What Does 1 Corinthians 9:1 Mean?
Am I not a sent one? Am I not free? Have I not perceived Jesus, the Anointed One, our Lord? Are you not my work in the Lord?
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Am I not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? are not ye my work in the Lord?THE KEY
Apostle means one sent, so the verse locates authority in a sending that becomes visible as living work in the Lord.
THE MEANING
Your life is named as visible work in the Lord. The verse holds that shared life beside freedom and sight of Jesus, joining a sending to the people who embody its fruit.
THE ROOT
ἀπόστολος
apóstolos
GROWS FROM
στέλλω
stéllō
To send or dispatch; in ἀποστέλλω (apostéllō), to send out.
“sent one” in this verse is apóstolos. The Greek family of “apostle” carries the concrete act of sending. Here that sending stands beside freedom and sight of Jesus, then becomes visible in the people named as work in the Lord.
ALSO GROWS
apostéllō: Send out, dispatch.
ἀποστέλλω
This verb shares the sending family behind ἀπόστολος and names the action carried by the apostle.
apostolḗ: Sending, commission.
ἀποστολή
This noun names the sending or commission embodied by the one sent.
יֵשׁוּעַ
Yeshua
GROWS FROM
יָשַׁע
yasha
To deliver, bringing out from constriction into spaciousness.
The name rendered Jesus is Yeshua, from yasha: deliverance itself. Having seen Jesus, then, is bound to encountering the nature of deliverance at the heart of this sending.
ALSO GROWS
yeshuah: Deliverance.
יְשׁוּעָה
The same root gives a name for the deliverance carried in Yeshua’s name.
moshia: Deliverer.
מוֹשִׁיעַ
This word names the one who delivers, connecting the name Yeshua with the nature revealed in the verse.
ἔργον
érgon
GROWS FROM
ἐργ-
erg-
Work, deed, activity.
The Greek word for work belongs to the same family as doing and the worker. The verse calls the people themselves “my work in the Lord,” placing the work in a living relationship rather than an abstract accomplishment.
ALSO GROWS
ergázomai: Work, labor, accomplish.
ἐργάζομαι
This verb shares the ἐργ- stem and shows the active side of the work named in the verse.
ergátēs: Worker, laborer.
ἐργάτης
This word names the person who works, extending the same root from the work itself to the one doing it.
THE PATTERN
A sending becomes visible through the life and work it produces among others.
Now go, and I will send you to Pharaoh, that you may bring my people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then I said, Here I am; send me.You did not pick me out, but I picked you out and set you, that you may go and bear fruit, and that your fruit may remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my nature, he may give you.THE THREAD
Then Jesus said to them again, Wholeness be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.The verb translated “send” belongs to the same Greek family as ἀπόστολος, “apostle.” Jesus’ words reveal the sending contained in Paul’s title: it passes through the one sent and reaches others.
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