1 Corinthians
1:1-3
Welcome to this series of daily
Reflections on God and Money for Advent. The theme is making lifestyle choices free
from the idolatry of money.
The above passage is the start of
St Paul’s letter to the Christians living in Corinth. The city was a Greek port on an important trade route across the Roman
Empire. It had a reputation for high-minded philosophy, sexual immorality and
financial corruption. The people were known for their wealth and extravagance.
There was a saying in the Empire, ‘Do it like a Corinthian!’, which meant that
the people there knew how to party. It was, in many ways, like cities
today.
St
Paul arrived at Corinth in about 52 AD. As people responded to his message
about Jesus, he started a church and stayed for 18 months or so teaching the
new Christians. Four of five years later, Paul heard about a spiritual decline among
the Christians. His friend, Apollos, visited the city and found the situation
as bad as reported. Paul then ended up with a list of practical issues to
address, some put to him by the church leaders and some by his friends, and he
deals with them in the first of two letters to the church that are preserved
for us in the New Testament.
Paul’s
guidance was not, however, limited to the situation in Corinth. The letter is
also addressed to ‘all those who in every place call upon the name of
our Lord Jesus Christ’. The letter is addressed as much to Christians today as to Paul's original readers living in the Roman Empire. It is addressed to us!
The passage at the start of
today’s Reflection is how Paul begins. It refers to his readers as ‘sanctified
in Christ Jesus, called to be saints’. To be sanctified is to be set apart for
God, dedicated to his service; to be saints is to live as Jesus’ disciples. But
as soon as we get into the substance of the letter, we discover that they were indulgent
of the same immorality and dishonesty as the rest of the city! Facing the same
pressures as people of all religions and none living in cities today, they had yielded and compromised their commitment.
Every religion struggles with the role of money in life and I hope the 'Christian' perspective in these Reflections will prove helpful to people of many backgrounds, religions and philosophies.
Among
the specific issues Paul deals with is whether Christians should eat food that had been sacrificed to idols. Although
this may seem very far removed from the problems facing us, it was in many ways
the cultural equivalent of the problem we face today with money. This is why I
think it is a profitable subject for these Advent Reflections.
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Copyright © All Souls Clubhouse Community Centre & Church and Philip Evans
2013. You are welcome to copy these Reflections for circulation to family and
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Scripture
quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®), copyright
© 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by
permission. All rights reserved.
Handling
money and dealing with debt can be complicated and neither the author nor
anyone else involved in the production of these Reflections is responsible for
any action you take, or fail to take, based on what is written here.
