Talk 1
1 Corinthians 1:1 – 1 Corinthians 1:9
Greeting
Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our brother Sosthenes,
2 To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours:
3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thanksgiving
4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, 5 that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge— 6 even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you— 7 so that you are not lacking in any gift, as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, 8 who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
This transcript has been automatically generated
Good. Well, thank you very much indeed. I’d be very grateful if you’d keep 1 Corinthians open in front of you.
Well, thanks for your kind welcome. It’s lovely to be back here again for another year. 1 Corinthians is what we’re doing this week. You’ll find outlines after the blue pages, so if you’re wanting to write notes or just be encouraged that we’re actually making some progress and will indeed reach the end of every session, that you might like to follow on with the outlines. Despite our brother’s very helpful prayer that we’ll be able to put the cares of the world aside as we come to this, let me ask you a little uncomfortable holiday question: how’s life going?
I wonder what you think of your life this morning. School, university, home, work. How’s it going? Are you making a success of it? Jumping the hurdles, ticking the boxes, getting the grades, reaching the goals, balancing the work and life thing.
How’s it going?
There’s no doubt about it, the successful life in our culture involves a terrific amount of jumping, ticking, getting, reaching, and balancing. How’s it going for you where you are in your situation? You feeling better now you’ve got up and asked that question to yourself? Or maybe that’s the sort of question you came here this week to avoid asking yourself. How would you measure the success of your life?
What would it look like, the successful life lived out in your situation?
Well, this morning is an introduction to 1 Corinthians. I’m not sure what your experience of 1 Corinthians will have been like. I think it’s not the easiest of New Testament letters. It’s big, there’s a lot of it, it’s difficult to read it all at once. And I think for various other reasons, it’s not quite the easiest of New Testament letters.
So I thought I’d start off by giving— getting a bit of exposure to— a bit of a feel for what your exposure to 1 Corinthians has been. I’m going to give you a minute to talk to your neighbour. Yes, you have to talk, and I’m going to ask you a very simple question. Can you remember when you’ve been taught something about 1 Corinthians and what bit and what you were taught? Okay, when, what bit, and what you were taught.
1 minute to talk to your neighbour. Go talk.
Okay, time. That’s a minute. I hope you enjoyed saying hello to the person next door to you. Do keep that going during the week. It’ll be very helpful for them, and I hope for you.
I don’t know what your experience of 1 Corinthians has been in the past, but here’s an observation and then a guess. The observation is that at first sight The Corinthian church would seem to be a great hunting ground for a tabloid journalist. Don’t you think? I mean, you can imagine the headlines, can’t you? Chapter 5, Scandal: Man Sleeps with Stepmother.
Chapter 6, Prominent Christian Sues Church Member. Chapter 15, Bishop Denies Resurrection. Brackets again, close brackets. Chapter 11, Christian Cult Linked with Mysterious Deaths. Chapter 14, the Corinth blessing.
Christians mad, says our religious affairs correspondent. Chapter 15, baptism for the dead. Christians mad, says our religious affairs correspondent. It really is some letter, isn’t it, 1 Corinthians? You want dysfunction with a slightly gutter press feel to it, Corinth is the place to find it.
And it looks rather like a slightly seamy set of tabloid articles in various ways. And here’s my guess that when you’ve heard 1 Corinthians taught, mostly you’ve heard it taught in a bitty sort of way. A bit here and a bit there. You’ll probably have heard more one-off sermons than average on 1 Corinthians for a New Testament book. Or you’ll have had short series on a block of it.
So you’ll have done chapter 6 on marriage and sex and relationships, and you’ll have had the Easter sermon on the first half of chapter 15, And you’ll have bits from chapter 11 quoted at communion, and you’ll have heard people arguing about bits of it. Chapter 14, gifts. Chapters 11 and 14, women’s ministry. Chapter 14 is a great chapter. Chapter 13, the love chapter.
