Shamed by Grace and Weakness

Sermon on September 2, 2018   

For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it? Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you! For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men. We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless, and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things.

1 Corinthians 4:7-13

Recall how Martin Luther spoke about those two ways of knowing God: namely, what he called a theology of the cross versus a theology of glory. We saw a bit of this in Chapter 1 with the so-called “foolishness of the cross” versus the so-called “wisdom of the world.” I think that the Apostle Paul could also speak of two ways of serving God: namely a “ministry of glory” that boasts in what we have in this world versus a “ministry of the cross” that glories in the sufferings that God uses to bear real and lasting fruit. Evidently, Paul was not done whittling these Corinthians down to size. Four chapters into the letter, he was still “deflating the puffed up church,” as one preacher called it. In order to draw this out, I want to use two words today that are usually economic words: surplus and deficit. These Corinthians were,

• Shamed by the “Surplus” of God’s Grace  

• Shamed by the “Deficits” of Christ’s Servant

These two—surplus and deficit—are the measurements of how much an economy is either over or under its point of equilibrium. Just so, there is a spiritual economy by which people measure the goods of divine blessing or curse. Of course, our human standards of measurement are usually amiss. However, in verses 7 and 8, Paul will use the metrics of a real spiritual surplus to shame the puffed up church; and from verse 9 to verse 13 he will use what they think are deficits that Christ’s servants are running. This will also be to their shame. 

Doctrine. God’s grace and Christ’s cross are often used to deflate our pride.  

Shamed by the “Surplus” of God’s Grace

In the year before his death, Augustine would write a few last books on the doctrine of salvation, one of these being a Treatise on the Predestination of the Saints. In it he would say that this verse—1 Corinthians 4:7—was the verse that really turned the lights on for him as far as God’s sovereign grace goes. Paul asks the rhetorical questions, ‘For who sees anything different in you? What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?’ Three building rhetorical questions are here. The answer to these questions, as Augustine saw, has to be no one, nothing, and sorry! Such rhetorical questions are all the more powerful because their answers are all the more literal. Not one thing to boast in: meaning not one thing that we are, not one thing that we do, that could ever contribute to God or impress God. This has massive implications for understanding how we are saved by God. Paul was using it to change our understanding of how we relate to each other. 

Oddly enough, many opponents of the doctrines of grace detect what they claim to be something most ungracious. We do indeed acknowledge the reality of the arrogant Calvinist. However, as Charles Spurgeon once preached,

He who is proud of his election is not elect; and he who is humbled under a sense of it may believe that he is.1

A true believer in election immediately grasps Paul’s point in asking: ‘Who sees anything different in you?’ (v. 7a). By contrast to the true believer in election, the honest Corinthian answer at this point would have to be: “We do! Everybody’s doing it! That’s how we roll in Corinth! We make distinctions between each other. And we especially separate Christians into ‘kinds of Christianity’ groups: thinkers over there, feelers over there, and doers over there, everyone else, over there! Then we make perfectly righteous judgments about everyone not in our group!” Now of course no one would ever say this because Paul’s question is rhetorical and obviously meant to shame them. Their own brand of distinction-making is not just divisive. It comes to mean that, “Our group (or my gift) is superior.”2

There is a second rhetorical question: ‘What do you have that you did not receive?’ (v. 7b) What we “have,” in Paul’s meaning here, includes everything that belongs to us our persons—natural and spiritual endowments—and yet the Scriptures elsewhere say: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above” (Jam. 1:17).

Then a last rhetorical question to punctuate the point: ‘If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?’ (v. 7c) Whether we like it or not, failure to recognize grace alone, is boasting alone, or self alone: Solus ipse! What we find in Paul is that whenever grace is highlighted as the cause of our life in Christ, it is always pit against boasting: “so that no human being might boast in his presence” (1 Cor. 1:30); “Where then is boasting? It is excluded” (Rom. 3:27).

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast (Eph. 2:8-9). 

