First importance

You can tell people who are excited about something - they talk about it all the time. And you can tell what people think is important, because it gets their time, their money, and they talk about it all the time.

Based on that, Paul was both excited about the gospel and thought it was important. Actually, most important. "For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance." That's 1 Cor 15:3. Unlike a lot of the world, who would have said, "Since this is so great, I'm keeping it to myself," Paul passed it on. He was excited.

And what was this thing that was so important? (vv314) "That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures . . ." and then that he appeared to a bunch of people.

Paul's most important thing was this old piece of news about a dissident rabbi who was executed in Jerusalem. So what?

Well, for starters, there was this whole hassle and expense of taking livestock to the temple,, or buying some there, an then the smelly, bloody, noisy business of cutting it, bleeding it out, and burning it. Worship back then had a lot in common with packing plants.

And then, there's this business of no longer needing the priests as intermediaries. You could now talk to God wherever you were, no matter who you were.

But best of all was the reason behind this visible changes: No more guilt! Sacrifices were no longer necessary because the blood price and been paid for all of us, for all time, in one single bloody, torturous event. The priests were no longer needed because our relationship with God had been restored. The law had been fulfilled, and God's people had entered the time of the rule of love and grace.

First importance to be sure! Yet, for us,, sometimes pretty ho-hum. In fact, since we've lived with it all our lives, it's easy for us to cheapen grace. God will forgive us anyway, so why worry about it?

Maybe if we got a little blood-and-burnt-flesh stink (that's probably what hell smells like) in our nostrils we'd be as excited as Paul was. And maybe we'd be more eager to tell people about it.