You’ll have had it at weddings and at evangelistic events on Valentine’s Day. It’s taught in a bitty sort of way, 1 Corinthians, and it’s easy to see why. Because when you come to it, it looks fundamentally bitty. Bit of bad behaviour here, another bit of bad behaviour there, more bad behaviour over there. And that combination, the slightly grotesque subject matter and the apparent randomness of it all, makes it difficult to read.
If it weren’t in the Bible, we might be prefacing it with, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Now I hope that by the end of this week you won’t be seeing it that way. My experience from looking at this letter over the last 3 or 4 years is that it’s utterly contemporary in ways I didn’t expect it to be, and that far from being the product of a kind of tabloid approach to Bible writing, it really is the most carefully ordered and persuasive piece of pastoral work, that it isn’t really bitty at all. Here’s my one visual aid for the day. Here is a piece of holiday confection, a tube of jelly beans.
On the surface, it looks kind of, well, as though it has a unity to it because, you know, they stay in one place. And you’ll notice that it has stripes to it. It looks a though it has some sort of order. But the truth is that take the tube away and the jelly beans disperse all over the place and the stripes appear to be complete— and the stripes are no longer stripes and the whole thing is completely random. Is 1 Corinthians like that?
A tube of randomly sorted things that are just bunged in and happen to belong to the same letter? Well, my answer is no. It’s more like a stick of rock. You know those stripy sticks of holiday rock? They look superficially like this, stripy and colourful on the outside, but no matter where you slice them through, the same thing is written all the way.
And what we’re going to try and do this morning is to get beyond the stripes, as it were, to the thing that holds this letter together. What’s going on in the church in Corinth?
Now let me look briefly at the stripes before we’ll give ourselves in a little bit more length to the core, the things that holds them together. Together. What’s in 1 Corinthians? There’s a lot of it. Let’s just get a quick overview to what’s there.
Chapter 1, verses 1 to 9, greeting and thanksgiving. We had Roy read out a little bit of it to us earlier on, which, as is normal in Paul’s letters, is much more significant than one might first assume, because Paul characteristically puts his big themes in the first few sentences in embryo and then expands on them all the way through the letter. And that’s exactly what happens in the first bit of chapter 1, and we’ll find that as we go through this week. Second big section starts really at 1:10.
Verse 11, it has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there is quarrelling among you. This is the first big issue he addresses in the letter. Parts of this letter are in response to things that he’s heard from various parts of the Corinthian church, this time from Chloe’s people, I guess, a house church within the bigger Corinthian church thing. And this section, chapters 1 to 4, covers quite a bit of ground, but there isn’t really a break in the argument at any point. And so I think it belongs together.
And we’ll look at that a little bit this morning and a little bit more tomorrow morning. Next, chapter 5, verse 1. Here’s a new section. It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you. And we kick off on a chapter, a couple of chapters worth, of specific other issues that he’s heard about.
It deals with sexual immorality, with taking people to court, both publicly scandalous things. And then, chapter 7, verse 1, there’s a new section. Now concerning the matters about which you wrote. And actually, that fills most of the rest of the letter in one way or another. There are things that the Corinthian church has corresponded with him about.
They’ve written to him apparently, and he’s responding to what they’ve written to him. So every so often in the narrative that follows, you get this phrase, now concerning. Chapter 7, verse 1, now concerning the matters about which you wrote, and chapter 7 is about marriage and stuff like that. Chapter 8, verse 1, now concerning food offered to idols. Chapter 12, verse 1, which we’ll come to on the penultimate day.
Now concerning, well, literally the spirituals or the spiritual things. Chapter 16, verse 1, concerning the collection for the saints. These are all things that they’ve wanted to ask him about and he is responding to. Now in this big section, 7:1 following, there are other bits mixed in there, things that he takes the initiative in writing to them about. So chapter 11’s got a bit of that.
Chapter 13, the love chapter, has got a bit of that. Chapter 15, the resurrection chapter, has got a bit of that. So it’s a kind of hotchpotch, this part of the letter, but it’s driven in part at least by things they’ve corresponded to him about. And then chapter 16, verse 5, we get, well, the concluding stuff that you usually brush over in Paul’s letters— greetings to various people, descriptions of various things that he needs doing, which, as is normal in Paul’s letters, is much more significant than one might first assume. Because more often than not, just as he introduces ideas at the beginning of his letter, he ties them together at the end.
