1 Corinthians 4:14-21

CRITICAL NOTES

1 Corinthians 4:14.—Irony dropped. Even in 1 Corinthians 4:6 it was “Brothers!” Now, “Beloved children!” Yet surely he did desire to make them ashamed of their bearing towards and estimate of himself? Yes. But not vindictively, nor so as to humiliate them before others. It was only such fatherly use of “shame,” as if in private between him and his erring children, as is really a most effectual “admonition” and educating force.

1 Corinthians 4:15. Instructors.—More accurately “tutors”; an illustration of his in Galatians 3:24, with a different application. The slaves to whom the boy was intrusted during his school-life and minority, to look after him generally. [As the Master says, “I am the Shepherd to whom the sheep belong; others are but ‘hirelings.’ ” However faithful servants they may be, the sheep are “not their own.”] (Stanley thinks of the (often) “harsh and despotic sway” of these pedagogues, and compares 2 Corinthians 11:20.) I begat you.—Not claiming any larger share in the origin of their spiritual life than in Galatians 4:19; Philemon 1:10; Philippians 2:22; 1 Timothy 1:2; 1 Timothy 1:18. All he had done was “in Christ Jesus”; no independent work or glory. “An approach to the doctrine of the new birth.… Paul’s only direct reference to this doctrine is Titus 3:5” (Beet). [James 1:18 approaches Paul’s “through the Gospel” here.]

1 Corinthians 4:16. Followers.—“Imitators,” as in Philippians 3:17; 1 Thessalonians 1:6, which again joins on to Ephesians 5:1. Says Pressensé: “Paul has attained to such a stripping off of self that he can without egotism propose himself as a model.”

1 Corinthians 4:17.—To his “beloved children” he sends his “beloved child.” [As the Great Householder sent His Son to the unfaithful, rebellious husbandmen, Matthew 21:35.] As in 1 Corinthians 16:10, there is the always recurrent strain of appeal for a kindly reception of Timothy. For this cause.—I.e. in order that you may imitate me. Timothy will remind you of “my ways in Christ.”

1 Corinthians 4:18.—“Timothy instead of himself! He dares not come himself! Or, at best, he does not know his own mind, or stick to his purpose long together!” Cf. 2 Corinthians 1:15. Thus would revive suspicions of vacillation or duplicity already awakened. Note the tense, which is exactly, “Some got puffed up” previously. The Lord.—Most probably Christ, as in 1 Corinthians 4:4.

1 Corinthians 4:20. Word … power.—Be ye prepared to match with facta non verba my own coming with facta non verba (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:18). [How irresistible Stephen was (Acts 6:10). Cf. Acts 8:6; Acts 10:44; Acts 17:11; Acts 19:20; Acts 14:1. If the preacher stands firing, and never hits anything or anybody, he must aim badly, or must have got the wrong sort of ammunition. The Truth, the Kingdom, are always “in power.”]

HOMILETIC ANALYSIS.— 1 Corinthians 4:14

Fatherly Appeals; Fatherly Discipline.

I. The tender relationship.—Paul was a gardener (1 Corinthians 3:9), then a “master builder” (1 Corinthians 3:10), then a “minister of Christ” (1 Corinthians 4:1), then a “steward” in God’s household, the Church (1 Corinthians 4:1). Now he is a “father,” even to such thankless sons as these Corinthians. His heart cannot keep up the satire and rebuke and self-vindication against them; to think of them, and to recall their past, even that he might rebuke, melts him down. The tears are in his voice, “my beloved sons.” No tie more tender—no tie so tender—as that which binds together the minister and his spiritual children. No love deeper than that of the man who has seen in some souls the satisfaction of the sore travail of his own (Galatians 4:19). No pain more acute than for the father to lose the love of his sons, or to see their life a flagrant contradiction to all he tried to teach and to be before them. They will not be his “imitators.” That minister has not yet tasted the chief joy of the ministry who cannot say to any one soul, “In Christ Jesus have I begotten you in the Gospel.” Is he after all nothing but their “instructor,” their “tutor,” their “pedagogue,” fulfilling indeed a very useful function as he brings them to the school of some better teacher, and guards and shields and trains the young life committed to his care? The man who takes refuge in this, that he does not indeed “see conversions,” but he “builds up the Church,” certainly is not doing nothing, but is doing only that half of a minister’s work which presupposes the new life to have begun. The “instructor” is needed, but the complete minister is the “father” also. And to his spiritual children that man will be like no other man. If they will hear “admonition” from any lips, surely it will be from his.

