Oh, what a shambles!

Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit lives among you? 1 Corinthians 3:16

It’s quite common for churches to compile a “profile” designed to give to visitors, or perhaps potential future leaders, so they have some idea of the church’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s a pretty good idea.

But suppose you were looking for a church to join and they gave you a profile such as this…

·        We tend to be argumentative, quarrelsome and immature.

·        We easily split into factions behind our favourite leaders.

·        We tend to be arrogant, with a high opinion of our own wisdom and gifting.

·        We turn a blind eye to sexual immorality within our membership; in fact, we are quite proud of our liberated attitude in this respect.

·        We have members who are happy to take other members to law over various disagreements.

·        When we have fellowship meals, including the Lord’s Supper, it’s quite common for those who get there first to eat all the food and drink all the drink and not bother about the poorer people who turn up later. And if some of them get drunk, well, so what?

·        We are very proud of all the charismatic gifts we have – so much so that our worship services can be quite riotous and chaotic.

·        So why not come and join us!

Most of us, I suspect, wouldn’t have too many problems answering that question. It sounds like a church worth avoiding like the plague.

No such profile would ever be written, of course; the whole idea is ludicrous. And yet the Christian community in Corinth was, if Paul’s first letter to them is to be believed, precisely like this - you can find all these outrageous characteristics just by skim-reading your way through the first letter. Of course there were good features as well, and Paul acknowledges them; but it’s these ugly characteristics that he’s specially concerned about.

And this is a church that he himself planted! No wonder he’s a troubled man writing a troubled letter.

In view of all this, you might ask the question: If this is so, how could Paul possibly write the words of chapter three, verse 16: “Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple, and that God’s Spirit lives among you?” Really? Really!?

If you or I were writing to this church, I suspect we might accuse them of not in fact being Christians at all. True, Paul accuses them of being immature Christians – “still worldly – mere infants in Christ” (3:1) – but at no point does he suggest that they have never become Christians. How can we explain this? How can such a shambles of a church claim to be truly Christian?

We must recognise, of course, that these people were still relatively new Christians, and that they belonged to a city dedicated to many gods and idols. As well as material prosperity and different forms of culture, there was much sexual vice and what today we might call paganism. So on conversion to Christ these people had started from a low base morally and spiritually.

And this reminds us that new converts don’t, generally, become holy people overnight! – time is needed for them to learn and grow and to absorb the way of Jesus. No wonder, then, that things which shock us today – and which in fact shocked Paul at the time – were in evidence as he wrote. That doesn’t excuse them, any more than it would today, but it does at least makes it understandable.

We need to be patient with new-born Christians! We need perhaps to look back to our own early days in the Christian life. Did we become perfect overnight? (Are we perfect now, come to that?)

But “the temple of the Holy Spirit”…! That certainly seems a lofty description. Yet Paul means it. We, the church, represent God’s visible presence on earth, as did once the tabernacle made by Moses and the temple built by Solomon. God is made known to the unbelieving world through the community of sinful men and women who are being transformed, little by little and day by day, into the likeness of Christ. That, and nothing less, is what being a Christian means; and that is why Paul can use the seemingly exaggerated language of 1 Corinthians 3:16.

If this is true, it needs to come with a warning. We mustn’t allow it to lull us into complacency: “Oh well, then, if a shambolic bunch like Corinth was truly the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit, perhaps holiness and Christlikeness don’t actually matter all that much after all! That really is the grace of God – so why not turn a blind eye to sin so that grace may have more scope to operate?” (Some people in the early church thought that that was in fact what Paul preached – a suggestion that horrified him – as we see in Romans 6:1-14.)

No! A thousand times No! We are to view 1 Corinthians 3:16-17 as a solemn challenge, as a stimulus to seek, every day of our lives, to become more like Jesus.

Is that the great ambition of your life?

Thank you, Father, for making me part of your holy temple, a dwelling-place of the Holy Spirit. Give me a holy hatred of sin, and a true hunger and thirst for righteousness. Amen.