156. Year A - 6th Sunday in Ordinary Time: 1 Corinthians 3:1-9 - "We Are God's Building"

Pulpit Notes

One of the compliments that people often give when assessing a sermon is that it was “meaty.” What they often mean is that it was heavy in theology or history. It made them think about the text. Perhaps they learned something that they didn’t know before.

In our text this morning Paul draws a contrast between milk and solid food. In most of our minds, our default understanding of this is to think of “milk” sort of like a Sunday school level of understanding the Christian faith. Or maybe it is the kind of message that might appeal to new believers.

But we want “meat.” Good heavy sermons that you have to chew on for a while first before swallowing and digesting it. Just like a steak. I mean you wouldn’t feed steak to kids. They would just complain how hard it is to chew.

So that is the contrast that we have in our minds as we hear Paul writing these words to the Corinthians. But this gets the whole passage wrong.

We have to read chapter three here as an application of chapters one and two. In the previous chapters, Paul draws a contrast between the wisdom of the world, which is foolishness to God and the wisdom which comes from God.

Paul explains that God’s wisdom comes out of the heart of God, taught to us by the Spirit of God. The man of the Spirit is the one who knows spiritual truths that come from the very heart of God. He is a man, filled with the Spirit, who meets God and is in contact with God throughout his life.

The question that Paul is asking here is whether you have made the journey from spiritual infancy and childhood to adulthood. The adult is the one who communes with the heart of God himself by means of the Spirit. He is taught spiritual things by the Holy Spirit, the wisdom that resides in the secret places of God the Father himself.

The question that lays in the background here is, “Do you know the heart of God? “Have you met God?” Are you a ‘spiritual’ man, a man of the Spirit?”

The implication is that the Corinthians, who love worldly knowledge, worldly wisdom, all the stuff of rhetoric and philosophy, for all their knowledge, they are still children who need milk.

What Paul is saying here is that theology, theological rigor, all the things that we would consider to be meat, all of this is the kinds of stuff the world loves. Rational discussions. Debating Christian ideas. Discussing creeds and confessions. Its all spiritual baby food. Milk.

What Paul is concerned with here is whether or not you are living the resurrected life. “In Christ” we are a new creation. “In Christ” we have been raised from the dead.

Are we living the resurrected life? Are we being transformed into spiritual men and women with spiritual bodies? Are we revealing our resurrected bodies to the world?

He draws a contrast in the opening of the passage. Is your focus on “the flesh” or on “the spirit?”

Here, the English translation in the NIV is not helping us. Paul is drawing a contrast between two states of being. One is our earthly, fleshly state. The other is who we are in the resurrected life, our spiritual state in the new earth where we have a spiritual, imperishable, resurrected body.

The NIV makes it sound like a “horizontal” divide between us and the world. Rather, we should see this more as a vertical divide. Are you stuck in your old, earthly, fleshly way are living; or are you embracing your life that his now hidden “in Christ” in the heavenly realm?

The Christian faith is not therapy. It is not life lessons or self-help. The Christian faith is not about getting everything together and living your best life.

The Christian faith, the Christian life, the Way, is about revealing the saving work of God that was accomplished in Jesus Christ. Are you revealing the saving work of God in Christ?

The σαρκικοί, those who are “people of the flesh” are contrasted to the πνευματικοῖς, the “people of the Spirit.”

The σαρκικοί are those who hold on to fleshly characteristics. Paul is thinking here about those who want to hold onto the wisdom of the world. The so-called wisdom of the world tells us we can’t meet God and that if we do there is nothing there to actually know. Not like things you can see and touch. At best all that we can know about God is that we can maybe get a feeling of something greater than us. But this feeling has no real content. There is nothing there to know. It’s just a fleeting emotion.

Unfortunately, far too many of us as Christians, most of us, have accepted this critique and said in response, “But God had revealed himself in the scriptures.” So, we study the Bible and we develop complex theologies out of the Bible. None of this is bad. Sound teaching and theology is important. Its just, in Paul’s mind, spiritual milk.

The real content, the real meat, comes from meeting God in the Spirit and encountering the deep mysteries of his heart.

This is what frustrates Paul. You guys are arguing over who is the better teacher, me or Apollos, but this is the wrong question.

