Immanuel Sermon Audio
Grow Up (1 Corinthians 3:1-9)
"Take your Bible and find the book of 1 Corinthians." We're going to be in chapter 3, 1 Corinthians 3. Last week we started a new series, just a short series here in the middle of the summer, a break from the gospel of Luke, and the series is called "Grow Up," striving for maturity in Christ. And so last week we looked at Ephesians and we listened to what Paul had to say to the church in Ephesus, encouraging them to grow up, and they needed sound doctrine, and they needed to understand godly leadership and the role that that played in their life. And this morning we're going to listen to what Paul says to the church in Corinth. Chapter 3, 1 Corinthians, there's an outline in the bulletin if you like to follow along there. In just a few minutes we're going to read from 1 Corinthians 3. I don't think I have to tell you, I think you know that we live in a day and an age of cultural upheaval, cultural debate, lots of people in our day and age convinced that they know what is right, what is wrong, what is best, what's okay, what's not okay, and lots of people very, very vocal about that. One of the interesting things in the United States today where we live and all of this sort of upheaval and debate is that a lot of people in the United States still feel the need to have God on their side of the argument. And so on all of these cultural issues that people argue about in debate, there's this strong tendency in the United States to say, well, God is with us, the Bible is with us, and sometimes you have to do gymnastics with the Bible to get it to say what you want it to say, but there's this desire to say, God is with us, God is on our side of this, and a lot of times what happened is people say, I want Jesus to be on my side, I want Jesus to speak for me, and so they go to the gospels, they find some things that Jesus says here or there, they take those and ignore the rest, and they think that they've now co-opted Jesus to their side of the debate. What you've really done is you have recreated Jesus in your own image. You've made Jesus as you want Him to be, not as He really is. And so let's just think about a couple of things that are true about Jesus when you read the gospels in their entirety, these are things you cannot debate, you cannot argue about. A couple of things that are true about Jesus. Number one, Jesus cared for the sick, He cared for the poor, He cared for the disadvantaged, He cared for the helpless. He had a heart for those people. You can't argue that, you cannot debate it. People who were down on their luck, who life had beaten them down, Jesus had compassion on those people. Jesus loved sinners. He talked to them. He had relationships with them. He spent time with them. Different situations, He went to their homes and went to their parties and invested in their lives. He loved sinners, but let's also be clear that He called them to repent. He was never satisfied just to be friends with sinners and just sort of hope that one of these days they would come around. He always called them to repentance. He called Zacchaeus to repentance. He called the woman at the well to repentance. He called the rich young ruler to repentance over and over and over again. Jesus encounters these people who acknowledge their sinfulness, who acknowledge their need, and He calls them out of that into repentance. Here's something else that's true. Jesus called people to discipleship, not decision. When He called them to repent, it wasn't just pray a prayer, make a decision, and then I'm going to be on my way. It was, "I want you to follow me." Sometimes that literally meant, "Stop what you're doing and follow me." Sometimes that meant, "Go back to your hometown and tell other people about me," but He wanted people to be disciples. He loved children. The disciples tried different situations to keep the kids away and Jesus welcomed them. He loved children. He valued them. He wanted to be around them. He wanted to spend time with them and at different times, He encouraged us to be like children. He wants us to have humility like a child. He wants us to have faith like that of a child. Here's the rub when you think about this last idea that Jesus encouraged people to be like children. Some of us don't understand that Jesus wants us to be like children in some ways and in other ways, He really, really wants us to grow up. And some of us who claim the name of Christ are just content to be childlike in every area of our life, never what Jesus had in mind, never what Paul wanted when he traveled around and he started these churches. Yes, he wants him to have humility like a child. Yes, he wants him to have faith like a child. But in all of it, Paul is eventually saying to Ephesus to Corinth to the rest of them, you need to grow up. You need to strive for maturity in Christ. And so that's what we're talking about in this sermon series. Of all the churches that needed to grow up, Corinth was probably the biggest baby, the biggest child. The one that Paul wrote to, and if you could just summarize the entire book of Corinthians, maybe what Paul would just say to them is with a sigh and a roll of the eyes or maybe trying to grab them around the shirt collar, you've got to grow up. The church was a complete mess. Paul was the missionary who started this church. You can read in Acts 18. Paul goes to Corinth. He spends about a year and a half there. He's preaching. He's teaching. He's ministering before he moves on. He was the missionary who started it, the