Good morning. It is good to have you here today. If you want to follow along, we are going to be going into the book of 1 Corinthians 3:1-3. How many of you realize that in the past year or so we have been going through a baby boom? How many babies do you think we have had in the last year or so? We have had I think seven. We have four coming shortly. It is good we are having the babies. It means the church is growing. It is an exciting time. It does add a lot of strain on our resources, especially the nursery. But we know over time things will settle out because the little babies will go into the children’s ministry and the children will go into the youth ministry, Impulse, and at some point the hope is that they would become adult members of the church. That is a good thing that they grow up into spiritual, emotional, and physical maturity. If they didn’t, we might end up with a church that looks something like this [image of babies in pews]. As cute as it seems, there is something that just doesn’t look right. If you had a church where the kids never grew up, I would be looking out at a bunch of babies. At a minimum, you would end up with messy pews and at a maximum you would end up with a messy church.
As we open up the book of 1 Corinthians, we see that is what the apostle Paul was dealing with. He was dealing with a church where the people did not mature in their faith. He was dealing with spiritual infants so to speak. To bring you up to speed, we have been going through the series called The Story: God’s story as told through the people, places, and events of the Bible. We are at the very farthest side of the Bible. We are in what is called the letters. We have been looking at Paul’s letters. We know that Paul was an apostle who did a lot of church planting around the Mediterranean in the first century. He was also a pastor. He would star these churches and hang around. And like a good pastor he would go back and try to visit them every few years. When he couldn’t visit them, he would send a delegate or two to go to that place, and if he couldn’t send a delegate, he would sit down and write a letter. He wrote a lot of letters. These letters are collectively known as situational or occasional letters because they deal with specific situations that were going on in the church. Often these situations were not very positive. In fact, they were quite negative. The people who joined the church, many coming in from the pagan world, would bring in a lot of their negative baggage with them. Even to the extent of how they treated people kind of really negatively and mean. The writer Eugene Peterson in the introduction of the commentary to 1 Corinthians writes this: “When people become Christians, they don’t always become nice. This always comes as a surprise. Conversion to Christ and his ways don’t automatically furnish a person with impeccable manners and suitable morals.” Does anybody agree with that? Never, right! They all just come in and are nice from day one. We know that is not true. What is not true for the church today wasn’t true for the church back in Corinthians. The church back then was filled with people that were just mean. They were sexually immoral. There was jealousy and quarrels and divisiveness. They would argue about all sorts of things. How the gifts should be welcomed into the worship setting. How you should conduct the Lord’s Supper. The role of women in church and leadership and that sort of thing. Over time, the church became very splintered. So much so that one particular family we know as Chloe’s family wrote a letter to Paul letting him know the church is in trouble. There are things that are happening that shouldn’t be happening. The church is becoming very divisive. Paul, when he wrote this letter, he mentioned this particular letter. In the first chapter, he writes “My brothers, some from Chloe’s household have informed me that there are quarrels among you. What I mean is this: One of you says ‘I follow Paul’; another ‘I follow Apollos’; another ‘I follow Cephas’; still another ‘I follow Christ.’” In this new church, in addition to all the problems you had, you had division. Paul knew that he had to deal with this. If he didn’t deal with it, it was threatening the stability of the church. As I mentioned last week, although Paul was slightly interested in the rights of people, he was really more interested in the stability of the church. The early church was very fragile and it had to remain stable. So Paul decides to write this letter.
As we see in the first verse of chapter 3, Paul seemed to have a specific group in mind that he was directing this letter to. What he would call worldly people or infants. He goes on to write “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly – mere infants in Christ.” He seemed to be directing this letter to what he would consider the worldly, the infants in Christ, which also gives us an idea that because he called them Brothers, we are talking about Christians. He is referring to Christians not non-believers. What we see in addition to who he is pointing the finger at, he is also implying that in any given church there are two types of people. There are spiritual and there are worldly. There is really no in between. When we think about spiritual that is a word we use freely. In that time, he is thinking in a Christian sense. When somebody becomes converted to Christ, they receive the spirit of God within them and the spirit of God guides their life. They are spirit-filled and walking through life hopefully prompting to the spirit of God that is within them and connected to their spirit. We know from the basics of our faith, all humans have a spirit. It is just that in all humanity because of sin that spirit has become deadened to God. That spirit doesn’t have that spirit-to-spirit connection that was intended from day one. Paul would refer to these people early on as natural man but more commonly we see unspiritual man or the person without the spirit, specifically without the spirit of God. Because they didn’t have the spirit of God, they really had very little interest in the things of God. In fact, they thought they were foolish. He writes earlier in chapter 2 “The man without the spirit does not accept the things that come from the spirit of God for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because they are spiritually discerned.” A person without the spirit, a non-Christian, really cannot grasp the deep things of God even if they want to. The things of God are really foolish. Specifically the idea that God would allow his son to be crucified on a cross for the salvation of the world. That is pure foolishness in the eyes of the unspiritual person. If we had time, we would go back and look at earlier chapters where Paul talks about the foolishness of man. Man thought they were smart. They were very intellectual. But he said the foolishness of God was greater than the wisdom of man. That is the situation you have here when we are talking about unspiritual.
