Saint Paul — "Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I s…"
Awake to righteousness, and sin not; for some have not the knowledge of God: I speak this to your shame.
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More from Saint Paul
"O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?"
"For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ."
"For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression."
"Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the mutilation!"
"For in him we live and move and have our being."
Details
1 Corinthians 15:34, a call to righteousness and shame for ignorance
Date: c. 53-57 CE
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Confirmed
Found in 2 providers: gemini,grok
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Wake up and start living rightly instead of drifting into wrong behavior. Some people in your community genuinely do not know God, and your sloppy conduct is part of why. The speaker is calling out spiritual laziness directly, telling listeners they should be embarrassed that their lifestyle is undermining the credibility of what they claim to believe and harming people still searching for truth.
Relevance to Saint Paul
Paul wrote this to the Corinthian church, a community he personally founded and felt responsible for. As a former Pharisee trained under Gamaliel, he prized rigorous moral discipline, and as a missionary he constantly worried that believers' bad behavior would discredit the gospel he traveled thousands of miles to preach. Publicly shaming a congregation was a rhetorical tool he used repeatedly in his letters to provoke reform.
The era
First-century Corinth was a wealthy port city notorious across the Roman Empire for sexual permissiveness, drunken banquets, and idol worship. New Christian converts there were surrounded by pagan neighbors watching to see if this strange new faith produced different lives. Paul was writing around 55 CE, when Christianity was a tiny, suspect sect whose survival depended heavily on members behaving visibly better than the surrounding Greco-Roman culture.
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