1. God’s Field

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1 Corinthians chapter 3, commencing at the first verse. Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as 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 quarrelling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men? For when one says, I follow Paul, and another, I follow Apollos, are you not mere men? 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 made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow. The man who plants the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labour. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thank you very much, David. Well, as we keep our Bibles open there at 1 Corinthians chapter 3, this month on Sunday mornings, we’re going to look at the 3rd and 4th chapters of this great letter and following up on what we’ve learned last month from chapters 1 and 2. And we saw in those chapters, through Richard’s expositions of them, that the Corinthian church is a church in crisis because it is a church in conflict. The divisions between different groups of believers at Corinth are symptomatic of the church’s conflict with its human founder, Paul. And the Apostle’s greatest concern is that this is leading these Christians away from the true gospel of Christ and him crucified into a Never-Neverland of spiritual speculation and fantasy which will ultimately destroy the church.

So the first 4 chapters of 1 Corinthians are devoted to dealing this factionalism which is such a threat to the work of the gospel in Corinth. Broadly, Paul’s tactic is to expose 2 foundational mistakes that his opponents and detractors are making. We’ve looked at one of them in chapters 1 and 2. They have rejected the gospel of the cross in favour of a human wisdom that seems much more attractive and And much more successful because it is much more Corinthian. Fits the culture very well.

It appears to be so relevant. It actually adapts the Christian message to where the Corinthians are. And chapters 1 and 2 have exposed that. Now we move on in chapters 3 and 4 to see Paul’s second tactic, which is to expose their misunderstanding about the unique and divine nature of the church and its leadership, and in its place to put a like-minded subculture of shared religious experience. And these 2 disastrous and destructive tendencies in Corinth centre on 2 buzzwords, one of which we’ve already seen in chapters 1 and 2.

The other of which we come on to this morning. You remember in chapters 1 and 2, the buzzword in Corinth is wisdom. We must have wisdom. Wisdom that appeals to us and our Greek neighbours. Wisdom that is rooted, as Paul says, in the wisdom of this world.

And what they could not take was the wisdom of a cross, of a Jesus who is crucified, and therefore they were rejecting the gospel. But the other buzzword that we move on to now is the word spiritual. And chapters 3 and 4 are all about this. It’s the second of the two things that Paul wants to expose. What does it mean to be spiritual?

What is biblical gospel spirituality? Well, that has a very contemporary ring about it, and it’s very important for us to get these two chapters clear. Now there’s no doubt from chapter 2, where we were last Sunday, that Having wisdom and being spiritual were strongly linked in Corinthian thinking. The quest for wisdom, sophia, produced the Sophists, the philosophers of the 1st century Mediterranean world. It was very much an in thing.

There was a whole group of travelling teachers specialising in rhetoric and all sorts of bizarre speculation. I was trying to think who the contemporary equivalents of that are. I suppose they are the journalists and the TV pundits really. No great sense of responsibility. Novelty is everything.

Entertainment values were high. So the more popular the orator, the more prestigious it was to swing along in— to swim along in his wake. And the dinner parties of Corinth were doubtless full of chatter about the latest courses, the latest teacher, the new ideas, the new experiments in spirituality. No doubt that was how some of the Corinthians wanted to regard their Christian leaders. And when it came to that sort of assessment, well, of course, Paul wasn’t really up to it at all.

And that’s how they wanted to view the gospel. Their faith, they claimed, was the new divine Sophia, the new wisdom. And this wisdom was the key to real spirituality.

So their quarrel with Paul is that he doesn’t have a deep enough message. They thought of him and his message of the cross as immature, foundational, basic.

But they are made mature by their greater wisdom. And that seems to have meant a super spirituality by which they claimed they were living above the material plane of the present world, already experiencing the blessings of the Spirit and the fullness of heaven and the powers of the age to come here on earth now. Probably that was tied to their concern and obsession in some way with the more spectacular spiritual gifts which Paul addresses later in the letter. Because after all, the more ecstatic, the more that would be a visible proof of divine spiritual power. Now last week we saw in chapter 2, verse 6 how Paul picked up their vocabulary.

