You Tell Me
October 13, 2024
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
1 But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. 2 I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, 3 for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? 4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?
5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. 9 For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.
There’s a line that pastors sometimes use as a joke that might help us as we start. Christians often say, “If only we could be like the early Christians.” And churches often say, “If only we could be like the early church.” And pastors say, “Which early Christians and which early church?” It’s a sort of checky reply that tries to suggest that not every early Christian and every early church was so faithful and so spiritual and so wonderful as we often assume. That was certainly the case with a church like the one in an ancient city called Corinth. In this passage, we see that the Corinthian Christians were not-so-faithful and not-so-spiritual. That’s not the main problem, though. The main problem is that they don’t see it. And Paul had to show them. But it was for their good, just as I believe it will be for us. Let’s pray as we begin.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
Seminary is the name for “pastor school.” I know most of you haven’t been to seminary or pastor school, but let me tell you what it’s like, at least what part of it can be like. You have a bunch of men and women who are bright and have shown theological promise and spiritual aptitude. Hopefully, they also have the character that should accompany aspirations of a deeper understanding of God and his Word.
But sometimes, pastors-in-training don’t have the corresponding character, at least not yet, and competitions form among peers. There can be competition over a whole bunch of things. Sometimes the competitions are stated out loud. I remember some guy named Dan in seminary. I don’t remember Dan’s last name. But I do remember Dan won the competition for the preaching award in my seminary graduating class. I guess you could say that I also remember that I did not win the preaching award in my class.
Again, some of the competitions are out in the open. Yet most are subtle. There’s a competition for the best grades, a competition for the professors’ time and their attention and their favor, a competition for scholarships, a competition for the best internships, a competition for the best jobs after seminary, and a competition for who has the most-theologically sound teachers and most-right doctrine and most-right church strategies for growth and then who can say that fancy language with words like orthodoxy and orthopraxy. There’s a competition about who will work at which big church and what their title will be. There’s competition over who will plant their own church, and if so, what is the most needed area of a city.
Anyway, if all that sounds disgusting to you—Christian leaders competing in things that don’t matter or shouldn’t matter—know that it is indeed disgusting. It’s worldly and unspiritual. But why do we all do the same thing?
Who can be the best Christian mother or father or have the most obedient children. Who has the most perfect education for children, and is it this curriculum or that one? Or who can dress best at church or who has gifts that get to perform on the stage? (Did you hear the word “perform” and what it implies?) Who knows some famous Christian or who leads the biggest Bible study or the most faithful Bible study? Who has the most noble cause. Is it evangelism or prolife or something else? And who can quote the best, most respected teachers?
And on and on it goes, competing to see who can give the most or serve the most or be the most of whatever thing is most in vogue at the moment. And we’re not so different from the church in Corinth.
1. What’s wrong?
Let me re-read the first four verses again. See if you can see what’s going wrong.
1 But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. 2 I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, 3 for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? 4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?
How would you summarize this? I’d use a phrase that will be familiar to some of you: failure to thrive. It’s a term from the medical world. It is a description for a child, whether an infant or a teenager, who is failing to hit certain benchmarks, not in small ways but in large ways. The most obvious would be something like healthy weight gain, say when a newborn isn’t putting on weight. Failing to thrive can be quite serious. It can and should cause parents and medical professionals to move quickly on tests to determine the cause. And it should be the response of pastors and fellow church members.
You can hear the concern in Paul’s words as he describes them as failing to thrive. He speaks of them as spiritual infants in Christ, as those who need milk and not solid food. Think about how this would sting. What if a seminary professor closed the end of the lecture and said, “Hey, future pastors and counselors, when you come to the next class, please make sure to bring your baby bottles and sippy cups”? That would sting.
We should look at this most closely, though, lest we misunderstand. Baby bottle Christians are not a problem in and of themselves. Look at v. 2 again. Paul says, “I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it.” Paul implies there is a time for being a baby in Christ. There is a time for learning and growing at rapid intervals. Think about an actual baby. Babies can double and triple in size, even when they only drink milk and eat little jars of mushed green peas and Styrofoam-tasting little puff things. On just baby food, babies grow a bunch—they should grow a bunch.
