“And now these three remain, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13)

To become a father takes only a few minutes. To become a mother takes nine months of pregnancy – and that is only just the start of it!

Mothers and Love

To become a father takes only a few minutes. To become a mother takes nine months of pregnancy – and that is only just the start of it!

Most of us have experienced a mothers love. No mother is perfect and some fail big time, but most show a high and counter-cultural degree of love for their children. They are willing to endure pregnancy, nights with broken sleep, endless changes of nappies, tantrums, school runs, cooking, cleaning, teaching and counselling, not for their own sakes, but for the good of their children.

Most mothers, spend a lot of their lives centred on the other, that is their children and paying the emotional and financial cost for that.

Do you know how much the estimated cost of bringing up a child from 0 to 18 is? Over £200,000!

Yet, we live in a world, where the culture is increasingly individualistic and attitudes more and more self-centred. Do what makes you feel good. Your special. Don’t be constrained by others. Follow your dreams. None of this fits well with the sacrificial love entailed in being a mother.

No wonder that the birth rate is dropping in the West. To maintain the same size of population women need to have on average 2.1 children. In the UK women are now having on average 1.58 children. That means for every 100 adults in the present parental generation, there will be only 62 grandchildren.

In South Korea, things are even worse. The average woman has 0.78 children, which means a 100 adults will have only 15 grandchildren.

Our Western society talks a lot about ‘love’, but is the reality that we are more focussed on self-centred individualism, than the kind of natural love shown by mothers to children or indeed the kind of Christian love that Paul is encouraging in 1 Corinthians 13?

Love is Other-Centred, vs. 4-7

Paul gives a list of 15 things, that love is. He starts with 2 things it is, follows that up with 7 things it is not, what love does not and does rejoice in and four things where love is never-ending.

Patient. The old word is long-suffering. In other words, it keeps going for the sake of the other, even when it is draining for us. Most Mothers do this with children, enduring years of crying, tantrums and dirty nappies, followed later by teenage sulks.

This is what God does with us in our feeble and often half-hearted efforts to live for him, he is patient with us.

Linked with this are two of the negatives:

• It is not easily angered or irritable. Patient people don’t burst into rage when others upset them.
• It keeps no record of wrongs or remain resentful. Like God forgives us, true love forgives others the wrong they do.

Also, linked with this are the last four areas, that stress that love persists:

• always protects, it never gives up finding ways to help us, just as most mothers never give up on wanting to support their children and God never gives up on supporting us.
• always trusts and hopes. It wants to think the best of others and believe that they will come good in the end.
• always endures or perseveres. Love never gives up. Just as God never gives up on us and a mother never gives up on her child.

Kind. Kindness, is about wanting to make the other person welcomed, comfortable and happy. Not wanting to upset the other, unless it is necessary for their good. Mothers want to do these things for their children and God welcomes us into his family, offering us joy and peace.

Two of the negatives are the opposite of kindness:

• It is not rude. Rudeness does not care how your behaviour makes others feel. In a way it is the opposite of kindness.
• It is not self-seeking. Self-seeking is about doing things for yourself.  Love is not about that. It is about looking out for others.

Not Proud

The other three negatives are focussed on wanting to make yourself good or to feel important.

• Love is not proud or arrogant. In other words it doesn’t think of yourself as better than others or more important than others.
• Love is not boastful. It is not about trying to get everyone to think how great you are.
• Love is not envious. It is not upset when others seem to do better than you or have better things than you.

When you are envious you may be happy when others are caught out for doing wrong. That is probably what is meant by:

• It does not delight in evil or rejoice in wrongdoing. It is not happy when others prove to be wicked people, because it makes you look better.
• Instead it rejoices with the truth. Because love is not concerned with making yourself look good, it can embrace the truth and honesty about yourself even if it makes you look bad, because it may encourage and help others. It is also happy with the truth that others may be better or more successful than you, because you are concerned for others.

In all these ways, love is the opposite of self-centred, it is other-centred.

Like a good mum that is focussed on doing everything for the good growth of the child, not because the child is deserving, but because they are her child.

Like God who is focussed on doing everything for our good and our growth in Christian maturity, not because we are already good, but because he loves us and takes us in as his child

We as Christians are called to love others, to seek their good and to build them up, even when it is costly and difficult to do so. Not for our good, but there good.

This already answers the two questions from the group on our notice sheet:

• How do we continue to serve with love when provoked?

