A Mature View of Christian Ministry

This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.

So this afternoon, as we plot along through this text, as we continue our study in now Chapter 3, we're going to consider a topic that is, even for the few of us that are here, absolutely essential to the life of the Church.

Absolutely essential to the life of this Church that we are in, Grace Fellowship Church. And it would be a great disadvantage. It's funny, I included this thinking maybe why I would, but it would be a great disadvantage if we did not take the time today, right here and right now, to park ourselves in verses 1 through 9 to study this text thoroughly and to understand it well.

And the reason being is, as we study the first nine verses of Chapter 3, what we're going to do is we're going to focus our attention on the topic of Christian ministry. We talked before about how Nicole got one of the rejects in our print, and that was at the printing of the bulletin, and that was initially because I waffled back and forth between whether I was going to say Christian ministry or Christian leadership.

But what we're going to do, as we look at the first nine verses, is we're going to look at this topic of Christian ministry or Christian leadership. And like I said, I waffled back and forth whether ministry or leadership, but I think I settled on Christian ministers, which encompasses both the leaders of the Church and all of us.

We are all priests, that we believe in the priesthood of all believers, that the Scriptures teach this. And so, specifically, what I want us to discover, as we look in verses 1 to 9 in this third chapter, is I want us to develop a mature view of Christian ministers, of Christian leadership, of Christian ministry.

Now, earlier this week, I was meditating on this text, thinking about why Paul would write this. And it became apparent to me that this is an important subject, worthy of our study, because throughout the ages, regardless of generation, so across all time, regardless of geography, across all of the world, the issue of spiritual leadership, of ministry, if I can call it that, has been a complicated issue for God's people.

As long as the true people of God have assembled together in the world, before Christ in the Old Covenant and after Christ in the New Covenant, there has always been some form of dysfunction between the assembly of God and those who have been tasked by God to minister to that assembly, to the people.

And if we were to do just a quick survey, maybe I'll ask, can anyone think of a specific example of when there was dysfunction between God's people and maybe someone that God had placed in a position to minister to those people?

Can you think of a situation that might come to the forefront of your mind? No one put you on the spot. I suppose you could count that, for sure. Yeah, Noah's called a preacher. I think you can include that.

If you look at the story of Moses as he led the Israelites through the wilderness, what did the people do to God's deliverer, the one that God had placed in a position to lead the people? They grumbled against him.

They complained. There were insurrections that arose. Some people died. Noah, you might remember some people were swallowed into the ground when they rebelled against Moses. Even Moses' brother and sister, Aaron and Miriam, questioned his leadership.

They became jealous of him. If we look at Jeremiah and Ezekiel, what they said about the shepherds of Israel, they condemned the so-called shepherds who were tasked with tending to the old covenant flock of God.

Jeremiah wrote in Jeremiah 10 .21, he said, For the shepherds are stupid, and do not inquire of the Lord. Therefore they have not prospered, and all their flock is scattered. He wasn't talking about physical shepherds with their sheep.

He was talking about the people who were tasked to care for, to guard, to shepherd the nation of Israel. In Jeremiah 12 .10, he says, Many shepherds have destroyed my vineyard. They have trampled down my portion.

They have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness. So the people here bucked the leaders that God had given them. That was in the case of Moses. And the leaders that God appointed in some cases to look after the nation of Israel were slack in their duties to the detriment of the people.

We can read about the prophets. The prophets who were warmly received by the people were often the prophets that spoke lying words to the people, who said, peace, peace, when there is no peace. And then we can remember the prophets who were killed.

And why were they killed? Often because they spoke words of truth to God's people. If we fast forward to the New Testament, if you remember in Acts chapter 14, Paul and Barnabas went to Lystra to preach the gospel amongst the people in Lystra.

And when Paul healed a crippled man, the people could, it says, barely be restrained from worshipping them, from offering sacrifices to them. They treated them like gods. They said, this is Zeus and Hermes.

And then we think about the Lord Jesus Christ, the great leader, the great minister, the great shepherd, the great prophet, the great priest, the Lord of Glory, as he was called in our last passage. He came to the world, the world that he had made, and the world did not receive him.

But what did they do? They shouted, crucify him! And they nailed him to a cross. It appears, just from looking at the Old Testament and the New Testament, that many people simply do not know what they are to do with the ministers that God sends to them.

And if we think that our culture, that our time is any different, that we are somehow not included in all of this, we'd be mistaken. And all I have to do is say the word, or the expression, celebrity pastor.

