Reading 1, First Corinthians 6:1-11

¹ Is one of you with a complaint against another so brazen as to seek judgement from sinners and not from God's holy people?

² Do you not realise that the holy people of God are to be the judges of the world? And if the world is to be judged by you, are you not competent for petty cases?

³ Do you not realise that we shall be the judges of angels? - then quite certainly over matters of this life.

⁴ But when you have matters of this life to be judged, you bring them before those who are of no account in the Church!

⁵ I say this to make you ashamed of yourselves. Can it really be that it is impossible to find in the community one sensible person capable of deciding questions between brothers,

⁶ and that this is why brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers?

⁷ No; it is a fault in you, by itself, that one of you should go to law against another at all: why do you not prefer to suffer injustice, why not prefer to be defrauded?

⁸ And here you are, doing the injustice and the defrauding, and to your own brothers.

⁹ Do you not realise that people who do evil will never inherit the kingdom of God? Make no mistake -- the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, the self-indulgent, sodomites,

¹⁰ thieves, misers, drunkards, slanderers and swindlers, none of these will inherit the kingdom of God.

¹¹ Some of you used to be of that kind: but you have been washed clean, you have been sanctified, and you have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and through the Spirit of our God.