Now we have to be clear here, Paul is not saying that theological teaching is a bad thing. Good theology is important. And there is still a battle for our minds, between us and the world. He talks about this in Colossians, that we should not be taken captive by the deceptive philosophies of the world.

And we are warned that deceptive teachers will try to worm their way into the community and lead people away from sound teaching.

But sound teaching is only the beginning. It is milk. The meat is God himself.

By expressing loyalty to earthly teachers or schools of theology, as if giving the correct rational theological understanding of the Bible and theology is the goal, we end up having a diet of nothing but baby’s milk. Baby formula. Correct theology is not the goal. At best, it is the starting point. It is the stuff of spiritual children.

Many of us have deep theological knowledge and think we have arrived somewhere, that we have reached the goal. At best we are now ready for the real journey.

The real journey is drawing close to God. As I have said before, God is out there, he is in here, he is all around us doing his work all the time. Our journey is to join him in his work.

One of the primary outlets, the primary vehicles for him to reveal the resurrected life of the new heaven and the new earth is through us. Even if this is seen but, in a mirror, dimly, this dim reflected light that shines in the darkness will seem like the sun itself is shining upon us and the world around us.

Paul is very clear. I planted. Apollos watered. But God makes the plants grow. Whatever happens it is because we are growing closer to God in the Spirit and he is able to reveal in us ever more of his saving work.

We come alongside God and we help him in his work. God reveals to the world his saving work through us. Again, Paul is clear. It isn’t about me and my teaching. My teaching just gets things started. You want the real teaching, you want the real wisdom that isn’t taught by human words but is taught by the Spirit of God himself.

This is the thing that world denies. That God can be met. In meeting God there is real content, real substance. That meeting is the meat, the solid food that we as human beings crave. God himself is that nice juicy barbecued steak.

We often make the mistake, when the milk of a rational, theological faith no longer sustains us, is that we don’t break out of the modern denial that God can be met. Instead, we turn to the emotional. We want our heart to be moved. But emotions are not the same thing as meeting God. They are often a simulacrum: us convincing ourselves that meeting God should feel a certain way and so we go chasing that feeling.

And once we start chasing feelings, it’s easy to forget even the spiritual milk of theology and sound moral instruction. We just do what we feel is right.

The whole “head/heart” thing has been a disaster for the church.

Instead, we should be looking to God, to meet and be with God.

It is God who makes us grow. “Only God makes things grow,” Paul says. That includes us in our spiritual lives.

Paul is telling us that unity does not come from rational theological agreement. It doesn’t come from feelings. The answer is not going to come from resolving the differences in emphasis or the way that Paul or Apollos give the teaching of the gospel. It does not matter is Paul or Apollos is more sophisticated or has the better answer on this or that question.

Real unity does not come from theological teaching. Theology is just milk. It is baby food.

Real unity comes because together, sharing in the same Holy Spirit, we are as a people are brought into the heart of God and are taught by the Spirit, spiritual truths in spiritual words. We trust that our differences will be resolved in the presence of God through Christ.

What God is looking for is the reversal of the separation that occurred because of our sin in the Garden of Eden.

God wants us to be spiritual men who know his heart, his mind, his wisdom.

Paul begins by addressing these men as “brothers.” They are believers. But they are children. They are men of the flesh. They want earthly wisdom. They are not seeking the things of God.

Just being in the church for a long time does not make one a spiritual man. Being considered wise by earthly standards does not make one a spiritual man.

It is a thing that we are seeking with all that we have, it is the pearl of great price. And yet at the same time, even as we work to make ourselves ready, ultimately we are waiting on the Lord for him to make it grow.

Sometimes the waiting is the point.

As we wait, we read the Word and meditate on its teachings. We pray, continually. We gather for worship and communion. We give our gifts. We serve.

In all of this, none of it is the cause of our growth. God can use any and all of these things, just like he used the teaching of Apollos and Paul, he can use all of these things to make us grow, to build us up into his temple, his holy people with whom he can commune.

You may trust God, but does God trust you. Remember, God will be revealing his very heart, the spiritual wisdom, spiritual truths, he will be revealing in and through you the heavenly life.

We are God’s building, his work.

The whole point of it all is that today, here and now, we are able to live and experiencing the new life, the resurrected life, the life of union with God in the Spirit, taught by the same Spirit spiritual truths in spiritual words.

This life of union with God in the Spirit is the meat, the solid food that we crave.

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