I Corinthians 4:7 For who maketh thee to differ from another? And what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?
He Made You Different
I wonder how differently you’d feel this morning if you knew what was really going on in the hearts and minds of other people. It is entirely too easy to feel smug and superior to others or to feel inferior and jealous of others based upon our perceptions of them. Of course, none of us knows what is really in the heart of anyone else. God doesn’t want you to be a superior version of someone else. He wants you to be a faithful version of you.
In I Corinthians 4:7, Paul asks a couple of rhetorical questions. He says, “For who maketh thee to differ from another? And what hast thou that thou didst not receive? Now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hast not received it?” In Paul’s day, believers had divided into factions, each following their favorite preacher. Some said, “Paul is our man.” Others said, “Apollos is the brilliant one,” and others said, “Well, Peter is the man.”
Paul basically goes on to say, “None of us are divided. We are all serving the same Lord, and I am writing these things to you by way of an illustration so that you would know not to glory in other people or in yourselves, but to serve God.
Through these questions, Paul helps us to see a couple of things. First, God made you. “For who maketh thee?” he asks. That is why we are ministers of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God.
Second, God made us different from everyone else. That is not bad; that is good. It is not a cause for feeling superior or inferior. It is a cause for being grateful and faithful. What do you have that God didn’t give you? The answer is, “I don’t have anything worth anything that is not a gift from God.”
The bottom line is that we are stewards. We have been entrusted by God with exactly what God wants us to be for where He wants us to be. Finding our fit is not always as simple as we would like it to be, but it begins by being content with who we are, by being faithful with who we are, and by being faithful with where we are and with the gifting that God has entrusted to us.