II. And the father is a model for his children.—“Be imitators of me.” All reproach of egotism or vanity is beside the mark, when it is remembered that the father is talking thus, in that familiar love of family life which expects to be understood as a matter of course. The father is not on his guard against being mistaken when he talks to his children. (See also, for another turn to the thought, in Critical Notes.) One of the brothers, Timothy, shall tell them again, if they have forgotten them, their spiritual father’s rules for “behaviour in the House of God” (as he afterwards himself gave them to this same Timothy, 1 Timothy 3:15); Paul’s little household code for the training up of the children’s life and the ordering of their activities, which he was accustomed to enjoin wherever a new family circle—call it “a Church”—sprang up. How Paul’s dear children would treasure up every word which their spiritual father had left behind him! How our boys remember “what father used to say”! How the girls copy “what mother used to do”! “Remember my ways which be in Christ;” it is a charming ideal. He is himself a man “in Christ.” The formative principle, that which governs all his own life, and gives its distinctive tone to his judgments, and preferences, and dislikes, and volitions, is the Spirit of Christ dwelling in him. It is really Christ expressing and exhibiting Himself through Paul. If then he says, “Copy me, children,” it is after all, “Copy Christ, children.” It will be a task to distress and daunt the minister if he approach it from this side: “I must so bear myself, and so be, that my people may safely be imitators of me, even when I am least adverting to the effect of my very life upon them.” But let him rather approach it from this side, “I must be in Christ,” all the problem then falls into ordered simplicity of solution. All that springs out of the life “in Christ” may safely be followed. Be “in Christ,” and leave the rest to take care of itself.

III. Yet the father must needs sometimes speak sharply, and even use “the rod.”—Nothing but “love” and the “spirit of meekness” would be defective family government where the children are “puffed up” Even as “the rod” and the rebuke alone would be imperfect family government too. The “words” need the “power” behind them; but the “power” should be held, if it may be, in reserve. And (as in 2 Corinthians 1:18) if Paul seems self-assertive, it is simply that the man lives so thoroughly in his message and work, the Gospel he preaches has put its own stamp so deeply upon the man, that what is true of it is true of him; and, conversely, as is the man so are the Gospel and the kingdom he preaches. [The man preaches no “Yes” and “No” Gospel; he is no “Yes” and “No” man (2 Cor. as above). So here:] He comes on no errand of personal vindication; he comes to vindicate the “kingdom of God,” which has been endangered and endamaged at Corinth. It is not only or chiefly that he will show himself to have both “words” and “power”; and his thunder [says Jerome: “As often as I read Paul, I seem to myself to hear, not words, but thunder-claps”] to be wedded to swift-striking lightning. He comes only as the embodiment of a Gospel order of things in which indeed are words, tender or stern, as need may require, but where every word can be translated into a deed of blessing or of chastening wrath.

[IV.

1. This unconscious conformity of Paul to the Gospel he preaches is a real parallel to the, not conformity with but, identification of Christ and His Gospel. He and His religion, the Gospel of His Kingdom, are alike “the Way” (Acts 9:2; Acts 19:9; Acts 19:23); “the Truth” (not so precisely, but see, e.g., 2 Corinthians 13:8; 2 Thessalonians 2:13; 1 Timothy 3:15); “the Life” (Acts 5:20).

2. The same fundamental unity of character and form makes the paragraph under consideration so curiously and closely parallel to the case of God and His erring and wayward children, that, without any violence to sense or to essential Truth, it becomes almost a parable. Thus

(1) In all His dealings with sinful men in these days of His grace, God designs their amendment. Like Paul here, He desires to touch their heart into sorrow and into a reformatory love toward Himself. Even in their waywardness He does not deny them the name “children” or the epithet “beloved.” For His Son’s sake the race, even in their fall, are “the men of His goodwill.” If they will not be “admonished,” then there must come, even for these, the “shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2).