By mimicking the love of God in Jesus Christ. He died for us even when we were still sinners. He loved us not because we are lovable, not because of what we can do for him. He loved us even though it meant dying on the cross.

If we are struggling to serve others, because they are upsetting us, then we need to remind ourselves of God’s love for us and remember that true love is not easily angered and keeps no record of wrongs. Love is patient.

• What stops us from showing love to everyone regardless?

If love is not self-centred, then we do not love people only because they matter more to us, because they are our family or part of our friendship group or are inately loveable. We love them for their own good, even when we gain nothing in return. The secret to loving everyone regardless is to understand love as being divorced from our own personal gain.

Jesus said, “This is how you will know that you are my disciples – if you love one another.” Let’s work and pray for our churches to be marked by love above everything else.

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Paul’s description of love in verses 4-7 does not come, because he was preaching at a mothering Sunday service. His concern was not to give thanks for mothers or encourage good mothering. Neither was he writing particularly with married couples in mind, even though this is a popular passage to be used at weddings and it is important for married couples to learn to be other-focussed if their relationship is to flourish.

1 Corinthians 13, is not a standalone piece of beautiful literature, it is part of this letter to the Corinthians we have been looking at. It stands out from the rest of the letter as a beautiful rhetorical flourish, but it is also at the heart of Paul’s overall challenge to the Corinthian church.

Paul wants to say to the Corinthians, that this kind of love, he describes in the centre of the chapter is both essential and eternal. This is what should mark out our church life together. As he says in 8:1: “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up!” and in 16:14 “Do everything in love.”

Love is Essential for Church Life, vs. 1-3

In the first three verses, Paul underlines how essential love is to church life.

Next week, we are going to go backwards to chapter 12. Both chapters 12 and 14 talk about the spiritual gifts that church members may have and how they should be used to build up others and in the context of church meetings.

Paul does not want to stop the use of spiritual gifts, but he wants to challenge the attitudes with which they are being used in the Corinthian church. Without an underlying attitude of love such gifts or indeed any church activity become pointless and useless. No matter how wonderful, amazing or spiritually spectacular the Christian ministry are gifts are, if they are not done in love, in order to build up others, then they are pointless.

So an important question to ask ourselves, in everything we do, is am I doing it for the good of others, with patience and kindness, celebrating what is good about them, wanting to help them in their needs and sharing the good news about Jesus with them so that they might be saved, or am I doing it for more self-centred reasons, to preserve the buildings or style of worship I value, to make myself look good or feel important because of the role I am taking on or the gift I am using.

If we want to be more than a clashing cymbal or nothing or gain nothing, then we need to make sure that an attitude of love is at the heart of it all. Love is essential for church life – the Corinthians had not fully grasped that and we need to keep asking ourselves, whether we have.

Love is Eternal, vs. 8-13

Finally, love is eternal. In verses 8-13, Paul wants us to look at our lives and activities from the time after Jesus returns and we are raised with resurrection bodies to live with God face to face for ever more. Then things will be transformed.

This is the point of the child – adult analogy. We speak, think and reason differently as adults than we did when we were children, because we have grown up, where as once we only had a small vocabulary to express ourselves, now we have a full one, where as once we could only just begin to count, now we are able to handle money effectively. As adults, our knowledge and understanding is on a different level to what it was as children.

It is also the point of the mirror analogy. Corinth was famous for bronze mirrors, that could give a reasonably decent reflection. Yet, even such reflections were not the same as looking at someone directly. Some of the details are obscured. We don’t see or understand as clearly as we can when we see face to face.

The Corinthians valued, knowledge and understanding great mysteries. They looked up to Christians who seemed to have more knowledge of these things and perhaps felt that such knowledge was the key to being closer to God.

They also valued spiritual gifts that seemed to help reveal this mysterious spiritual knowledge of God: prophecy, tongues and imparting special knowledge. But Paul says, in eternity, we will see God face to face, we will all have complete knowledge. When that happens, the spiritual gifts of prophecy, tongues and imparting special knowledge will become obsolete, no longer any use. What they may offer in part now, will be fully known by us all then.

What will remain important, however, is love. Because that concern and action for the other is at the heart of God’s eternal nature. When people ask what will heaven be like, the answer is it will be a community of perfect love.

As the church today, we want to reflect something of that eternal kingdom. The main way we do that is by living as people of love.

In our year of discernment let us remember that calling above all.

