Pitch Your Tent
- Here's a nice thought: if the tent we live in was suddenly destroyed (flash flood?) we would have a nice home with God. In Heaven, there is no mortgage or rent, either.
- Right now, we're all sitting here on earth just waiting to go to our homes in Heaven. The neighborhood is way nicer there.
- On Earth, we're away from God. But, that's doesn't mean we shouldn't keep doing everything we can to make him happy.
- In fact, it probably means we should be more focused on making God happy. After all, he is going to judge the heck out of us when we're done with our time on Earth. Gulp.
- No worries (if you're Christian, that is)! Believers know God and try to pass the good news about him onto others. He loves that stuff, so it's gonna work out pretty well for those guys.
You Best Reconcile
- Again, Paul isn't trying to brag. He just wants to give the Corinthians some ammunition to use against his detractors (those so-called apostles that have been hanging around Corinth).
- These guys put a lot of stock in public displays of religiosity. They're obsessed with looking holy, Paul thinks.
- But Paul knows that real authority doesn't come from how religious you look, but from your devotion to God's people. Hint, hint, Corinthians. He's talking about you guys.
- After all, Jesus died so that all of us could live. Now, we don't live for ourselves anymore, but for Jesus.
- So if you're truly a believer in Christ, your old self is dead. You're a new person. You don't see things in a regular old human way anymore. Meaning it doesn't do any good to look for status symbols when picking your apostles, guys.
- All this stuff—it's directly from God.
- Paul urges everyone to "be reconciled to God." Basically that just means that people need to work on making things right between themselves and the Big Guy.
- This is obviously what God wants from us. After all, God could have kept a big old score card of our sins, but he threw it away and sent Jesus instead. God's cool like that. Or else he's a lousy bookkeeper.