Examine yourselves, whether you are in the faith; prove your own selves. Know you not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, unless you are counterfeits?
Read Chapter 13
Ambrosiaster
AD 400
Paul is saying this because if we do not know how to put one another to the test, we do not know whether Christ is in us or not. To fail to meet the test is not to know the faith inherent in our religious profession. A person who has a sense of faith in his heart knows that Jesus Christ is within him. Commentary on Paul’s Epistles.
Examine yourselves whether ye be in the faith. A stern rebuke. See, 0 Corinthians, that ye do not foolishly put faith in the false apostles, and so be out of the faith. Try yourselves, and see whether you believe or not. If you hold fast the faith, and continue in it, you will believe, nay, you will see Christ to be powerful in you, and also in me, by the mighty works He does through me, and thus you will be led to acknowledge my apostleship and evangelical truth.
Theophylact and Gagneius take it otherwise: Make trial of yourselves, and see if you are powerful through Christ indwelling within you, so that through Him you work miracles. In the primitive Church the faithful laity even had the power of working miracles. These two writers, therefore, understand S. Paul here to refer to that faith which works miracles united to the gift of prophecy and of tongues, which faith is a sign of the indwelling of Christ in that congregation in which it flourishes.
Others, thirdly, explain it thu...
Try your own selves if you be in the faith. He does not mean if they have a right Christian faith or belief, but either whether they had a saving Christian faith working in them by charity, or as St. Chrysostom says, a faith that showed itself by the gift of miracles, at that time commonly given to the first Christians.
Unless perhaps you are disapproved, rejected, and justly deprived of this gift, which was a proof that they were Christians, and had received the Spirit of Christ. I judged it better to translate here disapproved, that reprobates, which in other places is often taken as opposed to the predestinate and the elect, whereas there it signifies those who were rejected, and deprived of the gifts of the spirit, particularly of that of miracles, and of those spiritual gifts granted to the first Christians, and which were a proof that they had received the grace: and the 7th verse, not that we may appear approved, but that. We may be as reprobates. That is, we wish that we may h...
Look into yourselves and you will find that you have Christ in you. But if Christ is in you, how much more is he in your teacher! Homilies on the Epistles of Paul to the Corinthians
For since by what he has said he has shown that even if he does not punish, it is not because he has not Christ in himself, but because he intimates His long-suffering, Who was crucified and yet avenged not Himself; he again, in another manner, produces the same effect, and still more irrefragably, establishing his argument by the disciples. 'For why speak I of myself,' he says 'the teacher, who have so much care upon me and am entrusted with the whole world and have done such great miracles. For if you will but examine yourselves who are in the rank of disciples, you will see that Christ is in you also. But if in you, then much more in your teacher. For if you have faith, Christ is in you also.' For they who then believed wrought miracles. Wherefore also he added, Try your own selves, prove your own selves, whether ye be in the faith. Do you not know as to your own selves, unless indeed that Christ is in you, you be reprobate? 'But if in you, much more in your teacher?' He seems to me...
