1 Corinthians 1:18-31 || Discipleship - The Call

Topic: The Call – As Jesus’ disciples we are called to a radical and disruptive life

Passage: 1 Corinthians 1:18-31

Date: 6 June 2026

Preacher: Rev’d David Browne

This week we’re kicking of a new sermon series. It’s designed by our Bishop, Peter Grice, and churches across our region will be doing this series together as we think about our most important function as a church – making disciples.

Over the next four week’s we’re going to look at:

-The Call

-The Cost

-The Challenge

-The Commission

Of discipleship.

Today I want to zoom in on one reading chosen for this Sunday which is 1 Corinthians 1:18-31 which is all about God’s call on our lives.

Look at 1 Corinthians 1:26 which says:

‘Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called.’

Perhaps you can think of what it was like when God called you to follow him. I can think of several different moments in life when I heard God’s call, and it’s changed me for the better. Perhaps you haven’t yet heard to call of God on your life and don’t even know what a disciple or discipleship is all about. Either way you’re in a good place because today we’re going to how disciples of Jesus are called to a radical and disruptive life.

Radical

The word ‘radical’ today means a lot of different things. I grew up in the 90’s where radical was a phrase Bart Simpson used as another word for ‘cool’. Then after September 11, 2001 a radical Muslim, Christian, or leftist, started to be used negatively. Sure there were nice vegans, but it was the radical ones you had to watch out for!

Now today I don’t want to use the word ‘radical’ in the Bart Simpson sense or the September 11 sense. Today we’re going use ‘radical’ in its original sense which has to do with roots. Discipleship is radical because its essential source is found in the message of Jesus Christ.

Jesus didn’t spend his life attracting fans, contracting workers, or enlisting troops. Instead, he called disciples. This is why in the book of Acts chapter 18 ,the apostle Paul travels to the city of Corinth where he spends his time making tents in the marketplace and making disciples. He starts in the local synagogue, a Jewish meeting place, where he reasons with Jews and Greeks, telling them about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and how he was calling them to come follow him.

And this is where he runs into a problem. You see preaching about a man who was crucified rising from the dead does not impress the Corinthians. Corinth was a young vibrant port city with lots of temples to Greek gods and a large synagogue for a growing Jewish community.

Greeks loved wisdom and loved to listen to brilliant preachers talk about the newest ideas and philosophies. The idea of someone preaching that an ancient Jewish God sent his Son into the world to die on a cross for the sin of the world and then rise again sounded ridiculous.

The Jews demanded signs. If Jesus was the Saviour, the one true King of Israel, then why were the Romans still in charge of Israel? Where were the miracles? Paul simply didn’t do enough magic tricks or preach a good enough sermon to convince people, so they chucked him out of the synagogue and started riots when he tried to preach in the streets.

Now Paul got discouraged but one night God spoke to him in a vision.

“Do not be afraid; keep on speaking, do not be silent. 10 For I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city.” 11 So Paul stayed in Corinth for a year and a half, teaching them the word of God. (Acts 18:9-11)

Miraculously a few families did repent and begin to follow Jesus. Paul baptised them and continued to disciple them, teaching them about the life and ways of Jesus and instilling in them the importance of the message of the cross. Their example of endurance in suffering, inclusivity, and passion for Jesus meant that they in turn made new disciples as people rejected the pride and greed of Corinth to follow a humble and generous Jesus.

Slowly the church began to grow, so much so that the people who had rejected Paul’s message began to join the church. But these new disciples tried to take over the church and make Christianity sexier to new converts. Brilliant preachers schooled in philosophy started gathering followings and tried to make the message more palatable by not talking about Jesus’ resurrection. Rich new members started to throw their money and power around to try and gain influence in the church.

Slowly the church was losing its roots, and this is why in 1 Corinthians 1:18 Paul says:

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:18)

Here Paul is bringing the church back to its roots and to God.

Look at v.22 which says:

“Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:22-24)

This is the core message of Christianity – Christ crucified and resurrected. While it’s tempting to focus solely on the unoffensive parts of Christianity, like Jesus’ love and compassion, without the cross you have a movement with no power to save lives.

The root of our discipleship, the anchor of our lives is the calling from our Lord to follow a Crucified Messiah into a life of suffering service. Attempts to water down our message or ‘sell’ the Christian message by making it more palatable to the surrounding culture happened in Corinth and it happens today. In Corinth there were leaders in the church mucking with Biblical teaching on family, giving to the poor, lawsuits, liturgy, and many other things but fundamentally they were questioning Jesus' death and resurrection. Sadly, this is still the case today and this is why we need to be rock solid on our calling in Christ as disciples.