Just turn back for a moment to that reference, chapter 2, verse 6. And he says, we do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature. You see, he picks up their word and he says with irony, yes, I have got a message of wisdom for the mature, but it is totally contrary to the Corinthian wisdom. If you’re looking for a hidden esoteric wisdom that no one would even have been able to guess or predict Well, says Paul, then it’s in chapter 2, verse 8. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for the wisdom is in the fact that they crucified the Lord of glory.

And the glorious blessings that flow from the cross are both present blessings in measure but also future blessings. Verse 9: No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him. But the only way you will understand that, verse 10, is by his Spirit. So you see, already in chapter 2 he started to teach us what is real spirituality. Now we are in a position then to see how the flow from chapter 2 into chapter 3 produces for us, and I want this to be our structure this morning, 2 significant propositions about biblical spirituality.

And in the first 9 verses of chapter 3 they are very clearly spelt out for us. And I want us to consider how that impacts not only the Corinthian church in correcting their errors and challenging their complacency, but how it impacts contemporary evangelicalism. Firstly then, gospel spirituality challenges worldliness. Gospel spirituality challenges, it takes head-on worldliness. Verses 1 to 4.

Now the opening of chapter 3 is again full of irony. Brothers, I couldn’t address you as spiritual, but as worldly, mere infants in Christ. You see, the very people who are setting themselves up as spiritual and elevating the claims of their heroes over against Paul indicate by their very actions, says Paul, that they are only babies. In fact, there are 2 devastating phrases that sum them up. Do you see the first one in verse 1?

Mere infants. And the second in verse 3? You are still worldly. Mere infants, still worldly. Now we need to unpack this carefully because Don Carson warns us, and I quote, few passages of the New Testament have been abused by preachers and writers more than this one.

So with that encouragement, let’s see what we can do with it.

Firstly, there is no doubt that these misguided people were Christians. They were real believers. Some commentators have tried to make out they weren’t, but it seems to me impossible. Verse 1 says they are brothers, and he describes them as being in Christ. He’s recognised at the end of chapter 2 that we have the mind of Christ, but as he moves into chapter 3, saying, brothers, your problem is that you’re not using it.

In that sense they are spiritual people. They are born-again people, we might say. They are regenerate. And the contrast is with the natural man who came at the end of chapter 2. 2:14, do you remember?

The man without the Spirit, the natural man, doesn’t accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. But even though they are spiritual, that is they have been born by the Spirit in that technical sense, What chapter 3 is saying is their behaviour is totally inconsistent with that status. Being spiritual separates them from those who do not have the Spirit, who are unconverted people, as the church is separated from the world. But the gift of the Spirit does not lead to an elite status for some in the church with all its consequent jealousy and quarrelling. And because that is what they’re claiming, a super spirituality, Paul says you are still worldly.

Don’t complain that Paul’s message isn’t advanced or deep enough, because that shows, he says, that you’re mere infants in Christ. You haven’t left the kindergarten. In fact, you’re still in the crèche. You’re not yet even on solids. You are mere infants.

Infants. Now that is a pretty devastating blow to someone who thinks that he’s super spiritual. But Paul follows it up with a careful argument. He says, that’s why I wasn’t able to feed you with meat, because you weren’t yet able to take it. And there’s more to come.

Look at verse 2: indeed, you are still not ready— literally, still not able.

So he’s telling us that it’s possible for real believers to be stunted in their development and for whole congregations to be affected by that problem. Well, there was plenty of speaking and knowledge in Corinth and no shortage of spiritual gifts, but the church is characterised by childishness.

And though the storey of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, is still a great favourite, in the real world it’s a tragedy, isn’t it?

There are stages in our children’s development that go by all too quickly. And you know, sometimes at those particularly charming stages, people say, I just wish they could stay like this always. And yet, of course, if they did, we know it would be tragic.

And helpfully, there are stages that they can’t pass through quickly enough as far as we’re concerned. But in the spiritual context, we can never remain content with childishness. For Paul, that’s a synonym for worldliness, or literally the flesh. It’s drifting back to the old way of living, the world’s outlook and value systems. It is, as he says in verse 3, acting like mere men, the men without the Spirit.

So the Corinthian problem is not with the message or the messenger, but with the hearers. They are not able, not willing, to cope with the demands of a spirituality that centres on the cross.

But the second thing to notice is not just that they were real believers, but that their divisions are the indisputable evidence of their immaturity. How does Paul know this? Answer: because they are so divided. You see, they are no different from anyone else when they elevate their teachers to the position of party leaders and line up behind them in antagonism towards one another. That, says Paul, is walking according to man, literally.

