I Corinthians 3:1-9
In his regular fashion, Paul first introduces the
writers of the letter: himself and
Sosthenes. He states his intended
recipients: the Corinthians, of course,
but he is also writing to “all who in
every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” which includes us
as well. Paul describes his audience as “those who have been sanctified in Christ
Jesus” and “saints by calling.”
Paul continues, saying, “I thank my God always
concerning you.” (I Cor 1:4-9) He goes
on to say, “You’ve got it!” You have
been given the grace of God in Christ.
You have been enriched in everything in Him: in all speech, in all knowledge. You are not lacking in any gift.
He offers further encouragement. The testimony concerning Christ was confirmed
in you. The Lord Jesus Christ will
confirm you to the end, blameless. God
is faithful. You have the proof of these
things because of your fellowship with Jesus.
This is good news. We should take
time to pause and reflect. We should
take care not to move on too quickly.
In my job, one responsibility I have is to give
people annual performance reviews. I’ve
been doing it for a while, more than ten years.
In that time, I’m confident I’ve given well more than 50 reviews. I think nearly every person is either itching
to know or quietly loathing the section that we call “Opportunities for
Improvement.” This is often to the
exclusion of the part we call “Strengths” or the evaluations of how we
performed according to specific goals for the year. The good news can get overlooked because of
the anticipation of the correction.
Maybe I’m weird, but I hope to get “opportunities
for improvement” whenever I get reviewed by my boss. It’s not that I want to get bashed, but I
know that I have shortcomings. I know
that I can get my focus on the wrong thing.
I want to know if I’m going in the wrong direction. Please tell me. Don’t just watch me wandering around and
shake your head wondering when I’m going to “get it”.
The danger is that in anticipation of the
“opportunities for improvement,” whether we have a constructive view or a
fearful view, we miss out on the positives that are being shared, too. Paul has just said remarkable things about
us. We need to grab onto those things
and hold on to them for dear life. Our
attitude should be filled with the confidence that God is faithful. He is true to His Word.
Let’s thank God for these truths together.
Lord Jesus, thank You for what You’ve done for
us. Thank You that You have changed our
identity from striving on our own to being Yours. Thank You that You have enriched us with
everything that is in Christ. Thank You
that we have been given Your grace.
Thank You that we are not lacking any gift. Thank You that You have confirmed these
truths in us now and You will confirm them until the end. Thank You that You find us blameless. Thank You for the ongoing proof of these
things through our relationship with Jesus.
Amen.
When you stumble, when you doubt, keep coming back
to Jesus. Allow Him to correct things
that are not right, but know that He has placed you securely in Him. Write these truths on Your heart and believe
them.
Paul goes on to make one of his primary points of
correction for the Corinthians … I Cor 1:10 … “I urge you that there be no divisions among you” … if we believe
in Jesus, we should be united in Him. We
talked about this a couple of weeks back.
Paul then warns us … he urges … stop thinking like
the world does … it will only lead you down the wrong path. (I Cor 1:21) He
quotes from Jeremiah 9:23 saying, “Let
him who boasts, boast in the Lord,” not in Apollos or Paul or Cephas or
anyone else. (I Cor 1:31) Do not be divided.
Then, in chapter two, he exhorts us, giving his own
example: “I did not come with superior
speech or wisdom. Yet we do speak wisdom
among the mature.” What is that
wisdom? It is not the wisdom of this age
or its rulers. It is the knowledge that
Jesus is the Christ. This is confirmed
by the Spirit of God in us which shows us the things freely given to us in
Christ. What things are freely given to
us? All things according to 1:4-9 and 3:22.
Chapter 2 concludes with a somewhat mysterious
verse and an amazing promise. In the NAS
version, it says the one who is spiritual (or mature) should appraise all
things but not be appraised by others?
The ESV says to judge but not be judged?
The NIV says make judgments but not be subject to judgment?