founding pastor of the church. But then he left. And after he left, he starts getting reports about things that are happening at the church in Corinth. And the reports are, if I could summarize them, they're acting like a bunch of kids. They're children. And so Paul writes this letter to them. And in our passage, he talks about, "You're not ready for solid food, you just have to have milk." And he talks about, "You need to grow." And so we're going to listen. As Paul talks to the church in Corinth, as he encourages them to grow up, to strive for maturity in Christ, what does that mean for us? What does he want from them and how do we apply it to our church and to our lives? So look at 1 Corinthians chapter 3, beginning in verse 1, "But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh as infants," mark that word, "infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you are not ready for it. And even now, you are not yet ready, for you're 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? When one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow a Paulus," are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants, through whom you believed, is 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. This is the word of God. Very simply this morning, I want you to hear some of the things that Paul is calling the Corinthians to think about, things that they need to do in order to grow up. And the first one isn't even on your outline. It's really just sort of an understanding that they need to come to. And Paul talks about it when he describes them as people of the flesh. Look at verse 1. You are people of the flesh. Verse 3. You are still of the flesh. Here's what Paul's saying right out of the gate to the Corinthians. Look, you've got all these problems in your church. It's a mess. You've got divisions, people fighting, people suing each other. You have sexual immorality that's open and out in the public and everyone just thinks it's okay. You have people getting drunk at the Lord's Supper. You have chaos in your worship service. Nothing is good. It's all a mess. And the problem is that you're people of the flesh. He doesn't say to them, the devil made you do it. Is it true that the devil prowls around like a roaring lion seeking people to devour? That is true. But he doesn't blame Satan for this. Is it true that the world tries to draw us back to our old ways of life? Absolutely. But he doesn't say it's the world's fault. Paul says, look, the problem is you. The problem's not out there. The problem is in here. You're still people of the flesh. There's this old part of you, this sinful part of you. It's been saved. It's been forgiven. It's in the process of being changed. But it's still there and you've got to fight it every day. You've got to wake up and fight and you're not fighting. You're just people of the flesh. You're just living according to the flesh. You're just doing what the old you would have done. And right out of the gate, he wants these people to know. Right at the beginning of this letter, if you're going to put all these pieces back where they belong, if you're going to grow up into maturity in Jesus Christ, the first thing you've got to acknowledge is that the problem is you. There's something inside of you broken and twisted, depraved that leads you down these roads into all these problems that you're experiencing in your church. He says, "Your people of the flesh," in the remedy, verse 6 and 7, you need to grow up. You've got to grow up. How do they do that? Number one, in Corinth or at a manual, if you're going to grow up, you need unity within the church, unity within the church. Right beneath that, the church in Corinth was divided over lots of things. Here's a few. Personalities, some of them like Paul, some like Tepalos, some like Peter, some like Jesus. They're all divided over personalities. They're divided over matters of conscience. They're arguing and fighting about, "Can they eat the meat that's been sacrificed to the idol? Can they not eat it? Should they stay away? Is it okay?" And when Paul talks about it in chapter 8, to be honest with you, he says enough to make both sides of the arguments upset. Both views, he says, you missed it. You're dividing over matters of conscience. Chapter 11, 17 to 22, they're divided over economic diversity. Those who have, not concerned about those who have not. They're divided over all of these issues. This is remarkable when you think about the people that had preached in the "pulpit" at First Baptist Corinth. Think about the preachers that they had listened to, Paul first. Then when Paul left, they got to listen to Apollo, some mighty man in the Scriptures. At some point, some of these people had heard Peter preach. Maybe he had traveled through town. Maybe they had traveled to Jerusalem, but they'd been exposed to Peter's preaching ministry. And apparently, some of them had even heard Jesus preach. Again, maybe they had been in Jerusalem while Jesus was alive. They listened to him preach, and they're divided over their favorite preacher. Now look, those are four pretty good preachers. Paul, Apollo, Peter, and Jesus. That's what they'd been exposed to, and they're still divided. They're still fighting. When you think about the fact that they're divided, after listening to that preaching, it's a slap in the face to any preacher who thinks they can stand up on a Sunday morning, spend 30 minutes talking to their people, and they're just going to grow up. It's not enough. And when you think about the fact