And so we’ll find that— though we won’t do it in enormous detail— that there are various bits about chapter 16 which pull together the threads that have run through the whole thing. Now, those are the stripy bits, the different flavours of one Corinthian jelly bean, if you like, the kaleidoscope of issues that make this letter up. But the big question is, does anything hold it together? And if so, what?
Well, here’s the big idea, and I’m going to state it as big and bold as I can. And I hope that during the week you will see how that works. Here’s the big idea: that the Corinthians want the benefits of the cross of Jesus without the cross-shaped life.
They want the benefits of the cross without the cross-shaped life. Now, put it like that It seems too stupid for words that they could possibly think that, doesn’t it? How could any Christian think that you could be a Christian and not— that not involve in some way the cross-shaped life? Doesn’t every Christian, certainly every St Helen’s-related Christian, know the words of Jesus, Mark chapter 8? Join in when you recognise them.
If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and We all know this, don’t we? You don’t have to be around long to know those words. Every Christian knows them. But— and here is the big but— it is very easy, isn’t it, for that taking up the cross idea to be somewhat abstract.
Going the way of the cross, we talk about. We talk about it of Jesus, We even to some degree embrace the idea for ourselves. There are very few who’d call themselves Christian who wouldn’t admit that a degree of difficulty is involved in the Christian life. But what does it actually look like, the cross-shaped life, the following Jesus sort of life? Now here is the big point of this morning.
This week. So step back and wake yourself up, and if your neighbour has fallen asleep, this is the time to prod them, because this is the big point of the week, and if you miss this, you’ve missed everything. Let me put the words of Mark chapter 8 in the terms of 1 Corinthians.
If anyone would come after me, he must imitate the way of life of my servant Paul.
Just let that one sink in for a moment because it actually is the issue at the very heart of this letter. If anyone would come after me, he must imitate the way of life of my servant Paul. I wonder if you’ve heard the Christian life portrayed in those terms before. You may not agree with that statement, at this point. How does it grab you?
Paul, itinerant missionary, persecuted, shipwrecked, imprisoned, killed in the end. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the idea of imitating Paul filled you with a good deal less enthusiasm than the idea of imitating Jesus. Because you know there are things about Jesus that you can’t imitate— sacrificial death on the cross. You’re not going to pull that one off, are you?
And Jesus, there’s a dignity about him. He’s a great name, if nothing else. He’s impressive even if you don’t agree with him all the time. His impact on history is undeniable, even if you’re a thoroughgoing pagan. People the world over think there is something positive about Jesus.
But Paul? Not quite so easy to embrace, is he? Paul, variously regarded in our own age as the one who tampered with the message of Jesus and invented his own thing, which everybody else has followed. Paul, the hater of women, the hater of Jews, the champion of inhumanly narrow sexual morality, the friend of fundamentalists. I could go on.
There are so many things about Paul that our culture finds enormously difficult to embrace. And brothers and sisters, the same was true in Corinth. And it’s the big issue in this letter. Every part of this letter rotates round that central sun, the Corinthian distaste for the Apostle’s way of life.
Now let me introduce you briefly then to Paul and the Corinthians and how this all came about. Paul had brought the gospel to Corinth. You can read about it in Acts chapter 18. That would be a good preparation for tomorrow, actually. Just have a little skim through Acts chapter 18 and get the feel for that encounter.
It was a very significant part of his ministry. He spent at least a year and a half there in Corinth. And a church was started. It was a notably difficult work in Corinth. Partway through the chapter, he receives a vision from God to keep him at it because there’s loads of opposition.
It’s very complicated. Let’s dip into 1 Corinthians and what the letter says about Paul and the Corinthians. Chapter 1, verse 5. You’ll need a Bible open at this point. Because we’re going to be all over the place in the letter for a few minutes.
