Everything Belongs to You

Everything Belongs to You
1 Corinthians 3.18-23

I remember a wise address given at a graduation ceremony by a respected senior professor. (I was present in order to say the opening prayer.) In his address, the great man said many things, and gave a lot of good advice, but the one thing that stands out in my memory is his description of a humble faith. ‘It isn’t’, he said, ‘a matter of knowing that you’ve got it all together; you haven’t. It’s a matter of knowing that somewhere it is all together – and that you’re part of it.’

That combination of humility and confidence is hard to keep in balance. The pressure from the world around us is always trying to make us either deny that we know anything or adopt one of those brittle, high-risk, know-it-all positions. Genuine Christian faith isn’t like that. It involves learning to be foolish, as Paul says here, in order to become wise; and it involves celebrating that fact that ‘all things are yours’ while recognizing that ‘you belong to the Messiah, and the Messiah belongs to God’. What does Paul mean by these astonishing statements?...

Taken from Paul 1 Corinthians for Everyone – by Tom Wright