Or at the bottom of the page there, acting like mere men, verse 3. It’s adopting the world’s lifestyle, and it’s evidenced in jealousy of what others have and what others can do, which inevitably leads to strife or rivalry, and the church is then indistinguishable from the world. So if it is true that part of the demise of the Conservative Party is because of its divisions and its internal wranglings, and that has led to its being rejected by the electorate and may well lead even more to a greater disintegration, you see that process working out. Now, if that happens in the world and that sort of attitude develops within the church, what is going to happen? The church will disintegrate.

So you see how this is evidence that they have not yet come to terms with the message of the cross. They’re not able to take in more because the fundamental lesson has been rejected. And what is the fundamental lesson? Well, you remember that old illustration we used to give in gospel talks to teenagers when we talk about the word sin and we say, if you want to know what sin is, write the letter I in the middle of it, bigger than the other letters, because sin is the big I that’s at the middle of our lives. Our rebellion against God, our self-centeredness, our self-seeking.

And if you want to know what Jesus Christ does and the difference it makes to be a Christian, well then the I is crossed out by the death and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. But Corinth doesn’t seem to have grasped that at all. To bow before a crucified Saviour is to acknowledge my own wretchedness and abject need and to cast myself on the rich mercy of God as a rebellious sinner who deserves nothing but God’s wrath and an eternity in hell separate from him. It is to recognise in that old hymn that I have nothing in my hand to bring. Simply to your cross I cling.

Now do you see that if you embrace that gospel and it becomes the heart of your life, that it spells the end of human pride and self-seeking? And therefore the end of jealousy and quarrelling and factions and divisions in the church. That is the first lesson in the school of spiritual maturity. The sort of jealousy and quarrelling that was dividing Corinth was evidence that the self has never been crucified with Christ. That the gospel had never got under their skins.

Oh, they were believers in Jesus. They confessed him as Lord. They knew that his death on the cross forgave their sins. But the working of the gospel into their lives was deficient. And it is true in us too, isn’t it?

Because this has to go on continually through our earthly lives and pilgrimage. As soon as we start to compare ourselves with others. As soon as we start to say, well, why should God bless them in that way and not me? As soon as I start to become jealous of another Christian or a Christian leader or resentful or critical or quarrelsome— and I do it very naturally and I guess you do too— it shows that the cross is not really at work in our lives. Because at root we’re saying God isn’t fair, God doesn’t know best, God doesn’t really love me, God can’t be relied on.

I know better of God, and I will be the centre of my world. And isn’t that just how a baby behaves? Give me my milk now.

Now, of course, mature Christians are not always going to agree about everything. But it’s the way we handle our differences that reveals whether we are still worldly, whether we are mere infants. And wherever you see that sort of jealousy and bickering and quarrelling, you know the cross is not at the centre. Wherever there are self-centred desires that force themselves upon other Christians, it’s a sign that we haven’t really understood the gospel. And it is a sign that if it goes unchecked, the gospel will be the casualty.

Self-centered children are a great pain, aren’t they? And it’s true within the Christian church that that is exactly the same. I was hearing just this week of a church that is going through great trauma and troubles at the moment because certain people have come in with another spirituality and they’re claiming that the full gospel is not being preached and that The cross is too basic and elementary a message. That’s happening all around us all the time. And any spirituality that moves us away from the cross is going ultimately to destroy the gospel of the cross.

That is what people don’t realise, you see. So to insist on another spirituality other than gospel spirituality, cross-centred spirituality, whether it’s Celtic or Catholic or charismatic or whatever it may be, is to divert us from the gospel, and it will ultimately destroy the gospel work. That is the great danger that Paul sees, because what we do then is put our own spiritual demands in the place of God’s gospel priorities. And what you get is spoilt children who are bickering with one another and always wanting their own way. All party spirit in the church belongs to the nursery.

Mere infants. Still worldly. And as the later chapters teach us, spiritually mature Christians love one another and build one another up. And without love, the greatest gifts are empty gongs and clanging cymbals. So gospel spirituality challenges that sort of worldliness.

The cross challenges our self-centredness. But the second thing that Paul says in verses 5 to 9 is that gospel spirituality models servanthood. Gospel spirituality models servanthood. What after all, verse 5, is Apollos? And what is Paul?