Even God's people today don't know what to make of the men that God puts to shepherd them. So we take these mere men, some of them are faithful and godly men, and we put them on a pedestal, sometimes to their own dismay.

We've never met them. We don't know anything about their real lives. We don't know if they're good husbands, if they're godly dads, if they're faithful shepherds of their church. But in our eyes, they can do no wrong.

People say, I am of Calvin. I am of Wesley. I am of John MacArthur. I am of Paul Washer. In other cases, people lift up dangerous heretics who either don't know their Bibles or who find it more profitable to lead people astray.

And they fill stadiums to praise and to listen to these men. And as we've seen over and over again over the years, some of these individuals that are so revered, they're so beyond human, superhuman, almost untouchable, that there's no accountability structure amongst these people.

And so many of them crash and burn in the most dramatic fashion, often bringing disrepute upon the Gospel. It just seems that many people, many of God's people, don't have a good grasp of the role and the function of the biblical minister, of the biblical leader.

And that's why we see so many distortions around us. But today in our text, as Paul writes to the Corinthians, he's going to address the Corinthians' ongoing issues with his ministry and Apollos' ministry.

We've already talked about this at length, so I'm not going to rehash that again. I'm not going to subject you to that. But what Paul is going to do is he is going to offer in these first nine verses a corrective to this error that the Corinthians have fallen into.

And he's going to do this, he's going to correct this error by laying out a proper, a right, a mature view of Christian ministry, of Christian ministers, of Christian leadership, all of those things included.

And so some of that is going to apply to the leaders of God's church, some of that is going to apply to all of us. So we'll look in the passage beginning in verse 1. We're going to look at verses 1 to 4 together, and then we're going to unpack verses 5 to 9 more carefully.

Carnality, Immaturity, and the Corinthians’ Divisions

So Paul says, But brothers, I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants of Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not 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?

Paul starts with that word, but. I don't know if you've noticed over the last few weeks, but I've highlighted these buts. And in the English language, and even in the Greek language, we would call these conjunctions.

These are words that join two sentences or two ideas, like conjunctivitis. When your eyes stick together, it joins two sentences together. And so whenever we see an and, or a but, or a therefore, or a however, these are conjunctions.

And for us to do good biblical interpretation, what we need to know is when we see one of those conjunctions, the author is building on something that they have already said. And so for us to understand what is being said, we need to understand the context in which it is being said.

So our sentence here, verse 1, starts with but. Other translations render it and, but it's one and the same. It's connecting it to the last thought. So you'll remember from chapter 2, the argument that Paul was making here, that he had just finished saying that the Corinthians, that the believers were mature.

Who are the mature ones? They are those who have placed their faith in Christ. They are complete. They have been perfected. They've been indwelt by the Holy Spirit. You'll remember we ended last week, and he says, but we have the mind of Christ.

So he said all of these, what I would say, are very important, very good, spectacular things about the believer. That we are the mature ones. That God has filled us with his spirit. That we even have Christ's mind.

That he has shared his thoughts. He has revealed himself to us. And then Paul begins, verse 1, with this, but I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people. I like how Paul does this. This should be instructive for the way that we correct our brothers and sisters in Christ in our lives.

He says, but brothers. He reminds them that even though, and he's about to deliver another rebuke in this chapter, even though he's going to rebuke them, he counts them as brothers and sisters in Christ.

He's not treating them as unbelievers, but they are brothers. So nothing has changed from the end of chapter 2 to the beginning of verse 3 in terms of the spiritual identity of these Christians in Corinth.

But Paul says, but, he says, oh, where am I saying? But brothers, I could not address you as spiritual people. He says, even now, later on, you are not ready. You're not ready for solid food. You are still of the flesh.

So Paul's not backing out of his words in chapter 2. He's not saying that they are no longer spiritual persons, that they no longer have the spirit. But he's saying this, you have the spirit of God. You are mature.

You have the mind of Christ. But you are not walking in it. Your behavior is betraying your spiritual condition. He says in verse 3, are you not of the flesh and behaving in only a human way? He's saying you're not walking consistently with who you are in Christ.

They're spiritual people, but they're acting like the natural person that we read in chapter 2, verse 24, that does not accept the things of the spirit. So their issue isn't an identity issue. It's a behavior issue.

