Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?
— 1 Corinthians 1:13
Corinth had more spiritual gifts than it could handle. Paul says the believers there were enriched “in all speech and all knowledge” and were “not lacking in any gift” (1 Cor. 1:5, 7). Yet word reached him that the church had split into camps behind the names of its teachers: Paul, Apollos, Cephas, and even Christ, used as one more party label (1 Cor. 1:12).
Paul’s own name was on the list. He could have welcomed that loyalty, or at least used it to bring the others in line. He does neither. He asks, “Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you?” (1 Cor. 1:13). A few lines later he explains why he would not win them over with clever speech: he did not want “the cross of Christ” to “be emptied of its power” (1 Cor. 1:17). For Paul, the answer to their conflict lay far from Corinth, at the cross on Calvary.
When people are divided, they usually look for the solution among themselves. One side gives in, a better leader steps up, everyone tries harder to be patient. Paul knew none of that could heal the Corinthians, because the problem was in all of them.
So he points them to the one thing no faction can claim as its own, the cross of Christ. “The word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18). No teacher in Corinth could give them that power.
Corrie ten Boom learned this after the Second World War. She was a Dutch watchmaker whose family had hidden Jewish people from the Nazis in their home. In 1944 they were arrested, and Corrie and her sister Betsie were eventually sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp in Germany, where Betsie died. After the war Corrie traveled widely, speaking about God’s forgiveness. In 1947, after one of those talks in a church in Munich, a man came toward her, and she recognized him as one of the guards from Ravensbrück. He told her he had become a Christian. Then he held out his hand and asked her to forgive him.
She could not lift her arm. She later wrote that she felt nothing, no warmth at all. She remembered that Jesus had died for this man too, and she prayed silently, “Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me Your forgiveness.” As she took his hand, a warmth came through her, and she forgave him with her whole heart. She found at the cross what she could not find in herself.
At the cross, Jesus gave Himself completely. He came “to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:45), and He “humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:8).
Leviticus describes a gift of this kind. When an Israelite devoted something to the Lord, it could not be sold or bought back, because “every devoted thing is most holy to the LORD” (Lev. 27:28). Once given, it belonged to God for good. Jesus was that kind of offering, given to God without holding anything back. Paul calls it “a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:2).
Paul saw his own life inside that offering:
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.— Galatians 2:20
If Jesus gave Himself wholly, those who belong to Him have been given too. That is why Paul could urge believers to “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God” (Rom. 12:1). A few lines later he reminds them that “we, though many, are one body in Christ” (Rom. 12:5). Offerings laid on the same altar do not compete with one another.
This is why the cross heals division. The people who followed Paul and the people who followed Apollos had been given to God through the same death, and a life that has been given away has no side left to fight for. When all of us come back there, we begin to love one another as He loved us, and our life together becomes what His was: a fragrant offering to God.
Coming to the cross once is not enough. We drift. In the next disagreement our pride and our need to win slip quietly back into our hands. Jesus knew this when He told His followers to “take up his cross daily” (Luke 9:23).
Maybe a name came to mind as you read this. Someone in your church, your family, your own home. We often tell ourselves we will make peace once they admit they were wrong. The cross asks something harder and kinder: that we go back first, carry that person with us in prayer, and look again at the One who gave Himself for both of us. There we remember that we no longer belong to ourselves.
We will not find the strength for this in ourselves. Corrie ten Boom did not either. She asked for His, and her hand was lifted.
Christ was not divided. He was given, and we were given with Him.
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