that they're divided, after hearing this great preaching, it's a slap in the face to any congregation or any person in the pew who thinks, "Well, I'm going to come, and I'm going to sit here for 30 minutes on Sunday mornings, and I'm going to grow up." It doesn't work that way. You say, "Well, so preaching and teaching really doesn't matter." No, it matters. And we talked about that last week in Ephesians 4. You need pastors and teachers, and you need sound doctrine. You need those things if you're going to grow up. But if you think you're just going to sit underneath someone like a sponge and take in everything they say for 30 minutes on Sunday morning, and then magically you're just going to grow up, you're going to end up like Corinth. It doesn't work that way. And I didn't design it to work that way. The passage we looked at in Ephesians is not the only instruction we have for how to grow up. And right here Paul says, "If you're going to grow up, there must be unity in the church." Now, I know I say this to you regularly. I'm going to keep saying it regularly. Say it up here. I say it when we have a new member class. You don't have to like everything at a manual. In fact, I fully expect that you won't. You don't have to like every sermon I preach. You don't have to like every lesson your Sunday school teacher delivers. You don't have to like every schedule that we come up with or time slots or this or that. You don't have to like everything. And as you look around the room, let me just let you off the hook. You don't have to be best buds with everyone in the room. Some of you, that's a relief for you. Here's what you do have to do. You do have to care about the unity of this church, period, end of story, that's it. If you're part of this church family, you don't have to like it all, but you have to fight tooth and nail for the unity of a manual Baptist church. That means you're going to have to guard your heart at times from being angry or bitter about things. That certainly means you're going to have to guard your mouth at times from saying things that don't necessarily need to be said. But you have to fight for unity. You have to care about the unity of this church if we are going to grow up. So number one, you need unity. Number two, you need a biblical view of leadership, biblical view of leadership. And the key here is balance, right? You don't want to go to extremes on this idea of biblical leadership. The problem in Corinth is that they had gone to the extreme of having an overly inflated view of their spiritual leaders. So they're arguing, right? And they're fighting. Paul, that's my guy. No. Peter, that's my guy. No Apollos. I like him. And then you've got the people who they sound like the voice of reason, we just like Jesus. But they're probably just as fleshly as the rest of them and just want to lay the trump card down to win the debate. You're all wrong. I just love Jesus. And they have this overly inflated view of Paul and Apollos and of Peter. Here's what Paul says to these people. This is on your outline. Those who put their leaders on an exalted pedestal must remember that leaders are fellow workers, fellow workers. Literally how Paul describes them here is their servants or their waiters. They're just servers. He's saying to the church in Corinth, take them down off the pedestal and just see they're just fellow workers. They're just servers. They're just laborers. Yes, God's used them. You believe through them. But what's Paul? What's Apollos? Nothing. They're just fellow workers and fellow servants. Let me try to explain how this in one scenario might impact us today, 2015 in Odessa, Texas. As Paul talks about this, Paul, Apollos, Peter, he's talking to a church and there's division within this church because within this one church, one church, they have these four different leaders and they each sort of have their own faction. Today, technology has taken that exact same problem, the cult of personality and it's blown it up on a global scale. The same problem in Corinth except now it's just across churches, across state lines, across the globe, we have the same issue on a massive, massive scale. This is not a tight timeline but let me show you a few developments over the last 50 years that have brought this about and I think you'll understand what I'm saying. In the 50s, there's a young evangelistic preacher named Billy Graham and he does something fairly innovative and he starts broadcasting sermons and crusades on TV for people to watch. Taking technology and the goal is, I think, noble. We want to leverage this technology and use it for the gospel and so he's preaching and they put it on TV and people watching all over the place and pastors pay attention to this. Others start to think, I can preach in one place and not only can I fill the room but people can hear me all over the place, that's amazing. And somewhere in there in the pastor's heart, there's the noble idea of we can spread the gospel this way and somewhere in there in the pastor's heart there's the idea of I can become a celebrity. And so years go by, 70s and 80s, you have the rise of these famous televangelists. Do you recognize some of those faces? People you watch on TV and they have this ministry and most of these guys connected to a church in some way, shape or form, but now bigger than just that church and they're on TV and people are watching and well, who do you watch? Well, I watch this guy and I don't like that guy, I like this guy and people have their favorite that they're invested in. In the 80s and 90s, you have the rise of the mega church and I don't mean like there were no mega churches before that, but they just became way more common in the 80s and the 90s, these just huge churches and I'm not knocking mega churches. Mega churches are good and bad just like small churches are good and bad, but you have these mega churches, they're just popping up all over the place and usually they're centered on one sort of charismatic dynamic person. He's the key to the whole thing and all of these people coming to these huge churches. 