“I thank my God always concerning
you for the grace of God which was given you in Christ Jesus, that in
everything you were enriched in Him, in all speech and all
knowledge, even as the testimony concerning Christ was confirmed in you,
so that you are not lacking in any gift, awaiting eagerly the revelation of our
Lord Jesus Christ, who will also confirm you to the end, blameless in the
day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, through whom you were
called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” (1 Cor. 1:4 –
9/NASB).
This passage reminds us of
Philippians 1:6, “For I am confident of this very thing, that He who began a
good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus.” Paul, as the
other Apostles, saw Jesus Christ as the Author and Finisher of our faith, the
Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End; Jesus is the One who initiates our
faith and He is the One who completes our faith.
The Holy Spirit has been given to
us as the guarantee of this ongoing work of Christ that will culminate in His revelation
of Himself through His People and in our completion, as His People, in Him (2
Cor. 1:19 – 22; Eph. 1:13 – 14; Romans 8:18 – 25).
The work of Jesus Christ is such
as to make His People blameless; it is Christ’s perfect work of justification
and sanctification and glorification (Romans 8:28 – 30; Ephesians 5:25 – 27; 1
Thessalonians 5:23 – 24; 1 Corinthians 1:30-31). As Paul writes in 1
Thessalonians 5:24, “Faithful is He who calls you, and He also
will bring it to pass.” As we, by His grace, behold Jesus Christ and obediently
submit to Him, He transforms us into His image. Jesus is the One who knew no
sin, and yet He became sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of
God in Him (2 Cor. 5:21).
When our preaching and teaching
is Christocentric then our lives orbit around Jesus and He is the Light of our
life and we see life in and through Him. We read and hear the Scriptures
through and in Him. The thoughts and intents of our hearts radiate from Him and
to Him. Jesus Christ is our supreme confidence, He is the love of our lives, He
is the heartbeat of the Church. When Christ is our All then we are uninterested
in anything less, for nothing compares to the beauty of Jesus Christ, and we
cannot desire anything other than intimate relationship with Him and the joy of
seeing others come to know Him.
Considering what follows in 1
Corinthians, verses 4 – 9 may take us by surprise. Beginning in 1:10 Paul
begins to deal with problems in the church, and yet, prior to 1:10 he has
already started dealing with the problems, for Paul is reminding the Corinthians
of who they belong to, he is reminding them of the One who began a good work in
them, he is reminding them of who they really
are – they are not members of a group that follows Paul or Apollos or Peter,
not really, they are members of the Body of Jesus Christ.
How often do we begin to address
a sinful situation by first pointing out the sin and disobedience, rather than
first pointing to Jesus Christ and His perfect work? How often do we first
point to our insufficiency rather than Christ’s all-encompassing sufficiency?
When we first point to Christ and
His work and His holiness, then our insufficiency and sin is magnified in the
light of His glory; but then we are also given hope and a way out of our
disobedience as we behold His perfect obedience. Our only hope of
transformation is to behold Jesus and allow Him to work in us. If Paul’s
approach is foreign to our experience it demonstrates how far we have strayed
from Biblical thinking and ministry.
This passage (1:3 – 9) anticipates
Chapter 15, the great Resurrection chapter with its promise, “Just as we have
borne the image of the earthy, we will also bear the image of the heavenly”
(15:49). It also anticipates the great cry of 15:55 – 57, ““Death is swallowed
up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to
God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Verse 1:7 with
its “eagerly awaiting the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ” unfolds in Chapter
15.
We can minister confidently to
God’s people when we affirm the perfect work of Jesus Christ in the Church, His
Body. This affirmation reminds us that the work of the ministry is first and foremost
the work of Jesus Christ and that we are called to be participants (to have
koinonia) in His work – not to generate
and sustain the work, only Christ can do the work of Christ.
Can we see how 1:3 – 9 plays into
Chapter 2? We are to know Jesus Christ and Him crucified (2:2) so that our
faith should not be founded on the wisdom of men but the power of God (2:5).
Our trajectory in Christ found in 1:7 is connected to 2:9 – 10 which again is
connected to Chapter 15.
If we are in Christ, if that which is working within us is the work of Christ,
if we are indeed in the “fellowship (koinonia) of His Son” (1:9) then we ought
to realize that “a natural man does not accept or understand or discern the
things of the Spirit of God” (2:14), in fact, “they are foolishness to him”.
But then, do we believe this?
What does our teaching and preaching tell us about what we really believe? Do we believe that only the Holy Spirit can reveal
Christ and His Word to us? Do we really need
the Holy Spirit to live? To understand? To preach and teach? To understand what
we read and hear? Are we functionally self-sufficient? Are we submitting to the
Word of God in the Spirit of God or are we superimposing a humanistic mindset
on the Bible and church-life?
Do we conform our educational
standards to the world? Do we conform our communication methods to the world? Do
we import motivational and marketing techniques from the world?
Are we living as the People of
God or as “mere men” (3:3)?
“For consider your calling,
brethren, that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many
mighty, not many noble; but God has chosen the foolish things of the world to
shame the wise, and God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the
things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised God
has chosen, the things that are not, so that He may nullify the things that
are, so that no man may boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ
Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification,
and redemption, so that, just as it is written, “Let him who boasts, boast in
the Lord.”” (1 Cor. 26 – 31).
