WWUTT 1457 God Gives the Growth (1 Corinthians 3:4-6)

Fleshly Division Prevents Growth in Christ

As long as we're focused on the flesh, we are not growing in Christ. We're focused on worldly things. We're behaving as merely human people. We need to behave as those who have been born again when we understand the text.

This is When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible study in the word of Christ that men and women of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. Tell your friends about our ministry at www .utt .com.

Here's your teacher, Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky. Hey, before we get started today, I wanted to let you know that we've got two free tickets to go to the Wokeness and the Gospel Conference this coming Friday and Saturday at Denton Bible Church in Denton, Texas.

You can go to wokenessandgospel .org for the itinerary of everything. Great speakers like Dr. Owen Strand, Dr. Tom Buck, Daryl Harrison of the Just Thinking podcast, Tommy Nelson, and others. What is going to be there?

We're going to have a booth in the exhibition hall and we want you to be there as well. You just need to provide your meals, lodging if you need it, travel to get there. But if you want to get into the conference, we've got two free tickets for you.

First come, first serve. You have to email lynn at fbclyndale .com. That's L-Y-N-N at fbclyndale .com. Include your name, address, and phone number and somebody will get in touch with you. All right, now let's get to the Bible study today.

Paul Had to Reprove the Corinthians Before Teaching Deeper Truths

We're in 1 Corinthians 3, and as with yesterday, I'm going to begin by reading the first nine verses. The Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth. But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.

I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?

For when one says, I follow Paul, and another, I follow Apollos, are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.

So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers.

You are God's field, God's building. I mentioned yesterday starting the lesson that Paul wanted to write to the Corinthians about some deeper spiritual truths. He wanted to teach them some greater things, but he could not because they were so immature.

So he had to go back to basics. He had to handle some of the sins that were going on there and the divisions that had started up because they were behaving in such a human way. Back in verse one again, I, brothers, could not address you as a spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.

When Jude started his short but very powerful letter, he began by saying, beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, so he wanted to write to them about something else.

He wanted to rejoice in the gospel, in the common salvation that they had been given in Christ Jesus. But he goes on to say, I found it necessary instead to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.

Why did Jude have to shift gears in the letter that he wanted to write? Well, because he had heard about some false teachers that had come into their midst and were teaching them to go after sensuality.

They have perverted the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only master in Lord Jesus Christ. So they were appealing to the flesh rather than rejoicing in the spirit of God and the goodness of the gospel of Christ.

And so Paul is having to confront the Corinthians in this as well. Now, some of the things that the Corinthians were guilty of did have to do with sensuality of the flesh. We're gonna talk about that when we get to chapter five, but he begins by addressing the factions, the divisions that had started up because of people uniting themselves to certain teachers and saying, this person has the only way.

Like this wasn't a matter of a personal preference. I just really liked Paul better than Apollos. I just think he's a better speaker. There were actual divisions that had started in the church because one had said, Paul has the truth and another had said that Apollos has the truth.

And there had stirred up jealousy and strife among them. So Paul is having to go back to basics with them. And some of those basics are gonna be making sure that the Corinthians understand what love is.

That's the whole thing of chapter 13, right? The love chapter of first Corinthians, where Paul says, love is patient, love is kind. You know this chapter, right? And we often love that chapter, very lovey-dovey.

It's gonna show up in our weddings, in our Christian weddings all the time. So it's probably nine out of 10 weddings that I've attended. Somebody is reading from first Corinthians 13. I'd be hard pressed to try to think of a wedding where first Corinthians 13 wasn't mentioned.

It's almost every wedding that I attend, whether they're Christian weddings or not. You know, somebody's gonna say something from first Corinthians 13. Anyway, but that's not the nature of what Paul was talking about there.

The Corinthians just did not know what love was. They were not acting in a loving way. They were acting in a fleshly way. So that's how back to the basics that Paul had to get with some of the things that he addressed with them.

Think about this. Did you see a chapter like first Corinthians 13 in the book of Romans? Did you see that there? Where Paul had to tell the Romans how to love each other? No, even when he was talking about loving one another.

In chapter 13, he says the summation of the law is to love your neighbor as yourself. And then you get into matters of conscience in chapter 14 and on into chapter 15. He even says to them there, I know you're doing this.

I'm just encouraging you to do it all the more, to love one another. This church that had been going through persecution, people in their midst were dying. And yet these brothers and sisters in the Lord building one another up in love.

Paul is just making sure they're continuing to do that more and more, growing in this love and affection that they have for one another, being reconciled together in Christ Jesus. So you don't see a rebuking chapter teaching the Romans how to love each other like you see in first Corinthians chapter 13.

This is how back to basics Paul has to get here. A lot of times when we think of more mature doctrines, we might be thinking of something like predestination or the doctrine of election or God having chosen from before the foundation of the world whom he would save.

