1 Corinthians: Failures in Judgement

The first letter to the Corinthians begins with Paul calling out the Christians in Corinth for wrongly judging their teachers. Namely, they were elevating and glorifying certain teachers and in so doing were demeaning other teachers.

This false judging of teachers had in its roots the idea that some thought they were spiritually superior to others because of who had taught and baptized them.

In addition, some of them had falsely judged Paul to not be a real Apostle. After all Paul had not walked with Jesus during his ministry and he wasn’t there at Pentecost. Certain of the Jewish Christians were mad at him because he wouldn’t make the Greek Christians follow Jewish customs like… circumcision.

So it was easier to vilify Paul’s apostleship, his teachings and his… converts.

The Corinthian’s were so high and mighty in their ability to judge Paul and other teachers that they failed to judge much more weightier issues (the Elephant in the room) like the member in chapter 5 who was in an inappropriate and sinful sexual relationship with a relative.

Their inability to properly judge was also revealed in chapter 6 when they took their fellow soldiers in Christ to Roman polytheistic magistrates to settle their civil matters.

Certain of them were so arrogant in their self-defined spirituality and superiority that they didn’t mind making others feel inferior and worse failed to recognize or to lift their sin sickened brethren out of Satan’s soul sucking quick sand.

You can see how improper judgement can destroy a congregation and render it ineffective in declaring the wisdom of God.

The ones in a congregation who are really spiritually superior don’t even recognize that. They are too busy helping others to even think like that.

As far as judging goes… let’s start by taking a critical and hard look at ourselves first and see how that feels before we serve a portion of that to someone else.