1 Corinthians 15:10 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

By the grace of God I am what I am; by the free love and goodness of God, I, that was before a blasphemer, and a persecutor, and injurious, have obtained mercy; and though it was impossible for me any more to requite and answer, than at first to merit, that love, yet his grace in me hath produced some fruit, and hath not been wholly in vain; for in the discharge of my ministry, as an apostle, I have abundantly laboured, though not more than all the rest of the apostles taken together, yet more than any one of them all, who were my fellow apostles: what these labours were, he told us, Romans 15:19; and more fully, 2 Corinthians 6:4-10. But lest he should be thought to arrogate any thing to himself, and the power or good use of his own will, he addeth, yet not I, but the grace of God which was with me. Grace seemeth, in the latter part of the verse, to be taken in something a different sense from what it was in the former part: here it signifies the free love and favour of God; though it may also there be understood of those gracious habits, which were the effects of that free love and mercy; here it plainly signifies those gracious habits which were infused into Paul, together with the gracious influences of the Holy Spirit, by which he was enabled to reduce those habits into acts. Paul had something in the acts he had done considered as a man, but yet so little, as in these spiritual acts he denieth his own efficiency, and attributeth all to Divine grace, either exciting him to his actions, or preventing, or working in and with him, and assisting him, and giving him all that success he had had.