1 Corinthians 4:1 Commentary and Bible Study

This is about the duties and the lives of God's ministers. Let a man so account of us, estimate us, assess us as ministers, preachers, pastors, and Christian workers. Now there was a problem in the church at Corinth, good church as it was in many respects with many earnest people. Among its problems was the fact that there appeared to be preachers who preached to draw attention to themselves. They were probably sound and saved in their way, but they had veered from the track; matters perhaps had gone to their heads a little and they preached in order to put on a good performance. They adopted all the oratory of their Greek culture, and they spoke splendidly with high-flown words that dazzled the people, and the apostle Paul is teaching here how to evaluate ministers. The word here translated ‘minister’ is not the Greek word used in the previous chapter; that was a servant, the most often used word for minister in the New Testament. Here it is a word which means, roughly speaking, an ‘under-oarsman’. That is very valuable to us. What is a minister? Is he some celebrated eminent character? No, the under-oarsmen in a vessel worked with a multiplicity of oarsman under the direction of whoever was steering. The oarsmen didn't man the tiller. He had nothing to do with the direction of the vessel. His task was to pull on the oar, and to keep time. It would obviously have been chaotic if everybody had rowed in their own time. So a minister of Christ is working from the word of God, and he is to do justice to that. He is not to inject ideas and initiatives of his own. He is a minister of Christ and of his word, and he doesn't determine the shape of the church, or the nature of salvation, or the instructions for behaviour or for helps and encouragements. He is an under-oarsman. That is what you are looking for, not these men who are concerned how they come across, what people think of them, garnishing their reputations, indulging in flights of fancy. Are they under-oarsmen?‘And stewards.’ Well everybody knows what a steward was in those far-off days. Let's say, a chief steward of an estate, who paid the wages of all the labourers on that estate. He didn't fix the wages – the owner did that, that master did that – but he distributed them. We are distributors of God's bounty; he is given the blessings, we distribute them. We preach them; stewards of something put into our hand: stewards of the mysteries of God. We live in New Testament times. Christ has come; the great mystery of God is now open. The Old Testament secret is out, that a Saviour was coming. All the types and the shadows looked forward to him. The people of the Old Testament trusted in the great mercy of God. The sacrifices indicated that a price must be paid, and God would arrange it, and the secret is now out: Christ has come. The whole of salvation focuses on him. So stewards of Christ are to make known his crucifixion, his suffering, his substitutionary atoning death on Calvary, and his resurrection. Another part of the mystery was the salvation of the Gentiles: that they would be saved, and in vast numbers. That was prophesied in the Old Testament, but it wasn't understood or well accepted. But now it is happening on every hand, and Gentiles are being saved. What is more, the mystery is that the Gentiles will be fellow heirs with converted Jews: no difference between them whatsoever, all one in Christ Jesus in the very same church.