Only servants. Through whom you came to believe. You see, their failure to understand the basic gospel of the cross shows up further now in the way in which they wrongly understand the church and its leadership. If the cross spells the end of all confidence in the flesh, as obviously it does, it precludes all human boasting. It is, as chapter 1 says, the destruction of worldly wisdom.

But those seem to be the very things that these Corinthian Christians had missed. They are actually backing human wisdom as they boast about belonging to their favourite leaders, boasting of whom they follow, trying to convince others of how very prestigious their favourite leader really is. So in verse 5, Paul launches into this wrong thinking. You want to have wisdom? You want to have teachers who are powerful personalities to follow?

Well, that is not an option in the church of the crucified Jesus. What do you have? Only servants. Only servants.

So the messenger must live the lifestyle of the message. The two have to agree. We’ve seen this week how even in the secular world people hate hypocrisy. If we have a message of a crucified Christ, then the messengers have to live crucified lives. It’s obvious.

For the cross is not just the paradigm of the gospel, it is the model of all gospel ministry, of all Christian service. Servants are not masters to worship and follow. They are the Lord’s agents, verse 5, through whom you came to believe. Not in whom you came to believe, but through whom. So he is saying to them, you were not converted to Paul or Apollos.

He would say to us, you were not converted to St. Helen’s or to the Baptists or the Brethren or to Dr. X or to the Reverend Y. The human agencies, however gifted and however used by God, have to be kept in perspective. They are only servants, and a servant takes his orders from someone else. End of verse 5: as the Lord has assigned to each his task. So it’s the Lord who gives the servants his orders, not the church.

It’s not that the church employs the servants, it’s that the servants serve the Lord in order to minister to the church, and he assigns the task according to the gifting of those servants. Verse 6 expresses it so simply and so clearly, doesn’t it? I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. See, it’s God who’s doing the real work through his servants. He’s the only one who can give life to the seed.

And unless God does give life, then all the planting and the watering are in vain. It’s a fascinating way in which Paul expresses it. The tenses don’t come through too clearly in the English translation. But what he is saying is the planting happened at a point in time, the watering happened at a point in time, but God kept on making the seed grow, and he hasn’t stopped growing it yet. That is his work.

And Paul and Apollos, well, they’re just servants. Different tasks on an equal footing, but nothing unless God makes things grow. Verse 7: So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who makes things grow.

Well, that’s a great warning, isn’t it, against putting our confidence in the Lord’s servants? See, it’s a very natural thing to do, but it’s natural, not spiritual. Those who have really helped us, those whose ministry we’ve profited from, the people who led us to Christ, the people who nurtured us at the start of our Christian lives, it’s very easy for us to want to make them into heroes because they’ve helped us. To want them to be superhuman. To follow their every word and their every whim.

But that is the natural man. They are only servants through whom you believed. When I was at theological college, I remember Jim Packer saying to us, when you get out into the ministry, people will want to put you on a pedestal and you will want to let them. Well, that’s the danger, you see, isn’t it? That the church wants to elevate its ministers and the ministers rather like being elevated.

And we all come crashing down together because we are only servants.

So the Corinthians’ perspective on the Lord’s earthly servants is far too high. Paul and Apollos have no independent importance, no inherent significance in themselves. They are just the Lord’s servants. And if it were not for God’s activity, then there would be no church at Corinth at all. So he says, stop treating the church and its leaders like any other human social grouping.

Focus on a crucified Saviour and you’ll think rightly about your Christian leaders. They’re labourers, they’re expendable, they can be moved on at any time. So no Christian worker should think of my pulpit or my people or my small group or my seat on this committee or that That’s back to the flesh and the world. But I’ve been crucified with Christ.

So it means, you see, the end of all competitiveness between Christians. That awful poison at the heart of so much church life that actually ruins our work for the Lord. So much bitterness and hurt come out of a competitive spirit. And instead of those divisions, gospel spirituality stresses the essential unity of all Christian servants. Do you see that in verse 8?

It’s a great verse. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labour. More literally, the planter and and the waterer are one. One unit. One entity.

Well, you see, that’s the answer to Corinth, isn’t it? Paul and Apollos are not in competition. They’re not in competition with one another as preachers or leaders. And that is never right in the church. It’s never right for us to compare preachers and leaders and how people pray and whether we think they’re successful witnesses or not.

