Nor do we boast and claim credit for the work someone else has done. Instead, we hope that your faith will grow so that the boundaries of our work among you will be extended. 16 Then we will be able to go and preach the Good News in other places far beyond you, where no one else is working. Then there will be no question of our boasting about work done in someone else’s territory. 17 As the Scriptures say, “If you want to boast, boast only about the Lord.”

When people commend themselves, it doesn’t count for much. The important thing is for the Lord to commend them. NLT

We’re not barging in on the rightful work of others, interfering with their ministries, demanding a place in the sun with them. What we’re hoping for is that as your lives grow in faith, you’ll play a part within our expanding work. And we’ll all still be within the limits God sets as we proclaim the Message in countries beyond Corinth. But we have no intention of moving in on what others have done and taking credit for it. “If you want to claim credit, claim it for God.” What you say about yourself means nothing in God’s work. It’s what God says about you that makes the difference. The Message

When Paul wanted to be acknowledged as the founder of the church in Corinth, it was for sound pastoral and practical reasons. His God-given calling meant that he still had apostolic authority among them (even though this was being questioned, and undermined by certain others).

Note that he also cherished a vision that he and the Corinthians might ‘team up’ on a missionary project, and use Corinth as a launch pad to go to unreached regions beyond. But all the time, Paul would still be working within his remit, and not straying into the ministry territories given to others.

However it’s important to grasp that in none of this was Paul ‘boasting’ in a conventional sense. Whatever God had used him to do, it was God who had done it through Him. So his ‘’boast’’ was in the Lord.

‘What it all comes down to is the true nature of the Christian ‘boast’: anyone who boasts should boast in the Lord! He’s already quoted this (it comes from Jeremiah 9.23) in the first letter to Corinth (1.31), where it stood as a sign that all the different things the church might want to boast of, not least its social and cultural advancement through teachers with more rhetoric than substance, had to be subjected to the humiliation of the cross. Now he quotes it again with a similar though slightly different aim. He wants to warn the church against those who ‘commend’ themselves, but are not commended by the Lord; and he wants to prepare the way for one of his own most powerful pieces of writing, the ‘boasting’ in chapter 11 which will show them, once and for all, what it means to have one’s whole life reshaped around the Messiah and his cross. Is it boasting you want? he asks. Then boasting you shall have; but don’t expect it to look like what you imagined. ‘In the Lord’, after all, everything has been turned upside down and inside out. That’s what must happen to boasting as well.’ Tom Wright