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Sep 07, 2025

The Saints We Are & Aren't

Preacher: John Repsold

Series: 1 Corinthians

Category: New Testament

Keywords: identity, holiness, position, calling, passion, apostles, corinth

Summary:

How do you deal with a bunch of God's people whose lives are really still pretty messy? Paul does that with the Corinthian church by starting with the calling of God upon both his life and theirs. How we perceive ourselves determines SO much. This message calls us to live into God's call above all else.

Detail:

The Saints We Are…& Aren’t

Series in 1 Corinthians

September 7, 2025

Fellowship Question:  Share with someone about something or someone that helped you discover who God has uniquely made you to be.

INTRO:  Heading into a new series in the book of 1st Corinthians.

When Sandy & I were in Bible College together, they would start your college career by giving you a test to see the level of your biblical knowledge upon entering the college…and then the same test when you graduated.  (I’m hoping I improved!)  So how about we do a little pre-course quiz on the book we’re going to be studying for several months?  I’ll make it easy.  I’ll structure the exam such that you have a 50-50 statistical probability of getting each question right, no matter what you answer.  Every question will be true/false or a/b.  Ready?

  1. Paul visited Corinth on his first missionary journey? (F—2nd)
  2. Paul spent almost 3 years living in Corinth establishing the church (F—18 mo., Acts 18:11)
  3. The city of Corinth in Paul’s day was less than 100 years old. (It had been completely wiped out by the Romans about 2 centuries earlier and the current city was now less than 100 years old. T—wiped out in 146 B.C, inhabitants enslaved.; reestablished by Julias Caesar in 44 B.C.)
  4. Corinth had a reputation as an immoral city. (T—The ancient playwright, Aristophanes, coined the verb korinthiazesthai, meaning “to fornicate.”  But in Paul’s day, it was probably no worse or better than most pagan Roman cities.)
  5. Corinth was famous for which athletic games: ) the Olympic games, or b.) the Isthmian games? (B)
  6. Corinth was a port city. (F—it sits between 2 port cities, Cenchreae and Lechaeum) on the isthmus of Corinth.  Map)
  7. There is currently a canal connecting those two ports. (T—started by Nero in 67 A.D., it was actually completed in 1893 and is just short of 4 miles long.  Smaller ships were previously hauled overland by a trolly system.)
  8. 1st Corinthians was Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth? (F—1 Cor. 5:9 tells us there was at least 1 previous letter.)
  9. 1 Corinthians focuses more on church challenges than Christian theology? (T—while it contains doctrine, it is primarily a letter addressed to particular problem issues in the church—divisions, liberty, immorality, marriage, the Lord’s Supper, lawsuits, proper use of spiritual gifts, false teaching on the resurrection, stewardship.)
  10. 1 Corinthians was written while Paul was living in Rome. (F—Ephesus, 1 Cor. 16:8)
  11. BONUS: The Corinthian church was known for its abundance of spiritual gifts.  (T)

So, that gives you a bit of a framework for who was receiving this letter and perhaps some reasons why Paul wrote it.  But let me provide just a little more context about the make-up of the city and the church in it. 

            As I mentioned in Q#3, Corinth had been a very prosperous city for hundreds of years until the Romans literally wiped it out in 146 B.C. and enslaved all its residents.  After it was rebuilt by Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. and became a Roman colony, it was largely populated by Romans, Greeks, businesspeople and government officials.  It became the capital of the Roman province of Achaia.  Many of the new citizens were former slaves, now freedmen, who were probably looking to make a new start in life and find upward economic mobility.  Corinth was a relatively new, bustling commercial and cosmopolitan center with a very diverse population in it.  There was a monotheistic Jewish community along with a dominant polytheistic Greek society. 

That diversity was, as we will see, reflected in the church Paul planted there. It had Jews and Gentiles, wealthy and poor, slaves and freemen, Roman citizens and government officials.  And while Paul will tell us in 1:26 that “not many of you were…powerful, not many were of noble birth”, that little phrase “not many” means some of them were.  In fact, Erastus, a city official of Corinth who became part of Paul’s mission team (see Rm. 16:23 Acts 19:22; 2 Tim. 4:20), was so wealthy that he funded a costly public pavement for the city.  Archeologists have found an inscription in the ruins of Corinth that reads, “Erastus, for his aedileship, constructed [this pavement] at his own expense.”  (Makes you wish we had more generous benefactors like that for Spokane streets, right?) 