“These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the culmination of the ages has come.” (1 Corinthians 10:11)

In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul is concerned that the Christians of Corinth will lose their faith. He is worried that some of them are so complacent about the strength of their own faith, that they are in danger of slipping into idolatry without realising the danger.

Warning Signs

Sometimes warning signs make me laugh.

On Wednesday I saw a warning sign on Broadstairs beach:

“Caution, Plant and vehicles moving!”

I could see the moving JCB digger, but I couldn’t see any moving plants.

Or here is one from when my children were younger:

“Warning free range children!”

I thought it was only chickens that were free range!

Or what about this particularly worrying sign I found online, which I hope is a joke:

“Warning: Unattended children will be captured and used for medical experiments!”

Of course warning signs are no laughing matter. They have an important purpose, to alert us to the dangers that lurk, to call us to be careful and to avoid dangers that might otherwise harm or kill us.

Warnings for the Christian

One role that the Bible plays for us as Christians, is to lay down warning signs for life. It says in verse 11, talking about the Bible stories just referred to:

“These things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us…”

During the week some of our groups looked at our reading from the Bible this Sunday and submitted some questions about it. One group asked a fairly basic question based on the verse that comes just after our reading:

• What is a mature or sensible Christian? (vs. 15)

Is it someone who has been a Christian for a while? Attends church regularly? Reads their Bible a lot? Prays?

One way of answering that is to ask who would you say is a sensible driver. Probably your answer would include, someone who notices the warning signs on the road and drives carefully in response.

In the same way a ‘sensible Christian’ is someone who understands the warnings given by the Bible and lives out their Christian life taking them into account.

But many non-Christians and indeed many Christians struggle to see how the Bible fits together. Indeed, a couple of our groups raised questions along the lines of:

• How do we reconcile God’s acts of judgement in the Old Testament with the emphasis on God’s love in the New Testament?

The Old Testament is the part of the Bible that tells of the history of God and his people before Jesus came. Whilst the New Testament tells us about Jesus and the people of God from then on.

To many it feels like the Old Testament is full of God’s judgement, whilst the New Testament talks about his love. So, for example, verse 6 of our reading, which refers back to the Old Testament story says:

“Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, their bodies were scattered in the wilderness.”

That certainly sounds like a lot of judgement!

The first thing to say is that a more careful reading of the Old Testament shows that there is a lot about God’s love, compassion and faithfulness, not just his judgement.

Also, a careful reading of the New Testament, shows that God is still spoken of as judge and Jesus more than anyone else warns people about being shut out of heaven and stuck in hell.

Secondly, love and judgement are not mutually exclusive. A parent who loves their child will punish them when they do wrong out of love, because they want them to grow up into a good person. Also, when people commit acts of evil, we will want them punished to discourage others from doing the same. We do this to protect the community at large. The punishment of criminals is done out of love for the wider community. True love has to involve judgement when confronted by wrongdoing.

Thirdly, if as Paul suggests here the acts of judgement are to serve as warnings for God’s people, then inevitably there will be more judgement at the start of the story, with God hoping that future generations will learn the lessons without having to face judgement themselves.

The God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament and that assumption is everywhere in the New Testament and the teachings of Jesus. As Christians we are not to be embarrassed by the Old Testament, but rather we are to learn from it as part of our Spiritual heritage. Which is just what Paul in his writing here wants us to do.

By linking the Christian life today, with the stories of the people of God led by Moses, he sets up a helpful parallel that can help us last as Christians and so experience the fulness of God’s love.

So let’s try to get to grips with what he is saying.

The Christian Life and the Biblical Story

Blessings for All

God Saves

Paul takes us right back to the story of God’s rescue of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt. There they were oppressed by the Egyptians and forced to do hard labour and even had their newborn boys killed in an attempt to control their population growth. They were desperate to be rescued, so God sent Moses to lead them out and he sent ten horrible plagues on Pharaoh the king of Egypt to force him to let the people go.

When he finally did, God led them out by a cloud and through the Red Sea to escape from the Egyptian army. Israel were freed from being slaves and from the oppression of the Egyptians. God did that freely and lovingly for all who fled Egypt through the Red Sea.

In our reading, Paul in alluding to this story, says ALL the Israelites were baptised into Moses. By using the word, ‘baptised’ he links the story of Israel under Moses, to the story of Christians under Christ.

In a parallel way Jesus has rescued us not from slavery to a human king or power, but from the power of our own sin or wickedness and death. He did that through his death and resurrection. In baptism we are becoming one of the people who Jesus saves.

