SPCK - N T Wright
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Marriage and Divorce
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Marriage and Divorce
by SPCK - N T Wright
Marriage and Divorce 1 Corinthians 7.8-16 Divorce has swept the Western world like a plague. When I was young, nobody I knew, in our street, my school, anywhere, was divorced. There were occasional mentions of marriage breakdown well outside our close family and friends, but it w…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Life Within Marriage
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Life Within Marriage
by SPCK - N T Wright
Life Within Marriage 1 Corinthians 7.1-7 I was staying for a week in the suburbs of an American city where I hadn’t been before. I had some free time lined up, and after a long flight and many hours at a desk I fancied going for a good walk. I asked my host where he would recomme…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - What is the Body For?
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - What is the Body For?
by SPCK - N T Wright
What Is the Body For? 1 Corinthians 6.12-20 I once knew a student who never bothered to buy a screwdriver. He had a couple of knives that he used instead, one larger and one smaller; and most of the things he needed to screw or unscrew he could do quite well with the point of one…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Inheriting God's Kingdom
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Inheriting God's Kingdom
by SPCK - N T Wright
Inheriting God’s Kingdom 1 Corinthians 6.9-11 We stood in line for the ride at the funfair. But as we got closer I saw a sign. This ride was for little people only – for children. Beside the sign was a small wooden archway, and you had to walk through, without stooping, to get to…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Lawsuits in the Church?
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Lawsuits in the Church?
by SPCK - N T Wright
Lawsuits in the Church? 1 Corinthians 6.1-8 The business was just getting going when one of the customers noticed a strange thing. He had begun bringing his car to this particular garage a few months ago, and had believed that it was doing a good job. People in the community seem…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Get Rid of the "Leaven"!
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Get Rid of the "Leaven"!
by SPCK - N T Wright
Get Rid of the “Leaven”! 1 Corinthians 5.6-13 If you’ve ever been in a Jewish home at Passover-time, you’ll know what Paul is talking about in verses 7 and 8. It’s a tradition that’s been kept for more than three thousand years, ever since the Jewish people came out of Egypt at t…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Scandal and Judgment
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Scandal and Judgment
by SPCK - N T Wright
Scandal and Judgment 1 Corinthians 5.1-5 When I was a boy, studying Greek and Latin classics, the texts we were given to study often had bits cut out. There were lines missing from poems, and sometimes entire sections; in one case (in the Roman writer Juvenal, I recall) a whole p…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Puffed Up or Powerful
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Puffed Up or Powerful
by SPCK - N T Wright
Puffed Up or Powerful 1 Corinthians 4.14-21 We all know the difference between talk and power. Imagine you are driving along a road, without worrying too much about how fast you’re going. All of a sudden a large car with flashing lights overtakes you and motions you to pull over.…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Apostles on Display
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Apostles on Display
by SPCK - N T Wright
Apostles on Display 1 Corinthians 4.6-13 We walked down the hill in the bright sunshine. This, our guide explained, is where the Roman generals would come when they returned to the city after winning a great victory. They built massive ‘triumphal arches’, some of which are still …
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Judgment Then Rather Than Now
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Judgment Then Rather Than Now
by SPCK - N T Wright
Judgment Then Rather Than Now 1 Corinthians 4.1-5 I stood in the workshop, barely able to see over the workbench as my father patiently whittled away at a piece of wood. I was fascinated and (as befits an eight-year-old) puzzled. What on earth could he be doing? The work seemed t…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Everything Belongs to You
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Everything Belongs to You
by SPCK - N T Wright
Everything Belongs to You 1 Corinthians 3.18-23 I remember a wise address given at a graduation ceremony by a respected senior professor. (I was present in order to say the opening prayer.) In his address, the great man said many things, and gave a lot of good advice, but the one…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - The Coming Day, the Coming Fire
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - The Coming Day, the Coming Fire
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Coming Day, the Coming Fire 1 Corinthians 3.12-17 I love sightseeing around ancient ruins. Like many historians who have had the good fortune to travel round the ancient world, I have stood in the Temple of Apollo in Corinth, in the synagogue at Capernaum, in the Forum at Rom…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - God's Farm, God's Building
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - God's Farm, God's Building
by SPCK - N T Wright
God’s Farm, God’s Building 1 Corinthians 3.5-11 Was Paul ‘the founder of Christianity’? I found myself embroiled in a debate on that subject a few years ago. From time to time people try to establish a familiar viewpoint: Jesus didn’t really begin Christianity, since he was just …
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Spiritual or Merely Human?
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Spiritual or Merely Human?
by SPCK - N T Wright
Spiritual or Merely Human? 1 Corinthians 2.14-3.4 Once, during the ‘hippy’ era in the late 1960s, I sang and played my guitar in a folk club on the west side of Vancouver. I was there a week, and got to know some of the other regular performers quite well. One was a young man wit…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - God's Strange Wisdom
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - God's Strange Wisdom
by SPCK - N T Wright
God’s Strange Wisdom 1 Corinthians 2.6-13 When my sister celebrated her 21st birthday, she and I were at university, a long way from home. So a cousin of my father’s, who lived nearby, invited the two of us to dinner to celebrate. He and his wife had no children of their own, and…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - The Powerful Message of the Cross
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - The Powerful Message of the Cross
by SPCK - N T Wright
The Powerful Message of the Cross 1 Corinthians 2.1-5 Life is full of mystery. The deepest, richest and most complex theories that science can ever come up with only serve to highlight the fact that there is still a depth of mystery which goes way beyond it all. You can study bio…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - God's Folly
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - God's Folly
by SPCK - N T Wright
God’s Folly 1 Corinthians 1.18-25 On 15 March 44 BC, Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome, a mile or so away from where I am writing these words. His killers were a group of conservative Republicans who thought, with good reason, that Caesar was planning to make himself king of…
Paul for Everyone 1 Corinthians - Beware of Divisions