Just in case you are wondering, like I was, what an “aedileship” is, the aediles were Roman magistrates responsible for maintaining public buildings, regulating public festivals, ensuring public order, and overseeing the city's infrastructure, including roads, sewers, and aqueducts. They also managed the grain and water supply, supervised markets, regulated weights and measures, and organized public games and entertainment.

This man was part of the first church of Corinth.  So was Crispus (1:14) who, according to Acts 18:8, had been a leader of the Jewish synagogue in Corinth.  Then there were Priscilla and Aquilla, Jews who had been driven out of Rome under Nero and who were, like Paul, tentmakers.  Paul met them there and both stayed and worked alongside them for some time. 

What a very diverse, eclectic bunch of believers God put together there in Corinth.  It reminds me of Mosaic!  We have similar diversity here:  people with powerful jobs and people with no power at all; people with significant financial resources and people with little to no financial resources; people with grade school educations and people with doctoral degrees; people who have grown up in safe, loving homes and people who have survived and triumphed over abusive, dangerous, destructive homes; people from various ethnic and religious backgrounds; those who are young and those who are elderly.  Corinth was that kind of city…and that kind of church.  And with that came some unique challenges and unique strengths. 

So, keep all that in mind as we unpack this book and the issues it addresses piece by piece.   Of all the local churches in Spokane, we may be more similar to the Corinthian church than just about any other.  And by the way, some scholars believe that the entire church in Corinth was about our size—a couple hundred people drawn together by one thing:  their belief in and love for Jesus Christ.

So, let’s jump into the first few verses of this book and see how a community of believers not all that dissimilar from us was doing…and what they have to teach us.

1 Corinthians 1:1--Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes….

This is a very normal and familiar way for people in the 1st century to write a letter.  They started by identifying themselves first, the reverse of what we do today (unless you are using letterhead).  After all, when you receive a hand-written letter, in handwriting you don’t recognize and without a return address, do you read the whole thing first or do you look to see who signed it? 

            If you know your N.T. epistles, you know that Paul was often under attack in the very churches he had founded, not usually by the people he had led to the Lord, but by those who had come in after his departure from those cities.  They were often attempting to supplant him and his authority, as we certainly the case in Corinth. 

            I don’t think Paul is trying to trot out his credentials here like some people do whenever they are introduced.  I think he’s trying to get his readers to focus on the most important reality when it comes to how we go through life—what our relationship is to Jesus Christ.  Paul is going to focus on that when it comes to the Corinthians.  So he focuses on the same thing when it comes to himself:  what is my relationship to the one Person who created the church, saved us all, is head of the church, calls us into a completely new life, defines our present and future, and will be our focus for all of eternity? 

            For Paul, the call that Jesus had put on his life was what defined who he was and what he would do every day of his life post-conversion.  Jesus had called him to be an “Apostle,” meaning literally “one who is sent out.”  The N.T. recognizes that the 12 Apostles had a unique role in the church.  They were the “foundation” of the church (Ephesians 2:20) along with the prophets with Jesus as the cornerstone. 

            Paul will go on in chapter 15 (vs. 9) to recognize that he is “the least of the apostles, who is not fit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” But he was nonetheless and apostle, sent by Jesus himself, to be the Apostle to the Gentiles (Rm. 11:13; Gal. 2:8).   

            I won’t go into detail about what constituted an apostle and why.  Suffice it to say that not everyone, by any means, was considered an apostle in the early church.  The 12 who had been with Jesus from the beginning (Ac. 1:21), held very unique roles in the church.  They were the ones primarily “sent” by Jesus to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth.  Paul clearly lived in that calling. 