This word that gets translated here as appraise or
judge is used several places in the New Testament. In Acts, it’s the word that is used to
describe the Bereans and their investigation of the Old Testament to see if the
message Paul preached to them was in fact true.
Their behavior was strongly praised.
(Acts 17:11) Other places it is
used in the sense of a court of law, the questioning in order to render a
verdict.
Here in I Corinthians 2:15 it says that mature,
Spirit-filled believers should be examining the messages they encounter and
making judgments even to the extent of judging all things. There is a tension here with the potential
for a contradiction with the words of Jesus.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said, “Judge not, lest you be judged.”
(Matthew 7:1) Greg Koukl in the book Tactics
(pp. 185-186) does a good job explaining the differences between types of
judgment. Jesus went on to qualify His
command to judge not when he said that we should first take the log out of our
own eye. (Matthew 7:3, 5) Jesus was not condemning all judgments, he was
condemning hypocritical judgments, the kind of judgments that are arrogant and
often characterized by disdain and condescension (the kind of judgments that
the Pharisees were very accomplished at rendering). Since not all judgments are this kind, not
all judgments are condemned.
Jesus in fact encourages a different kind of
judgment once we deal with our hypocrisy, once the log has been removed from
our eye. Scripture commands at least two
types of judgments. There are judgments
that are judicial. Church discipline
would be this kind of judgment. (Matthew 18:15-20, Galatians 6:1) Paul will
warn later in I Corinthians that we should not use this type of judgment of
unbelievers. (I Corinthians 5:12-13) God reserves that judgment for
Himself. The second type of judgment
Scripture commands is assessment, appraisal of what is “right or wrong, wise or
foolish, accurate or inaccurate, rational or irrational.” Jesus talks of this in the Sermon on the
Mount (Matthew 7:6) when He says, “Do not
give what is holy to dogs.” We must
evaluate what is holy and who are “the dogs.”
I Peter 4:7 says that we should “be
of sound judgment.” (Ephesians 5:11,
John 7:24, Luke 12:57)
We’ve discussed three types of judgment here: judicial action (guilty/not guilty), appraisal
or assessment (right/wrong), and hypocritical arrogance (I’m better than you). Only the last one (hypocrisy) is disqualified
by Jesus’ words in Matthew 7. The other
two in their proper place are actually virtues commanded by Scripture. The second one, appraisal or assessment,
seems to match most closely with what Paul is describing in I Corinthians
2:15. This calling is given to the
spiritual person for two reasons. One,
the subject under consideration is spiritual.
Paul had already said that the natural man cannot understand spiritual
things, so how could the natural man judge spiritual things. Second, the spiritual person is mature enough
to be guarded from the false judgment of hypocritical arrogance. If you can’t judge “in the Spirit”, then leave
off judging and give the situation a wider berth. Galatians 6:1 says that we should seek to
restore a believer who is caught in a sin, but we are to look to ourselves so
that we will not be tempted.
What then of the concluding remark that the
spiritual person is not to be judged?
Two thoughts on that: First, the
spiritual person is not to be judged by the natural person (unbeliever). Why not?
Well, on what basis would the unbeliever judge spiritual things if they
don’t understand them? Second, the
spiritual person is subject to judgment but rather from the Spirit. Paul says over in I Corinthians 4:3-4 that he
doesn’t even judge himself rather it is the Lord who examines him.
How then are we judged by the Spirit? We can be judged from within. The Spirit can speak to us in our hearts
telling us that something we are doing or have done is wrong. We can be judged by the Word, the Bible. When we read, we can learn or be reminded of
things we need to change or do (Hebrews 4:12).
We also can be corrected by other believers. We then can evaluate what they have said
against Scripture and what the Spirit in us is speaking.
The amazing promise that ends chapter two is, “We
have the mind of Christ.” When we have
trusted Jesus, we have within us the necessary understanding to make these
spiritual assessments and to hear and take to heart the message of wisdom.
