1 Corinthians 9:1-2

1 Corinthians 9:1-2

Am I not free?  Am I not an apostle?  Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?  Are not you all my work in the Lord?  If for others I am not an apostle, rather indeed for you I am!  For you all are my seal of apostleship in the Lord.

Thoughts for Today

First Thought

Paul does a really neat thing with the verbs in his first three questions.  In the first two, he is asking a question about the present reality.  He is reminding the people of Corinth that he is an apostle and he is free in Christ.  That is his current reality.  However, when he gets to the third question he switches tenses.  When he speaks about seeing Jesus our Lord, Paul switches to the perfect tense.  Remember that the perfect tense is for action that happened in the past but whose effects continue into the present and likely continue into the future.  Where Jesus is concerned, Paul knows that meeting Jesus is not just an event in time.  Meeting Jesus is an event that has continuing effects all throughout life.

Would you agree with this statement?  Does meeting Jesus have continuing effects that last all throughout life?  Is this true in your life?

Second Thought:

When Paul needs evidence of the Lord’s influence in his life, notice again that he does not go to knowledge.  Rather, Paul looks for actual fruit.  Anyone can make himself wise with enough study.  But only the Holy Spirit can work through us to bring others into a relationship with Him.  So when Paul is looking for evidence, he turns to the Corinthians themselves.  He calls them his seal of apostleship.  A seal is something that is used to guarantee the contents are what the sender says that they are.  A seal on a letter indicates the letter is unchanged.  A seal on a can indicates the contents have not been tampered.  The Corinthians are Paul’s seal.  The fact that they are in a relationship with God and are living life out in Jesus Christ is evidence of Paul’s apostleship.  His intelligence is absolutely nowhere near as important as the fruit born through him.

What is your fruit?  How does it speak to your work in the Lord?  Whom in the world are you reaching for Christ?

Third Thought:

Paul also lifts up a really neat point in the second verse.  He fully acknowledges that there are people in the world who either do not consider him an apostle or at the very least question his apostleship.  This saddens me.  To think that there were people in the church who didn’t consider that Apostle Paul a legitimate follower of Christ!  But the truth that we can get out of this is that this is a big church with many people and many opinions.  Every single one of us has people in the world that would question whether we are truly following Jesus or not – even within the church itself.  If people can question Paul and his work, they can certainly question mine and yours.

Why is it sad that this dynamic exists within the church?  What do you think is the underlying reason for its existence?

Passage for Tomorrow: 1 Corinthians 9:3-7