By Jared Warner
Willow Creek Friends Church
January 18, 2026
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1 Corinthians 1:1–9 (ESV)
1 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. 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.
What is our purpose? Why are we here?
These questions often ring in my mind, and I am sure they ring in yours also at times. All too often our existence seems to get placed under the weight of the world, and we begin to question what the point really is. This is why the first query of our faith and practices asks, “Do you earnestly seek to maintain a life in fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you practice the daily reading of the Scriptures in your families, giving time for waiting upon the Lord? Are you watchful not to be unduly absorbed by temporal affairs? Are you careful to avoid places and activities inconsistent with a Christian character”
I get unduly absorbed. I have admitted on many occasions that I am a news addict. This began when I was in Junior High School and it has persisted throughout my life. I grew up on the farm, and when you work on a farm you spend a lot of long hours alone in a tractor or working in a pasture. In the days before smart phones and wireless internet, before unlimited access to YouTube, all you had to bring entertainment while working was the radio. But the radio gets monotonous. I got to the point I could tell the time based on which song was playing on the radio because they would play the same playlist over and over every single day, I could quote the ads word for word in the voice of the reader, and I could basically tell the joke the DJ would say after a song before the DJ said it. I grew to despise our radio stations, and if you play Ace of Bass around me I might turn into the Incredible Hulk. We had very few options in the middle of nowhere though. I could tune in maybe three stations, one played country, one played pop, and the other was the public broadcaster that often played classical music.
What does someone in my position do? Well you flip the radio to the AM setting and see what you can find. I grew to love hockey because I would often hear a hockey game playing on a random AM station, sometimes I could get Chicago, often St Louis, but usually Dallas Stars. But during the day, there was news radio. I loved the news radio stations because at least it was not the same thing every single day. It was funny, interesting, informative, and it kept drawing you back each day because what if you would miss something important.
As I became an adult, my jobs would often lend themselves to similar themes. I worked in lawn care, going around treating lawns and making them look exceptional, again alone in a truck listening to the radio. I worked in landscaping, and since I had chemical application licensing I often found myself working alone in a truck. I found that as I continued to do this, I was getting angrier and angrier about things. And often I was only getting one side of the issue because I was only listening to one station. And rarely did I question things.
Then the call to ministry began to take hold of my attention. I switched the channel away from the news, or more accurately commentary on the news, and I began to listen to Christian radio more. At first I would listen to the music channel but quickly found that the music channel played the same playlist like every music station, so I began to listen to sermons and Christian oriented news. I eventually became a pastor and I continued this practice, and I found myself back in the same cycle. I was getting absorbed into the news once again. But this time I was hearing the news in contrast with scripture, and I was listening to the news alongside sermons. And I found myself in a dilemma. What I was hearing said in scripture and what I was hearing in the sermons and on the news often did not synchronize. I was being told to believe certain things in the sermons but the scriptures they were using were often taken out of context and in many cases the meaning was being twisted.
I listened to these teachers, these news broadcasters, these leaders I once respected say one thing and then over the course of years, when their party was in power they said the opposite. That is when I realized I had a problem. I was in the process of what is now called deconstruction. The faith I thought I had, the faith I thought I was taught, and the faith I was currently listening to was not meshing with the words I was reading in scripture and the experience I was observing in life.
What was I to do? I was a pastor. A leader within the church? Do I leave, or was there something to stay for?
I do not have all the answers. I am not the type of person that will try to debate with you and convince you that I am right, but I do have a tendency to argue. I am a news junkie, and I am a nerd so I read a lot. And at times I am like a pressure cooker and the valve just has to let out some steam. But as I went about my personal deconstruction I asked questions. What is the point? Why are we here? What is our purpose? This lead me to places I never imagined. Because I began to listen to some of the questions that people asked not to find an answer to win an argument, but instead I began to weigh the question with contemplation and prayer. The big culture war questions, proof of scripture questions, theology questions. I used them as places to pray instead of debate.
