"Everything belongs to you – whether Paul or Apollos or Peter or the world, or life and death, or the present and the future. Everything belongs to you, and you belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God" (1 Cor. 3:21-23).

"What do you have that God hasn’t given you? And if everything you have is from God, why boast as though it were not a gift? You think you already have everything you need. You think you are already rich. You have begun to reign in God’s kingdom without us! I wish you really were reigning already, for then we would be reigning with you" (1 Cor. 4:7-8).

In one breath, Paul is telling these Corinthian believers that everything is theirs in Christ. In another he is saying they think they are rich, with everything they need, and reigning in life, when they clearly weren't. What is going on?

Paul is saying: "Why do you limit yourselves by claiming that you belong to a particular preacher? Don't you realize that all teachers – indeed everything that exists – belongs to you in Christ? You are not to put them on pedestals. You do not belong to them; rather they belong to you as those who freely and joyfully serve you in your growth towards maturity."

He then gives a few examples of what actually belongs to all believers, with one notable exception: the past. In Phil. 3:12-15 Paul wrote about his goal in life. "That I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings … Not that I have already obtained this … but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own … One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Let those of us who are mature think this way." We are not to look back with deep regrets and a longing for what might or could have been. We are not to entertain an overwhelming sense of guilt or crippling self-pity. Many of our early circumstances were beyond our own control. The past belongs to God and he has covered it all with the blood of Jesus and buried it in the deepest sea.

What does belong to us is the world; the cosmos; the physical universe in which we live. That is an amazing thought and underlines again our responsibility to look after the planet. To what does "life and death" refer in the above verse? Leon Morris writes: "Paul's saying, 'to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain' gives us a clue. Life in Christ is the only life, and the Christian possesses this. To the unbeliever death is the end of all things. But for the believer Christ has overcome death and transformed it into gain.

The Corinthian believers seem to have forgotten all this and were boasting that they had arrived and had no need to press on to maturity. The devil wants us to believe that we are either the cat's whiskers or utterly hopeless cases. He works in the extremes. The truth is that we truly are royalty because of all that Christ has done for us; and all that is His is ours. Yet we must press on to make it our own because Christ Jesus has made us his own. Hallelujah!