Be on your guard; stand firm in the faith; be courageous; be strong.
1 Corinthians 16:13
Four Orders at the Door
Paul is nearly out the door. He's winding down his letter. He's given the Corinthians his travel plans, he's told them to set money aside each week for the collection, and he's about to send greetings. Then he stops and fires off four short commands with nothing between them.
Be on your guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be courageous. Be strong.
That reads like a briefing, and the church he's writing to needed one. Corinth is the congregation that split into factions over which teacher they preferred, that argued about food and about spiritual gifts, that had a man sleeping with his father's wife and stayed proud anyway. Paul has spent sixteen chapters on them.
Then comes verse 14, and it's four words. "Do everything in love."
That's the fifth command, and it governs the other four. Everything includes standing firm. Everything includes being on guard. Paul knows exactly what a church does with an instruction to be strong and hold the line, because he has watched this church do it. They held lines all over the place. But they held them without love, and he already told them back in chapter 13 what that's worth. Nothing.
So verse 14 doesn't cancel the four orders. It tells the church where to focus them.
Firm Without Getting Hard
Standing firm may look like saying no to something and not needing another person to agree with you. Standing firm is staying in a church you disagree with on a secondary matter, because the disagreement isn't eternal—at the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Standing firm is being the one in the family who doesn't take the bait, year after year, when the contrarian in the family is trying to start an argument.
Being on guard looks similar. This doesn't mean you should be suspicious of people. It means you should pay attention to what you're being handed, and to who is handing it to you.
I wrote about the pressure this creates in Holy Friction, where Hebrews tells us to spur one another on with a word that's closer to provocation than to a nudge. That's the same tension Paul is communicating here. Firm enough to push. Loving enough that the push is for them.
We're often strong in one direction and soft in the other. Some of us can hold a line but lose the relationship. Some of us can keep the person and never tell someone what they need to hear. Paul asks for both. He asks it of the church in Corinth, and he asks it of us today.
Prayer
Father, we want to be people who stand. Give us courage where we've gone soft, and give us love where we've gone hard. Help us to hold onto what's true about you without holding it over anybody. Where we've been fighting for something that was never eternal, show us. Work everything in us in love, so that we can do everything in love. We pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.