Let me read verses 4 to 7.
I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus, that in every way you were enriched in him with all speech and all knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, so that you are not lacking in in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will sustain you to the end, guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, by whom you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Look particularly at 5 and 6. Paul says, that the Corinthians have in every way been enriched in Christ, in all speaking and in all knowledge. Just note those key words, speech and knowledge.
Remember I said that the, the key ideas in the letter are introduced at the beginning? Well, those are very important Corinthian ideas. Just file them away. We’ll think about them more in the days that come. They were enriched in every way.
How? Verse 6, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, which is not terribly easy to understand on its own, but what I think it means is this: you were enriched through the testimony, the gospel, that I brought to you. Note the past tense. It was confirmed among you. Most of the past tenses in this letter refer to what happened when Paul came to Corinth.
The testimony I brought you made you rich.
He goes on later in the chapter to talk about that first visit in more detail. Turn to chapter 2, verse 1. This is what it was like from Paul’s end. Chapter 2, verse 1: I, when I came to you brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Christ Jesus Christ and him crucified.
And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling. And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might rest not in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. 2:1, I behaved a certain way when I brought the testimony to you. I didn’t try to impress you with a kind of speech and style that you would have been likely to be impressed by. I was different from that— fearful, trembling, and verse 5, I did that for a particular reason, that you would trust God and not me.
And the fact that you believed me, verse 4, was not because what I did pushed all your buttons and impressed you, but because the Spirit of God was at work in the whole thing. It was the Spirit’s power that made you believers.
That’s what happened back then, says Paul, I came to you deliberately unimpressive looking, but you believed my message and, chapter 1, verse 5, were thoroughly enriched by it.
That was back then. What about now? How do the Corinthians look on it now? Well, turn to chapter 4, to that bit that was read to us a little earlier on. I’m going to break right in, in verse 8.
What do the Corinthians think?
Already you have all you want. Already you’ve become rich. Notice the rich word. Without us you’ve become kings, and would that you did reign so that we might share the rule with you. Now just look over that verse and see what do you think is the most important phrase or word.
Already you have all you want, already you’ve become rich, without us you’ve become kings, and would that you did so that we might share the rule with you. Most important phrase or word?
Already certainly is important, but there’s something more important than that.
Have become, yes, that’s certainly important, but there’s something even more important than that. Without us. That is the key phrase here. Without us. Do you see the shift?
Stand back. Chapter 1, verse 5, enriched through the testimony that I brought to you. Chapter 4, verse 8, rich without us. Do you see the transformation there? You see shift in their thinking?
They have distanced themselves from him. They see themselves as having moved on from him. There were things about the way he did things when he came that didn’t ring their bells then and don’t now. They took his message on board, yes, but his way of doing things was always difficult for them to swallow. And now that he’s no longer there, they see themselves as having outgrown him.
We’re talking within a decade of his departure, probably 5 years or so. It’s not a long time.
They have a new richness that they didn’t get from him.
Now let me say that in many ways, verses 7 and 8 of chapter 4 get right to the heart of the Corinthian mindset. Look at the verses. Let me read verse 7. I didn’t read that earlier on. For who sees anything different in you?
The Corinthians think they are different, different from Paul, different from other Christians. I just keep a finger there and look back to chapter 1. Look at verse 2, another telltale little phrase: To the church of God that’s in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus. They think themselves different from others.
Back to chapter 4. Who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you didn’t receive?
They find it hard to swallow the idea that everything comes from God, that the gospel is all about God’s grace. There’s a tremendous focus on human activity in 1 Corinthians. Verse 7 again, why do you boast as if you did not receive it. The Corinthians are full of boasting, full of themselves and their abilities and what they have, which they got because of how special they are rather than because of what God gave to them.
And so verse 8, they view themselves as being different from Paul.
Now let’s step back and summarise. You see, this is where the Corinthian culture crashes right into the gospel of grace.
