Right in the midst of this great work of transforming and remaking Ephesus, Paul heard very bad news from Corinth, across the Ægean. He heard that the church there was in sad trouble. The people had divided into parties and were quarrelling. Some of the people had gone wrong and were doing the kind of things they used to do when they were heathen. Paul wrote a wonderful letter to them—our First Corinthians. It was full of good advice and counsel and it showed them how to get back into the new way of living. The most wonderful thing in the letter was what Paul said to them about love. He told them, in the most beautiful words that perhaps were ever written that love was the greatest thing in the world, that when everything else failed love would not fail and when everything else vanished away love would still abide. You would have thought this letter would have settled all their troubles but it did not. When people get wrong it is very hard setting them right again and it often takes a long time and much patience. Things went from bad to worse. Finally Paul had to leave his work in Ephesus and go across to Corinth, to see the people there in person and to straighten out their trouble. But even when he got among them, they remained stubborn and difficult, and he had to go back without getting the trouble settled. Then he sent Timothy over and he failed. It looked as though the church would fall to pieces and Paul would lose all his friends in Corinth. Then he wrote another letter, full of pleading, which he sent by his friend Titus, who was now his companion. While he was waiting, full of anxiety, for Titus to come back with the answer from Corinth, some dreadful catastrophe happened in Ephesus. There was a great uprising in the city against Paul. It seemed for a time as though there was no hope that his life could be saved. He has told us that the sentence of death was pronounced against him—probably the sentence that he should be thrown into the arena to fight with lions. For a time there seemed no hope. But his friends Aquila and Priscilla, whom Paul sometimes calls “Prisca,” saved his life. He says that they “risked their necks” for him and that he was “delivered from death.”