 So as we read through 1 Corinthians, and that would be a good thing to do at a run, both individually and in a church group, perhaps, we find topic after topic coming up. There's the question of church unity. There's the question of different leadership styles. There's the notion of wisdom. There's the meaning of the cross. And then there are all sorts of general topics and specific issues like sex and lawsuits and food and what to do about disagreements on what you can eat. There's how you do liturgy and worship. And in the middle of it all, there is love. And at the heart of it all, there is resurrection. All of that and more is in this letter we call 1 Corinthians. What's the situation? Why is Paul writing this letter now? He had been in Corinth for two years or so and then had gone on his travels again and had ended up in Ephesus. Now Ephesus is on the other side of the Aegean Sea from Corinth. Not that far as the seagull flies, but a bit further if you go the long route, the land route round through the north as he did more than once. And after those two years in Corinth, he knew these people pretty well and they knew him pretty well. And so he is writing now because of two things that have happened. One, some people from Corinth have come to him and have been telling him about the joys and sorrows of the church in Corinth. And that's part two, because some people had written to him with specific questions and issues. You didn't teach us about this or not very much. So what do we do now about this and that and the other? And so Paul in Ephesus is now writing to them to say, well, there's this and there's that and there's the other. He does refer to an earlier letter which he had written. And as usual scholars disagree about these things, whether that earlier letter is now perhaps incorporated within either this letter or more likely the letter we call second Corinthians, there is a passage which might correspond to that, or whether as no doubt is true of other letters that Paul had written, that letter is now lost. But it's the first, the first Corinthians is the first letter that we've got about all these issues. The situation in Corinth was quite different from the situation of some of Paul's other churches for one very interesting reason. In Acts chapter 18, some people in Corinth tried to get up a case against Paul, a case in front of the Roman governor, Galeo, the proconsul of Achia, which is the southern part of Greece where Corinth is. And the people who tried to get up a case against Paul were saying, we are Jews and this man Paul is teaching styles of worship which are illegal for us Jews to practice. But Galeo wasn't having it. Galeo said, as far as I can see, this is simply an inner Jewish problem, so I don't want to have anything more to do with it. And that caused trouble, as one may imagine, but at least it meant that in southern Greece, Christianity, as we call it anachronistically looking back, was free to flourish and develop because the Jewish people were allowed by the Romans to worship in their way. So if the Christians were allowed to worship as a new kind of Judaism, if you like, then they were free in a way that was not true in other parts of both the Greek and the Roman world, where the Christians were regarded as dangerous, as illegal, as people to persecute or certainly to treat with great suspicion and hostility. So the problems in Corinth arise from freedom. They are free, which means the pressure is off, which means they can indulge in personality cults or in different styles of life without needing to bother whether these things are actually helping the church to hold together in front of the principalities and powers of the world.