That brings us (finally) to today’s passage, I
Corinthians 3:1-9:
Brothers and
sisters, I could not address you as people who live by the Spirit but as people
who are still worldly—mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food,
for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are
still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you
not worldly? Are you not acting like mere humans? For when one says, “I follow
Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere human beings?
What, after
all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to
believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos
watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor
the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The one
who plants and the one who waters have one purpose, and they will each be
rewarded according to their own labor. For we are co-workers in God’s service;
you are God’s field, God’s building. –I
Corinthians 3:1-9
Paul starts chapter 3 with a sad statement,
essentially telling the Corinthians, “All the spiritual stuff I’ve addressed is
not something you can understand right now.”
Why not? Well, they are still
worldly. Literally, it says that the
Corinthians are fleshly. They have the
Spirit, but they are not living by the Spirit.
They are trying to survive by their wits and their emotions alone.
Paul then goes on to explain why he knows
this. He knows because of jealousy. He knows because of quarrels. He knows because there is division. People are taking sides that don’t even
exist. There was no division or
competition between Apollos and Paul.
Yes, they are distinct individuals, but they are working together toward
a common goal.
Paul describes himself and Apollos as
servants. They are not seeking a high position. He says neither he nor Apollos is
anything. Neither of them “owns” the
church at Corinth. It’s not Paul’s
church or Apollos’ church. Isn’t that
interesting? How many churches are known
by their pastors today? How often we see
signs outside churches which prominently display the name of the pastor? We have pastors who are celebrities
today. (I’m not seeking to make judgment
here—I just find it interesting in light of this passage.) Paul is “proud” of the church, not the other
way round. It ultimately is a boasting
in the Lord. Look at what God has done,
not look at what I have done.
There are definitely common themes with the parable
Jesus shared in Mark 4:26-29. In this
parable, Jesus said that the kingdom of God was like grain growing in the
fields. A man scatters some seed, and
then the seed sprouts and grows whether or not the man understands how, the
plants mature and then the head matures and the grain ripens. At this point the man harvests the grain
because the time has come. It is not the
one who plants or tends, it is the One who makes things grow. Paul and Apollos are working in God’s
service.
Unfortunately, the immaturity of the Corinthians
has caused them to miss this completely.
Wrong thinking is like this.
Walking in the flesh instead of in the Spirit is like this. The amplified version says in verse 4, “Are you not [proving yourselves unchanged,
just] ordinary people?”
While considering this verse, I thought of a couple
of alternative titles for this message.
One was “Still Worldly” or “Still Fleshly” from verse 3. The other was “Unchanged”. The actions of the Corinthians proved to Paul
that they were in large measure unchanged outwardly.
However, notice that Paul did not question their
salvation. He did not say, “The Spirit
is not in you.” What he did say was,
“You are living as if what Jesus has said and done is not true.”
We made a quick trip to visit my parents at the
first part of this past week. As we were
nearly there, we passed a church with a sign out front. It said, “It is easier to give ten sermons
than to live one.” As one who obviously
has the opportunity to give messages in front of the church a few times a year,
let me be the first to say, “AMEN!”
(James 3:2 gives a similar thought, “We
all stumble in many ways.”)
It reminded me of a story from the book The Same Kind of Different as Me. That book is the telling of the real life
stories of Ron Hall and Denver Moore, a wealthy white art dealer and a homeless
black man, and the startling relationship which has developed between them. It is worth reading if you have the
time.
Moore grew up illiterate and in virtual slavery in
1960’s Louisiana. Even still, among his
many hardships, his family attended a small all-black church in their
community. The preacher was a traveling
preacher, so he wasn’t able to come to their church every Sunday. There was a man in the community who would
preach in his place when the traveling preacher was not there. This man would preach the same sermon over
and over again. The people not
surprisingly got tired of the repeated message and questioned the man on why he
would only preach one sermon. His answer
was a simple one, “When you are able to follow this one message, then I’ll
preach something else.”
Fast forward to my experience growing up going to
an all-white church in North Carolina.