Paul then turns from questions to a kind of mock tribute to their greatness: ‘Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you!’ (v. 8) Now some commentators, rightly I think, make a point to say that the Apostle must to be speaking directly to the ringleaders in this place and not to the whole church.3 This is biting sarcasm and irony. It is as if to say: “Of course you have attained spiritual perfection—you are so socially connected!” But the implication that they could not miss was this: Social status and material resources in the world is not the same as spiritual maturity and God’s mandate in the kingdom. So there is a rebuke to those who had made themselves “kings” in the Corinthian church because of how they have succeeded in the world.4 Hence the word ALREADY—that is, apart from the spiritual resources of the church. On the other hand, there is also a more gentle shaming to the whole church. Look at what you all have! And that part is not a bad thing.

Thus it is not simply that we have nothing, in ourselves, to commend ourselves to God, but that when God gives to us, He gives it in abundance. He “lavished” his grace on us (Eph. 1:7). Here is the double-upshot of grace: We always have more than we need and we always have better than we deserve. It is not simply that we start with less than nothing, in terms of resources God is bound to use in this age, but also that God gives us “every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Eph. 1:3). We have gone from enemies of God to having the ultimate surplus: the infinite resources in God Himself. 

Shamed by the “Deficits” of Christ’s Servant

‘For I think that God has exhibited us apostles as last of all, like men sentenced to death, because we have become a spectacle to the world, to angels, and to men’ (v. 9). I spoke at the beginning of two ways of serving God. There is a “ministry of glory” that looks down on the “ministry of the cross.” It sees the servants who have fewer earthly resources, or who are frankly getting their butts kicked by life, and it despises them and judges them as though they are in sin: “They must have done something wrong! Someone up there must be mad at you!”

It would seem sometimes as if Job’s three “friends” have made their way into our churches, or at least that they have been offering their counsel to some of our more “put together” members. But Paul is unashamed to use that very same resume of so-called “shame” and turn it around like a mirror to the Corinthians’ genuine shame. Paul leads the procession of those condemned in this way. And note how he says that “God” is the one who has put the apostles on this exhibition of “failure,” this spectacle of suffering, like men on a death row walk that lasts for years. 

Then he states the same in a clear contrast: ‘We are fools for Christ's sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honor, but we in disrepute. To the present hour we hunger and thirst, we are poorly dressed and buffeted and homeless’ (vv. 10-11). Remember this contrast in Chapter 1? Whose side was foolishness and whose weakness? It was God’s “foolishness” versus the world’s “wisdom.” How, then, about weakness and strength? It is the same pattern: the “weakness” God versus the “power” of the world. So what is Paul doing here? He is drawing out of that same paradoxical contrast the implication of how to tell the signs of true apostles versus false.

The false appear in the world as successful, as in the tale of Gyges’ ring, used by Socrates to contrast the just man and the unjust man—the former of whom must be stripped of all reputation as just, even unto day of his death, since to merely appear just is only one more false prize of the unjust man.5 Let the perfectly just man pursue justice for its own rewards and not for the applause of the crowd. The trouble-makers in Corinth would have sympathized with the practitioner of “perfect injustice” whose virtue is but an appearance. Later on to the Corinthians Paul will reach the heights of his sarcasm with name-calling. He will call them “super apostles” (2 Cor. 11:5). But we must not dismiss this as petty.

Whereas verses 10 and 11 were a statement of the facts, now Paul adds the response of true servants: ‘and we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat’ (vv. 12-13a). It is not enough for Paul to fill up his resume with the sufferings of Christ; but he must anticipate the objection: “So, Paul, you just get wrecked in this world and this is all your virtue?” Not at all! But Paul knows that such people hear this cross-shaped resume as mere losing, and as one long train of excuses after another. So in this sense they can’t hear Paul at all. They hear Paul saying, “My high and mighty Corinthians, the reason I can’t attain as you have is because I have these chains, these opponents, these setbacks.” What they hear is Paul giving reasons for not being and doing better.

But they miss Paul’s whole point: WHAT YOU CALL ‘BETTER’ IS NOT ‘BETTER’ IN GOD’S KINGDOM! Now since Paul is determined that they not miss this point, he piles on top of mockery a list of what he does in fact do. Paul never said anything such as: “The reason I don’t work hard is because …” Not in the least! He is working with an energy that they know nothing of because of a prize of which they are equally ignorant. “I worked harder than any of them” (1 Cor. 15:10). Again, he never says, “The reason I gave up is because…”—No again! We have endured in the same gospel and same mission. But in the end, he is proving out that he was working for the gospel, and some of them, at least, will be shown to have been working on a different project.

