Pray the Word with David Platt is a resource from radical.net.

1 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 20,

For the kingdom of God does not consist in talk, but in power.

Oh, man, what a great verse.

The kingdom of God does not consist in talk, but in power.

Now, you think about the context.

So that's what I think is helpful, like diving into all these individual verses in one chapter of scripture and one book of the Bible

because it's so easy to take things out of context. You can hear that verse and be like,

okay, what does that mean? You can start making up all kinds of things that that means.

But when you look at it in its context, you got Paul addressing a church where there's all kinds of division because different

people were saying, I follow Paul, I follow Apollos, I follow Seifus, I follow this or that. And even

here in 1st Corinthians chapter 4, you see Paul addressing just this variety of teachers and even

some of his critics in Corinth who are saying negative things

about him and he says, listen, what matters in the end is it's not talk. And he's even kind of,

as in 1st Corinthians chapter 2 talked about the negative impacts of words of eloquence,

human wisdom, all that kind of stuff.

He said, that's not what the kingdom of God is about.

The kingdom of God is about the power of God.

In the gospel, right before this in 1st Corinthians chapter 4, he just talked about how

it's a very different power than the way the world views power.

The world views power in terms of wealth and health and strength and all these different things.

And he says, but there's a different kind of spiritual power.

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