Sermon:
I don’t know about if you have every been depressed. Situations all around you just seem to wrong. When it seems as though everything and everybody has turned their back on you. You got a past due notice on every bill. You have to through your bills and the air and whichever lands face up is the one getting paid. You pray before you go to the ATM machine that it don’t snatch up your card and shred it to pieces. You try to use your credit card but the clerk tells you that she has got to confiscate it. Have you ever put seventy five dollars in the bank just so you could have nothing? Your bank account was so negative that you put just enough money to bring your account to a zero balance. Your children got kicked out of school or locked up. You have been out looking for a job for months and it seems like when you walk up they take down the now hiring sign. It seems as though you just can’t get a break. It seems as through you have come to the end of your rope and run into a brick wall. I have been depressed to the point where I thought that I would take my own life. I could have been dead and gone but do you know you can’t check out of here until you fulfill the master’s plan. I am hear to tell you today that GOD is able to turn your dead end into a finish line. (Turn to your neighbor and say God is able to turn your dead end into a finish line.

There is a pre-requisite. The bible says tells us that if my people which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from there wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven.

Over in Ezekiel 33rd chapter the bible gives us warning and promises. The warning is thou warn the wicked of his way to turn from it, if he do not turn from it, if he do not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity; but thou has delivered thy soul.

The promise Ezekiel gives us the promise that if the wicked restore the pledge to GOD walk in the statues of life without committing iniquity he shall surely live. Going back to my text.




1 Corinthians was written by Paul to the Church in Corinth and Christians everywhere. It was written sometime about 55 A.D. during his three year visit to Ephesus. Corinth and Ephesus faced each other across the Aegean Sea. The Church as Corinth was going through the same struggles that the Church and our government are going through today. They were struggling with their social environment. Sin and corruption on every hand and they felt the pressures to adapt. Churches today are feeling the pressure to adapts to the world but the bible says be not conformed to this world but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Paul is known as one who like to set the order. Paul wrote this letter to address problems in the Church such as division in the Church and Disorder in the Church. The Corinthians questioned Paul’s authority as an apostle, they even got together and sent Paul a list of questions and Paul included in this letter answers to their questions.

As we look at closely at Chapter 9. The Corinthians questioned Paul’s Authority as an apostle and he starts out this Chapter by giving some credentials and how he talked with the resurrected Christ, who called him to be an Apostle. As we look closer as verses 24 - 27. The NIV version reads
Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize?