Reminded

DEVOTION

1 CORINTHIANS

REMINDED

1 Cor 4:14-17

14 I am not writing this to shame you, but to warn you, as my dear children. 15 Even though you have ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel. 16 Therefore I urge you to imitate me. 17 For this reason I am sending to you Timothy, my son whom I love, who is faithful in the Lord. He will remind you of my way of life in Christ Jesus, which agrees with what I teach everywhere in every church.

NIV

And not we see there are two ways of life that believers seem to participate in. There is the life in which it would seem the Corinthian poeple were indulging in and the way in which Paul was living. He was in fact warning them of their style of Christianity and telling them they should be living in the manner he is. What are we to discover in this contrast between their life and his? It would seem from what we have seen so far, their life style was not that much different than when they lived in ignorance of the Gospel. We certainly know Paul underwent a most drastic change from being a persecutor of the Church to being an apostle of the church, instead of spending all his efforts trying to destroy believers, he now spends all his efforts building the church, sharing the Gospel, and continuing to encourage, instruct and correct those believers God has empowered him to bring to Christ. It might serve us well to take some of this truth to our own way of life. Do we spend most of our time and efforts on the pursuit of our own style of Christianity, that is to say, pursuing our own goals, ambitions, happiness, thinking we only need ask God for whatever we want for our own self needs, and He, like a genie in the lamp, fulfills our every request? Or do we spent our energies in the pursuit of His will for us, seeking His calling on our life and how we are to live in order to be a benefit to the Kingdom God? We see that Paul is sending Timothy to remind them of the right way to live in Christ Jesus; so in fact, we know they were living the wrong way. Who will remind us? Has God sent anyone to instruct us in the right way to live in Christ? Do we pay any attention to that instruction? Or are we so steeped in our own brand of Christianity that we cannot hear the truth? Perhaps it is not a matter of imitating Paul, but rather a matter of imitating Christ. Can we live in the way of Christ and the way of the world at the same time? Can we serve both God and money? How did Christ live? How did Paul live? How do we live? Are we reminded?