Thursday, October 21, 2010

The Apostolic Rule: Corinthians

The teaching of holy apostle Paul…

Pray to our Lord Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 1:2

Never stop thanking God for all the graces you have received through Jesus Christ.
1 Corinthians 1:4

Make up the differences between you, and instead of disagreeing among yourselves, be united in your belief and practice.
1 Corinthians 1:10

Instead of the spirit of the world, we have received the Spirit that comes from God, to teach us to understand the gifts He has given us. Therefore we teach not in the way in which philosophy is taught, but in the way that the Spirit teaches us. We teach spiritual things spiritually.
1 Corinthians 2:12-13

The temple of God is sacred, and you are that temple.
1 Corinthians 3:17

There must be no passing of premature judgment. Leave that until the Lord comes.
1 Corinthians 4:5

Keep to what is written.
1 Corinthians 4:6

The Kingdom of God is not just words, it is power.
1 Corinthians 4:20

You should not associate with a brother Christian who is leading an immoral life, or is a usurer, or idolatrous, or a slanderer, or a drunkard, or is dishonest. You should not even eat a meal with people like that.
1 Corinthians 5:11

How dare one of your members take up a complaint against another in the law courts of the unjust instead of before the saints! As you know, it is the saints who are to judge the world; and if the world is to be judged by you, how can you be unfit to judge trifling cases? Since we are also to judge angels, it follows that we can judge matters of everyday life.
1 Corinthians 6:1-3

You know perfectly well that people who do wrong will not inherit the Kingdom of God: people of immoral lives, idolators, adulterers, catamites, sodomites, thieves, usurers, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers will never inherit the Kingdom of God. These are the sort of people some of you were once, but now you have been washed clean, and sanctified, and justified through the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ and through the Spirit of our God.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11

Keep away from fornication. All the other sins are committed outside the body, but to fornicate is to sin against your own body.
1 Corinthians 6:18

Your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. You are not your own property. You have been bought and paid for. That is why you should use your body for the glory of God.
1 Corinthians 6:19-20

Let each man have his own wife, and each woman her own husband. The husband must give his wife what she has the right to expect, and so too the wife to the husband. The wife has no rights over her own body; it is the husband who has them. In the same way, the husband has no rights over his own body; the wife has them. Do not refuse each other except by mutual consent, and then only for an agreed time, to leave yourselves free for prayer. Then come together again in case Satan should take advantage of your weakness to tempt you.
1 Corinthians 7:2-5

A wife must not leave her husband, or if she does leave him, she must either remain unmarried or else make it up with her husband. Nor must a husband send his wife away.
1 Corinthians 7:10b-11

If a brother has a wife who is an unbeliever, and she is content to live with him, he must not send her away; and if a woman has an unbeliever for her husband, and he is content to live with her, she must not leave him. This is because the unbelieving husband is made one with the saints through his wife, and the unbelieving wife is made one with the saints through her husband. However, if the unbelieving partner does not consent, they may separate. In these circumstances, the brother or sister is not tied. God has called you to a life of peace. If you are a wife, it may be your part to save your husband. If a husband, it may be your part to save your wife.
1 Corinthians 7:12-16

What each one has is what the Lord has given him, and he should continue as he was when God’s call reached him.
1 Corinthians 7:17

Let everyone stay as he was at the time of his call. If, when you were called, you were a slave, do not let this bother you. But if you should have the chance of being free, accept it.
1 Corinthians 7:20-21

You have all been bought and paid for. Do not be slaves of other men.
1 Corinthians 7:23

We all have knowledge. Yes, that is so, but knowledge gives self-importance. It is love that makes the building grow. A man may imagine that he understands something, but still not understand anything in the way he ought to. But any man who loves God is known by Him.
1 Corinthians 8:1-3

The man who thinks he is safe must be careful that he does not fall. The trials that you have had to bear are no more than people normally have. You can trust God to not let you be tried beyond your strength, and with any trial He will give you a way out of it and the strength to bear it.
1 Corinthians 10:12-13

For me there are no forbidden things, but not everything does good. True, there are no forbidden things, but it is not everything that helps the building to grow.
1 Corinthians 10:23