            There were others in the N.T. that were referred to as “apostles” (lower case “a”).  Barnabas is referred to as an “apostle” in Acts 13:2 and 14:14. Andronicus and Junias are possibly identified as apostles in Romans 16:7. The same Greek word usually translated “apostle” is used to refer to Titus in 2 Corinthians 8:23 and Epaphroditus in Philippians 2:25. So, there definitely seems to be room for the term apostle being used to refer to someone besides the twelve apostles of Jesus Christ. Anyone who was “sent” could be called an apostle. [Found at https://www.gotquestions.org/what-is-an-apostle.html on 9.5.25.]

            There is a movement afoot today that seeks to put forward modern day “apostles” with some special level of authority or influence.  I am not of that belief.  There is zero indication that God has extended the apostolate of Peter or any of the 12 Apostles of the first century.  The only possible room I see for contemporary day “apostles” would be missionaries who are sent out by Christ and his church today to take the Gospel to places where churches are not established, sometimes doing so through the aid of signs and miracles but with the dominant focus upon the person and Gospel of Jesus Christ. 

            Paul uses this “Apostle” identifier for himself in almost all of his Epistles, save Philippians, Thessalonians and Philemon. What Christ had called him to do and be was determining everything about his life when he wrote these letters.  Everyone who read these letters knew that.  They knew that Paul was living out his calling to “go and make disciples of all nations” more than any other responsibility in his life.  It dominated and determined everything.  If you wanted to know what a true “apostle” looked like, Paul was your man…and those who watched him knew it.  His calling by God and relationship to Jesus drove everything. 

            So, when he now switches to identifying WHO he is writing to, it is not very surprising that he also identifies them by their relationship to Jesus and their calling by Him. 

NOTE:  Just a couple of quick things in passing about the mention of “Sosthenes our brother.” Sosthenes was apparently functioning as his secretary or amanuensis to Paul at this time, some 3-4 years after his time in Corinth.  Curiously, this Sosthenes was probably the same fellow mentioned in Acts 18 who had been a leader in the Jewish synagogue at Corinth and, who on one occasion, was beaten by the Jews and Greeks for his involvement in bringing Paul before the civil court at Corinth and failing to get a conviction. 

            How do you suppose he changed from being publicly against Paul to being Paul’s publicist?  We can only surmise that Paul must have extended grace, love and compassion towards him at some point after Sosthenes had been beat up by the mob.  By all rights, he would have been scorned and ignored by any normal person.  But Christians are not normal.  And I’ll bet Paul saw an opportunity in his enemy to reach out to him with the love of Christ sometime during those 18 months in Corinth.  There is a subtle lesson here about effective evangelism:  Go for your enemies! 

            Secondly, Paul is always careful to let his readers know that he doesn’t do ministry solo.  NEVER!  He was always pulling in other men to be with him, to travel together, to minister alongside, whether Barnabus or Silus or Timothy or Epaphroditus or Prescilla & Aquilla.  The great Apostle Paul understood what so many contemporary missionaries and ministers of the Gospel do NOT today:  ministry in the service of Jesus Christ is not to be a solo sport.  It demands partnership in the Gospel.  Because partnership changes you.  It makes demands on you solo work doesn’t.  It requires growth, mutual submission, patience and more. 

            Let me say this very directly:  don’t try to do ministry alone.  You will almost certainly fail deeply at some point and you most certainly will not be able to do what you could have done if you had determined to do it with other believers.  Strong leaders lead, but they do not lead alone.  And neither should any of us!

            But back to where Paul now puts the focus on the Corinthian believers.  Right at the beginning of this letter, he’s going to put the focus on WHO the Corinthian believers are in God’s eyes.  Despite their dysfunctional church, despite, in some cases, their gross immorality, despite their selfishness even about how they shared food, despite their arrogance or inferiority about their spiritual gifts, despite their petty divisions and misplaced priorities, Paul talks to them as the people God has and is making them.  Listen.

1 Corinthians 1:2

2 To the church of God in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people, together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours….

            Before he starts taking them to the woodshed for their many and deep failings, Paul wants to paint a picture for them of how God sees them and will make them to be for all eternity.  Because Paul knows that perception is everything.  How we see ourselves usually determines how we live.  Who we think we really are usually determines the choices we make.