Paul wrote to the church in Corinth and in the beginning of his letter he says some powerful things. He introduces his letter as he usually does, “Paul, called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and our bother Sosthenes. (sOs thAEnAEs)” If you look at most of Paul’s writings, he writes the letter in community. He usually is writing with someone else, in conversation with them. In this case he is conversing with Sosthenes. We do not know a great deal about this man. When I looked him up in my study, all I found was that he wass possibly the synagogue ruler that was beaten by Gentiles in Corinth, which can be found in Acts 18. Unfortunately that is all we can say, it might be that man. That is the problem with most scholarly activities. We cannot prove much of anything for certain, with any degree of accuracy.
That is the weakness of the discipline of Apologetics. What can we prove about faith? We just went through the season of Christmas where we celebrate the birth of Jesus. The problem is we cannot prove Jesus was born. I know the gasp you might have. We cannot prove it because we do not have multiple sources apart from scripture. Jesus does not have a birth certificate that we can find in the archives of Bethlehem. But we can provide greater proof that Jesus died. We can prove someone died but cannot prove they were born makes little sense I know. That is the limitations we face. But there is something more. We have community. Paul is writing with Sosthenes. If they questioned Paul, they could ask Sosthenes, and if they questioned them both, well Paul has a long list of others that he is also writing with in his other letters. There is a community of people living together, and they are saying similar thing. People can be wrong, but within a group, as you listen to multiple stories you can usually determine if this is or is not something that is believed to be true.
That is why I do not discredit tradition. I know that there are times where tradition and mythology can be fantasy but often there is truth within the story that is more important than facts. Did St Francis really preach to the animals? Who know but what is the truth? Compassion and empathy. Francis loved creation so much that he shared the gospel even to the birds.
Paul does not limit his community to merely Sosthenes. He is writing, “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: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.”
We often overlook these greetings, at least I do. I find them to be a bit flamboyant, and although I do not use plain speech as many of my ancestors did, I use simple speech. And Paul is wordy. But in this greeting he is telling us that this letter does not only apply to the people of Corinth it is for everyone that is called to be saints with all those who in every place call upon the name of Jesus. He is their Lord and ours.
God is for all people. This was what I hope we got out of last week’s message. God is and has always been for all people. Yet he chose to reveal his wisdom through one group or nation. It was through that group that God would give his teachings or his commandments, and it was ultimately through that group he would come in the flesh to live among mankind. Does this mean that the people of Israel are saved through their heritage? No, they like everyone else must become saints along with everyone else. We all must believe and call upon the name of the Lord.
This was part of my struggle with faith. I heard a lot of sermons that called groups of people the spawn of Satan. I heard a lot of political commentary saying that one side of the other was anti-Christ. I heard a lot, and then I knew people too. I knew people that were among the despised group that had greater faith than I did. And I wondered how this could be. Just so you know preachers on AM radio can be very interesting, in an off the wall sort of way.
“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.” We need to accept them at their word. We need to recognize that although we might be in very different places, if they claim Christ they are together with us. We are the church.
This means something. It means that although I struggle with many people, I need to remember that they also are loved by God. They too are children of the same Lord. And if they are of the same Lord we need to listen to them.
This is tricky. I mentioned that I listened to a lot of different voices. I heard many sermons on that AM radio. Many of the things said were twisted to such a degree it is hard to believe we worship the same God. And that is the point Paul is making. We need to listen before we speak, and offer grace and peace. The same grace and peace our Lord offers us, because I might be the one that is mistaken.
Paul continues by saying. “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 in all speech and all knowledge.”
Does this mean that I know everything? Nope. Does it mean you know everything? Again no. What does he mean? God gives us grace, and when we come together in mutual care, when we come together in humility and submission to each other and with God, God will grant us wisdom and knowledge for what is needed in that moment. This is the point of the Quaker Meeting for Business. We do not vote in our sessions of business, instead we wait for the Spirit of God to move us to a solution. It can be a slow process. It can be a drawn out process, and at times it seems pointless. But I have watched it work.
I have sat on various boards and participated in countless committee meetings, I have listened to many passionate people, and there are many times where those passionate words are listened to, and later we find that by listening to those words, we are in a worse position than we were previously. There there are times where those passionate voices were quieted by a lone voice that asked a question no one was considering. Because that question was asked, the meeting had an obligation to reconsider, to still their voices and to seek a different path forward.
