Prove Your Own Selves

A letting agent turns a key in a flat that is supposed to be occupied. The post has banked up behind the door. Nothing has been damaged, the paint is fine, the kitchen is spotless because nobody has cooked in it. The tenancy is paid up and current. The only question worth asking in that hallway is whether anyone lives here.

Paul is standing in a doorway of his own. This is his third approach to Corinth, and the congregation has been auditing him: since ye seek a proof of Christ speaking in me, he writes, half quoting their demand back at them. They wanted evidence that the apostle was genuine. He turns the key round and hands them the same test. Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves.

Then notice what he expects the test to find. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you. The thing being looked for is a resident.

Reprobate, the word at the end of the verse, is the term for a coin that went to the assayer and came back rejected. Paul uses it three times in three verses, once about them and twice about himself, and then says he would rather fail his own examination than have them fail theirs: we are glad, when we are weak, and ye are strong.

He had asked them to do this once before, at the table: But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread. The flat can pass every inspection a landlord runs and still be empty. So ask it before the year turns over, in the form he puts it: whether Christ is in you, and what in an ordinary week would show that to somebody standing in your hallway.

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