Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Yesterday in Acts 18, we met the people of the church in Corinth. Paul went there on a missionary

tour and stuck around for 18 months. He likes to check in on them

from time to time and he sends them letters in response to what he hears. Before he wrote First

Corinthians, he wrote them another letter that we haven't found. We call it Zero Corinthians. He

references it in the sexual read tomorrow. Then at some point later, he sent this letter,

First Corinthians, to address some really upsetting problems he'd been hearing about, as well as some questions they had.

Before we jump in, this is your friendly reminder to slow down when you're reading Paul's intros.

They aren't fluff. They are steeped in theology. Okay, here we go.

Paul spends a lot of time in this letter correcting things the Corinthian Church is doing and believing.

It carries the weight of a rebuke.

But he opens with some encouraging reminders before launching into the problem areas.

In one seven through nine, he says that Jesus will sustain them to the end and will make them

guiltless. He says that since God is the one who called them into his family to begin with,

God will be the one to keep them there, because what God initiates, he will sustain, and he will fulfill. When you're about to be confronted with all

your sin, it's nice to be reminded that none of it changes the way God views you. None of it revokes

your status as his beloved child. The first problem Paul addresses today is that the people are

divided over their favorite leaders in the church.

There are some things worth dividing over for sure, but these aren't those things. None of this is about doctrine or theology at all. This is a popularity contest. This is about being part of the

in crowd. Worshiping their teachers is idolatry. Paul isn't the one who died for them. All Paul

does is plant some seeds. He has zero power to make those seeds grow. That's on God. God is the one who gives the growth. He also mentions that his job isn't to baptize people. He's not diminishing the importance of baptism so much as pointing out that it's secondary to preaching the gospel. And that all checks out with what we've mentioned about it not being the act of

baptism that saves a person. Otherwise, Paul would have been adamant about it here. He goes on to say that

...