We’re continuing to make our way through 1 Corinthians, and this week we’re in 1 Corinthians 6:1-11.  At first glance, it seems like the kind of passage that we tend to just skate over.  The ESV passage title reads, “Lawsuits Against Believers”.  For most of us, we don’t really have much experience with lawsuits between believers.  We tend to chalk it up to a specific problem that the Corinthian church had that we don’t struggle with and blow on through.  But, in reality, we face exactly the same situations that the Corinthians did, and in some ways we mess up in the same ways.

At the heart of this passage is the issue of how Christians settle disputes among themselves.  Clearly, the way in which the Corinthian church handled things was not the way they ought to have handled them.  Paul was shocked at their behavior, and he systematically laid out where they went wrong.  And while the issue of lawsuits might have been the presenting problem, Paul saw a much more serious underlying problem that is at the root of their issues.

Not surprisingly, the problem here in chapter 6 is the same problem that has plagued the Corinthian church in the previous 5 chapters.  They have not understood how the Gospel is supposed to unfold in their lives and transform their interactions with each other.  Each situation that we have examined in our series comes back to the foundational question, “Am I living in light of the Gospel?”.  Come Sunday as we seek to answer that question in this area of our lives.

Hope to see you then!

Rev. Wang