So, of course, there is a time to be a beginner at anything, even Christianity. But is that the problem? Look again at v. 2 and v. 3. “I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it,” Paul writes. “And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?” Do you see the problem? They are failing to thrive. Paul doesn’t expect them to be spiritual mothers and fathers yet, let alone spiritual grandparents. But he expects them not to be infants and toddlers.
Notice that Paul loves them so much he’s willing to confront them with concern. He loves enough to ask the question. So many of us are afraid to ask this question. We assume we can never question ourselves or someone else. I know I’ve been too slow to ask questions like this in the past, too worried about what people would think of me.
Of course, we can be too blunt and uncaring. That’s possible too. If someone says something dumb in a Sunday school class or small group, you shouldn’t be like, “Bro, are you even saved?” This isn’t about someone saying something dumb once and Paul bringing the hammer. Instead, like a good parent and a good nurse, Paul has observed a troubling pattern, so he asks, “Are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?”
Does Paul then think they are not Christians anymore? Not necessarily. I actually think he really does see them as believers. He’s called them “saints” in the opening verses. He’s called them brothers here, which means he sees them as belonging to the family of God. He speaks of them as in Christ, albeit infants in Christ, but in Christ nonetheless. This is all language that assumes faith, assumes salvation, assumes something better than they are currently experiencing. Which is why he wants them to see that because they have such jealousy and strife and competition, they are not nearly as mature as they think they are.
Paul is not critiquing them for being child-like in the ways Jesus wants us to be like children. We should strive to be the kind of believers who take God at his Word and have a child-like dependence. Paul’s problem, we might say, was not that they were child-like but childish.
2. What are the causes for failing to thrive?
So, we’ve been asking the question of what went wrong. And I’ve been answering that they were failing to thrive. We should ask another question: but why? What stunted their growth? We see three answers to this in vv. 4–9. Let mre read those verses again.
4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human? 5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. 9 For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
What are Paul’s reasons for their failing to thrive? Three answers.
Thinking too much of leaders
First, we can think too much of spiritual leaders. Leaders are just servants, he says. We didn’t make the food. We didn’t supply the food. We didn’t build the restaurant. We didn’t do a whole lot. Spiritual leaders are like waiters at a table. We are, Paul says, no big deal. In fact, the phrase he uses is that he’s nothing.
We certainly need this reminder in our day. Just think of all the ministry scandals you’ve heard about lately. I would have no way of knowing the mind of the Lord in why, over the last few years, so many pastors have fallen in prominent ways. Christianity Today published an article that this summer alone in just the Dallas–Fort Worth area, eight megachurch pastors were let go because of moral failure. And just last month, after the article came out, there was a ninth pastor from the same area, this one with an internationally known preaching ministry.
I’m not saying we should think less of pastors because all pastors are losers. That’s not true at all. That’s not Paul’s point. And, again, there is no way for me to know all that God might be doing in allowing the moral failings to happen. But I suspect one thing might be that he is pruning us of our love for celebrity pastors so that we don’t lose sight of Christ, who is everything. This leads to the next reason for failing to thrive.
Thinking too little of God.
If having a view that is too high of spiritual leaders was the first cause, what’s another cause? The second is a view that is too low of God. Look again at the verses.
5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. 9 For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.
Paul can plant. Apollos can water. Nothing comes up from the ground unless God makes it grow. “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” And whose field is it, anyway? Who owns the field? See v. 9. Not Paul, not Apollos. It’s God’s field, Paul writes. Who owns Community? Not me. Not the pastor-elders. Not even you. God does. Who owns your life? Not you, if you know God. And that’s a good thing to be God’s. God is a good owner. But if we keep resisting his ownership, if we don’t think highly enough about God, we’ll fail to thrive. Not connecting everything back to God is one way we can remain Christians with sippy cups, to paraphrase Paul.
