Reading: “I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ.” —1 Corinthians 1:4 

Previously, we looked at how Paul prayed for the Christians in the troubled church in Corinth. We saw that Paul was thankful for the saints regardless of their strengths or weaknesses and that his love for them did not lessen because of their weaknesses.

Let’s look a little further and consider how Paul had learned to look for a man’s virtues before he looked for his failures. Instead of being wholly absorbed with and weighed down by their sad failures and beginning this epistle by rebuking the Corinthians for their waywardness, Paul rather enumerates certain things which evidenced them to be objects of divine favor.

Paul could not say of the Corinthian church what he was able to say to the saints at Rome (Romans 1:8): “I thank my God through Jesus Christ for you all, that your faith is spoken of throughout the whole world.” But, despite his disappointment in the church at Corinth he did say to them (1:4), “I thank my God always on your behalf, for the grace of God which is given you by Jesus Christ.”

It was the grace of God in them that thrilled Paul and made him thankful. Paul’s first efforts were employed in finding how much grace they had rather than how little grace they had. Again, in this we must hear Paul say, “Be ye followers of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).

“Between here and heaven, every minute that the Christian lives will be a minute of grace.” —C. H. Spurgeon