Will Vaus

This final chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Church at Corinth is so typical of him. In chapter 15 he waxes eloquent about the resurrection, but immediately in chapter 16 he moves on to more mundane matters. That is Paul. His mind is in the heavenly clouds, but his feet are planted firmly in first century earthly soil.   More than anything else, this final chapter of this letter is about people, because that is what the church is all about. The church is not primarily a building, or an institution, or even a movement. The church is people. Paul calls them saints, which the NIV translates as “the Lord’s People”. The word literally means “holy ones”. This word designates not perfect people but rather ones set apart to belong to Jesus. In this final chapter Paul has a word about The Collection for the Saints, a word of Commendation of the Saints, a word of Courage for the Saints, and a final word of Final Greeting to the Saints. Listen for God’s word to you from 1 Corinthians 16… ...

For the last two Sundays we have been focusing on the resurrection chapter of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 15. Two weeks ago, we looked at Jesus’ resurrection and Paul’s three reasons for us to anticipate a great future. Then last week we looked at the resistance to the idea of resurrection both in the ancient world and today. Now, this week I want to address the question: What will our resurrection bodies be like? Listen for God’s word to you from 1 Corinthians 15:35-54… But someone will ask,   “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will they come?”   How foolish!   What you sow does not come to life unless it dies.   When you sow, you do not plant the body that will be, but just a seed, perhaps of wheat or of something else.   But God gives it a body as he has determined, and to each kind of seed he gives its own body.   Not all flesh is the same: People have one kind of flesh, animals have another, birds another and fish another.   There are a...

The story is told about the young son of an undertaker who was puzzled one Easter morning when he heard from his Sunday school teacher about the resurrection. “Do you mean,” he asked, “that Jesus really rose up from the dead?”   “Oh yes,” the teacher replied.   The boy shook his head. “Then I know my daddy didn’t take care of Jesus after he died because if he had then Jesus never would have got up again!”   Some people are resistant to the idea of the resurrection. In fact, that is probably the reason why Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 15, the resurrection chapter in the Bible, to help us overcome our resistance. Listen for God’s word to you from 1 Corinthians 15:12-34…   But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?  If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised.  And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so i...