God Provides

But Paul also reminds us that once Israel were in the wilderness, on their journey to the Promised Land, where they could settle, that although it was tough and difficult, God provided for them. He did this miraculously or spiritually through the provision of a daily supply of food called Manna and by bringing water miraculously out of a rock. Again ALL the Israelites received this support freely out of God’s love for them.

Paul again links this to the Christian life, with the rather weird statement: “Christ is the rock.”  What he means is something like just as God provided water for the Israelites from a rock in the wilderness, so Christ supports and helps us as Christians through life now. Again God does that freely for ALL who come to him out of love.

Loss for Some

Paul in writing to the Corinthians does not want them to lose out on God’s blessings. So he reminds them of the warning stories from the Old Testament about those who although they seemed to have had God’s salvation and blessing, lost it because ‘they set their heart on wicked things.’

We haven’t time to explore the stories he refers to in detail, but the wickedness of their hearts was expressed in two fundamental ways.

Failure of Loyalty

But although ALL the baptised receive these blessings, many lose out. The warnings are for us not to lose out.

The first was a failure of loyalty to the God who had done so much to save them. Instead of making him their one and only God, they fell into the worship of other gods, what we call idolatry.

This leads to another question from one of the groups:

• What idolatry do we need to flee from today?

Idolatry is something that we allow to take the place of God in our lives. To become the guiding principle by which we live, to be the thing we look to for our ultimate salvation or provision.

In our world, that tends not to be idols worshipped in temples, as it was for the Corinthians Paul was writing to, but things like love of money or pursuing sexual pleasure or putting our trust in some man-made idea, organisation or leader.

At first glance they can seem more appealing, more immediate, more real even than the true and living God, but in the end the salvation and provision they offer is empty and meaningless. Only the God of Jesus Christ can truly satisfy. To abandon him, to risk his wrath and lose the good blessings won for us by Jesus is foolishness indeed.

Let us heed the warning, and remain loyal to the God who truly love us.

Failure of Trust

The second problem was to do with a failure to trust in the God who saved them and provided for them. In verse 10 it says, they grumbled. This led to another question from one of the groups:

• What’s wrong with grumbling? Is it ever legitimate for Christians to complain? (vs. 10)

Well to answer that question we need to look back at the stories of the Old Testament and see what the Israelites were getting wrong when they were grumbling.

Despite seeing the amazing rescue God had given them, they failed to believe God could provide, they looked back at their old life in Egypt and forgetting the slavery and oppression remembered the better food. They looked forward to the life in the promised land that God was leading them toand did not believe they would be able to defeat the people there at the time. So, they grumbled against God and against Moses.

This grumbling was an attitude of the heart that had fundamentally given up on trusting in God. So, yes complaining is fine for Christians, but when it becomes a heart attitude that fails to trust God, then it becomes an insult to God and a failure of faith, which is a disaster.

Why? Because it is through faith in God’s goodness, salvation and provision that we are saved. When we stop trusting in God’s goodness, then we let go of that salvation.

These then are serious warnings for all Christians. You may be baptised, you may have joined a church, you may call yourself a Christian, but true Christians are those whose hearts remain loyal to and keep trusting in Jesus to the end.

God saves us freely and baptism is a sign of taking hold of God’s act of amazing grace. We don’t have to prove ourselves to God to be saved, but we do have to remain loyal and keep trusting if we are to truly reap the blessings promised in baptism.

That sounds hard. But as it says in verse 13, God will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. There will always be a way to remain loyal and trust in him that is within our grasp. But we cannot be complacent, we need to heed the warnings, we need to be sensible Christians and remain loyal to and keep trusting in Jesus.

“Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible.” (1 Corinthians 9:19)

Paul is concerned to win. But he is not after the prestige of winning for himself. His concern is to win people for Christ. That is to share the good news or gospel of God’s salvation through Jesus, so that they might believe and so be forgiven for their sins, be reconciled to God and receive the gift of eternal life. When this happens, there is a sense of success for Paul and rejoicing in heaven, but the greatest reward goes to the one who has been won for Christ.

What prize are you after?

It’s great to win prizes.

I was never much good at sport, often coming last in races on school sport’s day and only being picked for sports teams when they were really desperate! I was never going to win a sporting prize at school.

But, I did discover I was pretty good at chess. I even won a prize as best West Sussex under 14 in one competition. But even with chess, I was never going to win any really fantastic prizes. When I was a Sixth Former, I was asked to play for Sussex under 18s twice. Both times I lost – once to a twelve year old! Then when I went to university, I had a friend who played for the Greek chess team. He could quite easily wipe the board with me!!

