1 Corinthians 5:9-10

Be Still: Lord Jesus, as I enter into your word today, would you bring stillness to my body and peace to my mind as I prepare for you to speak to me. Amen.

Read: 1 Corinthians 5
I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people - not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. (v. 9-10)

Encounter: And here we have it – the mess of the Corinthian church in full view. It doesn’t make for pretty reading. On one level, I find 1 Corinthians reassuring because the church has always been a mess. Sometimes, I hear others talking about the early church in a way that suggests those were the ‘glory days’ and we just need to get back to how it was then. But, as we’ve just seen, the early church was anything but squeaky clean.

This passage is primarily about the importance of what we do (or don’t do) with our bodies. But that aside, Paul mentions some other things in verse 10 that are worth paying attention to. Alongside the ‘sexually immoral,’ Paul mentions ‘the greedy and swindlers, or idolators.’ I wonder whether there are certain things that we have a degree of blindness to because of our culture. John Mark Comer in his book Live No Lies describes how our disordered desires can be affirmed by our culture. In other words, our culture can normalise the things in us that are disordered, leaving us feeling they’re okay because the world around us says they’re okay.

For me, and probably for many of us, a huge area of blindness is materialism - the cultural current in our society that whispers to us ‘you are what you own.’ Paul doesn’t say ‘don’t be materialistic’ but he does talk about greed in the same sentence as sexual immorality. Interesting. Again, Paul doesn’t challenge these things because he’s judgemental or has a superiority complex. Paul knows that greed corrodes our souls – it misshapes us into something less than we are. Our materialism reduces us to what we own, when we are nothing less than the children of God.

Switchfoot is one of my favourite bands and the lyrics of one of their songs state: ‘You possess your possessions or they possess you.’ God doesn’t want us to be controlled by anything – he wants us to be free.

Apply: Are there things in my life that I should think about more critically and through the lens of scripture?

Devote: Lord, I’m sorry for where I have allowed my surrounding culture to normalise things that are not okay. Shine your light in my heart today, illuminate the darkness in me and fill me with your Spirit that I might become more like you.