Corinthian culture likes impressive things and impressive people. Corinthian culture is very focused on status and its outward markers. It’s boastful, it’s achievement-orientated, and Paul’s gospel is not, and neither is his lifestyle.
Look what they think of him. We’ll carry on in chapter 4. Look at verse 10.
We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honour, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed, buffeted, homeless. We labour, working with our own hands.
When reviled, we bless. When persecuted, we endure. When slandered, we entreat. We’ve become and are still like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things. What he’s describing is what the Corinthians think of him.
Verse 11, they don’t like his food. They don’t like his clothing. They don’t like the fact that he is beaten, that he doesn’t have a home to go to. They really don’t like verse 12, literally, that he gets tired working with his hands. We’re talking here about Paul’s tent-making activity.
If you read Acts chapter 18, it’s in Acts chapter 18 that we’re told about Paul’s tent-making activity. One of the things he did in Corinth was that he earned his own living rather than being supported by them. They hate that.
They like paying for their speakers.
Darling, it’s so manual, Paul’s lifestyle. They hate that. It’s so un-Corinthian. They don’t like his passivity, verse 13. Ought to be smacking the enemies hard rather than taking the hits.
Verse 13 is perhaps the worst. This is what they think of him: we have become and are still like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things. They think his life is garbage.
Verse 14: I don’t write these things to make you ashamed. It’s not why he’s writing, although they ought to be ashamed, but to admonish you as beloved children.
You see the distaste that’s contained in those verses. They look at what he does and how he lives and they go, it’s so not us, that.
Why? Well, because the things that the Corinthian culture values the Corinthian church also values. They’ve just given a spiritual gloss to the values of their own culture and called it Christian. The things they value now are a sort of spiritualised version of the things they valued before they were converted. And Paul was, and remains, an uncomfortable reminder of the fact that grace values people, not by what they are or do or appear, but solely on the basis of who God is and what God does and what God gives.
And Paul’s lifestyle mirrors that. You could not look at Paul and say that he was living the successful life. You really couldn’t.
He didn’t look that way. In prison, homeless, not eating much and at the right times, not looking after himself, not achieving. He is a painful reminder to the Corinthians of an entirely different way of valuing things. And the big issue for the Corinthians is whether they will adopt that way of thinking for themselves or not. Now, the big appeal of this letter, all the way through in different ways, is, I want you to imitate me.
Look at 4:14. I do not write these things to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children. I still think of you as my children, though you’re so negative about me. For although you have countless guides in Christ, you don’t have many fathers, for I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. I urge you then, be imitators of me.
That is why I sent you Timothy, my beloved and faithful child in the Lord, Lord, to remind you of my ways in Christ, as I teach them everywhere in every church. There’s that idea from chapter 1 back in again. Everybody’s the same. I teach this everywhere. You’re no different.
You have to imitate me. And in order to impress that upon you, I’m going to send you a person who lives the same sort of lifestyle as I do, to remind you of what it really looks like. Notice Timothy is referred to as a faithful implying that the Corinthians may be unfaithful children. He looks on them as children, but not at the moment faithful ones, not at the moment embracing that pattern of life for themselves.
He wants them to imitate him. Turn on to chapter 10, please, would you. Same message again.
I’ll read from verse 31.
10:31: So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do— it’s a whole-of-life application here— do it all for the glory of God. Give no offence to Jews or Greeks or the church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage but that of many, that they may be saved, be imitators of me as I am of Christ. This is a pattern of life not just for apostles but for Corinthians, not just for church but for everyday life. Imitate me. Why?
Because I am the authentic pattern of following Jesus. If anyone would come after me, he must imitate the pattern of life of my servant Paul. Paul is modelling the authentic Christian life here. The Corinthians wish that it were otherwise because they find his lifestyle so distasteful. So much does it bump into the things they value.
Now, why does he want this? Well, basically he wants this so that the gospel will be effective among them and also among others. I just turn to chapter 15 very briefly. We’ll look at this in much more detail on the last day, but Paul’s great concern is that the gospel continues to bite in Corinth and, and through the Corinthians among the lives of other people. So the great application at the end of the resurrection chapter, which isn’t really about resurrection, but we’ll find that out in the last day: Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.