90s in 2000s, I don't have a picture of this, but you have podcasts, I'm going to podcast preaching. We do that at a manual, right? We say when people miss, when they have to work in the nursery, when they're out of town, folks who don't live here, we want them to be able to hear the things that we're talking about. It wasn't really new in one sense because preaching had been on the radio, but what is new is now you have access to all sorts of people, all sorts of preaching, and it's at your fingertips. You don't have to tune in at the exact right time, it's on the radio. You just download it, listen to it, whenever you want to listen to it. Latest trend that's undeniable, it's a trend, is the multi-campus church. One church, many locations, and the vast majority of these churches that are going to this approach say, "We're going to have one location, somebody's going to preach here, and then we're going to beaming on a Jumbotron screen to the other location." We're going to have all these people, all these different locations, but they're listening to the same one person. I've talked to some people who have met with the key leaders at the largest church in the United States that has this multi-location deal, and one of the questions they asked him is, "What happens if your pastor dies?" You're beaming him to all these locations all over, all these campuses. What happens if he dies, and you know what their answer was? We're done. We're done. That's why people come to listen to him, to hear him. That's not a biblical view of church leadership. It's the same problem that was happening in Corinth, blown up with technology, but at its root it's the exact same issue, and Paul is saying to these people, "Please take your leaders down off the pedestal that you've put them on." Paul, Apollos, Peter, stop it. It's not about the preacher, it's about what God has done through the preacher. It's not about the personality standing up there, it's about the message once for all delivered to the saints that the preacher or the pastor or the teacher is communicating, and so he says, "Don't put them on this pedestal, they're just fellow workers." Twice, he makes it very clear. That is the one who gives the growth. If you think that just because you sit under this one person that you're automatically going to grow spiritually, you missed it. They don't give the growth. God gives the growth, or on the flip side, if you think, "I'll never be able to grow under this person." You missed it. It's not about that person. They don't give the growth, they're not in charge of that. God gives the growth, he says to the Corinthians. That's one side of the debate. If you've put them on this pedestal, you've put them in a position where they don't belong, take them down off the pedestal, they're just a fellow worker. Here's the other side, in some of us struggle with this one. Those who refuse to submit to spiritual leadership must remember that godly leaders are to be followed. Those who refuse to submit to spiritual leaders must remember that godly leaders are to be followed. We saw this in Ephesians. You can see it in Hebrews 13-17, I'll let you look that up on your own. In somewhere in there, you find the balance. You find the balance of saying, "God has put spiritual leaders, pastors, teachers, elders in my life to lead me, and my job, Ephesians 4, Hebrews 13, is to follow." At the same time, I'm not to put these people up on a pedestal as if they are the key to my spiritual life. It's not about them, it's about what God might do through them, and so Paul is saying to the church, "You need to have a biblical view of leadership, spiritual leadership." Here's the last idea, this is a big one. Paul's writing to these believers in Corinth, and he says, "You need to have a biblical view of grace." If you're going to grow up, you have to have a biblical view, a biblical understanding of grace. And here's the drum in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2 and 3. Here's the drum that Paul keeps hitting, okay, over and over and over again. God is sovereign over the process of salvation. He just comes back to it over and over and over and over again. You've got to understand grace and how it works and how it doesn't work. And Paul is saying to them, "It's so clear when you read through these verses, God is in control of all of it from beginning to end." Look in your Bible at 1 Corinthians 1, verse 4. 