And to say these Christians are more spiritual than those Christians. We are not in competition with one another. We’re not in competition with other churches or other denominations. We are not rivals. We are one if we are serving the crucified Lord.

And God gives to all of us different tasks and different opportunities, and we have distinctive gifts and contributions. And every piece of Christian service matters, and each will be rewarded according to his own labour. Well, that’s a wonderful liberty, isn’t it? To know that God isn’t going to judge me as over against you, or you as over against me. That’s what the philosophers did.

That’s what the teachers the Corinthians loved did. These travelling teachers graded their disciples. They had beginners, they had those making progress, they had the They had those who were taken into the inner circle and told the secret things. And the Corinthian church has taken these secular categories into their thinking about ministry. And Paul is saying the Lord does not set up tables of merit.

He loves to reward. And his criterion is faithful labour, hard work done for his glory. That’s what he loves.

And that’s something we can all aspire to. God honours all his hard workers. So there are diverse tasks with one purpose and rewards for each faithful servant. And verse 9 sums it up when it says to us, for we are God’s fellow workers, you are God’s field.

In fact, the word God occurs in verse 9 3 times at the beginning of each of those phrases. God’s fellow workers we, that is Paul and Apollos, are. God’s field you are. God’s building you are.

Speaking on behalf of those who serve the church in Corinth, Paul says we belong to God as fellow workers. It’s not that we’re working alongside God, but we’re working alongside one another under his authority. We are all on the team. We’re all part of the task force. Horse.

God is the owner and we are the workers in the field that is the church. But then the whole church is the field that God owns in which he sets his labourers to work. It’s God’s field and it’s God’s building, a metaphor that we’ll look at next week.

So you see how the verse summarises the thrust of the paragraph. We all belong only to God. Leaders don’t own the church, whether they’re denominational leaders or local church leaders, and the members don’t own the church. However many years they’ve been part of it, however much time and money and energy they poured into it, it is God’s field, God’s building, and it is God who produces the crop. It is God who raises the edifice.

It’s God who selects the labourers. It’s God who allots the tasks. And it is God who rewards the faithful. And to realise that is not to abdicate proper leadership, but to see that gospel spirituality models servanthood.

So I guess we ought to ask ourselves, how mature are we as a congregation?

It’s a corporate application, isn’t it, to the church in Corinth. So it does apply to the congregation as well, of course, as to each of us individually. And it’s fascinating, isn’t it, when we ask those questions to see where Paul’s teaching drives us. I wonder what he’d say of us. Mere infants?

Still worldly?

Or servants? Servants who are committed to the Lord, who is the master, and who seek to be faithful to the task he’s assigned, knowing that he, the infallible judge of the hearts and secrets of all of us, is the God who loves to reward those who are faithful to him.

I guess we will be faithful servants when we grasp the centre of our spirituality. Only God makes things grow. Only God brings spiritual life. And the only way he does that is through a Christ who was crucified, who has risen and ascended and glorified. So as he’s going to say a little later on, no more quarrelling about men, no more natural ways of thinking.

No more squeezing our spirituality out of a mould that is really fundamentally worldly, but simply a recognition of Jesus Christ as Lord and him crucified that sends us out to be servants for Jesus’ sake.

Let’s pray together.

We thank you, our gracious God, for the liberty it is and the refreshment it is to step outside of the world that squeezes us so frequently into its mould and to breathe the fresh air of your word by your Spirit. Thank you, Lord, for the way in which you liberate us from those things that destroy and disintegrate Christian fellowship when we ourselves bow again at the cross of the Lord Jesus and acknowledge that in him and in him alone is all our help and strength and life. And we pray that that cross-centred gospel spirituality may go on characterising our life together as a fellowship of your people and all that is done through this local church and any other local churches in which you give us a part to play. We pray that for the church across our land. We ask, Lord, that you will return us to a cross-centred spirituality that challenges childishness, that does not act as the world acts, that is prepared to be crucified with the Lord Jesus and then to live the life of a servant in the power of his resurrection.

Have mercy on us, Lord, in this generation. We so much need your help. We’ve drifted so far from the biblical priorities in so many ways in our evangelical churches. And we pray that you will help us to be servants, to help others wherever we can. For Jesus’ sake.

Amen.