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Andrew Wilson walks through 1 Corinthians showing how grace shapes every church. A flexible guide for devotion, small groups & sermon prep.
Part of the God’s Word For You Series
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The church at Corinth was a mess.
Divided by personality cults, embarrassed by a sexual immorality scandal that even the pagans found shocking, dragging fellow believers through the secular courts, getting drunk at the Lord's Supper, arguing endlessly about spiritual gifts, confused about the resurrection. If you were looking for a model church — a community that got everything right and could serve as an inspiring example for others to follow — Corinth would be essentially the last place you would look.
And yet Paul wrote to them one of the most extraordinary letters in the entire New Testament. Not to write them off. Not to distance himself from their embarrassing failures. But to show them — and to show every reader who has encountered their letter across twenty centuries — what grace actually looks like when it lands in the lives of broken, confused, competitive, sometimes scandalous people who are nonetheless genuinely the body of Christ.
1 Corinthians For You by Andrew Wilson is a compelling, accessible, richly applied expository guide through this breathtaking epistle — showing how the extraordinary range of subjects Paul tackles in a single letter add up to a comprehensive, grace-saturated vision of what a local church is, what it can be, and how the grace of God is capable of shaping it even when the raw material it has to work with is — like the Corinthians, and like us — deeply, obviously, embarrassingly flawed.
Few letters in the New Testament cover as much ground as 1 Corinthians. Paul moves from one subject to another with a speed and a range that can feel almost bewildering — and yet underneath the variety, a single, coherent, grace-saturated vision of the Christian life and the Christian community holds everything together.
The subjects Paul addresses read like a comprehensive guide to everything a local church could possibly get wrong — and to how the gospel speaks to every single one of those failures:
Divisions and factionalism — the church splitting along personality lines, with different groups claiming allegiance to Paul or Apollos or Cephas. Paul's response is a profound, searching meditation on the nature of the gospel and the foolishness of the cross that makes every human boasting impossible.
Sexual immorality — a case so brazen that even the surrounding pagan culture was shocked. Paul's response is a radical account of what it means that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit and that Christians have been bought at a price.
Lawsuits between believers — members of the same body using secular courts against each other. Paul's response reveals his vision of what the church is and what it is capable of — a community that should be able to adjudicate its own disputes rather than dragging them before people who have no standing in the kingdom of God.
Marriage and singleness — one of the most nuanced and carefully reasoned passages in the entire New Testament on one of the most contested subjects in contemporary Christian conversation.
Food offered to idols — which sounds like an irrelevant ancient problem until Paul opens it up as a window into one of the most pressing questions any Christian in any culture faces: how do I exercise my freedom in a way that builds others up rather than tearing them down?
The Lord's Supper — what it is, what it means, and why the Corinthians' behaviour at the table was a catastrophic failure to discern the body of Christ.
Spiritual gifts — the famous passage on tongues and prophecy, set within the even more famous passage on love that is the heart of the whole letter.
The resurrection — the magnificent fifteenth chapter, which is Paul's most sustained and most theologically rich treatment of the bodily resurrection and its implications for how Christians live in the present.
Each of these subjects is opened up by Andrew Wilson with the combination of textual care, theological depth, and genuine contemporary application that makes this guide both intellectually satisfying and practically transforming.
What holds the whole letter together — and what Andrew Wilson consistently helps readers see — is a single, overarching theme: this is what grace looks like.
Grace does not make the Corinthian church perfect. It does not eliminate their divisions or instantly resolve their ethical failures or produce overnight the kind of unified, mature, gloriously functional community that everyone would want to be part of. But grace does something more realistic and more wonderful than that: it stays with them, works in them, calls them higher, refuses to write them off, and continues to shape them — slowly, imperfectly, but genuinely — into the body of Christ they are called to be.
This is deeply encouraging for every reader who belongs to an imperfect church — which is to say, every reader who belongs to any church at all. The Corinthians were a mess. And Paul did not tell them they were beyond hope. He told them they were the body of Christ, that grace was at work in them, that the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead was dwelling in their community, and that the God who had called them was faithful and would do what he had promised.
1 Corinthians For You helps every reader see their own church — and their own life — through those same grace-saturated eyes.
Like every volume in the God's Word For You series, 1 Corinthians For You is designed to serve multiple purposes with equal effectiveness:
As a book to read straight through — for anyone wanting a readable, engaging, theologically serious guide through the whole of 1 Corinthians
As a personal devotional — with the reflection questions and personal application that invite sustained, prayerful engagement with each section of the text over time
As a small-group leader's resource — providing the exegetical depth, the illustrative insights, and the contemporary application that small-group leaders need to engage with 1 Corinthians with genuine confidence and genuine pastoral wisdom
As a sermon preparation resource — for preachers who want Andrew Wilson's careful, applied, accessible treatment of the text as a foundation for their own preaching through this extraordinary letter
Less academic than a traditional commentary and more applied than a standard Bible study guide, 1 Corinthians For You occupies exactly the right space between rigour and accessibility — making it genuinely useful for readers at every level and in every context.
1 Corinthians For You is ideal for:
Andrew Wilson is the teaching pastor at King's Church London and one of the most gifted and trusted Bible teachers writing in the English-speaking world today. He is known for his ability to combine rigorous theological thinking with warm, accessible, often witty writing that makes deep biblical truth genuinely available to every reader. He is the author of several books including Incomparable and Spirit and Sacrament, and his teaching ministry has shaped thousands of Christians across the UK and beyond. In 1 Corinthians For You, he brings all of those gifts to one of the most demanding and most rewarding letters in the New Testament — with results that are both intellectually satisfying and genuinely personally enriching.
1 Corinthians For You is part of the God's Word For You series — a collection of accessible, theologically serious, flexibly usable books that walk readers through individual books of the Bible with the combination of exegetical care, pastoral warmth, and contemporary application that makes each volume genuinely useful across a wide range of contexts and needs.
Other titles in the God's Word For You series available at forthetruth.in include:
The Corinthian church was a mess. And Paul loved them anyway — not despite their failures but through them, with a grace that refused to give up on the people who bore the name of Jesus however imperfectly they were living up to it.
That grace has not run out. It is still at work in every imperfect church that gathers week after week around the Word and the table and the name of the Lord who bought them. It is still shaping, still calling, still refusing to write off the people and the communities that are — like the Corinthians — simultaneously embarrassing in their failures and extraordinary in their calling.
1 Corinthians For You is an invitation to see that grace at work — in Paul's letter, in the Corinthian church, in your own church, and in your own life. And to be encouraged, challenged, and genuinely transformed by the vision of what grace is capable of producing in the most flawed and most beloved community on earth: the body of Christ.
