Spiritual Babies Series

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.