1 Corinthians 3:11

1 Corinthians 3:11

Consider how Christ is the True foundation.

I. The nature of Christ. It was Godhead divested of its circumstance. His great power, the secret of His wonderful, unparalleled career, was not His Godhead, but the immeasurableness of the Holy Spirit which was in Him, which, never being grieved by the slightest approach of sin, wrought in Him infinitely. But He was a man generally subject to the same physical and spiritual laws as any other divinely commissioned and supernaturally furnished messenger of God. And this entire manhood of Christ is one of our foundations.

II. The work of Christ. It was complete. Sealed with the anointings of the Father for this very end, He worked out sacrificially as a Priest what now He gives and applies royally as a King. When that representative Man died, it was the same as if the whole race of mankind, which He was representing, died at that moment, in His death. So the debt is more than paid, the ransom is more than equivalent, the justice of God is more than satisfied. This is the work of Christ, and this again is the element of our Christianity.

III. And, thirdly, the claim of Christ. What return has not such a work a right to ask? As God, He demands His own twice-created work, your body, soul, and spirit all you have and all you are to be His and only His, to love Him, to serve Him, to glorify Him for ever and ever. If the foundation is once set, our life will have in it that triple power, without which it is not worth living. (1) There will be a mind at rest. (2) The composure of a soul at ease will sustain a confidence which always commands success. (3) From that foundation by secret processes, there will be continually emanating over the whole man a hidden influence, strengthening, uniting, filling him, as for every duty here, so to be able to bear the weight of the glory in heaven.

J. Vaughan, Fifty Sermons,5th series, p. 83.

References: 1 Corinthians 3:11. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxv., No. 1494; B. J. Snell, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xv., p. 56; J. Vaughan, Sermons,8th series, p. 116.