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1 Corinthians 3 Devotional – Day 4

By January 28, 2021Daily Devotional

ADORATION – Reflect on God’s Greatness

GOD IS SPIRIT God isn’t made of matter, has no parts or dimensions, cannot be perceived by our bodily senses, and is more excellent than any other kind of existence. He doesn’t have a physical body, nor is he merely energy, thought, or some other element of creation. God is spirit.

John 4:24 God is spirit, and the people who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

Praise God that He is Spirit
Praise God that he is alive. Praise him that he is personal. Praise him that he is more than a force or energy. Praise him that he has revealed himself to us.

CONFESSION: Confess your sins to God and receive his continued mercy.

“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9

THANKSGIVING: Giving thanks to God for his specific blessings in our lives.

“Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Know that the Lord is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations.” Psalm 100

SUPPLICATION: Bringing our requests to God.

  • Bring your personal prayer requests to God.
  • Pray for awakening in America. Pray for awakening in the church. Pray for awakening in your life.
  • Ask God to bring salvation to Moroccan Arabs. Pray that Moroccan believers would have boldness and wisdom to share the gospel.
  • Ask God to send out laborers into the harvest
  • Ask God to speak as you read the scriptures.

SCRIPTURE READING:

1 Corinthians 3 The Message

1-4 But for right now, friends, I’m completely frustrated by your unspiritual dealings with each other and with God. You’re acting like infants in relation to Christ, capable of nothing much more than nursing at the breast. Well, then, I’ll nurse you since you don’t seem capable of anything more. As long as you grab for what makes you feel good or makes you look important, are you really much different than a babe at the breast, content only when everything’s going your way? When one of you says, “I’m on Paul’s side,” and another says, “I’m for Apollos,” aren’t you being totally childish?

5-9 Who do you think Paul is, anyway? Or Apollos, for that matter? Servants, both of us—servants who waited on you as you gradually learned to entrust your lives to our mutual Master. We each carried out our servant assignment. I planted the seed, Apollos watered the plants, but God made you grow. It’s not the one who plants or the one who waters who is at the center of this process but God, who makes things grow. Planting and watering are menial servant jobs at minimum wages. What makes them worth doing is the God we are serving. You happen to be God’s field in which we are working.

9-15 Or, to put it another way, you are God’s house. Using the gift God gave me as a good architect, I designed blueprints; Apollos is putting up the walls. Let each carpenter who comes on the job take care to build on the foundation! Remember, there is only one foundation, the one already laid: Jesus Christ. Take particular care in picking out your building materials. Eventually there is going to be an inspection. If you use cheap or inferior materials, you’ll be found out. The inspection will be thorough and rigorous. You won’t get by with a thing. If your work passes inspection, fine; if it doesn’t, your part of the building will be torn out and started over. But you won’t be torn out; you’ll survive—but just barely.

16-17 You realize, don’t you, that you are the temple of God, and God himself is present in you? No one will get by with vandalizing God’s temple, you can be sure of that. God’s temple is sacred—and you, remember, are the temple.

18-20 Don’t fool yourself. Don’t think that you can be wise merely by being relevant. Be God’s fool—that’s the path to true wisdom. What the world calls smart, God calls stupid. It’s written in Scripture,

He exposes the hype of the hipsters.
The Master sees through the smoke screens
of the know-it-alls.

21-23 I don’t want to hear any of you bragging about yourself or anyone else. Everything is already yours as a gift—Paul, Apollos, Peter, the world, life, death, the present, the future—all of it is yours, and you are privileged to be in union with Christ, who is in union with God.

Copyright © 1993, 2002, 2018 by Eugene H. Peterson

SCRIPTURE REFLECTION:

We must continually choose which “wisdom” we will embrace. The current versions of wisdom get a lot of attention and can easily take center stage in our minds and hearts. The eternal version of wisdom is continually pushed to the sidelines because it is often believed that “if it’s not new, it’s not true.” The fact is “if it is brand new, then it is certainly not true.” To believe otherwise is pure “chronological snobbery” (CS Lewis). God’s wisdom has been revealed to us in Christ and in the Scriptures. His truth is as eternally “old” as it is perpetually “current.” Do not disdain truth in any form when it comes to you. Ultimately if it is truth it comes from God. But truth outside the Scriptures will come like pearls in oysters. You must learn to throw away the shells and not the pearls. And as you keep the pearls you must not hold onto shells. Be humble, be open to learning and growing, but be determined in your belief that God has spoken in his Word and no new word will come along that will undermine Him.

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