I Corinthians 1:1-3 (Part 1)

"Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes,"

Paul in Corinthians, is writing in response to Chloe's people (1.11) who tell Paul of some of their concerns with the church in Corinth and to a letter written to him (7.1) from the Corinth Church.

This is the first part of a three part segment on the grand opening of this book.

As we dive into the text we notice the first word in the letter as being "Paul". To many this isn't strange or even interesting, that is until one look into the history of this "Paul" figure and see that he wasn't always called Paul, but at one time he was known as Saul of Tarsus. The first time he appears in scriptures he's holding the garments of those who dragged Stephen (one of the seven picked in Jerusalem to serve) out of the city and stoned him to death. This Saul went from holding garments and approving of this execution to participation in it. He went house to house dragging people off to prison for their faith in Jesus. This Saul was in the very act of trying to destroy the church when he encounters Jesus on the road to Damascus. This Saul after an encounter with Jesus was forever changed, he started to preach and to build up what he once tried to destroy. After a time Saul was called with a man named Barnabas by the Holy Spirit to do a work for God. It is at this time we are told that his name is no longer Saul But Paul.

Saul is a Hebrew name and it's Greek equivalence is Paul. In the book of Acts once the author mentions that Saul was also called Paul, the author of Acts (Luke) never again refers to his Hebrew name but only his Greek equivalence Paul. This gives us a hint into part of Paul's calling, which was to the Greeks.

"Paul, called by the will of God..."

This statement mirrors the Acts account of Paul's conversion. Jesus calls Paul while Paul is in the very act of persecuting God's people. It's the calling of God that can bring a ville persecutor of the Gospel to saving repentance. The echo of Romans 8.30 is heard here, "...and those whom he called he also justified,...". Without the call of God Paul would have remained Saul, just another one in a long list of men who persecuted the church. Paul wasn't called my mans will, but Paul's calling was by the will of God. This God is the one who "works all things according to the counsel of his will". So we see that it was in God's sovereign will to call Paul, this calling led to Paul's conversion, and not only to his conversion but to his vocational calling as an apostle of Jesus Christ.

The day Paul met Jesus he was forever changed. The prof that Paul met Jesus was the fact that he changed, he went from being Saul the persecutor to Paul the Apostle of Christ Jesus. Paul's life testified to the reality of his encounter with Christ. One of the ways we can know if we really have had an encounter with Jesus is a changed life. Not only a changed life sometime back-when in the good old by and by, but a life that's continually being changed by the ever real presence of the call of God on ones life.

Paul mentions in a later part of this letter as being untimely born, it's in the sense of being spiritually born again. If one is asked how many disciples did Jesus hand chose, one would be wrong if they say 12. Jesus chose Paul on the Road to Damascus, Paul is the 13th hand picked disciple of Jesus. An apostle is a "sent one", one who is sent in the name of another. Paul was called by God to be a sent one, and the Corinthians are a recipient of this calling. Paul's authority behind writing the Corinthians isn't his own, nor is it in some other person, but it's in his calling because it was God who called him, chose him, justified him, and declared him to be an Apostle to the Gentiles, and this is symbolized by the fact we know this man mainly as Paul instead of Saul.

There are a couple of truths we can pull out from this. The first is that salvation is by grace, Paul wasn't looking to be save, yet by Gods grace he came to know Jesus in a saving way. The Second is the sovereignty of God, God is in control. When we look at people and think, "they can never be saved," God says all things are possible through me. God being sovereign over salvation is one of the reasons we can be encourage to pray for the lost. And third, when God calls us to a task, he gives us the abilities to preform it in his strength. Paul wasn't an apostle in his own strength but he relied on Jesus as his source. We are not saved because of what we did, and we cannot stay saved because of what we do, salvation is all of God, from first to end. So in all of this like Paul we can only boast in the cross of Christ.