WE COME NOW to another phase of being in Christ. “For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel” (1 Cor. 4:15). Here Paul contrasts “guides in Christ” and his being a “father in Christ Jesus.” He says “you have countless guides in Christ”—people who can guide what has already been created—but you have only one father in Christ—the person who created you in Christ. The difference was between those who cannot create, but can only guide the already created, and the person who shares the creatorship of Christ and creates spiritual children. The distinction is important.
Many can tell you how to direct your Christian life, but few can beget that Christian life; yet the latter is the privilege of every Christian. In Christ you can become creative—creating newborn souls, new hopes, new movements, new thinking, new acting, new loving, new health, new everything. To share the creative activity of Jesus and become a center of creation is the glorious and breathtaking privilege of those in Christ.
The pastor is often content to guide his flock—to guide what has already been created. The really surrendered person, however, who lets the creative power of Jesus work through him becomes a spiritual father, creating newborn souls. This is normal. Every Christian should be spiritually creative, or else he sinks into the subnormal, the sub-Christian.
To guide people may be a species of subtle self-assertion—“I’m superior, he’s inferior, I must guide him.” But to be creative in Christ means a constant surrender of the self to the creative activity of Christ within us. One is self-assertive and the other is self-surrendered. The creative Christian knows that he is only the channel of the creative Spirit of Jesus within him. Only the surrendered are creative. The self-assertive become the guides, the fussy managers of other people.
O Lord Jesus, Thy touch upon life is the touch of creation. Everything Thou didst touch began to have life. Work in and through me this day, with creative power. I want to be the father of new life in Thee today. In Thy name. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: To aspire to be a guide to others may make me a Pharisee; to aspire to be a father may make me a Christian.