Keep in mind though that although they were unspiritual, they probably were not atheists. Most of them probably did believe that there was a supreme being that governed the universe but not in the sense that we think of God. In fact, if you were to think about a range of 1-10 with 1 being very little spiritual but maybe a Christian and 10 being really on fire for the Lord, these people would be a -8. They have very little interest. They know that there is a supreme being out there, but they don’t think in any way this supreme being would influence their life on a day-to-day basis. Some of you are familiar with this scale called the Engel scale. I don’t agree with it totally, but it is kind of a way to measure where people are in their spirituality. If you look at the top and see a -8 which it basically says is awareness of a supreme being but no effective knowledge of the gospel. At some point, in theory, the person is first exposed to the gospel. Further down where it says awareness of fundamentals of gospel, grasp of the implications of the gospel, a positive attitude towards the gospel, personal problem recognition, in other words the person realizes they have sin in their life, then at about -2 a decision to act. In other words, are they going to act on the information they received or are they going to reject it and then they get pushed back to -5 because they still know the implications of the gospel. It is just a tool to think about where people are in their relationship with God. The idea is they get down to -1 and they make the decision and repent of their sins and decide to accept Jesus Christ as Lord, then they become born again, which Jesus referred to in the gospels when he met with Nicodemus the need to be born again or what Paul would refer to as to become a new creation in Christ. In fact, 2 Corinthians 5:17 says “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old is gone, the new has come.” It is like a rebirth. That is why you hear the term born again. That is what is happening. You are becoming born again with the spirit of God in you. That is the good news. The bad news is you are born a baby. Some of you have been there. Some of you might be there now. You feel like a baby Christian. I really don’t know a lot. Consequently, what happens is, if you are a baby Christian, you have to be spoon fed for a while until the point where, hopefully, down the road you are going to be able to feed others. We feed babies first with milk and really that is what is going on with the spiritual baby. We need to encourage the spiritual babies to crave what the apostle Peter would talk about, the pure spiritual milk. In 1 Peter, he writes “Like newborn babies, crave pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up in your salvation now that you have tasted that the Lord is good.” The pure spiritual milk he is really talking about is the word.
As a side note, I think what happens is we get people who come to the Lord, get saved, and we don’t give them a lot of direction. We plop them in small groups and different things, and they never really get a solid understanding of God’s word. I am one who thinks that the first thing you should teach the new believer is how to find their way around the Bible and how to know the basic facts of their faith and how to understand what the Bible is all about. Otherwise, they kind of just jump around from topic to topic and then they have been a Christian for a while and can’t communicate the basics of their faith through the word. So the pure milk of the word is what we are talking about here so that they can grow up in their salvation. That is really just a fancy way of saying allowing the thing that is happening inside of you to begin to express itself through word and action and deed. As Paul would refer to later in Galatians as the fruit of the spirit. The positive things that should be happening in your life. What he is implying is you need to let that transformation that is happening in your life in your deep center in your spirit to be able to find its way into your entire being; your mind, your emotions, your will, and especially your body. Over time you find that you are actually being shaped and formed into the very image of Christ and begin to do the things that Christ would do if he was standing and walking in your shoes. In a nutshell, that is what we refer to around here as spiritual formation. Being formed into the image of Christ, which is a cooperative effort between the believer and the Holy Spirit.