I was good at chess – but not that good! To do really well at chess or any sport, you need both abundant talent and dedicated training. It turned out I had some talent, and a little bit of training – but not enough of either to become a really top notch player!

In the NIV version at the end of the reading, Paul talks about ‘not being disqualified for the prize.’ A little earlier he talked about the prize that sportspeople of his day went for – a crown.

In Greece in the first century, there were four great sporting events that people from all over Greece travelled to. The most famous was the Olympic Games at Olympia, but the second most famous one was the Isthmus Games, which were held in a stadium only six miles from Corinth. The first readers of Paul’s letter, would have been very familiar with athletes racing against each other and other competitive sports taking place, with the athletes aiming to become top notch, to win first prize. And what they won in those days was not a gold medal like today, but a crown made up from pine leaves covered in plaster.

It was a great symbol of accomplishment and honour. But of course, it  was not a crown that lasted. The leaves would soon have withered and after a few years the crown would have crumbled.

Paul, however, says that as Christians our aim is not to win that kind of crown – one that soon falls apart. Our aim is a crown that will last forever.

What is the prize we are seeking to win? (9:27)

One of the groups who looked at the passage this week were not sure what this referred to and asked, “What is the prize we are seeking to win?” What is the everlasting crown that Paul is referring to? It’s a good question.

It may be the salvation won for us by Christ, that we will receive on the last day. Paul certainly talks about the crown in that way in other places.

Yet, Paul’s concern in chapter 9, is to win people for Christ. When he does that, they receive the crown of righteousness and become part of God’s eternal kingdom, but they also become in a sense his crown, the symbol that shows he has preached the good news of Jesus faithfully. Paul sometimes describes the churches he has founded in this way. For example in 1 Thessalonians:

“For what is our hope, our joy, or the crown in which we will glory in the presence of our Lord Jesus when he comes? Is it not you?” (1 Thessalonians 2:19)

This is an eternal crown, because those who owe their faith in part to Paul’s preaching will be eternally grateful as they share a place with him in eternity!

Paul’s passion then is to gain this crown. To see men and women come to believe in Christ, to receive his righteousness and his gift of eternal life. That is what he aimed for in his life and that passion is powerfully expressed in our reading today.

Questions…

But that leads to another question from one of our groups:

Is Paul’s strategy just for those called to be evangelists or all believers?

This is another good question and to help understand the question and its answer we need to remind ourselves how chapter 9 fits into Paul’s overall argument.

In chapters 8 to 10 of Corinthians, Paul is calling on the Christians to be willing to forego their rights, in order to build up and preserve the faith of other Christians in love.

In chapter 9, he uses himself as an example of this, explaining how he has foregone his freedoms and rights in order to preach the gospel about Jesus faithfully and so win people for Christ.

Some of what Paul says about himself, will just be relevant to his own situation and role, but the more general thrust of what he is saying is relevant to us all. We too need to be willing to sacrifice our rights out of love for others and particularly in seeking to win people for Christ.

One thing Paul does towards this goal is ‘to become all things to all people’ in order to save some. That leads to another good question from one of the groups:

How do we maintain Christian integrity, whilst also seeking to ‘be all things to all people’?

First of all we need to be clear that Paul is not saying that we simply imitate people’s behaviours in every way. It would not be right for example to take up drug dealing just to get alongside drug dealers!

Rather when Paul talks here about, ‘being all things to all people,’ he is saying he is willing to forego his right to live in a way that suits his background culture or comfort zone, in order to connect with people from different backgrounds. I am going to call that behaviour Holy Solidarity and that is what he emphasises in 9:19-23.

But to do that is certainly not to let go of our integrity as Christians. In fact in 9:1-18, Paul says he refuses to go along with certain expectations for the sake of the gospel, even when he would benefit from doing so and has every right to do so. I am going to call this Holy Resistance.

It is in attending to both Holy Solidarity and Holy Resistance that we can ‘be all things to all people’  and maintain Christian integrity.

So, let’s look at those two issues and what they meant for Paul and what they might mean for us.

Holy Resistance

First of all, Holy Resistance.

In verse 18, Paul says:

“What then is my reward? Just this: that in preaching the gospel I may offer it free of charge, and so not make full use of my rights as a preacher of the gospel.”