It was a rather large church with over 1000 members. The church had a staff of three and sometimes
more pastors to support such a large flock.
One of the associate pastors was a man named Charlie Hause. Charlie had worked in the furniture industry
in North Carolina for years, but decided to respond to a call from God by
attending seminary and becoming a full-time pastor. Charlie was a faithful witness for Jesus
Christ. Whenever he got into the pulpit,
which wasn’t too often, just a few times each year, he was committed to share
the good news about Jesus and the way of salvation. As a result, even though his sermons were not
frequent, people became “tired” of Charlie’s message. They wondered why he always seemed to say the
same thing. Couldn’t he talk about
something else?
Interestingly, Charlie was a gifted speaker. His messages were in fact different. He used many techniques and even props to
point people to Christ. At the same
time, it was true that the heart of the message was always Jesus.
I think Charlie was a lot like that old black man
in Louisiana. He wanted to make sure
that every person caught the most important message of all. There are lots of things we can learn and
apply by studying the Bible. You can put
into practice a lot of the principles for how to get along with others and live
a better life in this world. But if you
took every good thing out of the Bible and missed Jesus that would be the
greatest tragedy of all.
Do you feel a tension in your life? Do you ever feel like you live a Romans 7
kind of experience? “What I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” Do you feel
like you’re caught up in some of the struggles the Corinthian believers were
dealing with? Do you sometime forget the
things that Paul said at the beginning of the letter? Things like:
You have been given the grace of God in
Christ. You have been enriched in
everything in Him: in all speech, in all
knowledge. You are not lacking in any
gift. You have the mind of Christ. You have all things in Christ. The testimony concerning Christ is confirmed
in you. The Lord Jesus Christ will
confirm you to the end, blameless. And,
you have the proof of these things because of your fellowship with Jesus. (I Corinthians 1:4-9, 2:16, 3:21-23)
Or do you disregard these things, thinking, “I
don’t believe that.” or “It can’t be true.”
I go through seasons like that. Sometimes, I think I can pin it on a very
specific event. Something happens to
shake my faith, then I start walking in the flesh. (Usually, it’s me doing the shaking. The shaking I do is to mess up and sin in
some way.) I stop evaluating things
spiritually and start evaluating them naturally.
A funny thing happened on the way to work
Thursday. About halfway here, I saw a
car ahead of me which was driving slowly maybe 25-30 mph. As I was driving between 40-45 mph, the
distance between us was closing rapidly.
I happened to be coming down one hill and the car was ascending the
next, so there were a few moments in which I could observe the car, wondering
what was wrong. No smoke or smell, so
likely not an engine problem. Then, that
car began to veer across the double yellow line even though there were three
cars coming the other direction. (I winced
fearing the worst was about to happen.)
No one had to drive off the road to avoid a collision, but you could
tell the other drivers were reacting, moving over as far as possible. Then suddenly, the slow moving car made a
right turn and drove into a ditch leaving the rear bumper up in the air,
thankfully just clear of the road. At
that point, I thought that surely the person in the car was incapacitated, so I
decided to stop and check on them. When
I came up on the car, I was even more surprised that the car had ended up in
the ditch because turning a few feet sooner, the car would have been able to
drive into a driveway. Waiting just 20
feet further, the car could have driven safely into the grass where I ended up
parking my car. I was now even more
concerned, wondering what rudimentary first aid skills I would be able to
produce if the person were suffering from a seizure or cardiac arrest.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the driver
was a young woman who was a little dazed but uninjured. She was able to communicate with me clearly. She seemed embarrassed, and kept telling me
she had a flat tire. This was evident,
as the front driver side tire at the bottom of the ditch was completely
flat. However, each time she repeated
the fact of the flat tire, I couldn’t help coming back to the same observation
in my mind: “Yes, you have a flat tire, but that is not your biggest problem at
the moment. The real problem is that
your car is stuck in a ditch. If you had
a flat tire only, I could help to change it.
