Prove Your Own Selves

A letting agent turns a key in the door of a flat that is supposed to have a tenant. Post has piled up behind the door. Nothing is damaged, and the paint is fine. The kitchen is spotless, because nobody has cooked in it. The rent is paid and up to date. The only question worth asking in that hallway is whether anyone actually lives here.

Paul is standing in a doorway of his own. He is about to come to Corinth again, and he says so plainly: "This is the third time I am coming to you." The church there has been checking up on him. "Since ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me," he writes, half quoting their demand back to them. They wanted evidence that he was a real apostle. So he turns the key round and hands them the same test: "Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves."

Then look at what he expects the test to find: "Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you." What is being looked for is Someone living there.

The word at the end of the verse, "reprobates," describes something that was tested and rejected, like a coin that came back marked as false. Paul uses it three times in three verses, once about them and twice about himself. Then he says he would rather look like a failure himself than see them fail: "we are glad, when we are weak, and ye are strong."

He had asked them to do this once before, at the Lord's table: "But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread." A flat can pass every check a landlord makes and still be empty. So ask the question the way Paul puts it, before the year turns over: is Christ in you? Then ask what, in an ordinary week, would show that to somebody standing in your hallway. Paul asked expecting a good answer, and if you belong to Christ, the good answer is true of you. He has come to live in you, and He has promised never to leave.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 364 is Our Guide Unto Death (Psalm 48:14).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two