1CO 1
1
Apostolic Greeting
1 Paul, whom God called to serve as an apostle of Christ Jesus according to divine will rather than human appointment, together with Sosthenes our fellow believer in Christ,
2 To the church of God's people gathered in Corinth, to those who have been set apart as holy through union with Christ Jesus and called to live as God's consecrated people, joining with all believers everywhere who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, who is both their Master and ours:
3 May you experience the grace or unmerited favour and peace that come from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
Thanksgiving to God
4 I continually express gratitude to my God for you because of the generous grace God has bestowed upon you through your relationship with Christ Jesus.
5 This is evident because in every aspect of your life you have been enriched through your connection with Him, receiving both the ability to communicate spiritual truths effectively and the capacity to comprehend divine truth.
6 This spiritual enrichment confirms that the message about Christ has been firmly established in your midst.
7 As a result, you are not deficient in any spiritual gift or ability as you eagerly anticipate the moment when our Lord Jesus Christ will be fully revealed.
8 He will continue to strengthen you until the very end, ensuring that you stand blameless when you appear before Him on that day when our Lord Jesus Christ returns.
9 God is completely reliable and trustworthy, and it is He who has called you into intimate fellowship and partnership with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Exhortation to Unity
10 Now I urge you earnestly, fellow believers, by the authority and character of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you maintain harmony in what you say and believe, avoiding all factions and divisions among yourselves. Instead, work towards being perfectly unified, sharing the same mindset and the same judgment.
11 I raise this concern because members of Chloe's household have informed me, my fellow believers, that contentious disputes have arisen among you.
12 What I mean specifically is this: each faction among you is claiming allegiance to different leaders, saying things like "I follow Paul's teaching," or "I align myself with Apollos," or "I belong to Cephas's group," or even "I claim to follow Christ alone."
13 Has Christ been fragmented into competing parts? Was Paul the one who was crucified to accomplish your redemption? Or were you baptised into union with Paul's name rather than Christ's?
14 I am grateful to God that I did not baptise any of you except Crispus and Gaius.
15 This means no one can claim that you were baptised into allegiance with me personally.
16 I do recall that I also baptised the household of Stephanas. Beyond these, I cannot remember whether I baptised anyone else.
17 The reason this matters is that Christ did not commission me primarily to perform baptisms, but rather to proclaim the gospel message. Furthermore, I was to do this without relying on sophisticated rhetoric or philosophical cleverness, so that the message of Christ's cross would not be stripped of its inherent power and effectiveness.
The Word of the Cross
18 For the message about the cross appears to be utter foolishness to those who are on the path to destruction, but to those of us who are experiencing salvation, it represents nothing less than the mighty power of God at work.
19 This truth is affirmed in Scripture where God declares:
"I will demolish the wisdom of those who consider themselves wise,
and I will disregard the intelligence of those who think themselves intelligent."*
20 So where are the wise philosophers now? Where are the respected scholars? Where are the skilled debaters of this present age? Has God not demonstrated that the wisdom this world prizes is actually foolishness?
21 For since the world in all its human wisdom failed to recognise and know God through its own intellectual pursuits, God chose to use what seems like the foolishness of the preached message to bring salvation to those who believe.
22 This approach makes sense because Jewish people typically demand miraculous signs as proof, while Greek culture seeks sophisticated philosophical wisdom.
23 Yet we proclaim Christ in His crucifixion, which serves as an offensive stumbling block to Jewish expectations and appears as foolish nonsense to Gentile thinking.
24 However, to those whom God has effectually called, both Jews and Greeks alike, Christ is revealed as the very power of God and the true wisdom of God.
25 For even what might appear as God's foolishness surpasses human wisdom, and what might seem like God's weakness exceeds human strength.
26 Consider the circumstances of your own calling, fellow believers. Not many of you were considered wise by worldly standards, not many held positions of power or influence, and not many came from families of high social standing.
27 But God deliberately chose what the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think themselves wise, and God chose what the world views as weak in order to shame those who consider themselves strong.
28 God also chose what the world regards as insignificant and despised, indeed things that worldly people consider nonexistent, in order to nullify and set aside the things that the world considers important.
29 God did this so that no human being would have grounds for boasting in His presence.
30 And it is because of God's gracious work that you exist in union with Christ Jesus, who has become for us the embodiment of wisdom that comes from God. He is our righteousness, making us right with God; He is our sanctification, setting us apart as holy; and He is our redemption, purchasing our freedom.
31 Therefore, as Scripture declares: "Let the person who boasts find his grounds for boasting only in the Lord."*
Notes
19 Quoted from Is. 29:14
31 Quoted from Jer. 9:24
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Copyright © 2026 Michael Adeyemi Adegbola. This Scripture text is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).
