September 30, 2022
Daily Devotion:
"Spiritually Higher "
1 Corinthians 3:1
New International Version
3 Brothers and sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ.
Division was wrecking the church in Corinth. Quite unbelievably, various ones were claiming allegiance to Peter, or Paul, or Apollos! Even Those who maintained allegiance only to Christ had become a cliquish fellowship to themselves. So much for Jesus' prayer for unity! When you consider the mix of Jews and Gentiles in Corinth, you can begin to make sense of this. By their culture, Jewish Christians would have been more attracted to the excitement of miraculous signs; while the Gentile Christians, being more intellectually-minded, preferred a focus on reason and heady doctrine. Paul's Response was blunt and incisive. Despite the unity that their common baptism into Christ ought to have produced, he argued, they had all missed the central message of the cross. For Jews with a long history of miracles, had any exciting miracle saved Jesus from the cross? For Gentiles enamored with human wisdom and philosophy, did the cross make any earthly sense? Put simply, the cross of Christ defied all worldly yearnings and expectations. The road to unity (and beyond) was through being spiritually mature, not carnally immature. Just how much has changed since Paul wrote his scathing letter? Are we not still carnally minded and worldly? How would you describe our various worship experiences-truly God-focused or self-satisfying? Our view of the end times transcendent spiritual triumph or cataclysmic earthly upheaval? Or our understanding of the nature of heaven and our resurrected bodies: otherworldly or still very much this-worldly? “When I was a child, I talked like a child, With Ought like a child, I reasoned like a child." Carnal Christianity is not simply a mark of spiritual immaturity, but a quintessential oxymoron.
The cross-focused question is: If I were crucified alongside Jesus, would I Be looking down at the earth or lifting my human eyes spiritually higher?
