What do you have that you did not receive? (1. Cor 4:7)

For who regards you as superior? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as if you had not received it? (1. Cor 4:7)

Here, Paul makes it personal. They can’t hide their pride behind their preachers anymore. Paul demands an answer to what would lead them to see themselves as superior to anyone else. He does so with the piercing question “what do you have that you did not receive?”

No question could be more deadly to pride and arrogance. So you claim to have discernment, do you? Who did you get it from? So your preacher is better than his preacher? Who created your preacher? Who called him into the ministry? Who died on a cross to give him something to preach about? Was it you?

Try to think about the most evil and wicked human being you can possibly imagine. Someone who’s committed sins that would make the devil himself blush. Now ask the question. What separates you from him? Nothing but the grace of God. Left to yourself you’d not only be as bad as him. You’d be worse.

“Wait”, you say. “I’m not like that. I don’t have those same inclinations to sin.” That is right, and the reason you don’t is because of God’s grace. Even if you’re a first rank atheist, you still have some remnant of god-given grace in your life too keep you from going where you would go left to yourself. His grace is to some degree restraining even the most evil person you can think of.

For when Gentiles who do not have the Law do instinctively the things of the Law, these, not having the Law, are a law to themselves, in that they show the work of the Law written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness and their thoughts alternately accusing or else defending them, (Rom 2:14-15)

So what do you have that you have not received? Name one thing you’ve earned by your merits, or created yourself from nothing.

God resists the proud and gives grace to the humble. Becoming arrogant because of what you have received, is to take God’s gracious free gifts to you and turn them into something he detests. “But he who boasts is to boast in the Lord” (2.Cor 10:17).