New Testament
1 Corinthians
A letter to a gifted, messy church that could not stop competing.
Letter · 16 chapters · About 1 hour
Paul, c. AD 54, from Ephesus
Overview
Corinth was wealthy, cosmopolitan and spiritually showy. The church there had every gift and almost no love.
Paul works through their questions one by one — divisions, lawsuits, marriage, food, worship, resurrection — and keeps bending each answer back toward the cross.
In the middle of a chapter about spiritual gifts he stops and writes the most famous paragraph about love ever written. It is not a wedding poem; it is a rebuke.
What it keeps returning to
The foolish cross
God's chosen strategy looks like weakness and outperforms every philosophy.
Body
The church is one body; the eye cannot fire the hand.
Love
Chapter 13 makes love the measure of every gift.
Start here
1 Corinthians 1:18–31
The wisdom of God that looks like folly.
1 Corinthians 13
Love, read as correction rather than romance.
1 Corinthians 15
Resurrection — why any of it matters.
Go deeper in 1 Corinthians
“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”