When a plant loses its roots it cannot reproduce and it dies. Friends let’s be radical disciples, rooted and established on Christ who has called us, the pioneer and perfector of our faith.

Disruptive

The call to discipleship is rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, and this radical message disrupts our lives.

Today is a special day in the life of the Browne family. Zoë and I have been discipling our two boys Micah and Jude since birth. Every night we read the Bible, pray, and bless one another. It’s part of who we are as a family and today Jude is taking his first communion.

Jude has been asking for over a year to take communion, but we’ve been waiting for him to grasp the gravity of what this holy meal means before we encourage him to take it. As a baptised member of our church, Jude has always been part of our church, but we didn’t want him to take communion as a chore or simply because everyone else was doing it.

So we’ve been having conversations, praying over the right time, and learning through questions and answers about the significance of the Lord’s Supper. This is called catechesis, instruction, or formation in the faith. It’s what we should all be doing for and receiving from each other. Catechesis in our gathered worship services but we must actively continue to learn from one another and through serving during the week.

This is why in 1 Corinthians 1:26 Paul writes:

“Brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.” (1 Corinthians 1:26-27)

Paul is reminding his friends in the church about the God who called them, and how far he’s brought them. The people who first joined the church weren't high-powered movers and shakers, they were ordinary folk, called by an awesome God. The fact that this church survived in a town when they were many other religions, attractions, and demands on people’s time is a testament that God chooses the foolish things of this world so that nobody might boast before him.

Today cults like Scientology like to recruit the rich and famous so that others might be drawn to the movement in the hope that they might become rich and famous themselves. Christianity goes the other way, preaching a message that has more to do with who God is and what God has done than what’s in it for me. Sadly, over the centuries the church has focussed on attracting members by emphasising on what’s in it for them rather than the goodness of God, and it’s demanded less of members to them to sign on.

Sadly, this has harmed the church because people have stopped making disciples and they're become consumers of church instead. People’s lives have also changed little because they’re not willing to have their comforts disrupted because they’ve been sold cheap grace that demands little of them.

Theologian Reinhold Neibuhr in his book ‘The Kingdom of God in America’ summarizes the false gospel sold today as:

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” - Richard Niebuhr

Here in 1 Corinthians, we see that true discipleship is about the opposite. The Corinthians lives were disrupted by the good news of Jesus Christ. How he had taken the wrath of God for them, and taken their judgement upon himself, so they might look forward to a world of justice, where Satan, sin, and death had been dealt with through Christ.

Because of this the Corinthians and other Christians like them built vibrant churches. They looked after orphans, widows, and outcasts both Christian and non-Christian. They would take unwanted babies, particularly girls, who had been dumped in gutters and rubbish heaps and raised them as their own. They freed slaves, built schools and hospitals, and cared for people who were so sick, they’d been abandoned by their families.

Early Christians did this not because they had to, but they loved Christ so much they wanted to. This is something we often get wrong about discipleship today – we’ve made it all about us. A disciple should do certain things, look a certain way, and tick certain boxes. We’ve made the goal of discipleship becoming more like Christ for our own sake / benefit (?)

While becoming more like Christ is a good thing, it’s not the goal of discipleship. Instead, the goal of discipleship is Christ himself. Christ didn’t call his first disciples and then give them a list of boxes to tick to work their way up to sainthood. Instead, he called people to follow him and as they grew more in love with him, they automatically did what he did.

Friends our vision as a church isn’t: try harder and do more. Instead, our goal is to know Christ and to make him known. A disciple is someone who knows Christ, and to know Christ is to follow him.

Tom Holland, writing about how the strange behaviour of the first Christians, and every true disciple throughout history says this:

“It is the audacity of it—the audacity of finding in a twisted and defeated corpse the glory of the creator of the universe—that serves to explain, more surely than anything else, the sheer strangeness of Christianity, and of the civilisation to which it gave birth. All are heirs to the same revolution: a revolution that has, at its molten heart, the image of a god dead on a cross.” - Tom Holland ‘Dominion’

Friends as we walk through this life let’s hear Jesus call on our lives to follow him, and as we do let’s embrace his radical and disruptive grace. Let’s fall more in love with Christ so that we can say along with Paul: “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:31)