The Trust Fund Nobody Logs Into
1 Corinthians 1:5 "that in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge."
July 3, 1916. Hetty Green, the wealthiest woman in America, died at the age of 81 in her son's New York City apartment. The newspapers called her the Witch of Wall Street. The Guinness Book of Records would later list her as the greatest miser of all time. At her death she was worth somewhere between one hundred and two hundred million dollars, the equivalent of several billion today.
You would never have known it from how she lived. She had spent her life in the same tired black dress, worn until it fell apart. She had refused to heat her apartments. Word was that she would even eat cold oatmeal out of her bag to avoid restaurant prices. She had moved repeatedly among small rentals in Brooklyn and Hoboken, mostly to dodge property taxes. She had argued for twenty years over the cost of a hernia operation she eventually never had. Newspapers of the day reported that her fatal stroke came in the middle of an argument over the price of a bottle of milk.
According to one widely reported account, when her son Ned broke his leg as a boy, she refused to pay for proper medical treatment. The leg never healed correctly. It eventually had to be amputated. Whether exaggerated or not, the story became a symbol of the tragedy of living like a pauper while possessing enormous wealth.
She had every resource in the world. She spent her whole life as if she had nothing.
Now read what Paul writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 1:5. "That in every way you were enriched in him in all speech and all knowledge." They didn’t enrich themselves. They were enriched. A massive deposit landed in the account, and the deposit was made by Someone else, in its entirety, in the past, with ongoing effect.
This is what I find absolutely beautiful about the opening of this letter. The Corinthians were a hot mess. They were suing each other, sleeping around, getting drunk at communion. And the first thing Paul wants them to know about themselves, after their identity, is their account balance. They were already rich. They had every spiritual blessing they needed for every spiritual problem they were facing. The supply wasn’t the issue. The stewardship was.
Most of us are Hetty Green.
We have, by virtue of being in Christ, been made co-heirs with the Son of God Himself. Paul will say so explicitly in Romans 8:17. Every spiritual gift, every measure of grace, every fruit of the Spirit, every promise in this Book has been deposited into our account at the moment we trusted Jesus. The trust fund is huge. The balance is staggering. We didn’t earn it and we will never deplete it. And most of us are still eating cold oatmeal out of our bags, white-knuckling our way through Thursday afternoons as if the supply has run out.
Paul tells the Ephesians the same thing in even bolder words. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places" (Eph 1:3). Every spiritual blessing. Not some. Not most. Every one. And the verb blessed is past tense. It is done. The account is funded.
The Christian life is a campaign to learn what is already in the account.
This is exchanged-life grammar applied to the wallet. Paul writes to the Galatians, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me (Gal 2:20). The life inside the believer is His life. The peace inside us is His peace, deposited. The joy is His joy. The patience, the kindness, the self-control, the love. We aren’t waiting for a deposit. We’re learning to draw checks.
Most of our discouragement is not the discouragement of an empty account. It’s the discouragement of an account holder who never opens her statement.
Today: Pick one specific deposit you’ve been ignoring. Maybe it’s the Word; you haven’t opened it this week and you can feel the difference. Maybe it’s prayer; you’ve been white-knuckling worry instead of laying it down. Maybe it’s the body of Christ; you’ve been carrying alone what was meant to be carried together. Maybe it’s the indwelling Spirit, whose power for self-control or patience or kindness you haven’t asked for in months. Pick one. And actually use it before bed.
Prayer: "Father, thank You that the account You opened in my name at the cross is fuller than I have begun to imagine. Forgive me for living a small life on a vast inheritance. Teach me today to actually use what You’ve already given, beginning with the one deposit You’re putting on my heart right now. In Jesus' name, Amen."
-PK