A Lenten Journey: The Wilderness Trail — Day Twenty

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1 Corinthians 3:10-23, The Message

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.

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.

Don’t fool yourself. Don’t think that you can be wise merely by being up-to-date with the times. 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 chicanery of the chic.
The Master sees through the smoke screens
    of the know-it-alls.

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.

Everything.
Everything is a gift.

Even those things
that don’t exactly
look like gifts
when we first 
open them up?

Yes, even those.

Though, truth be told,
those are a bit
harder
to recognize.

How would my 
worldview shift
if I truly believed this?

How would yours?

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Comments

  1. Gwen Acres says

    Nothing would be wasted and everything would be valuable!! I need to look at my life with these new eyes!!

  2. I agree. And I’ve been forced to do that with some pretty ugly things of late. Sigh.

  3. Yes, some of those gifts we are given that don’t seem like gifts at the time often lead us to bear more fruit for the Lord. We don’t want to go through hardship and suffering, but if we come out on the other side closer to God because we have leaned upon Him, everything is worth it. Everything is a gift!
    Blessings, Diana!

    • Sometimes it takes a long while to see gift in some things – and sometimes it might never happen this side of eternity. But I do believe in a God in whose economy, nothing is wasted, everything is redeemable.

  4. What a concept. And the possibilities. Oh dear… Now I see: I must begin here, in my tiny, little corner of the world, in my kitchen, living & laundry rooms and believe it and practice thanksgiving. After all we know about the empty tomb. Thank you, Diana, for making my road a little more straight.