Grace and peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I always thank my God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus. For in him you have been enriched in every way—with all kinds of speech and with all knowledge— God thus confirming our testimony about Christ among you. Therefore you do not lack any spiritual gift as you eagerly wait for our Lord Jesus Christ to be revealed. He will also keep you firm to the end, so that you will be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is faithful, who has called you into fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. - 1 Corinthians 1:3-9
This is it. The new beginning to the story. Not the new end of the story.
Paul is clearly telling that God has enriched with resources for a new kind of life: grace, speech, knowledge, spiritual gifts, strength, fellowship with Jesus. It would really be a shame if we received all of these resources and put them in the closet, bringing them out only once a week to admire before carefully folding and returning them to the dark.
The best dishes are not the ones we put on display, but rather the ones we use every day because we get to enjoy their blessings often. If you calculate true usefulness as beauty times the number of days used, most museum pieces would lose to the common dish towel.
Likewise, we have received the bounty of God's blessing and true usefulness is calculated by how it is used, not in how great our meager gifts might be because time is the great multiplier.
So we should rejoice at the new beginning that God has given us, because each day exploring the resources that God has given us and live thankfully in them multiplies our praises before God the Father.
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