2. An Irresistible Community: 1 Corinthians
March 14, 2010
Mature
Have you ever wondered what Spiritual maturity looks like? We all start out as infants. When we are born we are weak and helpless. We depend on our parents for survival. We cannot eat for ourselves, we cannot drink for ourselves, we go to the bathroom in our pants or in the bed. We cannot work or take care of others. While we are infants we are completely dependent on someone else. As time goes by we start to grow. We learn to control some of our bodily functions, we learn to crawl, to walk, we learn how to communicate with words and as we do we become more independent. As children we can take care of some things for ourselves but we still need our parents. Then we get a little older. We enter our teenage years and suddenly our parents who knew everything two years ago have become quite stupid. It is amazing. As children our parents knew everything and can do anything now as teenagers our parents can do nothing and know nothing. We start feeling like we know everything, we start believing that we are more intelligent than our parents and that we are ready to be independent adults. The problem with teenagers is they feel they are ready for independence before they are. It is interesting to see how sometimes we view ourselves as mature long before we ever reach a point of maturity. You see when it comes to assessing ourselves we are not always the best judges. While we live with our parents we view them as a drag, they hold us back and are so stupid. Then we move out. Suddenly our parents are smart again. In our physical lives we reach a point of maturity where we stop depending on others and start having people who are depending on us. Maturity in our physical lives means that we are fully developed people who are capable of dealing with responsibility and having people who are dependent on us. I wonder however what does maturity look like in our Spiritual lives?
If you want to look at 1 Corinthians 3:1. We are looking at how to make the church an irresistible community. The desire for community is one of the central desires in the heart of man. We have a natural longing to be with people who love us and accept us for who we are and yet also challenge us to be a better version of ourselves. The church is the true answer to the world’s need for community but they don’t always see it. When the church becomes the church that God intended it to be people will be drawn in light insects to a bug light and then we can zap them. No. A church that is alive is naturally irresistible to those who realize their need for community. So what we are looking to do is to find some of the characteristics the church should have that would make it an irresistible community. Last week Scott Springer talked with us about his mission to mexico and unity. Unity is one of the primary characteristics of a community. For without unity community would just be comm….not nearly as exciting. This week we are looking at maturity. We can see maturity in the lives of others and often times that maturity can draw us in. See most people don’t want to go back to Junior High because there is something compelling, or even irresistible about maturity. Which I think is why so many young people want to believe they are mature before they actually reach maturity. But what I want to know is what does maturity look like in our Spiritual lives? To answer that let’s look at 1 Corinthians 3:
1Co 3:1 Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. 1Co 3:2 I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. 1Co 3:3 You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men? 1Co 3:4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not mere men? 1Co 3:5 What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. 1Co 3:6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. 1Co 3:7 So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. 1Co 3:8 The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor.
This is an example of what not to do. The Corinthians are not a church that we should make efforts to emulate. You might say they were a bit pompous. It is natural to presume that when it comes to Spiritual maturity the more spiritual you are the more mature you must be. That however, is not really how it works. The Corinthians believed that knowledge and speech determined the spiritual depth of a person. If it looks smart if it acts smart if it talks smart it must be smart. Paul however, opposes this way of thinking. There is more to being Spiritual than just sounding Spiritual. Actually in my Homiletics class at Ozark we would make fun of preachers who thought you could make any illustration deep by adding the word Spiritually to the end of it. I was driving down the highway the other day and it was storming all around me and my car almost got hit by lightning, so are you driving through storms, Spiritually? The words you use and how you use them don’t make you spiritual. The Corinthians are like teenagers, spiritually. They were viewing themselves as far more mature than they really were. So when Paul writes to them he has to show them that they are not as mature as they think.
This is an important place for us to start. We must realize that we may not be as mature as think. Sometimes we let ourselves believe that if we are older we are naturally more mature. If we have been a Christian for a long time we are naturally more mature. If we go through all the right motions, and do all the right things we are more mature. If we come to church every week and pray every night we are more mature. Sometimes this isn’t true at all. Sometimes the most mature among us haven’t been Christians their whole life or even more than a few years. The problem with thinking you are more mature than you are is the more mature you consider yourself to be often times the less teachable you are. Maturity does not come from amassing knowledge but through understanding. Honestly, sometimes the more you know the harder it is for you to understand. There was a man who came here to visit one Sunday morning and after church he started talking with me, or rather at me. I had mentioned in the service that it when we argue over petty theological differences while their lost people in the world that need saving we have got a priority problem. He wanted to teach me that theology was important in fact that it was more important than the Great Commission because the Great Commission was given to the disciples specifically not to us. As he was talking it became clear that this man had a lot of knowledge. He was familiar with Scripture and where things were. What his knowledge lacked however, was understanding. He knew what the verses said but clearly had no idea what they meant.
We have all heard the phrase Yada, yada, yada. I used it for years thinking it meant like blah blah blah which is contextually accurate for how we use it. In Hebrew there is a word YADA. It means to know, to understand and it describes a deep and personal understanding an intimate knowledge. The problem with knowledge when not accompanied with understandings is you get yada yada yada without any real Yada. We see people like this. They are doing something inappropriate or they need some encouragement but when you try to talk with them they don’t hear what you are saying because they already know it and because they already know it they ignore it even when that is exactly what they need to hear. A part of maturity is realizing that we can know something without understanding it and even in understanding we sometimes need to be reminded of it. What you know doesn’t make you Spiritually mature because you have lots of yada yada yada without any real Yada.
We all crave privileged information. We all want to know things that no one else knows. It makes us feel special. It makes us feel important. When you have a friend who tells you something that he could not tell anyone else, you know you matter to him. You know that you are important and it makes you feel good. In Chapter two of 1 Corinthians Paul showed the Corinthians that the spiritual information is privileged. He has given them a hunger for it and then BANG! He takes it all away. You see the Corinthians would have considered themselves spiritual. Due to Hellenistic thinking they would have believed that a person was more spiritual when he has more knowledge. The more you knew or the better you could speak the more ‘spiritual’ you were. It made sense in their thinking because they believed knowledge and eloquence to be close to the divine. Obviously the divine is spiritual so the better you speak and the more you know the closer you are to the divine and thus the more spiritual you are.
Paul robs them of this. He takes it all away. He says: I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly-mere infants in Christ. Paul takes everything the Corinthians prize and smashes it. They would boast on their maturity and spirituality and Paul says, you are not spiritual- you are merely infants. You can feed yourselves, you cant even chew your own food, I have to give you milk because you are babies. So we see knowledge, and experience in life do not translate to Spiritual maturity. What you know doesn’t mean anything if it doesn’t affect how you live. So what does Spiritual maturity look like?
In the New Testament understanding of spiritual maturity comes from Spiritual completeness. It is not seen in your knowledge: some or the most immature Christians have amassed a great amount of knowledge, yet some who are very mature and follow the spirit could not cite many scripture verses. Spirituality is measured not in the head with what you know, or the mouth with what you say or how you say it, or in the hands with what you do. You know who had all three of these? The Pharisees. They could think right, talk right, and act right but there was still something wrong with them. There was still something missing.
Paul calls the church in Corinth immature. How does Paul know where they stand in maturity? By their fruit. They are still jealous. They are still fighting. They are still acting like the world. If they were spiritually mature they would stand out. If they were spiritually mature they would know that the church was a place where they were with family, where they did not need to fight. If they were spiritually mature they would not be jealous but rejoice in the success of their brothers. If they were spiritually mature they would love instead of quarrel. If they were spiritually mature they would be acting like Christ, not like the world.
Paul desires to present every person mature in Christ. This maturity is a completeness or wholeness in Him. To be mature in Christ we must allow ourselves to grow in Christ accepting the a humble beginning of total reliance on Him and others for everything and growing to a point where you learn how to feed yourselves with His word. To do this we must start over. We must let go of our old life and grow up in Christ allowing ourselves to be developed and matured so that we grow up to look like Christ. You cant just change personal maturity in your physical life into Spiritual maturity. Spiritual maturity comes from looking like Jesus. Spiritual maturity comes from living according to God’s will. Living like Jesus which is loving like Jesus makes us look like Jesus. When we look like Jesus we become mature in our faith and our spiritual lives. When we do this as a church not just as individuals but when we become a mature community in how we live and how we love and how we treat each other we be become an irresistible community. For the love of God when truly experienced changes people lives. When we become a mature community, we will no longer have to worry about drawing people into the church they will be drawn in by the irresistible community that we become in Jesus. We first have to learn to love and to live like Jesus so that we can look like Him to the world.