You see that Paul makes arguments in his letters designed to undress the dirty tactics of leaders—tactics that laypeople would otherwise know nothing about—but there it is, in the letter, for all the laypeople to read. That is more interesting than commentators often let on. It is crucial. Then let me reiterate the point: Paul informs the whole church in his letters of what leaders in the church do. He is saying, “False leaders do this with the cross-shaped resume of true leaders. Watch that! Mark them!”

Paul is addressing the whole church and saying, in effect:

“WHOLE CHURCH: Mark that man. Watch that leader. Put a radar up for anyone who disqualifies other would-be leaders because of their ‘lesser status’ in the system of worldly metrics, or because of their ‘lot in life,’ or because of the opposition they face. Be able to distinguish actual biblical disqualifies that rest on actual character, not the room temperature around them, which is often kindled by the blasts of Satan’s kingdom. Keep your eye on that arrogant and ignorant tactic, church! Even I, the Apostle Paul, cannot stop those ‘super-suburban-elders’ if you continue to enable their power trip by buying into that definition of spiritual maturity and qualification.”  

‘We have become, and are still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things’ (v. 13b). In all of this, Paul is placing himself far below even those who the Corinthian superstars want to despise the most. He is saying, “You know that guy or that gal you say is a mess? I am with him. I am with her. If he or she is driven out of the camp, then I am driven out of the camp with them!” As “Jesus also suffered outside the gate … Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured” (Heb. 13:12, 13). Paul relates to the scum and the refuse: in other words, the city garbage, which not coincidentally would be thrown into the place called Gehena,6 one of the words used for hell. When we are thrown away by the self-appointed elite, we are like Christ and so we proclaim the good news. These things on Paul’s resume are not liabilities or deficits by heaven’s estimation. 

But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you (2 Cor. 4:7-12).

Jesus gave us the principle that, “a servant is not greater than his master” (Jn. 16:13). In other words, if Jesus had to endure opposition and slander and betrayal and loss, then why on earth would we expect to ride the First Class section of the church to glory?

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Correction. Paul is not commending to us a virtue of losing. Far from it! In suffering the loss of things in this world—including, what is on center-stage in this passage, reputation—it is not an actual loss. An actual loss in God’s courtroom would imply that the loss was a judicial consequence, that the loss of reputation was itself a just sentence through the agency of the crowd. The point is that the crowd is wrong, and that those who are “paraded” in the way of Job are in fact in right, and are ultimately those who are striving ceaselessly for victory; and that includes a heavenly-mindedness that makes a difference in this time and place. There are paradoxes like this that must be embraced on this parade route.

Use 2. Consolation. God’s grace and Christ’s cross are often used to deflate our pride. But what could bring us shame actually becomes gospel assurance to us. This loss of all things is really where we find a clear sight of our salvation. Do you know that when Paul taught these truths, it was not that he didn’t struggle to wear suffering well. It was exactly this subject he was talking about when he said, “Not that I have attained …” (Phi. 3:12). I actually find that very comforting. But how does that passage go right before it?

But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead (Phi. 3:7-11).

Do you see what Paul gained when he lost all those things that shine in the world? He found the righteousness of God in Christ’s performance for him! He found the King who led into exaltation by making Himself low and despised and of no reputation to those who would pursue the mere appearance of virtue.

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1. Charles Spurgeon, “Election,” sermon delivered on September 2, 1855.

2.  διακρίνει can either mean “put a difference between” or “regard as superior.” Here both are implied, but the later drives the former.

3. Morris, First Corinthians, 79.

4. Carson says, “Paul is not talking about the Corinthians’ status (‘become kings’), but about their perception of their function (‘You have begun your reign.’).” — The Cross and Christian Ministry, 103.

5. Plato, Republic, II:360b-361d.

6. cf. Matthew 5:22, 10:28, 23:33.