ILL:

  • Young people: the choices you make about the people you hang with, the activities you engage in, the effort you put into school or sports or video games or music or robotics…all of that will be shaped by how you perceive yourself.  If you have an over-inflated view of yourself or your abilities, you will probably make some less-than-rewarding decisions to pursue things that may be a waste of time.  On the other hand, if some of you listen to the negative  statements of people around you about you, you may not step out with any reasonable confidence to even try things God has designed you to be and do. 
  • Adults: many of us are still unwinding some of the negative messages we may have gotten from others about who you are and what you’re capable of.  Old…and wrong messages die hard.  But when we put them to death, it opens up a whole new world of possibilities about what we will attempt to do, who we will develop friendships with and how we will enjoy life. 

So, Paul really wants these people he lived among for a year and a half, suffered for and gave everything he had to encounter the living God to change how they perceive themselves…who they really are.

1.) First, they must see themselves as “called out” people in this world.  That is the literal meaning of “church”—ekklesia = “a people called out”, in this case, by God. 

Q:  Called out of what?  If I were to interview you and ask you, “What has God called you OUT from?”, what would you answer?

[Every form of sin imaginable…and the horrible effects of sin, personal and family dysfunction, seeing everything from self to this world through the wrong lens, a secular worldview, destructive habits and lifestyles, lies, deception, self-absorbed life, the dominant secular culture and mindset, hell itself….]

            The problem with the church looking so much like the world is that we forget what we’re actually supposed to be separate from. 

ILL:  When Daniel and I went to China one summer with a ministry team, we worked in a public school that had several thousand students.  It was a residential school so the students lived on campus.  They had classes from 9 a.m. on and off throughout the day until about 9:00 p.m….except for the track and field athletes.  They were exempted from all that tedium.  We would see them out on the field practicing all day long—running, vaulting, hurdling, long-jumping, you name it.  And as I watched them it dawned on me:  the Chinese are going to eat our lunch!  Their discipline and dedication were phenomenal.  And, lo and behold, they are catching our nations students and athletes and soldiers.  Why?  Because they understand what it means to be “called out” to do something very few of their peers get to do. 

            This is what God plans for us to experience as His church.  We’ve been called out of the grind of sin, selected by Him to be a special, new, different breed of human beings who experience a different set of things from the vast majority of humanity.  Only it’s not based on our abilities or intelligence as it is so often in this world.  It’s based on God and His grace—His call, His work of grace, His commission, His plan…all apart from any of our abilities. 

APP: 

  • Are you “called out” by God…a part of His called-out community, the church, by faith and surrender to Jesus Christ?
  • We cannot experience the kind of privileged living God wants us to apart from being a genuine part of His “church.” We must have a living, breathing, practicing, experiential theology of church and our relationship to a.) the God who calls us out from this world, and b.) the other people He intends for us to take this journey with.  You will not live the called-out life disconnected from THE church. 
  • Do we feel and value the privilege of being the church, terribly imperfect as we are? It’s not about how great we are or aren’t as the church.  It’s about how great the One who called us is and what an enormous privilege it is to be called by Him.  We are “the church of GOD”!  ILL:  Wanting to be chosen for that game of pick-up baseball or basketball…early, immediately …rather than last or not at all.  

2.) Paul desperately wanted the Corinthian church to come to grips with the dominant call of God in their lives—to be His holy people, to be saints—people who are “set apart for a holy purpose” (sanctified). 

…to those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people….

The word translated “holy people” here is the Greek term hagios meaning “set apart ones” or “holy ones”.

I honestly prefer the way the ESV and NET render “holy people”.  [Show the parallel translations using “saints.”]

ESV--To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ….

NET--…to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, and called to be saints, with all those in every place who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours. 

So, what IS a saint…or what MAKES someone a saint, biblically speaking?  It definitely has to do with holiness.  It definitely has to do with being “set apart for a divine purpose.”  But biblically, does that mean that I must have lived a life of “heroic virtue”…or die a martyrs death…or have verifiable miracles done after my death because people prayed to me?  While that may be some churches tradition in an attempt to identify a special group of believers in the history of the church, that is not who the Apostles called “saints.” 

