1 Cor

1 Cor. 15:1-11

11/18/2007

“By the Grace of God I am What I am”

In the first part of this passage we have a clear summary of the gospel message that Paul proclaimed. In the second part, we get a glimpse into Paul’s heart and attitude toward his ministry. The two are closely related, of course. What he preached and how he went about preaching that message and lived cannot be separated. Paul’s attitude toward his life and ministry can be summarized in the words, “By the grace of God I am what I am…” (v. 10). This is an attitude of gratitude. We have much to learn from this Apostle of Jesus Christ, especially about thanksgiving in this season of thanksgiving.

“By the grace of God I am what I am….” This is Paul’s declaration of his profound gratitude for who he is by God’s grace. What is he by the grace of God?

In the most immediate context, Paul’s gratitude was for his apostolic office: “For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am…” (vv. 9-10). He was an Apostle of Jesus Christ. It was a noble, exalted and honorable office. It was a unique office, which was not to be repeated or transferred from one generation to another. It came with many privileges and it commanded much respect and honor. But the honor of the office did not come from the people who occupied it; the honor of the office came from the One, who conferred it and the manner in which He conferred it--Jesus Christ personally handpicked His Apostles and set them aside for the unique, honorable office of Apostleship. And they were what they were--the Apostles of Jesus Christ--by the grace of God, not because of any noble and excellent qualities in them. To Paul, this was true especially of his case. For he once persecuted the church of God with an unflinching resolve and unrelenting tenacity. He had done it in ignorance but his ignorance did not excuse him. Yes, there is a difference between an intentional crime and unintentional crime but even an unintentional crime is still a crime. In persecuting the church of God Paul persecuted God Himself (Acts 9:4). What a crime of unthinkable magnitude and hideousness!

Paul had never forgotten that! All throughout his career he had mentioned about it many a time. Even toward the end of his ministry he said to Timothy, “The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost” (1 Tim. 1:15). These words, I believe, are obviously in reference to his persecuting the church of Jesus Christ. This is not to say that he was plagued with a constant, debilitating and paralyzing sense of guilt. But his sin was seared into his consciousness as a constant reminder of God’s amazing grace to him. After all, whom did he persecuted? He persecuted God, who deserves all praise and honor, fear and worship! Yet this exalted One, whom he persecuted with all his might and zeal, appeared to him and showed him the error of his ways. That alone should have been more kindness than he could ever expect. Yet the Lord’s grace to him abounded even more and he was granted an office of greatest honor. He did not bring up his sin again and again because he doubted whether God had really forgiven him of it--that would be a sin of unbelief, or, at best, a sign of a weak faith. The true faith always has before it what it believes. We all know that Jesus Christ is the object of our faith and He still bears in His hands and feet and His side the five wounds He received from Calvary. His resurrection did not remove those wounds. He will bear it all through eternity as a constant reminder of His sacrificial work for our redemption. So, even in heaven the theme of our praise will be His gracious redemption. If so, can we ever forget what we have been saved from, even in heaven? Paul knew and never forgot that he was an Apostle only by the grace of God, not because of any of his own goodness and merit.

But if that were the only thing, what relevance can his gratitude have for us? He was privileged with the office of Apostleship but none of us are. Of course, some of us have received, or desire, ecclesiastical offices. But as you might have detected already, Paul’s gratitude went deeper than the office or title he received. Foundational to his gratitude for his privileged office was the forgiveness of his sin. You see, Paul and we share the same grace: “Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures…” (vv. 3-4). This, he says, is “of first importance (v. 3). And take a look at the additional descriptions he piles one upon another concerning the gospel to show its primary importance. The gospel is what he preached to the Corinthians. The gospel is what they received. The gospel is that in which they stand. The gospel is that by which they are being saved (vv. 1-2). No, the resurrected Lord did not physically appear to the Corinthians, nor to us, while He appeared to the Apostles and the five hundred of His disciples and even to Paul (vv. 5-8). But consider why Christ appeared to these eyewitnesses. He did it not just to set them aside as a special group of people; He did it also for us that we might believe in Him! That is why Paul preached the gospel to the Corinthians and to many others! So we read in v. 11, “Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.” If Christ bestowed any privilege of witnessing His resurrection, it was for the task of proclaiming the gospel of His death and resurrection to the ends of the earth, to you and me!

Do we sometimes think, especially when we are down, that, if Christ would appear to us in person, our faith would become so strong and we could live like Paul? Would that be true? First of all, consider the throngs of people, who witnessed the miracles of Jesus. Did they believe in Christ because they witnessed the miracles? Many of them saw with their own eyes the lame walk, the blind see and the lepers cleansed at the command of Jesus. They even saw Jesus raising the dead right in front of their eyes! And yet most of them abandoned Christ when He spoke of their need to eat of Him. They even demanded Him to be crucified. What did Jesus say in His parable of the rich man and Lazarus? When the rich man from Hades asked Abraham to send someone from the dead to warn his five living brothers, Abraham replied, “If they do not hear Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be convinced if someone should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:31).