Thinking of other Christians as competitors
I’ll give you one final reason for our failure to thrive; they failed to thrive because they thought too much of leaders and too little of God. But they also failed to thrive because they saw others as competitors. They thought too much of leaders and too little of God, and they thought of their fellow Christians as competitors.
Paul says in v. 3 that they have jealousy and strife. They came to church thinking about the haves and the have-nots, and how they could become the winners and not the losers. They saw the success of other believers around them—the success of other teachers, the success of other ministries, and the success of other churches—to mean that they were losing. If some guy named Dan with a last name that I think starts with the letter “H” wins the preaching award in seminary, then what glory is left for me? If someone in our small group led their neighbor to Christ, if they got victory over sin, if they have a better marriage, or no marriage at all, then they are the winners, and I’m the loser.
Church, this is not the way. It would be pretty hard to have a healthy community group or a church if we thought that way. If it gets too bad, an observant physician might even say we were failing to thrive.
But before I let this go, I want to make it a bit more concrete. I want to go back to the lines about milk and solid food, and the idea of infants and what makes someone mature. Have you ever thought about what makes someone mature? How would you know if you were mature in Christ or not? I’ll put it like this…
If we had a member in our church who knew all the deepest things about God, about the Trinity and Christology and the end times and predestination and election and God’s sovereignty, would you consider that member mature? Perhaps. But what if I told you they never served others? Never greeted. Never gave. Never counted the offering. Never invited a neighbor over for dinner. Never used that knowledge to lead classes that actually helped people. Instead, they lead classes to show off their fancy knowledge. Would you still call them mature?
What if you had another member, one who maybe wasn’t so deep and wasn’t so articulate. They only knew Jesus loved them because the Bible told them so. But this church member knew that as Christ had served him, he would serve others.
Who would you consider mature? I think we know. Don’t equate mere knowledge with maturity. So many of us would call ourselves mature, but when we come to church, we’re asking the wrong question and measuring with the wrong rulers. We often come to church asking how did anyone greet me? Did people say hello to me? Did people care about my needs and concerns? Those are not terrible questions. But I’d submit to you that you can show your maturity by greeting others, praying for others, and so on.
Conclusion
And here, at the end, we’re brought to, of course, Jesus. He’s not some preaching gimmick. Paul resolved, as we saw the other week, to know nothing but Jesus Christ and him crucified. When we think of Jesus and what makes him so wonderful, is it that he is all-knowing? Of course, of course. Jesus is wonderful because he is all-knowing. Jesus knows about the Trinity because he’s a member of the Trinity. That’s pretty awesome.
But when we think of the maturity of Christ, I would submit to you, that what Christians have loved most about him and sung about him down through the centuries is that he showed his maturity in giving himself for others. I think of the words in Mark 10. When the disciples argued about who of them was the greatest disciple, Jesus told them, “But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all. For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mark 10:43–45).
Church, think about that. Take to heart the last line. Jesus says the good news that he “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”
Remember who he said it to. He loves the very people who most want glory and fame and who see themselves in competition with others. Jesus dies for them. Jesus gives his life as a ransom, even for people and for churches engaged in disgusting competition.
When he does that, when he gives his life for us, his forgiveness should change us and call us to something better. To use the language I read from Romans 6 before the baptism introduction, he calls us to walk in newness of life.
The death of Jesus saves us, but it also shows us what true maturity is. Spiritual maturity and spiritual thriving look like Jesus. We are most mature in Christ when the gospel causes us to consider others more highly than ourselves.
I’ll pray and invite the worship team to come up and lead us in a closing song, praying that God would make it so among us, even as we sing together. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
Sermon Discussion Questions
What areas of your life do you feel tempted to compete with other believers? Why?
Have you been in Christian communities that were failing to thrive? Were some of the same reasons at play in those communities? What part did you play?
Who are people you consider mature Christians? What makes you feel that way about them?
How do we see spiritual maturity in Christ?