When we come together without the power structures of this world, and come instead as a community of equals. When we submit to each other and seek what benefits the entire community instead of what is right from our perspective. It is in that moment we are able to hear the wisdom. It is in that place where we can be enriched with the light of God. It is in that moment we are able to use the gifts we already have available to us to accomplish the things we once thought were beyond reason.
There is a vulnerability in that manner of thinking. There are times where we must step back. There are times where we have to admit that my position is lacking. There are times where we must concede and compromise. And in our cultural understanding that is scary. It is scary because we are approaching things as individuals or a dominate majority, instead of a community. It is scary because we are required to give the person we might not agree with the same dignity as we would those on our side. But there is a promise within that process.
“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.”
As you wait revelation comes. But from what do we test this revelation? We test it against what we already know. This is why the Query begins with, “Do you earnestly seek to maintain a life in fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ? Do you practice the daily reading of the Scriptures with you families, giving time for waiting upon the Lord?” We are to sit with scripture, read the words within the pages of the book, and as we read those sacred words we are to let them flow deep within us. And as those words flow through us, we begin to ask the questions we are wrestling with at this moment. We do this as individuals, as families, and as a Meeting. We let the wisdom of scripture flow, and guide us through the questions that cause us to pause.
And we then look at the world around us. How is the fullness of our fellowship with Christ, and our contemplation of Scripture leading us to interact with the world around us?
I would like to use just a simple example. We all realize that our Meeting is multilingual. Several years ago that could have presented a problem. It is not that we do not love and respect all people, it is that we were not prepared as a meeting. What were we supposed to do? What does the wisdom of God tell us to do?
I am happy to say, that this was not a very difficult problem. Even though many among us are just as opinionated as I, when it comes down to the people with us we are of one spirit. We love the ones that God brings to us, and we do all we can to encourage them in their faith. Our diversity of saints makes this Meeting, it makes us recognize the fullness of the Gospel. It allows us to appreciate the vastness of God’s grace all the more. We would not be who we are without everyone here, because we are a community with each other. And the grace of God will sustain us through our trials, if we are willing to wait for his revealing and listen to his Spirit speak through our own souls and those around us.
That is wonderful. It is amazing. But how does this help us everywhere else?
How do I encourage the faith of a friend? How do I handle the illness of a loved one? How do I deal with the doubts I have within my own life? What do I do when I question the very existence of God?
Where is our focus? Are we focused on the problem, are we being unduly absorbed in the problem to the point we are distracted from all else? That is why I confess this morning. I am unduly absorbed at times. I argue on facebook, when I should be sleeping, praying, reading or doing something productive. I will listen to the news because I want to know what is going on in the world. I am concerned with what is happening in Ukraine. I am concerned with what is happening to our northern neighbors. I am concerned with what happens in South America, and in Africa. I am concerned. But often that concern distracts me from the reality that we are here now at this time and place for a purpose. God is calling us to participate in his kingdom right here and for all eternity. Am I willing to submit? Am I willing to lay myself aside and give what I have mind, body, soul and spirit to the God that loves me and the community of saints together here and in every place?
I can become distracted. I am distracted. But God will sustain us. He will provide a way forward if we will only wait on him. And he will show us how to offer Grace and peace to those around us just as He have offered it to us in our Lord Jesus Christ.
Previous Messages
Endure
By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church April 26, 2026 Click here to join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili Query 4 (Faith and Practice of EFC-MAYM pg 61) Do you provide for the suitable Christian education and recreation of your children and those under your care, and…
Ransomed to Love
By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church April 19, 2026 Click here to join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili 1 Peter 1:17–23 (ESV) 17 And if you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time…
Born Again to a Living Hope
By Jared Warner Willow Creek Friends Church April 12, 2026 Click here to join our Meeting for Worship Click to read in Swahili Bofya kusoma kwa Kiswahili 1 Peter 1:3–9 (ESV) 3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born…
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