On behalf of Pastor Mark and Grace Driscoll, we want to thank you for listening to this series based on the book of First Corinthians titled Good News for Bad Christians.

In this series from 2007, Pastor Mark is taking us on a 33-week journey through First Corinthians verse by verse.

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Thank you again and enjoy this message from First Corinthians.

Father, we begin by acknowledging that you are a great loving and good God and that you have devised a way to take away our sin and adopt us into your family as your sons and daughters, the church.

And we thank you for sending the Lord Jesus to live in our place, to die in our place, to rise in our place, to take away our sins so that we might be connected to you as Christians and that we might be connected to one another as the church.

And we thank you Holy Spirit for giving us faith, for changing our heart and our mind, for revealing to us the scriptures that you have inspired to be written.

We invite you today to be with us, to change us, to make us more like Jesus that our whole life would be a life of worship.

Responding to who Jesus is and what he has done in a way that is biblical and is pleasing and is acceptable to God.

And so God, we ask that our time would be pleasing to you. We ask that it would be profitable to us and we ask that in Jesus' good men. Amen.

Well as we get going, we find ourselves in first Corinthians where the Apostle Paul has a series of directives for a cool hip, urban, arty church filled with chain smokers, and vestibed drivers, and tattooed indie rockers, and feminist, and charismatic, not jobs.

I know it seems that it has nothing to do with us, but in fact it does.

They are just like us in every single way, and so the things that Paul has to say to them are things that he has to say to us as well, 2000 years later, to help however establish context for you.

Let me give you the overarching story of the Bible so that you have some reference point for this particular section of Scripture.

I'll do it briefly.

The Bible tells us that before there was anything there was God, that God is without beginning or end, He is eternal, He is the one who has not created, He is the one who causes all else to come into being, and God is the beginning and end of all things, He himself being apart from all things, all things coming from Him.

This God exists in a community of Father, Son, and Spirit, we call it the Trinity.

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