1 Corinthians 1, 4. Paul says, "I give thanks to my God always for you." Why? Because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus. Did Paul give it to him, did Apollos give it to him, did Peter give it to him? It's God's grace given to them in Jesus. That in every way you're enriched in Him in all speech and all knowledge, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you so that you're not lacking any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. Look at verse 8, "Jesus, who will sustain you to the end, can Paul sustain them, can Paul sustain them, can Peter sustain them, Jesus can sustain you? He gave you the grace and He can sustain you to the end." Guiltless in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ, God is faithful. Do they rest their hopes in Paul's faithfulness? Apollos' faithfulness? Peter's faithfulness? No, God is faithful, whom you were called into the fellowship of His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Look at the end of chapter 1. Look at verse 27. He says, "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. He chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. He chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not to bring to nothing the things that are so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of Him, you're in Christ Jesus, because of who? Because of Paul, you're in Jesus? No. Because of Apollos you're in Jesus, no, because God chose you, you're in Christ Jesus. So that no human being might boast. Because of Him, you're in Christ Jesus who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So as it is written, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. Don't boast in yourself or Paul or Paul or Peter, they're just fellow workers. God's the one who's done a work in your life, so you boast in God. Look at our passage, chapter three, verse five. What's Paul? What's Apollos? We're just servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each. God's in control of this. I planted in Apollos water, yes, but who's the one who gave the growth? God gave the growth. The one who plants and waters in anything, but it's God who gives the growth. You just add all those verses together. Here's what Paul just said, God's the one who gave you grace, God's the one who called you to Jesus, God's the one who brought you into Jesus, God's the one who's going to be faithful, God's the one who's going to sustain you to the end. From beginning, middle to the end, God is the one at work in you. Don't put your hope in Paul, don't put your hope in Apollos, don't put your hope in Landon, don't put your hope in your Sunday school teacher at a manual is the one who's going to make you grow up. I can't do that. Paul couldn't do that, but he understood God is the one who gave you grace, God is the one who called you, God is the one who put you in Jesus, God will be faithful, God will sustain you. Here's the reality. As parents and grandparents, as Sunday school teachers, as a pastor, sometimes you have people in your life and you just want to grab them by the shirt collar and tell them to grow up and you just want to try to shake some sense into them and you just want to try to make them strive for maturity in Christ. If you've ever tried to do that, you are painfully aware of the fact that you can't do it. God doesn't intend for you to do it, he intends for you to be a fellow worker. He says in here, we're the field, we're working in the field, God's the one who gives the growth. We're the building, we're the workers, building this building, but God's the one who gives the growth. And you understand and I have to understand that our job is not to shake spiritual sense into people, not to just try to prod people into growing as a follower of Christ, but to know our role as a fellow servant, as a co-worker, and to pray, God, you can give the growth. You can make them grow up. You can work in them from beginning to middle to end to lead them to maturity in Christ. When we realize that, when we acknowledge that, we realize this is in God's hands and if it's in God's hands, our job is not to try to do it ourselves, but it's to beg and plead with God to do it through us and to do it for us. So on that note, we're going to pray, you bow, we're going to ask God to do what only He can do. Father, we come to you, we're grateful to be a part of a church that is unified and we pray that you will continue to work that in us. Father, guard us from our flesh, guard us from the desire to have factions and rivals and divisions. Father, give us a biblical view, a balanced view of spiritual leadership. Father, help us not to put people in a position up on a pedestal where they don't belong. Help us not to look to other human beings to do what only you can do. Father, help us to remember the power of your grace, the gift of it. You're calling us to faith in Jesus. Your faithfulness and your promise to sustain us. Father, our hope ultimately is not in other human beings, in a preacher, in a teacher, in a podcast, in a church, but our hope is in you. And Father, our prayer is that as we are united as a church family, and as we acknowledge the leaders that you've put in place here, that we would grow, that these fellow servants and these fellow laborers would be the means through which we come to faith and we grow in our faith and we mature. But Father, we look to you for the growth. Guard us from the temptation of chasing personalities. Guard us from the temptation of looking for shortcuts to growth, of looking for ways to grow that are a dead end, that don't lead us to maturity in Christ. Father, guard us from following the wisdom of the world. Father, as we sing, we want to acknowledge you and your power and your grace. Father, you are the strong one who is able to do any and all things above and beyond what we can understand or comprehend. Father, receive our worship, send your spirit to work and our hearts to press these truths down into our souls, to convict us where we need to be convicted. Father, and to grow us. We love you. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen