As ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye may excel to the edifying of the Church.
Edification
consists both in building up from first principles to their practical application, and of fitting each member of the society into the proper places which the growth and rise of the old building require. It is “development,” not only in the sense of unfolding new truth, but of unfolding all the resources contained in the existing institution or body. Hence the stress laid on the excellence of “prophesying” as the special gift by which men were led to know themselves (1Co_14:24-25), and by which (as through the prophets of the older dispensations) higher and more spiritual views of life were gradually revealed. Hence the repeated injunctions that all the gifts should have their proper honour (1Co_12:20-30); that those gifts should be most honoured by which not a few, but all, should benefit (1Co_14:1-23); that all who had the gift of prophecy should have the opportunity of exercising that gift (1Co_14:29-31); that all might have an equal chance of instruction and comfort for their own special cases (1Co_14:40). (Dean Stanley.)
Doing one’s best at the best thing
I. In doing our best we must have the best thing to work at. Industry, concentration, perseverance, etc., should not be wasted on inferior aims. Steel may be sharpened into tools for making tables and chairs, and into weapons of war.
1. Rivalry is condemned by the very illustration. When rivalry comes in at the door, Christianity flies out at the window. There can be no rivalry between the man who shapes the stones and him who makes them into a wall; no rivalry between him who works in stone and him who works in wood.
2. But absence of rivalry is not enough. Co-operation must be added. A house can only be built by several men each working according to his own particular handicraft. He who comprehends that his powers were given him in order to make his contribution to a far larger whole, is the man who will find all things marvellously working together with him. Lubricating influences pour in from everywhere. Friction diminishes.
3. The method of successful co-operation pointed out. It is not a Tower of Babel which we work at; but the Chinch of Christ, an institution which is for the highest good of everybody in theworld. What can be more dreadful than that a Christian should use his place in the Christian company for self-aggrandisement? Some of the Christians in Corinth were acting as if a man employed to put up the walls of a building in which he and all the other workmen should afterwards dwell and be fed and clothed at the employer’s expense were to take the stones away and try to put up a little private and unsocial house of his own. If we try to use Christ for worldly ends we are bound to fail; if we try rather to use the world for Christ we are bound to succeed. Let the perishing praise the perishing; we work, however obscurely, at a building that will endure when all Babel fabrics are in ruins.
II. Having the best thing to work at, we must do our best. That Jesus who condemns rivalry, equally condemns indifference to excellence. That is a poor sort of contentment which has not some noble and elevating element mixed up with it. We are bound to be as good as we can be. We must not creep and loiter in the way of holy service. God’s building goes on so slowly, and seems as yet so little more than a neighbourhood of fragments, just because the building is crowded up from age to agewith loiterers and ornamental people. Their names are down in the list of workmen, but they do little or nothing. Indeed who is there that does anything like what he ought to do?(D. Young, B. A.)