Also consider this. Yes, Jesus appeared to the Apostles and the five hundred disciples to demonstrate that He indeed rose again from the dead. But what if He did not show Himself to them or to anyone after His resurrection? Does that mean that He did not rise again from the dead? Of course not! The historical fact of Jesus’ resurrection is independent of whether Jesus shows Himself to the disciples. Even if He just ascended into heaven without appearing to anyone, the fact that He rose again from the dead would still stand as true. But Jesus did appear to His disciples and proved His resurrection! So now, we not only have the historical fact of Jesus’ resurrection but also the eyewitness accounts of His disciples--not only the fact but also its proof! That is the pattern in which Paul presents the gospel. The main points are the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ--that Jesus died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that He rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures. The other two points are proofs of these two main events, respectively--that He was buried as a proof that He really died and that He appeared to His disciples as a proof that He really did rise again from the dead. Then do you see that the focus is on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for our salvation. His burial and His post-resurrection appearances--as important as they were--were of secondary importance! What we share with Paul--namely the death and resurrection of Christ for our sins--is so much greater than what distinguishes Paul from us.

So you and I can also give thanks to the Lord, saying, “I am what I am by the grace of God…!” Not because we have seen our resurrected Lord with our eyes, not because we have received a special office in the church, but because we have been saved, because Christ died for our sins and was raised again on the third day according to the Scriptures! Should we feel deprived because we have not seen the Lord with our eyes? Not at all! What is His appearance compared to His death and resurrection? What kind of sacrifice does Christ have to make to appear to us? But what is that compared to His suffering and dying for us sinners? If His appearance was necessary for our Christian faith and living, He would never withhold it from us. His love for us is too great to withhold anything that is necessary for our salvation, anything that is of eternal consequence! What greater thing can we be thankful for than our salvation in Jesus Christ! We are the redeemed of the Lord. We have been delivered from hell, from the condemnation of the law. We have been made God’s beloved children. And we are on our way to perfection and glorification. All because God is our God and we are His people. He will never take away from us the gift of Himself! Even the world looks down on those who marry for money. Are we not like them when we refuse to be happy and content until all our temporal, earthly desires are met? When we say, “I am thankful for my salvation but…,” do we not deny the all-sufficiency of God’s saving grace?

We are all that by the grace of God, not by our own works. We all know that grace is a favor that God bestows on His people even when we did not deserve it--in fact, when we deserved the opposite, which is His infinite wrath. The reason for God’s grace does not exist in us in any way, except that we were in desperate need of His grace for our salvation. Paul refers to this grace as “the grace of God” because it originates from God wholly and completely. We had no part in it whatsoever. This is called the doctrine of unconditional election. But we must not forget that this grace of God, though flowing out of God, is directed to us and finds its final resting place in us. That means, while God’s grace has nothing to do with us with regard to its origin and source--the incomprehensible will of God and His merciful heart being its only source--God’s grace has everything to do with us with regard to its effects and results. God gives us His saving grace so that it may bear its supernatural, life-giving and sanctifying fruit in us!

But we must beware: this grace can be abused and mistreated. The many apostolic commands we find throughout the New Testament are designed to show us the proper effects of grace and to warn us against wrong responses to it. And we can divide all the wrong responses into two categories.

The first kind of wrong response is that of unbelief. (We can call this legalism.) When we are plagued with unbelief, we find it impossible to rest fully on God’s grace. We are used to thinking, “Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could” (“Something Good” in “Sound of Music”). So we wonder how God can love us so freely, so unconditionally, how we can be given so much when we had nothing to do with it. The saving grace, because it is the unmitigated, unrestricted grace of a wonderful and marvelous God, [it] cannot be but an “amazing” kind of grace. And it is this very amazing-ness of the grace that we find it difficult to accept. So good and so gracious is this grace that it sounds unbelievable, too good to be true! But to those, who recognize (by God’s grace!) the true condition of their soul, the total depravity of their heart, this kind of amazing, unbelievable grace is the only thing that can save them from themselves! How utterly tragic and frustrating it is when we don’t understand the amazing-ness of God’s grace! Because we think that nothing comes from nothing--even the grace of God!--we think we must somehow earn His grace by being good or doing something or giving up something first. We don’t realize that, when we do that, we nullify the whole concept of grace; we make it into some kind of bargain rather than a free gift.

