Message: In 1 Corinthians 15 Paul was talking about the resurrection
of Jesus and all of the people whom he appeared to after his resurrection.
There were many of them that because of their Greek culture, did not believe in
resurrection of any kind so they didn’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus.
Paul completely dismantled the faith using this belief to show them that
without the resurrection, the whole thing crumbles. Without the resurrection,
Jesus was just a good prophet who taught people. This made me think of the
Muslim religion. Many Christians are surprised to learn that Muslims believe in
Jesus. They view him very respectfully and are even very careful to say his
name in a respectful manner. They acknowledge him as a prophet of God but they
don’t see him as God. They believe he died, but they don’t believe he
resurrected. This changes everything! For many of us, we may not struggle with
the idea of resurrection, but we struggle with the full grasp that his death
and resurrection took our sin because we still struggle with the temptation of
sin. Paul was urging the church of Corinth to stop walking in sin because they
carried a mindset that if the resurrection wasn’t real then there was no
afterlife. If there was no afterlife it didn’t matter what they did. This is
the argument of many atheists, but for some reason many Christians live as if
this were our truth too. We accept most of the gospel but live with pieces
missing. We academically accept that Jesus died and resurrected and wiped out sin
and it’s power, but we don’t always accept it on a personal level. We may
either dismiss sin issues, or go the opposite and struggle to accept grace as
we fight to be perfect. Either extreme misses the point and there should always
be a tension between the two. Without the resurrection power, what is the
point?
