Beginning

Thankful for God’s grace

1 Paul, called by God’s will to be an apostle of Messiah Jesus, and Sosthenes our brother; ² to God’s assembly at Corinth, made holy in Messiah Jesus, called to be holy, with everyone who calls on the name of our Lord, Messiah Jesus, in every place—their Lord, indeed, as well as ours! ³ Grace to you and peace from God our father and Messiah Jesus the Lord.

⁴ I always thank my God for you, for the grace of God that was given to you in Messiah Jesus. ⁵ You were enriched in him in everything, in every kind of speech and knowledge, ⁶ just as the messianic message was established among you, ⁷ so that you aren’t missing out on any spiritual gift as you wait eagerly for our Lord, Messiah Jesus, to be revealed. ⁸ He will establish you right through to the end, so that you are blameless on the day of our Lord, Messiah Jesus. ⁹ God is faithful! And it is through God that you have been called into the fellowship of his son, Messiah Jesus, our Lord.

Beware of divisions!

¹⁰ Now I must appeal to you, my brothers and sisters, through the name of Messiah Jesus our Lord, that you should all be in agreement, and that there should be no divisions among you. Instead, you should be fully equipped with the same mind and the same opinion.

¹¹ You see, my dear family, Chloe’s people have put me in the picture about you—about the fact that you are having quarrels. ¹² What I’m talking about is this. Each one of you is saying, “I’m with Paul!” “I’m with Apollos!” “I’m with Cephas!” “I’m with the Messiah!”

¹³ Well! Has the Messiah been cut up into pieces? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized into Paul’s name?! ¹⁴ I’m grateful to God that I didn’t baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius, ¹⁵ so that none of you could say that you were baptized into my name. ¹⁶ (All right, I did baptize Stephanas and his household as well. Apart from that, I don’t know if I baptized anybody else.) ¹⁷ This is the point, you see: the Messiah didn’t send me to baptize; he sent me to announce the gospel! Not with words of wisdom, either, otherwise the Messiah’s cross would lose its power.

God’s folly

¹⁸ The word of the cross, you see, is madness to people who are being destroyed. But to us—those who are being saved—it is God’s power. ¹⁹ This is what the Bible says, after all:

²⁰ Where is the wise person? Where is the educated person? Where is the debater of this present age? Don’t you see that God has turned the world’s wisdom into folly? ²¹ This is how it’s happened: in God’s wisdom, the world didn’t know God through wisdom, so it gave God pleasure, through the folly of our proclamation, to save those who believe. ²² Jews look for signs, you see, and Greeks search for wisdom; ²³ but we announce the crucified Messiah, a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles, ²⁴ but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, the Messiah—God’s power and God’s wisdom. ²⁵ God’s folly is wiser than humans, you see, and God’s weakness is stronger than humans.

Boasting in the Lord

²⁶ Think back to your own call, my brothers and sisters. Not many of you were wise in human terms. Not many of you were powerful. Not many were nobly born. ²⁷ But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong; ²⁸ God chose the insignificant and despised things of the world—yes, even things that don’t exist!—to abolish the power of the things that do exist, ²⁹ so that no creature could boast in God’s presence. ³⁰ Who and what you now are is a gift from God in Messiah Jesus, who has become for us God’s wisdom—and righteousness, sanctification and redemption as well; ³¹ so that, as the Bible puts it, “Anyone who boasts should boast in the Lord.”

The powerful message of the cross

2 This is how it was for me, too, my dear family. When I came to you, I didn’t come and proclaim God’s mystery to you by means of a superior style of speaking or wisdom. ² No: I decided to know nothing in my dealings with you except Jesus the Messiah, especially his crucifixion. ³ I came to you in weakness, in great fear and trembling. ⁴ My speech and my proclamation were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in transparent proof brought home powerfully by the spirit, ⁵ so that your faith might not be in human wisdom but in God’s power.

God’s strange wisdom

⁶ We do, however, speak wisdom among the mature. But this isn’t a wisdom of this present world, or of the rulers of this present world—those same rulers who are being done away with. ⁷ No: we speak God’s hidden wisdom in a mystery. This is the wisdom God prepared ahead of time, before the world began, for our glory.

⁸ None of the rulers of this present age knew about this wisdom. If they had, you see, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory. ⁹ But, as the Bible says,

¹⁰ —and that’s what God has revealed to us through the spirit! The spirit, you see, searches everything, yes, even the depths of God. ¹¹ Think of it this way: who knows what is really going on inside a person, except the spirit of the person which is inside them? Well, it’s like that with God. Nobody knows what is going on inside God except God’s spirit. ¹² And we haven’t received the spirit of the world, but the spirit that comes from God, so that we can know the things that have been given to us by God.

¹³ That, then, is what we speak. We don’t use words we’ve been taught by human wisdom, but words we’ve been taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual things to spiritual people.

Spiritual or merely human?

¹⁴ Someone living at the merely human level doesn’t accept the things of God’s spirit. They are foolishness to such people, you see, and they can’t understand them because they need to be discerned spiritually. ¹⁵ But spiritual people discern everything, while nobody else can discern the truth about them! ¹⁶ For “Who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of the Messiah.