When we think this way, we can retain the right to be proud and self-righteous toward ourselves and impatient and judgmental toward others. If “nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could”, then it must be that “somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.” That means we are what we are because of what we have done. Sure, we needed God’s grace to help us along the way but His grace helps only those who help themselves. If that were our attitude, then we can sit back and point our fingers at others who are not as good as we are. Being patient and forgiving others are no longer our duty before our gracious Savior but only an option, an extra-curricular project for extra credit. Do you sense any grace here? Partial grace is no grace at all!

The other kind of wrong response to grace is false belief. This is different from the first wrong response: whereas the first is the rejection of God’s grace (or the rejection of the all-sufficiency of God’s grace), this is a wrong understanding of God’s grace. (We can call this antinomianism.) It recognizes the nature of God’s grace--that it is totally free and unconditional. But it fails to recognize the purpose of God’s grace--that its goal is not only to deliver us from hell but also to make us fit for heaven, to make us holy and righteous.

Think about it: we have been saved by the death and resurrection of Christ (v. 2)! We must understand how comprehensive, how complete, our salvation is because it is God’s salvation and His work! Our salvation has as its goal nothing less than our perfection, our glorification--not just our justification but also our sanctification; not just the imputation of Christ’s righteousness for our justification but also the infusion of Christ’s righteousness for our sanctification; not just Christ for us, who has done everything for us outside of us but also Christ in us, who enables us to live a life of holiness as His beloved children. God does not keep us as beggars, handing out His alms as needed, so that we can learn to be grateful for the crumbs that fall from His table. No, He adopts us as His dear children and pours out on us all that we need to be His noble, godly children, to be worthy of His name--not just to be reckoned as righteous but to actually become righteous and holy in our character and actions. What God has in mind for our salvation is none other than a new creation. This new creation would be far more glorious than the first creation, far beyond what Adam was in his original righteousness. But this new creation, supernatural in origin, is also organic and progressive in character. Although there is a decisive beginning and end, it is not accomplished in one act of God. He renews and renovates us all throughout our life here on earth until we are glorified in a blink of an eye. And God is there every step of the way to sanctify us and to perfect us.

So what is the proper response to grace, especially in view of the purposefulness of God’s grace? We see in Paul’s words the proper response to God’s grace. As we have seen, Paul’s message was a message of God’s grace--not just for others but for himself, first and foremost. He declares that he is what he is by the grace of God. But what does he go on to say after this emphatic affirmation of the all-sufficiency and centrality of God’s grace? “But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me” (v. 10). What? He puts God’s grace and his work in one verse, not as polar opposites but as necessary cause and effect? Don’t you see? God’s grace and our works are polar opposites, they are mutually exclusive and totally incompatible with regard to our justification. But our works are a necessary consequence, result, effect, outcome of our justification by grace alone. In fact, how was Paul able to work harder than anyone? “I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.” Again we are reminded of the purpose of God’s grace: it is to enable us to do “good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).

But these works of faith, of course, are not the kind of works that the world suffers through. These works are not motivated by fear of failure or fear of rejection or fear of punishment and retribution. These works flow out of a grateful heart touched by God’s grace, inflamed by God’s love. They are not motivated by the law but by God’s grace. But does God’s love and grace nullify the law? No! Paul said in Rom. 3:31, “Do we then overthrow the law by this faith? By no means! On the contrary, we uphold the law.” Our good works, which must be motivated by God’s grace, must also be guided by God’s law for the proper expression of our gratitude. For there is the right way of expressing our gratitude and the wrong way. Just because you give someone a gift out of your love, it doesn’t mean that it is the right gift for the person, right?

More over, God’s grace does not make our service to him less compulsory than the law, does it? Paul says in 2 Cor. 5:14-15, “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” Does God’s grace make all the commands of the New Testament mere suggestions and advices, not commands? God’s grace makes our obedience to Him all the more compelling, all the more compulsory--not so that we can attain our salvation but because we are saved.

“Nonetheless, the danger of overemphasis is very real on both sides of this truth. It is not quite right to say ‘We obey out of love for Christ… and not out of duty.’ Duty and love are not incompatible motives. A father provides for his children because he loves them. Yet it is also his legal and moral duty to do so. The fact that a man loves his children does not lessen his duty to them. The more he loves them, the more he will see the duty as a joy and not a drudgery. But even when the duty is a delight, it should not diminish the father's solemn sense of duty.

“Our obedience to Christ is like that. Certainly we ought to obey Him out of a deep love for Him. And the sheer joy of pleasing Him should permeate our obedience. Yet we should never think of obedience as anything less than a sacred duty. Our love for Christ does not make submission to Him elective….” (John MacArthur, “Obedience: Love or Legalism?”).