(2) “One is your Father,” said the Great Teacher, the Eldest Son of the Family (Matthew 23:9). “Your Father;” it is the new name for God which leaps instinctively to the lips of the pardoned and adopted sinner, when “the Spirit of His Son” is “sent forth into his heart” (Galatians 4:6). It was unknown to the Old Testament saints [Psalms 103:13; Psalms 68:5 are no real exceptions; Psalms 89:26 is theocratic rather than personal; Jeremiah 3:4 is put into the lips of the nation, and is not personal]; no Old Testament saint got beyond “Friend,” and ordinarily were only “servants,” trusted and beloved and honoured indeed, but never, as does every New Testament saint, saying “Abba, Father,” as the customary, instinctive word of address to God. Nor does a man in the Old Testament stage of his spiritual life—for every man’s spiritual history recapitulates in brief summary the history of “the dispensations”—say “Abba.”

(3) And the “Fatherhood” and the “Sonship” depend on a new-born life; the children have “been begotten again” (1 Peter 1:3), and this “through the Gospel,” the living, “incorruptible seed” of a new life (1 Peter 1:23).

(4) He says—as Paul, with a special reference, once says for Him (Ephesians 5:1)—“Be ye imitators of Me.” Indeed, their new-created life is “after God,” the Pattern (Colossians 3:10; Ephesians 4:24).

(5) And has He not sent a “beloved Son,” “faithful” (Hebrews 3:2) to His Father’s commission and errand, who brings into men’s remembrance God’s “ways”? What He desires, what He is—the verbal pattern and the character-pattern to which God would have His children conform—where are they so spoken, where are they so seen, as by and in the Son who has been sent to men in their forgetful, wayward, rebellious mood of mind and heart?

(6) But men are “puffed up” as though God were afar off, and never could or would draw nigh, to any practical purpose. The natural heart is epicurean in the God it imagines and desires. Deism, which recognised a God, and even a Creator, but relegated Him to a distant aloofness of place and heart and relation towards His world, and towards the life of the individual man, was only a quasi-philosophical expression of the thought of the natural heart everywhere. “Don’t bring God too near me! Let me get into some far country away from Him!” Even believing science and history and politics do not escape the infection and tendency of the time, but are apt to minimise the supernatural. The scoffers of the last days cry, sometimes with a heart which feels a sinking misgiving underneath the loud mockery, “Where is the promise of His coming?” (2 Peter 3:4). (As they said it of Paul at Corinth.) Paul himself, in veiled language, has reminded us how The Coming (the Parousia) will burst in upon a world in which lawless revolt in voice and act will have risen to its climax of daring against God and His Christ (2 Thessalonians 2:8). [It is no mere accidental parallel that, only a moment or two before the Life-giver would raise from the dead the ruler’s child, the neighbours and hired mourners “laughed to scorn” the words, “Not dead but sleeping” (Matthew 9:24). Their mockery is a prelusive, anticipatory suggestion and hint of the loud, mocking naturalism of unbelief which shall be never more scornful and daring than on the very eve of the Parousia and the Resurrection.] Corinthian Church members who say, “Paul will never come here again—not he!” are but exhibiting the unbelieving habit of the natural heart in all men. [The parallel is not to be forced, but, until Paul arrive, Timothy will so be Paul’s representative at Corinth that he who saw and heard Timothy would see and hear Paul (cf. then John 14:9).]

(7) When He says, “Behold I come quickly, … to give every man according as his work shall be” (Revelation 22:12), it is as though we had Paul’s words in our paragraph “writ large,” written out on the Divine scale. In that day preeminently will the “kingdom” come “in power”! The Son, the “Minister” and Representative of God in that day of visitation, will bear the “rod”—of iron (Psalms 2:9). The “spirit of meekness” (Matthew 11:29), on which men have been presuming too far, will give place to the “wrath of the Lamb” (Revelation 6:16). Mutatis mutandis, one might have said to the refractory, rebellious Church at Corinth, in regard to the Advent of Paul, “Be wise now therefore, O ye Corinthians,” etc. (as Psalms 2:10). Such flexibility and ready adaptability of Scripture language to such varying purpose; the fact that the same vessel of language will so readily hold such varying contents; such often minuteness of coincident particulars as between the contents—events or series of events, trivial and tremendous,—are not to be dismissed off-hand as fanciful or accidental. Is it not part of the organic interdependence and intercoherence of the One Book which has been, on the human side, the gradual, and largely unconcerted, accumulation of books, in process through many widely separated centuries?]