In the first half of the chapter, Paul has used a number of arguments to make clear that those who preach the gospel, the good news about Jesus, deserve to be paid a reasonable wage for doing so. As an apostle he had the right to be paid by the Corinthians whom he had spent eighteen months teaching about Jesus and God’s salvation.

However, he had chosen to forego that right and refused to be paid by the Corinthians. Why did he do that? He says so that it could be offered free of charge. Earlier on in verse 12, he said because to do so would be to hinder the gospel of Christ.

Not that Paul did not want the Corinthians to be generous with their money. At the end of the letter he mentions a collection he is making for the poor in Jerusalem.

Probably Paul was concerned about the way patronage worked in Roman cities at that time. People would offer generous donations or gifts, but they would expect loyalty, even compliance in return.

So, Paul did not want to receive financial support from the wealthy in Corinth, because he might then become in some way obliged to them and so be drawn into one faction against another or privileging the wealthy over the poor. He as a gospel preacher would be seen to be bought and belong to one particular person or group, rather than free to show concern for the whole people of God.

So, although he had the right to receive money from the Corinthians for his work, he forewent that right as an act of holy resistance against the potential manipulative control of the wealthy.

As Christians today, we also will need at times to act in holy resistance. To refuse to meet people’s expectations or to join in with what people want in order to maintain the integrity of the gospel and our witness.

In particular, although, we struggle financially as churches, we also need to be careful that in accepting money or donations, we are not pushed into relationships or behaviours that undermine our gospel witness.

That is why, we encourage all giving to be done anonymously. If I and other key leaders don’t know who is giving large amounts of money to the church, then we cannot be unduly influenced by them.

Yes, let’s pray for more money to fund what we need, but let’s also be concerned to protect the integrity of the gospel. We are at times called to Holy Resistance, even when it is costly.

Holy Solidarity

At the same time as resisting pressure to do what some expect from him, Paul also says, in verse 19 – “Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible.”

Then in verse 22: “I have become all things to all people so that by all means I might save some.”

What Paul is talking about here is ‘Holy Solidarity.’ Just as Christ gave up the glory of heaven and became one of us, so we give up our rights and freedoms to come alongside those different to us.

Holy Solidarity means being willing to adapt ourselves to the culture and ways of others in order to connect with them and share the good news with them, even though it might mean taking on customs or ways that take us out of our comfort zones or what we are used to.

So, how might we go out of our comfort zones in order to help win others for Christ?

Some of the groups had some initial suggestions:

• One way may simply be on a Sunday after church, instead of rushing away or talking only to the same people as normal, to seek out and befriend those who may be new to the church, so that they can be encouraged in their exploration of faith.

• Another group suggested outside services as a way of going to where people are. This year we are going to encourage St. Luke’s and St. George’s to be more involved in the Churches Together Good Friday witness in the town centre.

• Another suggestion was to connect to people locally by showing love by meeting their needs. We are already doing that in a number of areas with a number of different groups: Gather that we heard about earlier, Cafe4All, the St. George’s community meal, Play and Praise, the potential After-School club. All these initiatives involve people giving up their own freedoms in order to help connect with people in holy solidarity, in the hope both to show them real love, but also to share the good news of Jesus with them.

• Finally, there were suggestions about how we might need to adapt our services in ways we may not like – no-one likes change, but might better enable and encourage new people to come and hear the good news about Jesus.

All of these are ways of showing holy solidarity with the world around, in order to help connect with them and so share the good news of Jesus.

In the Year of Discernment we need to consider how we might improve on these present ways of connecting and also whether God is calling us in new directions to.

Not Running Aimlessly

In the last few verses Paul compares his ministry with that of an athlete. Paul pushes himself hard, in order to win the crown just as an athlete does. He says he does not run aimlessly.

In response to this, one group asked the question:

What does ‘running aimlessly’ (1 Cor. 9:26) look like in a believer’s life?

It is to take our eyes off the prize, which is to win people for Christ. Those who come to faith partly as a result of our efforts are our eternal crown.

When we live the Christian life, but do not have our eyes on this prize, when we make no efforts or sacrifices to win people for Christ, whether playing our part in supporting the wider church witness or in our personal witness, then we are running aimlessly, we are not seeking the prize.

Let’s imitate Paul, as he imitates Christ, by being willing to forego our rights, make sacrifices, show holy resistance and holy solidarity, that together as churches in Ramsgate we might win the eternal crown of people in eternity with Christ because of our efforts.