“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
The Basket Case Chronicles #38
“For though ye have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel. Wherefore I beseech you, be ye followers of me” (1 Cor. 4:15-16).
Remember that Paul is talking about the contrast between the disreputable condition of being an apostle (v. 9) and the faux-respectability of churches founded by those same apostles (v. 8). He is talking about the tendency that Christians have to distance themselves from the kind of people that God used to establish them in the first place. This is not a modern phenomenon; it is how worldliness counterattacks whenever God does a remarkable work of grace.
Paul’s antidote for this is godly imitation. He is their father, and while they may have learned lots of things from ten thousand books at the ivy-covered library down at the seminary, they don’t have that many fathers. Therefore, he begs them to follow him. Imitate him. In what? Well, he wants them to imitate him in what he is talking about—a willingness to be talked about, laughed at, called a discredit to the gospel, and snorted over in the faculty lounge.
Every Christian scholar and pastor needs to make this a personal life goal. We need to learn to live in what one Puritan called the “high mountain air of public calumny.” Now that’s Pauline.