Did I kill our joy in the grace of God by all this talk of duty? I hope not. Isn’t this what Christ has done for us? What does it mean for God to enter into covenant with us? God swears by Himself because there is no higher name. He doesn’t have to swear at all because He is faithful and true to Himself: He will never fail to accomplish what He sets His mind to. But He swore by Himself when He entered into covenant with us His people. You know what that means? He thus imposed upon Himself covenant responsibilities, covenant duties, in an formal, official way--in fact, by the blood of Jesus Christ! Of course, He did it out of love and grace. But that doesn’t mean that He did not have covenantal duties to fulfill His promise for us. You see? Duty and love are not incompatible! Duty and freedom are not incompatible. For God, who is the freest of all beings, has imposed duty upon Himself. And He still is free because His performs His duty with His perfect love.

And Jesus Christ came as the fulfillment of God’s covenant duty toward His people. And His covenant duty as our Savior was to fulfill our duty in our place, for we in our sinfulness were hopeless and helpless to fulfill it! Yes, what He fulfilled was our covenant duty, which we could not perform. He fulfilled the law. He fulfilled every jot and tittle of the law. By fulfilling our covenant duty on our behalf in our place, Christ earned the righteousness we need to stand before the presence of God blameless with great joy. And this righteousness of Christ is not only imputed to us so that we may be reckoned righteous before God (our justification by faith alone); this righteousness is also infused into us by and by so that we may become holy as He is holy (our sanctification by faith working through love, Gal. 5:6)!

Do you see how significant this is? This means that, when we try to fulfill our sacred duty as God’s children, we do not try to build up our own righteousness with our own strength! No! Christ has already fulfilled all the righteousness that we need! Our victory over sin and laziness and impatience and unforgiving heart and lust and greed and lies and gossips and hatred and covetousness and all other sins has been already won in Christ’s death and resurrection for us! Our duty is to grab a hold of Christ’s victory by faith and start walking and working in Him by faith! Our duty is not to clear out and pave our own path of sanctification with our own works; our duty is to walk on the path of sanctification that Christ has already cleared out and paved on our behalf! This cannot be done without faith! This can be done only with faith! Every time we feel helpless and hopeless in our battle against sin and Christian walk, we’ve got to go back to the cross and the empty tomb of Jesus Christ and see there the all-sufficient grace of God not only to forgive us of our sins but also to make us holy! We cannot bemoan our weakness and inability. That is precisely the reason why Christ came and did what He did--not only to suffer the punishment of our sins but also to live out a life of perfect righteousness! God never called us to do it on our own. He wants us to live by faith in Jesus Christ, not only for our forgiveness but also for our sanctification!

Why is our attitude toward our Christian life so lax and laid back? Isn’t it because we see it as less than a sacred duty to God? If the law, which is outside of us, makes our obedience to God our duty, how much more compulsory does our union with Christ make our obedience? We are set free from the curse, condemnation and punishment of the law. But we have not been set free from the duties of the law! Because our union with Christ the holy One of God, our duty to fulfill the duties of the law is all the more increased, not diminished. “How can we who died to sin still live in it” (Rom. 6:2)?

If we don’t pray and if we don’t pray with greater urgency, isn’t it because we don’t see His commands as commands but as mere suggestions? If God’s commands are mere suggestions, why should we cling to Christ for the strength to obey them? In asking Christ for the strength to obey, we are not just asking Him to assist our efforts by giving additional strength, of course! We ask Him for strength because He possesses the righteousness we need, because Christ is our righteousness, because we are to live out of His righteousness! Do we believe that His grace is sufficient for us, not only to pardon our sins but to make us become holy? Oh, how we need faith to believe that the righteousness of Christ is not only for our forgiveness but also for our Christian walk as well!

When your spiritual life is down, what do you do? Do you blame God for it? After all, you believe God to be sovereign! And how do you expect God to restore your spiritual life? Do you expect God to do something special to jump start your Christian walk? What if God is saying to you, “My grace is sufficient for you”, pointing you to the cross and empty tomb of Jesus Christ? “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8). Did you notice the present tense? How is God now demonstrating His love to us? By pointing us to the cross! Why? Because Jesus’ death on the cross is the supreme expression of God’s grace and love for us! Even for the almighty triune God, it is impossible to outdo what He did on the cross! Then what more do we need to live in obedience to God? What other grace do we need? What other motivation do we need? If that does not motivate us, what can? We need to go back to the very basic gospel again and again and deepen our understanding of it. For in Jesus Christ we have all the grace we need--the grace for our forgiveness and the grace for our sanctification. As you find your forgiveness and strength in Christ, may you be able to declare with great confidence in Christ, “Behold, I am what I am by the grace of God--forgiven, adopted as God’s beloved child, being transformed from glory to glory! And the grace of God, in which I stand, will carry me through my life’s journey to heaven!” Even when we enter into heaven, we shall see the five wounds of Jesus Christ and the theme of our eternal praise will be His salvation for us. Let us begin that eternal praise today!