1Cor 3:21-23 - True Heirship in Practice

21-23 So let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, 22 whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, 23 and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.


Paul finishes up his argument against factions based on personality. No Christian should raise any other Christian above the rest. All are saved by the same grace. It is Christ who saves all and is in all and through all. And He is the Lord of all, both saved and unsaved. It’s just that some of mankind have been given the gift of living in that light and others have not. And of those who have received the gift of Christ, some have been given as gifted pastors and teachers while others have been given to serve in other ways.

Christians have, by the grace of God, transcended all issues of hierarchy or of comparative usefulness. All are fitted not by themselves, but by God alone. Whatever gifting and whatever measure of true understanding we have we have by the grace of God alone. What has any of us that we did not first receive? {1Co 4:7} We all belong to each other in Christ. And then we all belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God. There is a unity that we all have in God, by the Spirit through the Lord Jesus Christ - who is both our God and our brother. And it is by dint of grace and our union with God in Christ that we have any value or utility at all. That sort of renders party spirit a tad obsolete if we truly believe it, doesn’t it? Of course, working it all out is another matter because we are new creatures, yet in sinful flesh, warring against the deeds of the body.

We must not make either our teachers or ourselves into gods. The flesh will tend towards doing both. Satan is equally happy whichever way we go, so long as we don’t see and take the narrow way in which Christ is all in all - source, destination and even the journey itself - for He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Look at the expansiveness of Paul’s view of the Lord Jesus Christ. See the connection all Christians have, by right of both inheritance and marriage, to the Owner of all creation, and to ownership in Him. Not a theoretical ownership, but a real one to be received through faith. Nevertheless it is an ownership to be not grasped, but to be willingly set aside for a time. An ownership that will suffer wrongly rather than assert its rights. An ownership that will both decry and mourn insults and insolence to the Owner and yet will entreat men to turn and repent. And ownership that defers all things into the Hands of He who is above all, including that ownership itself. Nothing grasped, all given. Only through emptying of the self is there a constant refilling with the infinite riches of God. To own all is to grasp nothing. And to grasp nothing is to own all. What wisdom! And this was personified and demonstrated in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ - the very life that is now in us.

This is faith - to live believing these stupendous truths - to walk in such a way that our lives reflect our settled citizenship in heaven - and to do so when almost everything around us and within us screams the opposite. The world denies it. The flesh denies it. But thanks be to the Spirit of God by the grace of Jesus Christ our inner man believes it and lives in the light of it. Faith is the evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for, when that hope is true Biblical hope. It does not yet see as it shall, but it both hopes and believes what God has promised. And that not from its own sufficiency, but due entirely to God’s will and mercy. We live as citizens of heaven while on earth, and we do this by faith.

God is so wonderful, so deep, so wise, so overarchingly omnipotent, so loving, so patient and so gracious towards His own - that we, though we were dead to all of this, should be made alive together with Christ. Oh... words fail...