Now you see, the Corinthians look at Paul and his life and they think, that’s useless, that life. It’s rubbish. It’s not achieving anything. We don’t want to be like that. And he says, actually, the only way of living a life that is not in vain is if you imitate me and follow my way of doing things.
It’s the only way.
Only if you imitate me will the work of the Lord continue to go on in you and through you to others. They think his life is in vain because it doesn’t look impressive.
And this is his great concern, that in finding his life distasteful, they really are finding the gospel distasteful, and they are really finding the Lord Jesus distasteful.
And because they’ve distanced themselves from him, they’ve really distanced themselves from a fruitful way of living.
Because they value human things rather than grace, they’re in danger of leading lives that are in the end of no value at all.
Well, that’s enough from this morning. Let me just draw some closing conclusions. The surprising idea of this letter is that imitating Paul is the authentic way of imitating Jesus. And it raises the question, how are we to imitate Paul? In what way do we all need to be the itinerant missionary, the apostle to the Gentiles, etc.?
When I was a student, I remember Michael Griffiths, who was at that point a senior missionary in Japan coming to the CU to talk about mission-related stuff. And he related a tale of when, similarly, when he was a student, a senior missionary came to the CU to talk about missionary stuff.
And this senior missionary was, I understand it, a former military person. And his opening line was this. Any man here who doesn’t go to the mission field is wet.
Now, is that really true? Is that really the right thing to do? Is that the right way of imitating the Apostle Paul? Well, we’ll unpack that in the days that follow. The answer is no, but— or yes, but.
For now, let’s just reflect for a moment the achievement-centred culture in which we live. From our earliest years, from our mother’s milk really, we are taught to be independent, to get on, to achieve, to get the grades, to jump the hurdles. And we live in a culture tremendously affirming of human activity. Tremendously. I don’t know if anybody of you here watch the MasterChef programme.
It’s just another version of sort of gastro porn, isn’t it? But the repeating phrase in the MasterChef programme is, someone here will change their life. Changing your life, that’s what you can do in this culture. It’s tremendously affirming of human activity. But let me say how easy it is to baptise the values of the culture in which we live with a veneer of spirituality.
To assume that if my culture values something, then conversion will bring me a more spiritual version of the same sort of thing. As a friend of mine put it, before I was a Christian, I wanted to be rich and famous. Now I want to be the best preacher in the world. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? It’s no difference between those.
It’s just in a different field, I want to be the best person in the world. The achievement mentality is there in the world and it is there in the Christian culture.
So how’s life going? How would you value it? The brilliant thing about Paul’s gospel is that value is not really to do with what we at all. It’s all about Jesus and his achievement.
That is uncomfortable because it’s nothing like the way of valuing things that our culture uses. Nothing like it. Valuing yourself because of the achievement of another.
It is, however, thrilling because unlike the fruitless activity of our own world, the achievement of the Lord Jesus and the life that he has passed on for us to live is really not in vain.
Let’s pray together, shall we? Let’s pray.
Heavenly Father, there have been many new ideas to think about this morning.
We pray that as we digest this letter over these next few days, we would be gripped by the Apostle’s way of valuing things, his way of living.
We pray that we might recognise in that the authentic imitation of the life of the Lord Jesus Christ. And we pray that despite the way our own culture values things, that we might find our identity, our worth, our sense of accomplishment in belonging to him and in following his pattern.
We ask this in his name.
Amen. Can I just say a brief word before we close about homework? I’ve suggested a little bit of homework. It’s just some light reading. If there was any chance of you reading, skimming through chapters 1 to 4 before tomorrow morning, that would be terrific.
And a little bit about our study questions. Study questions are fewer rather than more. I hope they will give you a chance to reflect on things in some depth. Some days I’ve given you study questions for you to think about specifically and different ones for the group, and sometimes they’re all the same. So I hope that makes some sense.
You’ll find the study questions after the, the notes for each session.
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