What Do You Have That You Were Not Given

I want to start somewhere uncomfortable, and then I want to get you out of it, so stay with me.

There is a thing that happens to a person about two years after they change, and almost nobody warns them about it. It is not temptation and it is not backsliding. It is subtler and it is worse, and it does not feel like sin at the time. It feels like clarity.

You are sitting with people you have known for fifteen years. Somebody says the thing they always say. And a sentence forms in your head that has never formed before, and the sentence is: I used to be like this.

Not cruel. Not out loud. Just a small, cool, tidy little thought that puts you on one side of a line and them on the other, and then the evening goes on and you drive home and you feel slightly sick about it and you cannot work out why.

You know why. You just do not have anywhere to put it, because everybody who might understand would either tell you that you were right about them, or tell you off, and neither of those is what you need tonight.

Paul asks three questions and the third one ends the argument

Corinth had this problem badly. They were sorting themselves into tiers, and the tiers were built on genuinely good things: gifts, teachers, spiritual experience, all of it real. And Paul comes at it with three short questions that are among the most disarming sentences in the whole New Testament.

For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it? (1 Corinthians 4:7, King James Version)

Look at the shape of that. He does not tell them they are wrong about being different. He does not deny the gifts. He asks where the difference came from, and then he waits.

And there is only one answer. It was given.

That is why the third question lands so hard. Why do you boast as if you did not receive it. Not why do you boast, as though the good thing were imaginary. Why do you boast as if it were not a gift, which is the only way boasting is ever possible.

You have nothing in your hands that was not put there, and the difference in you was never your own manufacture. First Corinthians 4:7 asks what hast thou that thou didst not receive, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person hear that as relief instead of as an accusation.

The reason it grows in the separated

Now, why does this grow specifically in people who have been set apart? I think there are two reasons and they are both worth naming, because if you do not know why it grows you cannot stop watering it.

The first is that being different is lonely, and pride is the cheapest available painkiller for loneliness. If I am not with them because I am above them, then the distance is a promotion instead of a loss. That is a much more comfortable story, and it costs almost nothing to start telling yourself, and it will quietly ruin you.

The second is that when you leave something, you have to give reasons. To yourself, mostly. And the easiest reason is a comparison, and comparisons compound. You start with that was not good for me and after two years you are somewhere near those people are not good, and you did not notice the sentence change.

You are lonely rather than superior, and God has never once asked you to buy comfort with contempt. The written word says what hast thou that thou didst not receive, and the Spirit of God is the one who names the ache underneath a hard thought without shaming the person having it.

What humility actually is here

I want to say plainly what I am not asking you to do, because the wrong version of this does damage.

I am not asking you to decide the thing you left was fine. It may not have been. I am not asking you to go back into a room that was hurting you. I am not asking you to think less of yourself, which is not humility anyway, it is just self-contempt with better manners.

What is actually on offer is smaller and much better. It is remembering how you got here.

Because you did not climb out. You know you did not. Somewhere in your story there is a person who did not give up on you, or a sentence that arrived at exactly the wrong moment, or a door that opened when you had done nothing to deserve it, and none of that was arranged by you.

A person who was carried has nothing to look down from. That is not a rebuke. It is a description of where you are standing.

You were carried here, and a carried person is not standing above anybody. First Corinthians 4:7 says now if thou didst receive it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a good memory from turning into a ledger.