Sunday, February 2, 2025
Scripture Readings
- Primary Reading: 1 Corinthians 10-11
Key Verse
1 Corinthians 11:1 — “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ.”
Devotional Thought
Paul is writing to a church he loves, but a church with problems. In these two chapters he reaches back into Israel’s history and forward into Corinth’s dinner tables and worship gatherings. He reminds the Corinthians that their fathers—the whole congregation of Israel—were under the cloud and passed through the sea, baptized unto Moses, eating manna and drinking water from the rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ. Yet with many of them God was not well pleased; their bodies fell in the wilderness. Their story is written down as an ensample for us, Paul says, upon whom the ends of the world are come. The warning is plain: privilege is not the same as perseverance. “Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”
Then comes verse thirteen, one of the kindest promises in all of Scripture: no temptation has taken you but such as is common to man, and God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able, but will with the temptation also make a way to escape. Paul is not writing to spiritual giants. He is writing to ordinary believers in a busy port city, people who ate meat sold in the shambles, attended dinners hosted by unbelievers, and gathered on the first day of the week to break bread. In the middle of all that ordinary life he gives one great rule: “Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God.”
The second chapter turns to the Lord’s Supper, and here Paul’s tone grows grieved. The Corinthians were coming together not for the better but for the worse—divisions among them, one hungry, another drunken, the poor shamed while the wealthy feasted. So he goes back to the upper room and gives them the words of Jesus Himself: “This do in remembrance of me.” The bread and the cup proclaim the Lord’s death till He come. That is why a man must examine himself, and why the church must tarry one for another.
On this February Sunday, with winter still upon the land and the Lord’s Table perhaps spread before us this very morning, the passage lands close to home. We too have been baptized, fed, and given spiritual drink. We too sit at tables—some of them the Lord’s, some of them the world’s—and we too can grow careless. Paul’s counsel is not to flee the table but to come to it honestly: judged, chastened, forgiven, and gathered as one body around one bread.
Reflection
- Israel was baptized, fed, and watered, yet many fell in the wilderness. Where in your own life has God’s past faithfulness quietly become presumption rather than gratitude?
- Paul says the bread and cup proclaim the Lord’s death “till he come,” and commands self-examination before eating. What would honest examining of yourself look like before you next come to the Lord’s Table?
Prayer
Father, we thank Thee for the cloud and the sea, for the manna and the water from the Rock, and most of all for that Rock, which is Christ. We confess that we have often stood too confidently and eaten too carelessly, at Thy table and at our own. Search us, Lord, and judge us now, that we be not judged with the world. Make us faithful in temptation, thankful at every table, and mindful of one another—especially the weak and the hungry among us. Gather us as one bread and one body around Thy Son, and let all we eat and drink and do be to Thy glory, until He come. Amen.