I have just started to go through 1 Corinthians in my daily readings and have noticed things I have missed before. It is a reminder that the Word of God is like no other book. It is alive and active and penetrates to the heart of issues and to the core of our own very being (Heb. 4:12). It can speak to us in new ways every time we come to it; fresh daily bread; still warm and crusty!

Having been thinking a good deal about the holiness of God in recent days, and using the sun as a metaphor (both all-consuming and life-giving), I have come across two references to it in the first chapter. As we look at them, let's remember the woeful state of the Corinthian church when it came to their lack of spiritual maturity.

"I am writing to God’s church in Corinth, to you who have been called by God to be his own holy people. He made you holy by means of Christ Jesus, just as he did for all people everywhere who call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours" (1:2).

He made us all holy the moment we received him as our Lord and Saviour! We were purified and washed clean in his blood. "By one sacrifice he has made perfect for ever those who are being made holy" (Heb. 10:14). Our very awareness of our lack of holiness, and of the Holy Spirit's work in our lives to transform us into Christ's likeness, proves we have already been made holy!

"God has united you with Christ Jesus [it was God himself who placed you in Christ]. For our benefit God made him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God; he made us pure and holy, and he freed us from sin" (1:39).

Like the previous verse, we have to see it from a "now and not yet" perspective. We are already pure and holy, yet are being made holy. We are freed from sin, yet are kidding ourselves if we say as genuine believers we have no sin (Mat. 6:12; 1 John 1:8). We see ourselves in all our sinfulness and selfishness and failings, but God sees us as already transformed into the likeness of Jesus! Amazing! I believe this thought is included in the words "in this world we are like him" (1 John 4:17). That is, the Father sees us as he saw Jesus: "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased" (Mat. 3:17). We too are sons and daughters of our Father and with us he is well pleased, not because of our performance but because of our identity in him as his children.