Test of Spirituality – 1 Corinthians 3:1-9

The words of this 1997 article in Christianity Today leave me feeling sad:  “I was startled recently when I went through the news columns of Christianity Today for 1996 and found over a dozen good-sized fights reported among American Christians. (No doubt hundreds of other fights were too local to make national news.) They included the full gamut of quarrels over property, doctrine, money, leadership. Even though I had read all these stories as they appeared, I had not taken in their cumulative effect. The frequency of our fighting left me numb.”  I’m thinking of a church in my locale that was one of the most, in my mind, powerful, going and growing churches in our town, that ended up wracked with anger and fighting over an issue irrelevant to the gospel.  Lord Jesus, please help us.

But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. 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? For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being merely human?

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.  (1 Corinthians 3:1-9 ESV)

Paul comes right out at this point and levels his evaluation of the Corinthian saints as fleshly, not spiritual as they claim to be.  His hard evidence is their sectarian spirit.  They have failed to discern the merit of God’s servants as those who partner with God to build His church.  There are planters (evangelists) and waterers (disciplers) who serve in God’s harvest field.  The Corinthians should see them as equal in God’s plan.

Are you elevating leaders to an improper place?  Are you rejecting God’s person because he or she does not do the kind of ministry you need?  Do you pit leaders against each other who don’t see themselves as enemies?  Are you in this way behaving more like the world than like Jesus? Don’t be infantile in your faith.