Servants, Not Celebrities

 

God Gives the Growth – 1 Corinthians 3:1–9

Dear Friends, Paul writes to a church that had received the gospel, yet was still behaving like infants. He could not address them as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh. The evidence was not hidden. There was jealousy and strife. Some said, “I follow Paul,” and others, “I follow Apollos.” The problem was not that they remembered who had first spoken to them. The problem was that they had turned servants into banners and divided the family of God around personalities.

Paul is painfully clear. He fed them with milk because they were not ready for solid food, and even now they were not ready. Immaturity is not mainly a lack of information. It is a way of living that is still “merely human.” When the church splits into camps, when loyalty to a preacher outweighs loyalty to Christ, we are behaving like the world, not like people who have the Spirit.

Then Paul asks the searching questions: “What then is Apollos? What is Paul?” The answer is humbling. They are servants through whom the Corinthians believed, as the Lord assigned to each. One planted. One watered. Neither of them produced the life. “God gave the growth.” So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.

That is a word our generation still needs. We easily make much of the planter and the waterer and little of the Lord. We remember the voice we first heard, the style we prefer, the personality we like, and we forget that every true conversion and every true increase belongs to God. The workers are one. Each will receive his wages according to his labour. But the field is not theirs. “You are God’s field, God’s building.”

This passage both rebukes and comforts. It rebukes our party spirit, our pride in leaders, and our slowness to grow up. It comforts every quiet servant who plants or waters and sees little result. Growth is God’s work. Our task is faithfulness. His task is life.

Pause & Pray: Ask the Lord to show you any place where you have attached yourself more to a preacher, a group or a preference than to Christ Himself. Thank Him for every servant who planted or watered in your life. Then pray that He would give the growth in your own heart and in the church — and that you would be content to be a fellow worker, not a celebrity.

Verse to Remember: “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” (1 Corinthians 3:7 ESV)

Question to Consider: Are you still living on milk when God is calling you to grow up — and have you given His servants more honour than the Lord who actually gives the increase?

Article written by Shaun Fereday, Leader @SFGH Church