And those that he does not choose will not be saved, but will perish in their sins into which they were born, having been born with the sin nature of Adam. So we're born sinners, we're born rebellious against God, and it is by God's grace that he intervenes in that path and turns us from that sin to Christ so that we may believe, have faith, and we are saved.

So that's often what we think about when we think about mature doctrines, right? So that's a mature doctrine. We don't start with that, do we? We'll get to that a little bit later on. No, I tell you, that's basic.

I think that's a basic doctrinal truth as well, to understand that it is God who saves. From beginning to end, salvation is the gracious work of God. As you're walking a person through understanding a doctrine of salvation, you don't need to wait until they're two or three years down the road in their Christian faith before you start telling them about election, because how did Paul start this letter?

He began this letter by talking about God's sovereign election. 1 Corinthians 1, beginning of verse 1, Paul called by the will of God. That's how any one of us are saved. We've been called by the will of God to believe the gospel.

Paul called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus. And he mentions our brother Sosines, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.

Grace to you and peace from God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ. I shared that story with you when we were back in chapter one of the young man that I was witnessing to, who had some problems with Calvinism.

And so we got together at a restaurant, started talking about that. And he brought a notepad with all of these things about Calvinism that he had a problem with. And he just started going through TULIP, right?

The five points of Calvinism. And I let him talk for 20 or 30 minutes and I answered questions that he had. But then when I let him go through his notes, I just said, can we go to the scriptures and read them?

Let's turn in our Bibles. We'd been going through 1 Corinthians as a church, so that's where I opened up to. 1 Corinthians chapter one, and I just read that beginning. Paul called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus.

And right then, as I read that, he said, well, that's it. I mean, it is by God's will. It is not by our will that we are saved. It is by God's will. That's right. So we just go back to basics in the word of God and we come to an understanding that salvation is not by our power.

It is by God's grace and his mercy. That's why we talk about things regarding election and predestination and foreknowledge and ordination, all this kind of thing. We talk about that as being the doctrines of grace because it is only by grace.

If God had not shown us grace, we would never have looked for God. We would never have turned to him. God arranged everything in the way that he did. As Paul even talks about with the Greeks, he's sharing the gospel with unbelievers at the Areopagus in Athens in Acts chapter 17.

And he says to them there, God has arranged the times and the places in which we all would live. He put you here for a reason. God arranged that you would stand here on this hill among these idols and hear me preach the gospel to you and tell you to repent of your sin because judgment is coming.

And that judgment is coming by the one whom God has raised from the dead. And then after Paul said that, that was when they all went, oh, resurrection from the dead, that's ridiculous. But some, some who were there, they were intrigued by what Paul said about the resurrection of the dead.

And they say, we wanna hear more about this. So then they go to Paul and he shares with them more about the gospel that they may become believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Paul even talked about God's sovereign arranging of people in the times and places where they would be to hear the gospel and turn from their sin and believe.

He talked about that in his gospel presentation at the Areopagus. We often try to shy away from those doctrines because we don't wanna offend anybody by making, you know, it's offensive to your autonomy to hear that you don't have anything to do with where you are.

God is the one who has arranged all of this. That nothing happens outside the will of God. As it says in Lamentations chapter three, it does anything good or bad happen except that God had commanded it.

Everything that happens is by God's will. There is nothing that happens that is outside of God's will. These are basic doctrinal understandings. And so Paul is coming back to teach them basic doctrinal truths, including that they were called by God.

And so therefore they needed to repent of their sin and divisions and fleshly carnality that had separated them. They needed to repent of these things. I gotta go back and teach you basic stuff. Basic Christians understand that you don't cause factions and divisions in the church by going after fleshly things.

Now, the divisions that existed among them were not doctrinal. It wasn't, well, I believe in election, but I don't. It was strictly according to their flesh. You are behaving in the flesh and only in a human way, he says in verse three.

For when one says, I follow Paul and another says, I follow Apollos, are you not being merely human? And how are we to be? How can we be anything other than human? Well, Paul says, are you not being merely human?

We need to be born again. We need to be born of water and the spirit as Jesus said to Nicodemus in John chapter three. We need to have a new mind, the mind of Christ. We need to be dead to ourselves and alive in Christ.

Remember Galatians 2 .20, for I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me. And the life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me.

The life I now live in the flesh, I live to God. As Peter says in first Peter two, that we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that we may proclaim the excellencies of him who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

Peter goes on in verse 10, once you were not a people, but now you are God's people. Once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. So we're not merely human. We are to be of the spirit of God.

We live in these bodies, but the life we now live in the flesh, we are to live by faith in the son of God. We're the Corinthians living by faith, not if there's these factions and these carnal divisions that have stirred up between them.

See, this is preventing them from growing. They cannot mature, they cannot grow as long as they are divided by these carnal things. Sin keeps the body from growing. Very early on as a pastor, within my first couple of years as a senior pastor, well, I wanna say this was even in my first year.

