The Simplicity in Christ

Nobody makes a fake banknote more interesting than the real one. The whole skill runs the other way. The forger aims for the ordinary, for a note you would hand over without looking twice.

We are poor at spotting this, and it is worth admitting it about ourselves. We get bored with the simple thing. We have known the gospel since we were young, and it starts to feel thin. Beside it, a teacher with a system looks exciting, with a framework and a set of terms nobody in our church has heard yet. If we are honest, the hunger for that is often embarrassment dressed up as curiosity.

Paul words his fear for the Corinthians with painful care: "lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ." Subtilty is the old spelling of subtlety, and it means cunning. Notice the words "corrupted from." The danger he dreads is a drift away from something they already had. In the next verse he says what worried him. Somebody had come preaching "another Jesus," "another spirit," and "another gospel," and "ye might well bear with him." The Corinthians were not foolish. They were tolerant and open-minded, and a little proud of it: "ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise."

Paul warns that the fake will look good, because "Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light." The serpent's first words in the Bible were a gentle question from someone who seemed to take the subject seriously: "Yea, hath God said?" So the measure Paul gives is the Jesus they had first been taught, the One he had preached to them. Go back to Him and stay there. The simplicity in Christ was never thin, because it is Christ Himself, and He does not wear out.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 282 is Faithful to Forgive (1 John 1:9).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two