CJ served us wonderfully yesterday with his message, Deflating a Puffed Up Church from 1 Corinthians 4:6-13. He made two simple points:

1. Grace produces humility.
2. Grace prepares us for suffering.

I thought the humility section of the message may be most important for us, for the temptations to pride abound. We need “rare, unguarded moments of total honesty” in which re recognize that everything we have is a gift from God. Through the apostle Paul we have these three divinely-inspired questions:

1. Who sees anything different in you? (In other words, what makes you different from anyone else?)
2. What do you have that you did not receive?
3. If you received it, why do you boast as though you did not receive it?

We will do well to take these questions into our week. If you can identify a specific area in which you are tempted to be proud (athletics, academics, opinions, etc.), these questions will serve to deflate our pride and help us to grow in humility.

If you are interested, here are the quotations from the message:

“This is an invitation to experience one of those rare, unguarded moments of total honesty, where in the presence of the eternal God one recognizes that everything – absolutely everything – that one ‘has’ is a gift.” Gordon Fee

“O believer, learn to reject pride, seeing that you have no ground for it. Whatever you are, you have nothing to make you proud. The more you have, the more you are in debt to God; and you should not be proud of that which renders you a debtor. Consider your origin; look back to what you were. Consider what you will have been but for divine grace. Look upon yourself as you are now. Doesn’t your conscience reproach you? Don’t your thousand wanderings stand before you, and tell you that you are unworthy to be called His son or daughter? And if He has made you anything, aren’t you taught thereby that it is grace which has made you to differ? Great believer, you would have been a great sinner if God had not made you to differ. O you who are valiant for truth, you would have been as valiant for error if grace had not laid hold upon you. Therefore, don’t be proud, though you have a large estate – a wide domain of grace, once you did not have a single thing to call your own except your sin and misery. Oh! strange infatuation, that you, who have borrowed everything, should think of exalting yourself….” Charles Spurgeon

“One cannot boast about being a worthy recipient of grace.” David Garland

“The Christian life is not a fast track to glory but a slow, arduous path that takes one through suffering. The suffering so visible in the lives of the apostles is not some tedious detour for an elite volunteer corps but the main highway for all Christians. By contrasting the cross-centered lifestyles of the apostles with the Corinthians vainglory. Paul hopes to supplant their egotism with the wisdom of the cross.” David Garland

Categories: Monday Matters