3 In my own case, my dear family, I couldn’t speak to you as spiritual people, but as people who were all too obviously merely human, little babies in the Messiah. ² I fed you with milk, not solid food, because you weren’t able to take it—and you still can’t, even now! ³ You’re still determined to live in the old way! Yes, wherever there is jealousy and quarrelling, doesn’t that mean you’re living in the old way, behaving as any merely human being might do? ⁴ When someone says “I’m with Paul!” and someone else says “I’m with Apollos!” are you not mere humans?

God’s farm, God’s building

⁵ So what d’you suppose Apollos actually is? What d’you think Paul is? I’ll tell you: servants, through whom you came to faith, each one as the Lord gave. ⁶ I planted and Apollos watered, but it was God who gave the growth. ⁷ It follows that the person who plants isn’t anything special, and the person who waters isn’t anything special; what matters is God who gives the growth. ⁸ The person who plants and the person who waters are just the same, and each will receive his own reward according to his own work. ⁹ We are God’s fellow workers, you see: you are God’s farm, God’s building.

¹⁰ According to God’s grace, I laid the foundation like a wise master builder, and someone else is building on it. Everyone should take care how they build on it. ¹¹ Nobody can lay any foundation, you see, except the one which is laid, which is Jesus the Messiah!

The coming day, the coming fire

¹² If anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, grass or straw— ¹³ well, everyone’s work will become visible, because the Day will show it up, since it will be revealed in fire. Then the fire will test what sort of work everyone has done. ¹⁴ If the building work that someone has done stands the test, they will receive a reward. ¹⁵ If someone’s work is burned up, they will be punished by bearing the loss; they themselves will be saved, however, but only as though through a fire.

¹⁶ Don’t you see? You are God’s Temple! God’s spirit lives in you! ¹⁷ If anyone destroys God’s Temple, God will destroy them. God’s Temple is holy, you see, and that is precisely what you are.

Everything belongs to you

¹⁸ Don’t let anyone deceive themselves. If anyone among you supposes they are wise in the present age, let them become foolish, so that they can become wise. ¹⁹ The wisdom of this world, you see, is folly with God. This is what the Bible says: “He catches the wise in their trickery.” ²⁰ And again, “The Lord knows the thinking of the wise—and he knows that it’s all a sham!”

²¹ So don’t let anyone boast about mere human beings. For everything belongs to you, ²² whether it’s Paul or Apollos or Cephas, whether it’s the world or life or death, whether it’s the present or the future—everything belongs to you! ²³ And you belong to the Messiah; and the Messiah belongs to God.

Judgment then rather than now

4 This is how we should be thought of: as servants of the Messiah, and household managers for God’s mysteries. ² And this is what follows: the main requirement for a manager is to be trustworthy. ³ Having said that, I regard it as a matter of minimal concern to think that I should be interrogated by you, or indeed by any human court. I don’t even interrogate myself. ⁴ I don’t actually know of anything that stands against me, but that isn’t what vindicates me; it’s the Lord who interrogates me.

⁵ So don’t pass judgment on anything before the time when the Lord comes! He will bring to light the secrets of darkness, and will lay bare the intentions of the heart. Then everyone will receive praise—from God.

Apostles on display

⁶ I have applied all this to myself and Apollos because of you, my dear family, so that you may learn from us, as the saying goes, not to go beyond what the Bible says—so that nobody gets puffed up in favor of one person and against another.

⁷ Who is going to concede that you are special, after all? What have you got that you didn’t receive? Well then, if you received it, why boast as if you didn’t? ⁸ Do you really suppose you’ve already had all the food you need? Do you think you’ve already become rich? Do you think you’ve already been crowned as royalty, leaving us behind? I wish you really were already reigning, so that we could reign alongside you!

⁹ This is how I look at it, you see: God has put us apostles on display at the end of the procession, like people sentenced to death. We have become a public show for the world, for angels and humans alike. ¹⁰ We are fools because of the Messiah, but you are wise in the Messiah! We are weak, but you are strong! You are celebrated, we are nobodies! ¹¹ Yes, right up to the present moment we go hungry and thirsty; we are badly clothed, roughly treated, with no home to call our own. ¹² What’s more, we work hard, doing manual labor. When we are insulted, we give back blessings. When we are persecuted, we put up with it. ¹³ When we are slandered, we speak gently in return. To this day we have become like the rubbish of the world, fit only to be scraped off the plate and thrown away with everything else.

Puffed up or powerful?

¹⁴ I’m not writing this to make you ashamed! I am simply treating you as dear children, and putting you straight. ¹⁵ You’ve got a thousand babysitters in Christ, I know, but you haven’t got many fathers—because I became your father in the Messiah, Jesus, through the gospel.

¹⁶ So let me appeal to you: copy me! ¹⁷ That’s why I have sent Timothy to you; he’s my child in the Lord, and I love him and trust him. He will remind you how I conduct myself in the Messiah Jesus, just as I teach everywhere, in every assembly.

¹⁸ Some people are getting puffed up, as though I wasn’t going to come to you. ¹⁹ But I will come to you quickly, if the Lord wants it that way; and then I’ll find out, not what these puffed-up people are saying, but how powerful they are. ²⁰ The kingdom of God, you see, isn’t about talk—it’s about power. ²¹ What d’you want, then? Shall I come to you with a big stick, or with love, and in a gentle spirit?