Journey of Paul
Week 1
Thursday, February 1
The Mirror
1 Corinthians 12:31
And yet I will show you the most excellent way.
How would you read the Bible if it didn’t have chapters and verses? It might be harder to memorize parts of it without a verse by verse structure to draw from, however, I believe we might understand the story a little bit differently. One can understand why the chapters and verses were put there to help the reader, but it wasn’t originally written in that way. It isn’t like Paul wrote by thinking about what needs to go into each chapter. So when we read 1 Corinthians 13 and begin only in the first verse, we might lose the reason why Paul is writing this beautiful piece about love. The verse above gives us a context for why the great love chapter was written in the first place.
My scholarly guess, which is to say, I am pretty confident about this fact, is that they put the “And yet I will show you the most excellent way” verse as a way of transitioning from one style of communication to another. For me, this is the lead into what will be the response to the first “12 chapters” of the letter thus far. While many call this the love chapter, I tend to refer to it as the mirror chapter. If you look more in detail (of which we will over the next few days) you will see that the love chapter essentially holds a mirror up to the Corinthian church to help them see how they are doing in light of the responses Paul had earlier in the letter. It is one thing to give direct advice or communication, it is another to say, love is like this, now - do you look like that? Are you acting like that?
The mirror doesn’t lie. Some days, I wish the mirror would though. It is only when we see things clearly in the mirror that we can begin to address what needs to be addressed. So I was going to hold up a mirror on your spiritual life, what would you see?
Prayer
Lord, show me the most excellent way. Make it clear. Amen