However, the car is stuck, and a truck or tractor is needed to pull it
out of the ditch first. Until then, the
flat tire can’t be addressed.”
After making sure the woman was okay, learning that
she knew the people who lived in the house where she had stopped, and knowing I
really couldn’t do anything else productive at that moment, I made my way to
work. I can only assume that the woman
had been frightened by her flat tire and subsequent swerve into the left lane. She experienced the difficulty of turning the
wheel with a flat tire and was likely thinking only to get off the road as
quickly as possible, ditch or no ditch.
There were underlying reasons which had brought about the situation as
it occurred. But still, her biggest
problem at that moment was her car, flat tire notwithstanding, was stuck in a
ditch.
This situation caused several different thoughts to
run through my mind over the remaining 15 minutes it took me to get to
work. Mainly, I was thinking about how
we, people in general, often focus on a smaller problem to the exclusion of a
more serious problem.
I think that’s what happens to me when I get into a
“spiritual funk” or I start living in a fleshly, worldly way of thinking. I focus on the little things like why things
at work don’t go the way they should.
Why does my car keep acting up?
A.W. Tozer wrote, “The driver on the highway is
safe not when he reads the signs, but when he obeys them.” The reality is that in and of ourselves, we
do not possess the ability to be spiritual or mature successfully on our
own. We’re like the young woman with the
flat tire. We find it hard to keep the
car in our lane even though we know the rules of the road. There is something which prevents us from
driving straight and true. We need an
external remedy to our inability or we will eventually find ourselves in the
ditch. It is only a matter of time. That external remedy is the person of Jesus
Christ. He’s the only one who can pull
any one of us out of the metaphorical ditch we’re either in or keep us away
from the one we might be headed for.
Isn’t this the meaning of “spiritual things,” the
wisdom which can only be spoken among the mature, the solid food? Is it not the amazing truths of what we have
in Christ, things Paul told us in 1:4-9?
The things we’ve heard over and over in this message
Is it that we need to be simpler in our
thinking? David Guzik in his commentary
on this passage likened it to eating too much junk food. If you eat a lot of sugar, your body adapts
to that diet and then wants to eat sugar and drink sugary drinks. He said that was kind of what the Corinthians
were up to. They were trying to get all
kind of neat eloquent worldly wisdom, but at the same time, they were falling
into all kinds of behavior which were not consistent with being pure and holy. Do we need to simply confess our sin, repent,
and return to Christ?
Or do we need to humble ourselves? I found this quote from Os Guinness in the
book Tactics, “Followers of Christ
flinch at times from the pain of wounds and the smart of slights, but that cost
is in the contract of the way of the cross.”
Jesus said in John 16:33, “In this
world you will have trouble.” In
different translations, the word trouble is translated: tribulation, many trials and sorrows,
suffering, oppression, distress. Are some
of the things which I allow to cause me to be focused on myself just part and
parcel of the pathway of being a follower of Christ?
We’re not being abandoned by God through hardship
or uncertainty we may face. God is right
there with us in the storm. Jesus has
seen it all and undergone the deepest pain and trauma as well. In John 16:33, Jesus also said He was telling
us about the trials and tribulation so that we would not be surprised and that
we would have peace ultimately encouraging us, “Take heart, be of good courage, I have overcome the world.”
This is a rather simple example, but it has the
advantage of being recent. I had a busy
day on Friday at work. I had a monthly
report due a week earlier than usual because of an audit of sorts coming up
this week. In order to get it done, I
had to work on it every free minute I could spare. I finally got done about 5 pm. On top of that, I have a supplier visit on
Monday starting at 8:30 am. A big part
of their visit is reviewing our warehouses where their materials are stored
while on consignment.
I’m supposed to have people supporting me with the
warehouse tour on Monday, but I don’t like surprises. (I’ve been burned before.) I don’t go to the warehouses often and
thankfully because most of the time things work like they should. Parts come in, they get stored correctly,
they get delivered to the line on time, and that’s that. I don’t have to “do” anything.