There were a lot of things that were going on in the church. There were some growing pains, some issues with that because we had changed pastors. The previous pastor was gone. I was the new pastor that was in.

And so there were some adjustments that needed to be made and stuff like that. Everybody was very kind, very considerate of the things that I had to do. They saw some of the sins that were taking place in the church and some of those things that I had to deal with that others didn't have to do.

And so everybody was very compassionate about what can we do to help you? And I heard that a lot. I would get emails, I would get phone calls. People would ask after church. Some would even come over to the house.

Hey, is there anything that I can do to help you and Becky to kind of take some pressure off you guys? And sometimes we would take people up on that. We'll watch the kids for us while we have a date night, you know, something like that.

But there was one time when there was so much invitation to help that I couldn't really accommodate everybody. I couldn't just give everything to everyone. So there was one time after church, we were coming to the close of a sermon and I just said, hey, I love all of the affection that we have received as we're going through some of the things that we've been going through as a church.

A lot of you are asking me, what can I do to help? And I just want to say very plainly and very simply this, here's what you can do to help this church. Stop sinning and pursue Christ. That's what you can do to help this church.

Because if people were going to sin, if there were going to be divisions according to the flesh, if there were going to be arguments and fights, if people were going to nod their heads through the sermon on Sunday, but then live like the world for the rest of the week, then we as a church, we're not going to grow.

I was going to continue to clean up messes as a pastor rather than helping shepherd people to grow into the head of our church who is Christ. If you're going after the world, you're not growing in Christ.

It is stifling the growth of the church to be going after fleshly things. And then the whole church has to stop and deal with that before we can start rejoicing in our common salvation again, hearing the gospel proclaimed and rejoicing in God for the goodness that he shows to us.

Corinthians had to put everything on hold for that because as Paul gets to chapter five, you've got this sexually immoral man in your midst and you're not doing anything about that. So the church had to focus on the disciplinary issues that needed to take place, still rejoicing in God.

It's not like we forget to rejoice in God because we have to take care of these church disciplinary issues. But nevertheless, the church is not growing in sanctification as long as sin continues to be a problem and people are divided over human things.

We need to have heavenly minds. As Paul says in Colossians chapter three, that we need to seek the things that are above where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. For when Christ who is your life appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Jesus also saying, do not be anxious about the things that are here on earth, but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And all these other things will be added to you as well. That's Matthew 6, 33.

So Paul is having to direct the Corinthians minds to Christ. As long as they're focused on the flesh and on earthly things and causing these divisions, there's no growth happening here in this church.

They're behaving merely in human ways. Paul goes on in verse five to say, what then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each. And so here the assignment Paul has is to rebuke the Corinthians and direct their attention back to Christ.

I planted, Paul says, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. The growth that happens in our churches is by God. So it is by the will of God that we've been called to this faith. And it is by the will of God that we are grown in this faith.

Paul is directing the Corinthians attention back to the Lord, that they may grow in the Lord, that their attention would be there and not on these worldly things and not on their flesh and not satisfying their own selfish desires, but serving God.

And Paul presents himself as an example of that. Him and Apollos, we're servants. We are serving God and we are serving you for your benefit. So follow the examples of these men who have served on your behalf and serve each other.

We were there, we served you. We're doing other things in service to God. Now you must serve one another as the Lord has assigned to each because we're gonna get to talking about spiritual gifts and things like that coming up in chapter 12.

So as the Lord has assigned, He has saved you. He has assigned to you your spiritual gifting. He's the one who grows you. We planted, we watered. God is the one who is providing the growth. So you're still looking at and causing divisions over the planter and the waterer.

And therefore you're not growing. Look to God, He provides the growth. Stop looking to your own interests and look to the interests of others. That was what Paul said to the Philippians, Philippians chapter two, much more gentle with them because they were not as divided as the Corinthians were.

But nevertheless, just as we have been shown this humble grace and love in the picture of the Lord Jesus Christ, so we need to show that kind of love for one another, serving each other, putting other interests ahead of our own interests and God provides the growth.

God Gives the Growth, Not Human Leaders

Let's stop there. We'll come back to this section in first Corinthians three tomorrow. Heavenly father, we thank you for the love that you showed to us. We thank you that it was by your will. You called us to this faith so that you would get all the glory and we praise your wondrous name.

Grow us in whatever doctrine we're setting our eyes upon as we open up your word and desire to know the mind of God. May we mature in these things and help one another to grow in the knowledge of God as we do.

Holding fast to the head of the church who is Christ Jesus in whom we are joined together, every joint and ligament so that we may grow the body in love. We ask these things in Jesus name, amen.

Thank you for listening to When We Understand The Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. If you'd like to support this ministry, visit our website, www .wutt .com and click on the gift tab in the top right corner of the page.

Join us again tomorrow as we continue our Bible study When We Understand The Text.