Keep in mind, the apostle Paul was aware there were going to be baby Christians in the church. That is the good news. Having babies around is a good thing, even spiritual babies, because it shows there is activity going on in the church. People are saved. People are coming to the Lord. He had no problem with that. The problem he had was with people who were supposedly mature but were acting like babies. He would say acting worldly. Going back to that first verse, he says “Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly – mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you are not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men?” So you get the sense that the apostle Paul liked this word worldly. We don’t use worldly a lot but he is distinguishing worldly in the sense of the material world versus the spiritual world. Your interests lie in the material world and not the heavenly and spiritual things of God. As a side note, the actual word we translate worldly, if you look at the underlying word, it is sarx, which has the idea of fleshly. It is where we get the word sarcasm, which basically means a ripping and tearing of a person’s flesh. So when you are sarcastic in a very mean way to somebody, it is like you are ripping that person’s flesh apart. Paul is not so much concerned with the babies who are brand new to their faith. He is concerned with the people that by now should be mature in their faith. He is intentionally shaming them. In the first century, the people lived in a culture of honor and shame. You sought to be honored and you sought to avoid shame. So in a sense, his technique, which some people may not like because it comes across quite negative, is really to shame the people because they have not moved along the spiritual path that he feels they should. Consequently, he says I would like to give you solid food, but I am going to have to just continue to feed you the formula. I am going to have to continue to feed you just basic milk because you cannot handle the solid food. You cannot handle the real meat. You cannot handle the steak that I would like to give you.
As another side note, we think of the milk as the basics of the faith, so what is the solid food? We don’t know for sure. Some suspect Paul is trying to say, listen, there is so much more than the basics of your faith. There is so much more from just basic theology, Christianity 101. There is a whole God out there who rules the entire universe and all of creation for all time and you are still there chewing on what does it mean to be a Christian and accept Jesus as Lord. You are chewing on the basics of faith. He is saying there are so many unknown mysteries that I want to show you and that I want to reveal to you. I want to reveal myself, my Son, my Spirit in amazing ways if you would only just seek after it. What he is doing is shaming these people and attacking their pride in many ways because in the Corinthian culture, they prided themselves on their intelligence and giftedness. If we had time, we would look at the first chapter where Paul knows that so he starts off complimenting them all over the place about their knowledge and intelligence and giftedness. But by virtue of the way they were acting, specifically causing divisions and jealousy and quarreling, they are proving that they haven’t figured it out. They have not understood it. It is not just about gaining information and knowledge. They had knowledge. They probably were scholars. They got the basics. They could answer all the questions and get them all right. They had a lot of information but no evidence of any transformation in their life. Specifically beginning to slowly be transformed into the image of Christ. He was frustrated. These people should be teaching others by now and they are still on the formula. In a letter to the Hebrews, the writer of Hebrews writes something very similar that I am sure Paul could relate to. Some think it might actually be Paul, but we really don’t know the author of Hebrews. The person writes to the Hebrew people “By this time you ought to be teachers yourselves, yet here I find you need someone to sit down with you and go over the basics of God again starting from square one – baby’s milk, when you should have been on solid food long ago!” Paul is saying yes, this is the situation here. The church is growing. We have all this stuff going on and we need teachers and people that are mature in their faith. He is saying I look out in the crowd and all I see is babies, and he is frustrated. I have a shortage of teachers. We have all these problems going on in the church. If you were to sit Paul down and say what do you think is the problem? Why are you having people suing each other? Why are you having sexual immorality? Why are you having these problems with families? Why are you having these arguments over the Lord’s Supper? He would answer with two words: spiritual infancy. Spiritual babies. I am confident that is what he would say. The next question might be why? Why are there so many spiritual babies in a church? He might say I don’t know, but Paul would say as a pastor I can take a certain amount of responsibility for that because maybe I didn’t stick around the church long enough. Maybe I was only there 18 months and I was so anxious to get on and plant the next church that I really didn’t spend time to develop the leaders. He would take responsibility for that. But I suspect he might at some point begin to point to the leaders and say you call yourselves leaders but you haven’t developed your own spirit. You haven’t even formed your own spirit and you are trying to teach others? It is like one baby trying to teach another. They got so distracted possibly in the things of the church that they never got around to forming their own soul and their own spirit. They never were able to do that. So he might point the finger at the leaders. Ultimately, I think he would look at the individual. He would say you have been a Christian for one, two, three, five years or whatever and you don’t seem to be growing. What is going on here? I suspect some would just say I liked Christianity at first. It was interesting. I got the basics down. I really decided I don’t need to do that much more. I don’t want to pay the price. I am not a good studier. I don’t like to read. The Bible is so confusing so I prefer not to do that. They might just say I actually like getting fed by somebody else, but I don’t want to feed somebody else because that is messy. I really don’t want to do that. Whatever the case, the bottom line is they had a messy church. So messy that when we think today of the Corinthian church, we think about a dysfunctional church. We always go to Corinthians when we want to talk about the problems in the church. 1 Corinthians is like the model dysfunctional church. That is a real shame because you had all these super-intelligent people.
Because my time is limited, I am going to have to cut this short a little bit. What I had planned to do was maybe help clarify some things because you think Chuck is trying to bring it down to some sort of application and help us see which one of these categories each one of you fit in. I was going to put a list up that says “You know you may be a spiritual baby if…” but I decided I don’t have the time. What I realized is the bottom line is everybody in this room knows where they fit in. If you examine your heart, you can determine where you fit on this scale. I know in a group this size there are people that are back at the -8 or somewhere between -8 and -1. What they are doing is checking out Christianity. They enjoy being part of the church. They enjoy visiting. They enjoy hearing things about God and maybe they are inching their way closer to a point of decision. For those people I say that is great. You are welcome. Keep listening. Keep coming. Keep asking questions about God. But at some point, you have to quit asking questions and you have to learn to act. You have to come to a decision point either I am going to stay on the unspiritual side or I am going to cross over to spiritual. I am going to become a new creation in Christ. Everybody has to make that decision at some point, especially if you have heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. Do I believe that Jesus is the son of God that died on a cross 2000 years ago for my sins and was raised from the grave on the third day and because he was raised from the grave, I too will be raised from the grave someday? You have to make that decision. There is no option. You can’t sit on that -1 and wait. You are either going to go backward or forward. I know there are people in this church that are like that. I would say just keep asking questions but at some point stop asking the questions and decide you are in or you are out.
Then there are people who are very spiritual. In fact, I know in this church there are people that love the Lord. It has very little to do with age. We have some teenagers who are just on fire for God. They are hungry for the word of God. They can’t get enough. They are like a sponge just sucking all that fresh milk of the word in. They are just like grow me. They can’t get enough. For those people I say great. Don’t give up. Keep going. Get excited. If you can’t get fed here then go get fed by somebody else but get what you need and then when you get what you need, you make sure you give it to somebody else. Otherwise you are hoarding. You need to give it to somebody else. If you can’t get it at this church, go. Go to seminary. Go to college. Go to another church. Go wherever you have to go to get that pure word.
Then, of course, in a crowd this size there are probably 40-60% of the people that fall in that grey area that we would call worldly. That we would call spiritual babies. I just like hanging out. I like the company. I like a little bit of reading. I like to learn. I like to hear. My head is filled with information but there is no real transformation. In fact, if Paul showed up, he would say I recognize you from about five years ago. You are exactly the same person. That is what it means to be a spiritual baby. I know people like that. I could go back to Oregon and find somebody I haven’t seen for ten years and I know they would be exactly the same spiritually because they are stuck. They are stuck in the mundane life. The grey area between unbelief and belief. Between unspiritual and spiritual. If there are people that are like that here, I think what Paul would say is two words: grow up. The same thing you would say with your kid who refused to grow up. Grow up. Stop it. Stop misbehaving. Stop making 80% of the pastors time be spent on breaking up fights and quarrels and jealousies. Instead devote yourself to the word of God. Get excited about your faith. Begin to be able to taste and see that the Lord is good. What will happen is God will just open up all sorts of new avenues for you. If you are like that, if you are stuck in this grey area, it is time to put away your childish ways. Time to quit thinking like a child. Time to stop acting like a child or talking like a child or reasoning like a child. It is actually what Paul says later in chapter 13. He says “When I was a child I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.” I would say if you are in that grey area, if you are a baby Christian, this is a good one to memorize. When you start making dumb decisions or thinking stinking or whatever you want to call it, just remember that it is time to stop behaving like a child. It is time to stop thinking like a child. It is time to allow the spirit of God that each of you would claim that you have inside of you to begin to work out in you the work that has already begun. What you will see is a slow, gradual transformation of yourself. As you take what is happening to you and you give it to somebody else, you will begin to see transformation of family, of church, of community, and the world. Let us pray.