SEPARATE HOMILIES

1 Corinthians 4:20. Word and Power.

I. True of Christianity in contrast with other ethical systems.—As to their excellence “in word” they many of them deserve high praise. The religion of Jesus Christ gains nothing by an advocacy which does not do justice to the elements of truth in other religions—particularly moral truth. [As, for instance, the strong filial piety of Chinese life. Yet justice should be done to Christianity. Exaggerated praise is sometimes given to non-Christian systems. E.g. Confucius several times gave the rule, “What ye would not that men should do to you, do ye not do to them.” There is a surface similarity in this to the “golden rule” of Christ. But no such similarity (nor any ground in history) as to warrant the supposition that Christianity has incorporated an article of Chinese morality. As a matter of historical and chronological possibility or probability, it would have been more reasonable to assert that it should have “incorporated” the equivalent saying of Shammai: “What is unpleasing to thee do not to thy neighbour.” These two sayings may show the high-water mark of natural altruism; yet, as is easily seen, and often pointed out, these are negative; they restrain the hand from evil-doing; Christ’s saying, “Do unto others,” etc., sets the hand to busy, active benevolence and well-doing.] Hardly any considerable system of morals, ancient or modern, but enunciates some noble sentiments and precepts; the “Light that lighteth every man coming into the world” (John 1:9) has not left Himself without a witness in heathen minds and hearts in any country or age. Yet two facts are acknowledged by general consent. First that there was never any general agreement as to a moral standard or code of rules for conduct; and next, that, however admirable and noble the “word” of moral teaching might be, the systems never gave, or taught, the power to carry out the teaching and fulfil the code. All fail there. They have offered a marvellously complete analysis of human nature, but they are altogether wanting in motive power, and in practice the machinery of such morality was found to stand still. “Words,” plenty of them, and beautiful and noble; but no “power.” The result of man’s unaided moral experiment, as tried in its most highly developed form,—that of classical antiquity,—and with the greatest advantages, with philosophers for teachers whose names stand highest, beyond all comparison or competition, is exactly gathered up in Ovid’s well-known confession: “I see and approve the Better; I follow the Worse.” And this because power to follow the Better with any steady and persistent steps was not forthcoming. [Not only was the standard varying and uncertain, from teacher to teacher, no finality being attained, progress in ethical inquiry being “progress on a treadmill”; but no adequate motives were supplied for obedience to any one truth taught, no sanctions for the laws laid down; it was open to the individual to deny the cogency of any political or personal prudential “reasons,” and the authority of even the power and loftier dictates of his own nature, when it was at its best. Cicero long ago mockingly pointed out how seldom their moralisings produced much effect upon the lives of the very teachers themselves (Tusc. Quœst., 2). And, above all, nobody himself knew, or could teach others, how to fulfil his own ideals.] “Now as a matter of fact, Christianity has introduced into humanity a moral power, unknown apart from the presence of Christian faith and knowledge. This power has proved itself adequate to the vanquishing of the natural enmity of the heart to self-control and self-denial. The Christian religion has found and revealed a way of rendering virtue—which is admittedly admirable and desirable—actually attainable; has made the path of obedience progressively congenial, attractive, and delightful. There is a general agreement that this is the distinguishing characteristic of Christianity. First, in point of time, comes the provision for pardon; but first in point of real importance comes the provision of a spiritual power, which secures the love and practice of holiness.” [Professor J. Radford Thomson, whose words may stand for many more. But the fact is undisputed.]

II. True of Christianity as compared with Judaism.—This had a code, higher and most perfect in its comprehensive and adequate range of directions. And, further, it rooted its most thoroughly symmetrical and perfect code in the personal relation to God: “I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have,” etc. [A sceptical lawyer began to read the Bible in order from the beginning, and “pulled up” at last at the Decalogue, with the pregnant exclamation, “Where did Moses get that law?”] Further, and more remarkably still, it stated the true secret of all law-keeping, in its most condensed form: “Love the Lord thy God; love thy neighbour as thyself.” [Though note how little prominent is this latter (Leviticus 19:18), a mere sentence among a series, until, so to speak, disinterred by Christ, and exhibited in all its significance as one of the two cardinal enactments of the whole Law.] Yet, though it was a Divine directory of life, it was annulled “for the weakness and unprofitableness thereof” (Hebrews 7:18). The Law “could not make” the comers to its sacrifices and other ordinances “perfect” (Hebrews 10:1). God erected this fingerpost of duty; the highway of righteous life was in no sort of doubt. But the Law was only a fingerpost; it showed the way, but gave no help to walk in it. It condemned trespass swiftly and sternly, but it gave no direct aid to obedience. “By the Law was the” clearer and clearer “knowledge of sin” (Romans 3:20). But in the Law itself was nothing more. [Under the Old Testament order there was no doubt not only knowledge, but obedience, and obedience which meant victory over opposing evil within and around the man. Yet this was not in the Law, but was an anticipation and foretaste of the grace of the Gospel.] Jewish seekers after a life of moral perfectness found all the inner moral division and weakness which the heathen felt and mourned over; they understood it better than the best of heathen moralists could. But all their struggle ended in the moral breakdown and confessed failure of Romans 7:12. The Law said, “Do and live,” “Do or die”; but of itself it could not show how to “Do.” It was in word only, not “in power.”

III. The kingdom of God has, and brings, power.—In its clearer revelation as to Rewards and Punishments in the future life it has supplied sanctions such as even Judaism could not furnish. In its Central Person, Jesus Christ, it has supplied a perfect Pattern, a living Summary of all perfect human nobility and righteousness of life and character. In its love to that Personal Saviour it has supplied a perfect, a self-acting motive to obedience; a motive which, as matter of fact, has produced results which no other power could effect, and has done this in some drawn from the lowest types and grades of human life. [That love for Christ, moreover, supplies the most perfect legislation for the individual, prompting a very instinct for law where there is no express command.] Yet even in the most perfect Example it is only in a figurative sense that there is “power” to secure obedience and to elevate and purify; the real power is in the man himself, in his own will. Even a motive is not power. Love for Christ is a “power” only in the same quasi-poetic sense as Example is. The real spiritual dynamic that enables the will, and brings men at last to the secret of “power,” is in the working of the Holy Ghost upon, with, in the will of man. “The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus” makes a man “free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2). All this is experience in the man who has “entered into the kingdom of God” (Matthew 18:3); or as, with a significant reversal of the polarity of the thought, it is sometimes put, who has “received the kingdom,” and let it enter into him (Mark 10:15). The philosophers do but analyse more clearly and fully and cast into accurate and orderly language what all human hearts more vaguely think and feel on moral questions. No representative question is ever raised by them and discussed which earnest men somewhere have not at some time less definitely recognised and dealt with. [The problems and solutions of Job, e.g., or of Ecclesiastes are not so definitely those of any special age or country or philosophy, as to yield any basis for locating date or authorship. They are the questions and answers of serious men everywhere, always.] Every man’s spiritual life, as he is led up to and into the “Kingdom of God,” recapitulates the moral history of the race. He has his patriarchal age and his Mosaic dispensation, before he comes into the Christian era of his life and experience. [Hence such passages and descriptions as in Galatians 4:3 are true, as between Judaism and Christianity and men living on the border-time of both, and as between the days during which the individual is being led “unto Christ” and those during which he lives “in Christ.” In Paul and many of his Christian contemporaries the dispensational contrast and the personal were coincident. They lived, historically as well as experimentally, through the transition from the one age to the other.] The Law showed the way; the Gospel accompanies and directs and upholds the traveller. Conscience is light, not force; knowledge, not help or power. The bitterest of the bitter cup of true repentance is the experience, “When I would do good, evil is present with me”—present, and so much master that, “The evil that I would not, that do I.” “Our moral nature is disordered, and one of the chief evidences of the disorder is the conflict between duty and inclination. Conscience and the will are not at one. We may form beautiful ideals, but we cannot realise them. Desires which are known to be mean and poor often prevail in us against the voice of conscience and even the protests of reason. And often the state of things is worse than that of a conflict in which the bad usually gets the better of the good. In many the result is a state of helpless captivity. In these cases lusts of the body rise to sovereign power and crush down in ignominious bondage every good and wholesome desire. Men and women are degraded far below the level of brutes. In the grip of imperious lusts they are powerless, struggle as they may. When the outward evil is not so great, the triumph of evil is not so conspicuous; but that evil reigns is often lamentably apparent, even to the persons themselves. Often their lives are governed by a selfishness that, regardless of others, seeks to secure everything for themselves. [Culture, with its tendency to fastidiousness of liking and judgment, is often exceedingly selfish. Of itself it certainly has no redemption from self in it.] The will of God, which they know to be the true sovereign authority of the world, is little regarded except in so far as the ordinary usages of society may happen to agree with it. These lives do not conform to any noble standard. And even at their very best there is such a discord between what they are inclined to do and what they ought to do, that their highest achievements in duty are but the result of a hard struggle, not the free, spontaneous movements of souls delighting in the ways of truth and righteousness.” (Dr. W. G. Blaikie.)

IV. But the Gospel scheme provides “power.”—It has been a power working with the preacher of the kingdom of heaven. With what sledge-hammer force does the Gospel word, when full of the power of the Holy Ghost, break open the door of the most utterly evil heart, and find admittance for conviction and for Christ! How this power has again and again borne down before it, and swept away in its victorious rush, all the barriers of social pride, of personal reserve or timidity, bringing to open concern the most unlikely hearts! The man also who receives into himself the Spirit of God as a Spirit testifying to his adoption into the family of God (Romans 8:15) finds he has received the “Spirit of power” as well as “of love and a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). As a matter of mental and moral scientific analysis, no question is more perplexing, or seems more nearly insoluble, than that of the enabling effect of the Spirit of God upon the human will. But the simplest child of God finds that the same Spirit whose inwelling brings him peace and joy and hope brings power also. Old habits seem like Samson’s bonds of new rope when touched with His fire. The old struggle with the heart and its inclinations still may many times be a severe one; but it ends, not as in Romans 7, in defeat, but in victory. Evil may be “present,” but it rules no longer. The “new creature” is but “new” with the strength of the child, but that strength may be increased until the walk is with the firm and victorious tread of the man in Christ. Self-control, though in no strength of Self, is enjoyed and exhibited; patience and forgiveness of injuries—an impossible task to the natural heart—become possibilities and facts. Every mission-field, every Christian congregation, has its “modern miracles,” its moral miracles: degraded ones lifted out of the slough of gross or cruel sin; the utter, hard, proud, cold worldling-life melted away, and giving place to humility, unselfishness, tenderness, sympathy, self-sacrificing benevolence, and so on. Facts prove Paul’s words true. And only the Gospel of the kingdom of God has ever thus solved the moral problems which were the despair of the noblest ancient philosophers and ethics. The privilege of the regenerate life, moreover, should not be taken to stop short of this possession of moral power. The Gospel gives the moral leverage and the fulcrum—both—with which the world may be lifted. And this is no mere Christian boasting, but an assertion whose truth is verified in the whole history of the modern world. The representative world was sick at heart and corrupt, hastening to political and social ruin and disintegration, when Christianity came and put a new force into man and society. The world took a new start, and began a new life, at the era of the advent of the “kingdom of God.” And if it has seemed to fail in persons or in societies since, it is when it has degenerated into a thing of “words” only, in creeds and pulpits and life; and, indeed, has reverted to the ethics of cultured heathen naturalism in its doctrine of human nature; still bearing the Christian name, wearing the Christian mask, but heathen—natural—at heart, and in all essential principles and motives, and in the force which is appealed to for recovering man from degradation and moral failure and ruin.