During my trip to the warehouse, I am telling
myself, “I should have done this earlier in the day” (even though like I’ve
explained I didn’t have time for it). I
am worried because if I have any questions or find any problems, I’m thinking
I’m not going to have anyone to ask.
To make a long story as short as I can, there’s
only one guy in the warehouse. He
immediately asks if he can help me, then he proceeds to explain everything in
far more detail that I could possibly have hoped but at the same time in the
most efficient manner possible. In not
more than 10 minutes we’ve walked the whole warehouse, looked at every location
individually, and he’s described the whole process from receiving to delivery
even though receiving is done in a different building.
At the end, I shake his hand and ask his name. He tells me his name is David and the reason
he knows the process so well is that he’s recently changed to a weekend shift
in order to go back to school. Prior to
that, he was working in the other building, so he had experience with all the
processes.
I can tell more details involving my trip up to the
other building, but in a total of 15 minutes, I had exactly what I needed and
definitely more than I could have gotten in that short a time period had I
tried to take care of it earlier in the day.
God knew in advance what I needed.
On my way back, I was berating myself saying, “God
why do I doubt that you are in charge?”
He guards my going out and my coming in.
He owns the cattle on a thousand hills.
Nothing is too difficult for Him.
I have the confidence of promise on top of promise.
One of my favorite promises from God is a promise
about promises. This is II Corinthians 1:20,
For no matter
how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so through Him
the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God.
II Corinthians 1:20
An interesting example of this happened when we
went to Tina’s dance recital last night.
First of all, just guess how many girl dancers there were to boy dancers. Ten to one? A hundred to one? I was thinking more like a gazillion to one,
myself. Anyway, there were four boys,
and two of them were really little, and two were about 8 or 10 years old. So, in the second half all the girls are out
dancing pieces and there was one dance where the boy picked up the girl and
moved her about 3 or 4 feet. My heart
just soared when I saw it, I don’t know why, but it was so encouraging to me to
see that complementary effort. Later,
the guy instructor who teaches modern dance came out and did a performance,
twirling all around, bending all these different shapes, it was amazing. Then a girl dancer came out on stage with him
and instantly he became almost like nothing.
(Have you ever noticed how guy dancers dress in dark clothes, almost
like they’re saying, “Hey, I’m not here, don’t look at me!”) He had started dancing in the dark in dark
clothing, and I was really impressed, but I would have been even more impressed
if I actually see him! But then, the
girl dancer came out wearing a lot of color and he was lifting her around and
it looked like she was flying, it was so cool, and it was a totally different
dance.
Anyway, you are the bride of Christ, and God
delights in lifting you up and making amazing things happen to His glory. He’s like that dancer—He’s behind the scenes,
not out in front, but still everything is declaring the glory of God, and He
takes pleasure in working through us. In
this way, all His promises are true, they are “yes” in Christ Jesus. God glories in us.
We are most spiritual when we abide in Christ. It is a simple and narrow path. If you find that you are not feeling
“spiritual,” if you feel like you don’t know what you should be doing, please
take some time to get away alone with God and just talk to Jesus. Take your Bible, and read and listen. Ask Him to be the bright Morningstar of your
life. Take His yoke, His authority upon
your life anew.
We are God’s field, God’s building. (I Corinthians
3:9) It is God’s business to build us up.
Let us encourage one another to persevere and to abide in Christ. Only in Him, will we escape jealousy,
quarrelling, and division.
Let’s pray:
Father God, help us to see the pathway You have
planned out for each one of us here. I
pray for rest for those who are tired. I
pray for direction for those who feel lost.
I pray for strength for those who feel weak. But I pray that all those things will be
found in and remain in You. We don’t
seek You so that we can be filled up for a time so that we can go our own way
apart from You. We seek You and we want
to keep seeking You to get closer and closer to You. There is nowhere else we need or want to go,
only You have the words of eternal life.
Thank You, Jesus. Amen
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