More Milk Or Meat

More Milk or Meat The Choice is Yours

Corinthians I 3:1 And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ.

Corinthians I 3:2 I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able.

Corinthians I 3:3 For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men?

Corinthians I 3:4 For while one saith, I am of Paul; and another, I am of Apollos; are ye not carnal?

Corinthians I 3:5 Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?

Corinthians I 3:6 I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.

Corinthians I 3:7 So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.

I would like to use for a topic this evening more milk or meat

When a child is born, their digestive system is such that milk is the only thing they can handle. As they continue to drink the milk, they begin to grow and before you know it they want more milk, and all of a sudden they come to a point where milk just will not satisfy their hunger, it won’t satisfy their needs, any longer so you start to put some cereal in the milk, and as they grow and their appetite increases until the point where milk won’t satisfy, milk with cereal won’t satisfy, and mama finally says this child is ready to start eating real food or meat.

Now parents out there we know what a hungry baby sounds like. And we know when its time to graduate that child from milk to meat.

And we also know if that transition from milk to meat does not happen then something is wrong. I have not seen a strong healthy teen-ager living off of just milk. No in order to grow and mature the child must move from the milk to the meat. Milk is a great start but a prolonged diet of milk will equate to starvation.

If you had a child that the only thing they would take is milk and they were not growing and your concern for your child got greater to the point of outrage, this is the state of mind we find Paul as he writes to the church at Corinth.

This is Paul’s emotional state as he wrote his first letter to the church at Corinth. In Jesus’ sacrificial death, our Lord made possible the wonder of His church. He intended it to be beautiful and attractive to outsiders. He wanted it to be a wise and Godly representation of its Lord, and to be filled with His glory. The church at Corinth, however, was anything but beautiful, glorious and wise. Paul wrote that there was hardly anything about the Corinthian Christians that distinguished them from the world around.

They had taken the work of art that was the church and, to put it in modern terms, allowed it to be trashed. The church of Jesus Christ at Corinth, which ought to have taken people’s breath away by its beauty and attractiveness, had become instead an irritant and an eyesore.

There is an element of tragedy in Paul’s writing. His purpose is to help the Corinthians see who they really ought to be; to encourage them to throw off what was hindering them in their walk of faith.

We can sense the apostle’s frustration in these opening words of chapter 3.

The Corinthians should long since have progressed beyond infanthood. But that was what they were demonstrating to the world by their fleshliness, jealousy and strife. They were dividing up into factions, pridefully attributing their salvation to Paul, Apollos, Peter and others. This fan-club mentality was causing all kinds of problems in the church. That is why Paul calls them "babes in Christ." Their behavior was infantile. Their concept of Christian leadership was painful to the apostle.

Here in lies our scripture this evening.

One of the greatest frustrations that Paul must have felt was the lack of spiritual maturity in the Corinthian church. It must have been difficult for him to watch this church grow numerically, but not spiritually. It must have grieved him to see a church w/so much possibility doing so little for God.

Our born nature is sin. We are born in sin and shapen in iniquity.

Job 14:1 Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble.

This means from birth we are evil. We are selfish, jealous, we fight and the list goes on. For this reason Jesus answered Nicodemus when asked how could he be saved: