Every car that rolls into The Garage looks fine from the curb. Fresh paint covers a lot. But put it up on the lift, tap along the rocker panel with a screwdriver, and every so often a chunk of body filler drops onto the floor. Behind it is rust, a hole you could put your fist through.
Somebody made that car look good. Nobody made it right.
Body filler is fast and cheap. It sands smooth, it takes paint beautifully, and it will fool almost anybody standing in a parking lot. It just won’t survive the road. One hard winter, one good pothole, and what was hidden comes out.
Paul says every one of us is building something. And one day God is going to put it on the lift.
You are building something
In the last part of 1 Corinthians 3, Paul told a divided church, “You are God’s field, God’s building” (3:9). Then he walks onto the job site:
According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 3:10–11)
Three things stand out.
The foundation is already poured. You didn’t pour it, and neither did I. Paul came to Corinth and preached one thing: Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Nobody has to earn a place on that slab. Christ is finished, and He isn’t moving.
Paul built by grace. The master builder didn’t swing the hammer on his own strength. Grace came first, then the work. That turns out to be the whole point.
“Let each one.” Paul is speaking first to the teachers the Corinthians were lining up behind. But the New Testament won’t let the rest of us off the hook: “We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body” (2 Corinthians 5:10). The preacher and the postal worker. The worship leader and the woman who restocks the coffee.
So you are building something right now. Not someday, when you retire or get a ministry title. Right now.
Every conversation is a brick. Every hour at work is a brick. The way you talk to your wife on a Tuesday night, the way you treat the guy behind the counter, what you do with your phone at 11 p.m. Each one goes into the building or into the burn pile.
That could sound heavy. But it also means your life isn’t small. There is no wasted Tuesday and no throwaway shift, because there’s no moment God can’t use to build something that lasts forever.
What it’s made of
Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw… (1 Corinthians 3:12)
Six materials, two piles. Gold, silver and precious stones are temple materials; David gathered exactly those for the house of God (1 Chronicles 29:2). Wood, hay and straw are fine for a barn. They just don’t do well in a fire.
Notice that the difference between the piles isn’t size. A straw building goes up fast and big, and people drive by and say, “Look at that.” A gold building goes up slowly. It costs more. Sometimes nobody notices it at all.
The difference is substance, and substance comes from the source.
Straw is anything I build for the eyes of people. It’s the kindness I do so I’ll be thought kind. It’s the serving that quietly keeps score. It’s the good deed with a camera pointed at it. Jesus warned, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 6:1). Those people, He said, “have received their reward” (6:2). They got the applause. And applause burns.
Straw can be built out of position, too. I started this. I’ve been here thirty years. I’m the elder. Titles are fine, but a title isn’t a building material. Pride and position are body filler.
Gold is anything that flows from God and goes back to God. It’s work that starts with grace and ends with God getting the credit. Jesus said that whoever gives a cup of water to one of His people “will by no means lose his reward” (Mark 9:41). A cup of water. You don’t get much smaller than that. But given at the Spirit’s prompting and for Jesus’ sake, it’s gold.
The King James Version has an old word for that prompting: unction (1 John 2:20). It means anointing, the Holy Spirit resting on a believer and moving him to act. I’ve written about it before. Straw is action without unction. Gold is action that flows from unction.
Here’s a simple test for anything you’re building:
- Who prompted this? The Spirit, or my need to be seen?
- Who is it for? When it’s done, who gets the glory?
- Would I still do it if nobody ever knew?
That third question is the screwdriver on the rocker panel. It shows you what’s under the paint.
The only review that counts
Each one’s work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. (1 Corinthians 3:13)
The Day is the day Jesus returns, when everything goes up on the lift. And the fire doesn’t test how much you did or how visible it was. It tests what sort of work it was.
The Greek word for test is dokimazō. It’s the word for assaying metal, putting gold in the furnace to prove it’s real. It isn’t a test designed to catch you. It’s a test designed to approve you. The jeweler puts gold in the fire because he expects to find gold.
Paul gives two outcomes. If the work survives, the builder receives a reward. If it burns, “he will suffer loss, though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire” (3:15).
The good news: your salvation isn’t on the lift. Christ is the foundation, and “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1).
The warning: you can be saved and still lose a lifetime. Picture a man on his lawn at 3 a.m. in his bathrobe, watching his house burn. He made it out, thank God. But his hands are empty. A Christian can reach the end and realize he spent forty years building a reputation, a résumé and a kingdom of his own. All of it, ash.
But this passage isn’t meant to load you down. It’s meant to set you free. A few verses later Paul writes, “With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged by you or by any human court… It is the Lord who judges me” (4:3–4).
If there’s only one review that counts, every other review is small. Your boss’s. Your in-laws’. The voice in your own head that keeps grading you. Most of us are tired because we’re performing for a hundred audiences. You don’t have to live like that. You get to live for an audience of One.
And Paul says what that One will do: “Then each one will receive his commendation from God” (4:5). Not condemnation. Commendation. The One holding the fire is your Father, and He is looking for gold.
The Spirit wants to build through you
So how do you build with gold? Not by trying harder. White-knuckled effort just builds a bigger pile of straw. Gold starts with grace.
If you belong to Jesus, the Holy Spirit lives in you, and He wants to lead you. We act like He’s a reluctant contractor we have to beg to show up. Jesus said the opposite: “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Luke 11:13). God has already prepared the good works “that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:10). Your job isn’t to manufacture gold. It’s to walk in what He has prepared, listening as you go.
Most of the time His leading is small:
- Go. Walk over to the guy eating alone in the break room.
- Speak. Tell the coworker whose marriage is falling apart that you’re praying for him.
- Stay. Stay at the job you’d love to leave, because God isn’t finished with you there.
- Be still. Keep quiet when everybody’s complaining about the supervisor.
None of that needs a title or a stage. The mail carrier who follows the Spirit’s nudge on his route is building with gold. The mom changing her fifth diaper of the day for Jesus’ sake is building something that will outlast the pyramids. The retiree who lies on a cold garage floor under a stranger’s car, not to be thanked but because the Lord put it on his heart, is laying gold on the foundation.
A few questions for this week
- Where have I been building for the eyes of people?
- What review have I been living for, other than God’s?
- What is one small thing the Spirit has been nudging me toward?
- Have I asked Him, plainly, “What are we building right now?”
Some of us have a year left. Some have fifty. None of us knows. But every one of us has today. Paul ends the letter with this: “Be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).
Not one cup of water. Not one honest shift. Not one prayer nobody heard. Not in vain.
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