            The N.T. uses this term “saints” or “holy ones” some 67 times, most often in the plural, “saints” rather than “a saint.”  In the vast majority of cases it refers to people who are living, not dead. It is talking about ALL those who comprise the church through faith in Jesus Christ. 

            How on earth could Paul call the Corinthian believers “holy ones,” “saints”???  They were, frankly, a pretty unsaintly group in a whole lot of ways. 

            The Bible does not call us saints because of what WE do; it calls us “holy people” because of what GOD has done.

  • HE has called us to be holy: Hebrews 2:11-- Both the one [Jesus] who makes people holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters.”  It is Christ’s work, not our own, that makes us “holy people.” 
  • We are “called to be saints/holy people” according to 1:2. God is the one who calls  (See also Gal. 1:6; Eph 4:1,4; Col 3:15; 1 Tim. 6:12; I Peter 2:9, 21; 3:9; 2 Peter 1:3; Jude 1.)

There is, clearly, a difference between “positional” holiness and “practical” holiness.  Practical holiness is a matter of good works and holy living.  But even my best “set apart living” for Christ does not make me a saint.  My position IN Christ does!  In Christ, I have His holiness.  In Christ, I have the HOLY Spirit that continually calls me into holy living, whether I heed the call or not.  We are holy because of the One who makes us so.  Jesus has made us “set-apart ones” so that we can enjoy holiness as we were originally designed to do in the Garden of Eden. 

ILL: Scalpels are usually made of stainless steel or high carbon steel for their durability, sharpness and resistance to corrosion.  Nothing like being worked on with a rusty blade, right?

            So if humanity is the raw steel, imagine being for most of your life a rusty, common, dull, piece of steel like a hoe or axe or hammer.  Then one day, the Master Blacksmith comes along, picks you up, throws you in the melting pot, remakes your very chemical composition, and turns you into a precision stainless steel scalpel used to save people’s lives rather than hammer bent metal or pass along tetanus to anyone unlucky enough to get scraped by you. 

            Which life do you want (assuming you have a soul)?  After such a transformation, doesn’t it make sense that you want to be found in the hands of a master surgeon rather than some smelly brute pounding rusty nails?  While you will now always be a surgical scalpel, you could still choose to be used for the most common and evil sorts of things…or you could surrender to the Master Surgeon and save untold lives. 

Putting this back into N.T. terms, every child of God by faith in Jesus has undergone a nature change.  We have been called out of the world and into God’s family.  And we’ve been called to His family character which is holiness.  Holiness is to sinfulness as a gleaming scalpel is to a rusted hammer. 

  • Practical holiness is the restoration of all we have lost in sinfulness. It is the blessing of righteousness.  It is the losing of sin and the gaining of goodness.
  • Holiness is the realization of what we are longing for in heaven, the completeness of humanness we lost in the fall.
  • Being “set apart” for God’s purposes is the finding of our truest identity. Holiness is what we were made for.  Holiness is what will make me feel most alive, most fulfilled, most in-touch with my (now) deepest nature. 

Do you see why Paul wanted the Corinthians to focus on what they are because of their new relationship with God rather than what they aren’t experiencing because of their ongoing sin? 

Q:  How many of us wandered around for years trying to figure out what we were made to be?  But when you finally found that great fit in employment or a hobby or a friendship or a volunteer position or a marriage, wasn’t that a great feeling?  No longer did you have to operate out of your weakness or non-strengths.  It was the difference between pulling and pushing a rope. 

            That’s what holiness is for every person “called out” from the world and “called into” right relationship with God.  It is what we have now been made for and what we will be in all of eternity.  It is the truest nature of a child of God.  And it is what calls us out of sin and into communion with our Maker… “together with all those everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ—their Lord and ours.” 

            Remember that when you are tempted to sin.  Remember what you are missing of your truest nature, of the God who loves you, of the life He has called you into.  Holiness is wholeness.  And God loves to see broken children made whole.