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New Testament LESSON #33
(1 COR 1: 1-6) |
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YE ARE THE TEMPLE OF GOD
by Ted L. Gibbons
 PSomeone has called Corinth the Las Vegas of the Ancient World. It was a city of 250,000 citizens and another 400,000 or so slaves. It was located just off the Corinthian Isthmus, and was a crossroads for travelers and traders. It was a city of typical Greek culture; its people were interested in Greek philosophy, and placed a great value on wisdom.
We have been told that the city had at least 12 temples, although they may not all have been in use in Paul’s day. The most famous of these temples was the temple of Aphrodite, the goddess of love, where worshipers practiced ritual prostitution. The temple was served by more than 1000 pagan priestess-prostitutes. The immorality of Corinth was so widely know that the verb “to Corinthianize” meant “to practice sexual immorality.”
Paul had had some success in this city, and yet he received word while staying at Ephesus that there were great problems among the Corinthian Saints. The letter of 1st Corinthians was sent to address those problems.
During the summer after my appointment but before I assumed my duties as principal of a seminary in Utah, I received a Sunday morning call from the police telling me that the Seminary had been vandalized. I drove to the building and found the walls covered with spay-painted obscenities directed at the Church, the Mormons, and at Deity. Someone, in the middle of the night when no one was standing guard, came to the structure and attempted to deface it.
We made contact with professionals who came with pressure hoses and appropriate chemicals and cleaned the wall so well and so quickly that I was amazed. What a blessing if we could remove the graffiti from our spirits and souls as easily and proficiently as they did from that building. I suspect that it takes more effort than I saw that morning for most of us to cleanse the filth from our lives and return our spiritual structures to purity and beauty. But there is no doubt that Lucifer and his associates run around with spray cans of sin, temptation, iniquity, looking for unguarded moments to eradicate our cleanliness.
Paul had received word that many members of the Church in Corinth were in a state of awful filthiness. First Corinthians was his attempt to induce them to become clean once again.
> Read the Entire New Testament Lesson
 DESERT BLOSSOMS #102
by Ted L. Gibbons
My great-grandfather, Andrew Smith Gibbons, was a pioneer in the truest sense of the word. I have mentioned him before in theses articles. He joined the church in 1840 in Hancock County, Illinois, and like so many others gave his soul to the kingdom. He was a member of the pioneer company of 1847. He spent much of his adult life doing missionary work with the Indians. His entire life following his baptism was a demonstration of what it means to serve God with all one’s heart, might, mind, and strength (see D&C 4:2, 59:9).
A display of his devotion to the Lord and His work appears in the following tribute written by a descendant. The background and history are all true. The actual words are probably not:
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A tall man, aged beyond his years, picked a handful of ripe peaches and held them toward his son.
“Leroy,” he said, “look at this fruit.”
The boy took a golden peach, rubbed the fuzz off onto his trouser leg, and tried a juicy bite.
“I’ve planted nine orchards since I left Illinois,” the father recalled, and this is the first time they’ve let me stay in one place long enough to pick the fruit.”
This planter of orchards was a vigorous man who spent his life subduing the wilderness. His family remembered that, like Johnny Appleseed, he always carried seeds in his saddlebags. Wherever he went on the changing frontier, he always set them out, to leave behind a green legacy of fruit and field, of shade and beauty.
But he planted more than orchards.
He set out seedling communities all the way from Illinois to Arizona—towns like Nauvoo, Kanesville, or Council Bluffs, Salt Lake City, Bountiful, Lehi, Cedar City, Santa Clara, Las Vegas, St. George, St. Thomas on the Muddy, Callville, Glendale, Moencopi, and St. Johns. In them he left the harvest of his own strong posterity, doctors, dentists, lawyers, educators, teachers, farmers, judges, legislators, churchmen, tradesmen.
But he planted more than that. In the hearts of primitive red men he sewed the seeds of faith and trust, so that those who followed after him reaped peace and friendship between whites and Indians.
Planting was a labor of love (Helen Bay Gibbons, Saint and Savage, Deseret Book, 1965, p. xiii).
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I have picked fruit from every fruit tree I have ever planted that I was able to nurture into productivity. I have lived in nine communities in the years of my life. But when I moved it was for the money and the opportunities and the education. When Andrew moved, it was because a prophet of God pointed the way and said, “You are needed.” I hope the fire of that heritage of faithfulness and will warm me and my posterity forever.
Thanks to all of you who responded to my invitation and sent a note about these Desert Blossoms. Reading your kind words has awakened in me the realization that you have stories of your own . . . first generation stories of conversion and third- and fourth- and firth-generation stories of faithful ancestors. Your stories might find a voice here. If you have incidents in your family history that you would like to share with the readers of these columns, please feel free to send them to me at <tedgibbons@yahoo.com>.
I will need an accurate copy with documentation and permission to edit, if necessary, and publish them. There are plenty of stories in our history for these columns to go on for years, but your stories are probably the best ones of all. I would love to hear from you.
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