it was that they were preparing for. They had a few hints and prophecies, and they began to gather the picture. But it was only when Jesus came that suddenly it all became clear: this is the time, this is the moment, this is the gift and now it is for the nations of the world.

Paul is very conscious of this, because when Christ met him on the Damascus road, he called him not particularly to go to the Jewish people, but to go to the other nations that we generally call ‘Gentiles’ in the New Testament. Paul spent the rest of his life travelling further and further away from his homeland. At the time of writing here, Corinth is the furthest place that Paul has been away from his homeland by road, several thousand kilometres away from his homeland - by sea, a journey of two weeks, with coastal trading ships going along from port to port, to get from where he was back to Judea, which was his homeland at that time.

Holy Spirit Working in Our Lives

The Holy Spirit keeps revealing more of God’s plan to us after we have been saved. We come to understand the mystery of what has been going on throughout history and God’s salvation purposes, but also the Holy Spirit works in our lives as believers. Paul wants people to understand that the Holy Spirit is the living presence of God in us, from the moment that we are born again all the way through our lives and he is constantly making more things understood to us. When we first become Christians, we don’t really understand very much, do we? We just know we need to be saved. Jesus has died for us. We repent of our sins; we believe, perhaps we are baptised at that time. We are excited. But the work of the Holy Spirit doesn’t end there. Paul says, ‘we speak wisdom to the mature’, to the people who have gone past just being believers. Now they are wanting to deepen their faith. Paul emphasises that the Holy Spirit will continually teach you things, all the way through your Christian life. If you have been a Christian for many years, you will have had this experience - you begin to understand things more clearly. Such things as our eternal future. When we are saved, initially we are more concerned about the present. We feel troubled by our sin but then we begin to understand our body is going to be raised from the dead. There is an eternal future a new - a heaven and a new earth. We begin to understand things like the importance of the local church. Many people who are new believers haven’t really thought too much about the local church. They are just thinking about themselves but the Holy Spirit will always lead us towards understanding that it is very important to gather together, to be committed in your local church, to build up that family together. Maybe the Holy Spirit will teach you as time goes on what your particular ministry is, or how you can contribute to the church. When you are a new believer, you don’t necessarily have any particular contribution; you don’t know what it is. But you will have had the experience that you feel a sense of calling - an inner sense – ‘I want to be involved with the children’, ‘I want to be involved in spreading the gospel’, ‘I want to be involved in worship and music because God has given me a good voice to sing.’ There are many things that you might sense that you are called to do, and Paul’s point here is that the Holy Spirit is working in your life all the time to help you understand what you should be doing at this particular point in your life, and it will change during your life.

The Person of the Holy Spirit

“The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words. The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, ’Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”

1 Corinthians 2:10b-16, NIV

‘We have the mind of Christ’. We begin to think more closely according to God’s will for us. Our thinking changes. Why does our thinking change? Because of the work of the Holy Spirit. Look how many times in that passage the Spirit is named. It is the work of the Spirit.

Some people view the Spirit of God as just a power - perhaps an invisible power like wind is an invisible power, or electricity - a power that we respect. When the wind gets up, we are concerned. We close the doors; we check our houses and our properties. We respect electricity. We know that people can be killed by electricity if there is a fault. But the Holy Spirit is not like these forces. There is a big difference - the Holy Spirit is a person, not just a force. Paul is constantly encouraging mature Christians to think of the Holy Spirit not just as power to do things, but as God’s person living within them, communicating personally to them. That is what I want to encourage you to think about in this episode. That is what the Corinthians were failing to do sufficiently; they were not listening to the voice of the Holy Spirit within them. Paul is quite clear that the Holy Spirit not only leads us to salvation, but actually changes our life, creates fruitfulness in our lives, and shows us the things that we should do. The Holy Spirit will show us how to deal with practical problems. Many of us face difficult decisions and practical problems. How do we deal with domestic violence going on in our household, as a Christian family? How do we deal with a corrupt government official who won’t give you the government documents without a bribe? How do we deal with a situation where there are gangs on the streets, in our towns and cities? How do we deal with the difference between extreme poverty and extreme riches in our church community? How do we deal with having wisdom to parent our children? There are so many questions where we need God’s help and God’s wisdom. Paul has a view that the Holy Spirit will assist us if we invite him to do so, so that we can have the mind of Christ to know what it is that we should be doing at any particular stage in our lives.

Reflections

Paul wanted Christians to be mature - to have stability and wisdom in their Christian life. I hope that is your goal. In fact, it probably is your goal, otherwise you wouldn’t be listening to this because we are on this journey together, aren’t we? Some Christians never really develop from just being saved. They carry on with much of their traditional way of thinking and doing things, without allowing the Holy Spirit into their lives.

How do we connect with the Holy Spirit on a regular basis? Set aside a time to pray where you are quiet. Invite the Holy Spirit to fill your life and read the Bible carefully. That is what it is there for. The Bible is the primary means by which God communicates his will to us. Very often, when we read the scriptures, the Holy Spirit connects what is written in the text with our lives; we see the connection and we realise what we must do. Read the Bible carefully and regularly.

Worship regularly in your local church. Be active in your local church and discuss issues of guidance that you have with your pastor, or a Christian that you respect. In that way, you will enable the Holy Spirit to guide you through the complex and challenging issues of your life. You can become what Paul describes as mature, and you can have what Paul describes as ‘the mind of Christ’ - being able to think correctly about how to live your lives. This is something the Corinthians were really struggling to do.