1 Corinthians 1:3-7 | Episode #977

July 8, 2025

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

1 Corinthians 1:3-7 

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

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Transcript

This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to Hope.

Applying God's word to your daily life.

As we finish Faithful Finance, we want to produce our winter Bible study done at Lake Community Church on First Corinthians.

It'll be a fairly long Bible study.

We will break it up into different parts.

And so you will get a really good, really fast study through the book of First Corinthians before we move on to the book of Joshua.

He says grace to you and peace from God our Father, the Lord Jesus Christ. Now,

this is the first time this is mentioned.

It is Karas, Okay?

That word is the word for grace.

And it is the initial gift of God given to a believer from which all other gifts flow.

You need to hear that.

Now remember, it is a gift.

It is a gift that is given by God.

The gift of getting what you do not deserve,

which is a relationship with God. You get a relationship with God from a gift you do not deserve.

And the word for that grace is Keros.

All right?

And it's important because Kairos is going to turn into charisma,

the word we get, the word we use for the spiritual gifts that God gives us.

Okay?

Now, if. If to he, this book is about those things, okay? It's about spiritual gifts, and it's about how people operate in their gifts in the flesh.

Okay?

And it teaches us how not to do that.

And you would go, well, when people use in their spiritual gifts, they shouldn't be in the flesh.

That's. That's the. That. That's the.

That's the temptation. You think you're operating in the spirit and you really all up in the flesh,

okay? And so these spiritual gifts that God has given us,

everything flows from the gift of grace.

Everything flows from that gift of grace that God has given us. So he says here,

grace and peace. What does peace mean?

Calm, solitude, ease. Now, it doesn't mean that the circumstances you live in are those things.

It means that your attitude, who you are, how you're living today in the midst of maybe a huge storm is peace.

And he says, I want you to experience the grace of God, which will bring about the peace of God. And by the way, in the Old Testament, the peace of God and in Romans and Hebrews is interchangeable with the idea of God's favor, His best,

his promises.

All right?

Why did I go through all that? Because that's right there in the beginning and all y' all read that and just move on past it. Am I right?

Don't we do that? Let's just get to the good stuff. Well, you skipping a whole lot of good stuff.

He mentions a guy that gets mentioned twice in scripture.

And why did he get mentioned twice?

Because he got whooped up for God. He got beat.

He was beaten almost to death for God.

And so he gets mentioned twice.

He says, I thank God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you by Christ Jesus.

Now I want you to listen to me.

He's fixed. He's going to spend some time getting on to them.

In fact,

fifteen and a half chapters of getting onto them.

Okay?

All right.

Now notice he says, I'm thankful for you.

I think he means it, don't you?

I think he does.

Just because you dealing with people that are in the midst of their struggles and issues does not mean that you should not be thankful for your opportunity to be gifted, to be called and to be used by God in the.

In that setting.

Okay?

So he's saying, I'm thankful for you.

I'm thankful that I'm going to get to write this letter. And by the way, he's getting to write a book of the New Testament,

a book which is the revelation of God to the church.

Now you say, well, he wrote many of those books. Yes, he did. But right now he's getting to write another one. And him and softenes are writing that book. And so the knees has not gotten to write a write.

Has not had an opportunity to write a book of the Bible, but he's going to get to write this one.

You're going to notice that I'm going to show you a spot in this chapter where it's obvious that he is.

Somebody is pinning the letter with him and they're thinking about everything they say, okay?

Which ought to give you a lot of comfort that when these books were written, they were not just written willy nilly, they were well thought out. Every book of the New Testament is a well thought out letter to a church to try to get them to understand an idea or something that God wants the church to know.

Not only that church, but every church to come,

every congregation, every believer down the road.

He says that you were enriched in everything by him,

in all utterances and all knowledge.

Okay?

Now the word ginosko is the word we get for knowledge. There the two words in the New Testament for knowledge. There's ginosko and. And there are the word we actually translate knowledge.

Okay?

And then there's the word Yoda,

right? For all of you who love Star wars and Star Trek and all those things and some of y' all who are really heavy into it, either like one and hate the other.

I'm going to tell y' all, I'm. I'm. I'm a heretic. As far as space movies and space series, I like them all. I like every one of them, all right?

And in Star wars, there's this little green guy, okay? And. And he's the one that's got all the Force. And his name is what,

Yoda, which means he knows things.

He knows things that not only did he learn, but he knows things innately in himself,

okay? And that's Yoda knowledge. That's the knowledge of God,

okay?

That is knowledge that comes from innately being God,

okay?

Now notice he doesn't use Yoda. He. He uses Ginosko. And that's learned knowledge,

okay? That's knowledge that you gain by learning.

Are you following me? All right, that's important. But he says to you, he says to them that God has enriched them in everything by his utterances or by his logos.

