“According to the grace of God which was given to me, like a wise master builder I laid a foundation, and another is building on it. But each man must be careful how he builds on it. For no man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

Any work that we do for the Lord and His people is “according to the grace of God.” We take this to be true because Paul presents himself as an example of what he is teaching. He saw his work as a “grace” of God. If this is true of him, it must also be no less true for us. But what does that mean?

When one is out of work for a long period of time, and then a job comes through, he becomes very thankful for the new job, a way to make money in order to provide for his own. As a Christian he sees the job as a grace, that is, a gift from God. Paul went beyond this when considering his service for the Lord. He worked as a tentmaker as a way of providing for his own needs and the needs of others, as he said to the Ephesian elders: “You yourselves know that these hands ministered to my own needs and to the men who were with me” (Acts 20:34).

But Paul saw his service for the Lord as a blessing to himself – what a privilege that God would consider him worthy to do this work, to have a part in God’s wonderful plan! God graced him with the opportunity to be of some use to the Creator of the universe! He served, not for what he was getting out of it, but for the honor of serving the Lord. That itself was a blessing, a gift from the Lord to him. Anything he accomplished as an apostle, a church planter, a seed sower, was because of God. If God withdrew that grace, then his ministry would amount to absolutely nothing. If Paul did it for his own glory or for money, his work would be an utter failure. He recognized that it was all about God.

As one “graced” by God, he writes about his desire to do God’s work with excellence. His role in the building up of the church of God was to lay a wise and careful foundation. He left the building on that foundation to others. But in his role as evangelist who moved on from Corinth after planting the church there, Paul admonishes those who build on the foundation that he laid. Their work should be of the same wise and excellent quality as his foundational work. It should not be built on any other foundation but the one Paul had laid. At the heart of all Christian ministry is Christ. Or to put it another way, as Paul says, it should be about “Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Everything he has to write to the Corinthians is designed to bring them back to that foundation.

Lord, help me in everything to build on the truth of Christ and Him crucified.