Posts Tagged ‘1 Corinthians’
Read Matthew 7:1-6 and do the following exercises:
- Perhaps more than anything else, Christians are known in our culture for being judgmental and hypocritical – two of the very things Jesus condemns in this passages. Why do you think that is?
- All of Chapter 6 could be summed up with the words “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (6:33). How does Jesus’ teaching about seeking God above all else provide a logical foundation for being the kind of people that don’t judge?
- Read Romans Chapter 14 and 1 Corinthians Chapter 5. What are the similarities with Jesus’ words? What are the tensions? How can we reconcile the tensions between Jesus and Paul’s words in Matt 6/Rom 14 on the one hand and Paul’s words in 1 Cor 5 on the other? How do we know when it is and isn’t appropriate to judge?
- Take some time to write out the ways you tend to judge others inappropriately. How can “seeking God’s kingdom first” help you let go of these issues?
The realization that Jesus “baptism” was actually an explicit instruction about how to make disciples should lead us to an inevitable conclusion: Human transformation cannot occur in isolation. We must be immersed in a life permeated with God’s work, and because God most often does his work through and among people, the only way to be “baptized” in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is to live in and among a community of other Jesus-followers.
We first see this truth most strikingly in Jesus’ own ministry, where students were folded into the life of a larger community that was actively seeking transformation of themselves and the world around them. Paul also exhorts us to radically commit ourselves to the “body” of Christ (Rom 12; 1 Cor 1; Eph 4), his vivid metaphor for the community of believers.
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