Nobody should be looking for his own advantage, but everybody for the other man’s.
1 Corinthians 10:24

Whatever you eat, whatever you drink, whatever you do at all, do it for the glory of God. Never do anything offensive to anyone.
1 Corinthians 10:31-32

No one can say, “Jesus is Lord,” unless he is under the influence of the Holy Spirit.
1 Corinthians 12:3b

Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish. It does not take offense and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth. It is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. Love does not come to an end.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8a

You are not to be childish in your outlook. You can be babies as far as wickedness is concerned, but mentally you must be adult.
1 Corinthians 14:20

By all means be ambitious to prophesy, do not suppress the gift of tongues, but let everything be done with propriety and in order.
1 Corinthians 14:39-40

The gospel will save you only if you keep believing what was preached to you. Believing anything else will not lead to anything.
1 Corinthians 15:2

Never give in, never admit defeat. Keep on working at the Lord’s work always, knowing that in the Lord you cannot be laboring in vain.
1 Corinthians 15:58

Be awake to all the dangers. Stay firm in the faith. Be brave and be strong. Let everything you do be done in love.
1 Corinthians 16:13-14

We are Christ’s incense to God for those who are being saved and for those who are not. For the last, the smell of death that leads to death, for the first the sweet smell of life that leads to life.
2 Corinthians 2:15-16a

We do not go around offering the Word of God for sale, as many other people do. In Christ, we speak as men of sincerity, as envoys of God and in God’s presence.
2 Corinthians 2:17

We with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness of the Lord grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the Image that we reflect.
2 Corinthians 3:18

The troubles which are soon over, though they weigh little, train us for the carrying of a weight of eternal glory which is out of all proportion to them.
2 Corinthians 4:17

From now onward we do not judge anyone by the standards of the flesh. Even if we did once know Christ in the flesh, that is not how we know him now. For anyone who is in Christ, there is a new creation. The old creation has gone, and now the new one is here. It is all God’s work.
2 Corinthians 5:16-18a

It was God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the work of handing on this reconciliation. God in Christ was reconciling the world to Himself, not holding men’s faults against them, and He has entrusted to us the news that they are reconciled.
2 Corinthians 5:18b-19

We are ambassadors for Christ. It is as though God were appealing through us, and the appeal that we make in Christ’s Name is: Be reconciled to God.
2 Corinthians 5:20

For our sake God made the sinless One into sin, so that in Him we might become the goodness of God. As His fellow workers, we beg you not to neglect the grace of God that you have received.
2 Corinthians 5:21-6:1

We do nothing that people might object to, so as not to bring discredit on our function as Christ’s servants. We prove we are servants of God by great fortitude in times of suffering, in times of hardship and distress. We prove we are God’s servants by our purity, knowledge, patience, and kindness, by a spirit of holiness, by a love free from affectation, by the word of truth and by the power of God.
2 Corinthians 6:3-7a

Do not harness yourselves in an uneven team with unbelievers. Virtue is no companion for crime. Light and darkness have nothing in common. Christ is not the ally of Belial, nor has a believer anything to share with an unbeliever.
2 Corinthians 6:14-15

To suffer in God’s way means changing for the better and leaves no regrets, but to suffer as the world knows suffering brings death.
2 Corinthians 7:10

As long as the readiness is there, a man is acceptable with whatever he can afford. Never mind what is beyond his means. This does not mean that to give relief to others you ought to make things difficult for yourselves. It is a question of balancing what happens to be your surplus now against their present need, and one day they may have something to spare that will supply your own need. That is how we strike a balance.
2 Corinthians 8:12-14

We live in the flesh, but the muscles that we fight with are not flesh. Our war is not fought with weapons of flesh, yet they are strong enough in God’s cause to demolish fortresses. We demolish sophistries and the arrogance that tries to resist the knowledge of God. Every thought is our prisoner, captured to be brought into obedience to Christ.
2 Corinthians 10:3-5

Examine yourselves to make sure you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Acknowledge that Jesus Christ is really in you.
2 Corinthians 13:5

Try to grow perfect. Help one another. Be united. Live in peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you.
2 Corinthians 13:11

All texts are taken from the Jerusalem Bible (1966).

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