In April, Deo volente, I will be attending the Together for the Gospel conference in Louisville. As a prelude to that, I thought it might be good to read Preaching the Cross, which is a collection of the addresses from the 2006 conference. The following is an excerpt from that book.

Paul says here that “I care very little if I am judged by you or any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me” (1 Cor. 4:3–4). Paul is unaware of anything against himself, but knows that he is not acquitted by his self-assessment. It is the Lord who judges him. Of course, Paul is not saying that self-examination is wrong; in fact, he calls for it later in his letter (9:4–27; cf. 2 Cor. 13:5), but our self-assessment—a clear conscience—simply isn’t the ultimate issue. The nature of our fallenness is such that we can have a clear conscience and still be wrong, which is why our conscience must be educated by the Word of God. Self-esteem can’t be the final arbiter because we esteem ourselves too highly! We are called to make provisional judgments (so Matt. 7:6)—as Paul is about to do forcefully in 2 Corinthians 5!—but no mere human is our ultimate judge because, as Paul says in 4:4, we will be judged by the Lord (cf. 2:10–16).

—Mark Dever, Preaching the Cross (Crossway, 2007), 22–23.