Now, I talked about this a little bit this morning in our leadership,

our 2015, 25 leadership talk. We had a little meeting,

and I talked about this. Now,

I want you to get this. Because this is important,

and it's an idea that it's hard to get your hands around.

But if you'll start to think about it, it's important.

If I say to you,

let's pick a passage.

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously without finding fault. That's James, chapter one.

Okay?

If I say that to you in English, you understand what it means?

If you lack wisdom, ask God. He gives it generously without finding fault.

Makes sense.

All right, what if I did it? And I'm going to use the language this morning that we talked about.

What if I said it to you in Swahili?

It'd be useless for me to say it to you in Swahili.

Am I right?

Be absolutely useless. Now, would it be the Logos of God in Swahili?

Yeah, it would be God speaking his revelation in Swahili. It just doesn't have any, any, Any use for you there. So which one's right? Is it the Swahili or the English?

Which is the better? Which is the better logos?

Well, actually, it'd be the Greek,

because that's what it's originally written in. But if I said it to you in Greek, I wouldn't know it. You wouldn't know it. Nobody would know it. Am I right?

And so human language does not limit the Logos of God.

What I mean by that? Well, the Logos of God are the thoughts or ideas of God.

The Logos of God is the thoughts and the ideas of God and expressed in language to humanity.

Makes sense.

It's expressed in language to you.

So when we say the Word was made flesh and made his dwelling among us,

we, We. We do mean that what's written here became flesh and. And made his dwelling among us. And he says, and we beheld him the glory of the only begotten Son of God, full of grace and truth.

That's John, chapter one.

All right. So that revelation there is revealing to us in our ears and our eyes,

in our thoughts and our hearts,

God's revelation to us.

Are you following me?

But it's more than the words.

It's the ideas of God.

It's the understandings of God.

Oftentimes we get focused on the words.

When I was young, a young pastor, there was a major group of people in the evangelical south,

which is slowly dying out, who would tell you if you weren't preaching from the King James Version,

that you weren't preaching the true word of God.

Whenever I was asked that,

I would ask them,

which edition?

And they would say to me, what do you mean, which edition? Well, the one you're reading is the 27th edition.

Now, if we're going to read the King James in the original King James,

have you ever read Beowulf?

Well, it's a little better than Beowulf. You don't understand it. It ain't English to you.

If I read you the first edition of the King James Version to some of those folks, they'd say, preacher, that ain't the Bible.

Yes, it is. It's the King James version, the first edition.

Why do they have 27 editions? Well, the English language has changed over the last 400 years.

400 years.

So I want you to think about that.

That means we've had to have a whole lot of additions to alter the King James to the point where we can actually read it in our modern times. And by the way,

if you read the King James the 27th edition,

it doesn't make a whole lot of sense in our modern language.

If you didn't grow up hearing it,

you won't know it.

So what's the point? The point is there's nothing wrong with the King James,

but the King James is just translation of the Greek.

There's nothing wrong with the Greek. In fact, the Greek is the expression of God's word. But I want you to hear Me. It's deeper than just the Greek.

It's deeper than the Greek.

The Greek is expressing who God is and what God thinks and how God wants us to be.

Once you hear this,

it's expressing that in a language that could be spread all over the world.

Did y' all know that?

Y' all know Jesus came along at a very unique time,

very unique time in world history.

In fact, the only other time in world history that is similar to that in these regards is right now.

Jesus came along in world history. And the only time in world history prior to the Bab Tower of Babel,

where most of the world population had some access to what we call quine Greek or common Greek.

You go most of the world. Yes.

Did you know that they found in China many, many books that were written in Greek? The Chinese new Greek.

Did y' all know that?

South Africa,

all the way up into northern Europe,

all the way throughout Asia into India.

There are many cultures who had access to common Greek.

Okay.

Why am I telling you that? Because eventually common Greek did not become. Became uncommon.

Okay.

When the Roman Empire fell, common Greek became uncommon.

The next time in world history where most of the world has some access to knowledge of one language is now,

and it's English.

Most of the world has some access to English. In fact, a large majority of the world teaches English in elementary school, no matter where you're at.

All right,

Very interesting. The second thing is,

in that time in history,

it was the best time to be able to travel roads all over the world and get places that you couldn't get before get to before the Romans built roads and then the empires of the Asian steppe all the way over to China,

the Silk Road all the way over to China.

There was access for God's word to not only be known by people, but, but to be taught all around the world that you do not lack any charisma. Mission of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Meaning that the gifts of God lend to the revelation of God.

The gifts of God teach us the revelation of God.

All right?

He said you lose the treasure and he's going to talk about that.

All right?

So no, you can't lose your being born again,

but you can at times not be being saved.

And there's a lot of believers that go through that process. Am I right?

Namely, the main story in the Bible is,

is the rich young ruler and the prodigal son right as you go today. I pray that the Lord will bless you and keep you, that he'll make his face to shine upon you and that he will give you hope and peace today in Jesus name.