And this is something that we need to recognize, that we don't drift towards righteousness. We don't drift towards separation from the world. Christ, he renews our mind, he gives us a new heart, he changes our desires, but he also exhorts us, he commands us to walk in step with the spirit.

And the Corinthians are not doing this. They're not walking in step with the spirit. And then Paul gets to the crux of the issue in verse 4. Chapter 3, verse 4, he says, 4, there's another conjunction.

For when one says, I follow Paul, and another, I follow Apollos, are you not being merely human? So what Paul is saying here, he's getting at the root and the fruit of the Corinthians issue, the antecedent and the consequence of the matter.

Why is there infighting amongst the Corinthians? Why is there jealousy? Why is there strife? Why are they still acting like spiritual infants, not able to tolerate solid food? One follows Apollos, one follows Paul, but both are wrong.

They're both being merely human. They're acting like the natural people they once were, like the people in Corinth were around them. They're not using the minds of Christ that God has given them, but they're thinking like the world, and they have a distorted view.

This is the crux of the issue. They have a distorted view of the leaders that God has put before them, of the ministers of the gospel that God has put before them. So how is Paul going to address the malady of the Corinthians?

We're going to look at verses 5 to 9, because Paul is going to describe in these five verses, he's going to make unmistakable Apollos' ministry and his own. He's going to describe in unmistakable terms, and what I hope we see here will be instructive for us as well.

It's not an exhaustive description. You guys will remember when we did our statement of faith, we looked at elders, we looked at deacons. We're not going to look at the qualifications, everything, but we're going to see what this passage instructs.

We're going to see what this passage instructs for us believers and the church. So let's look at verse 5. Verse 5, Paul says, What then is Apollos? What is Paul? One word, servants. Servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each.

Servants, Not Masters: The Minister’s Role Under Christ

So the first thing that we see about the ministers, and you'll see in our bulletin that there's spaces there. It says the Christian minister is blank, the Christian minister is. The first thing that we see here is that the Christian minister, the Christian leader is a servant.

The Corinthians thought of the ministers, these ministers of the gospel, they thought of them as masters whom they were to devote themselves to and to follow. But Paul turns this upside down on his head.

Paul says, what are we? You really want to know who you are following. We are merely servants. You might recognize this word. Paul uses the word for servants, the word diakonos, the word that we get deacon from or minister.

That's why I settled on ministers as I was talking about kind of my semantic struggle. But he uses the word diakonos, and that word in its context simply means a table waiter. So you could read it something like this in verse 5.

What is Paul? What is Paul? Table waiters, servers, restaurant servers through whom you believed. And this is a term that the Corinthians would have known well. These table waiters were not in the upper echelon of society.

They were, just as Paul says, servants. They attended to the people as they ate and drank. They gave them food. They filled their cups. They took away their dirty dishes. They were table waiters. There's nothing romantic about it.

And one commentator writes this about it. He says, the term stresses the lowly character of the service rendered and ridicules the tendency to make much of preachers. And then he asks an important question.

Who would set servants on a pedestal? And yet that is exactly what the Corinthians were doing. They were setting Paul or Apollos or Cephas or Jesus on a pedestal. Christ deserves the pedestal, but none other.

And if you look around, that's still much of what we do today. We do so much of this pedestalling amongst Christian leaders. If you go hang out with a group of brothers or sisters, probably more likely brothers at a Christian conference, I listen to a lot of John MacArthur.

I listen to a lot of John Piper. Oh, you listen to so-and-so? Oh, well, I listen to so-and-so. There's nothing wrong with that in and of itself, except when people begin to align themselves behind human beings rather than behind Christ.

So Paul says, what then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, and he says, as the Lord has assigned to each. That word Lord comes from the Greek word kurios, which means master or owner.

And so Paul's saying we were servants. God is the master. He's the boss. He gets to decide where we go and what we do and what we say and how we say it, and he's the one that gets the glory. And Paul's going to tell the Corinthians, if we flip over a page to chapter 4 and verse 1.

He says, this is how one should regard us, as servants of Christ and stewards of the mysteries of God. And this hints at the chief task of the Christian minister. In Paul's day, the Christian minister was the apostle and the elders.

In our day, primarily when it comes to church leadership, it is the elder, the elder of the church, sometimes called pastor, but elder of the church. And the chief task of the elders, as is hinted at in chapter 4 and verse 1, is to be stewards of the mysteries of God, to steward the revealed word of God.

Noah, I want to ask you, is an elder called to serve physical tables? So if we were to put these tables out, would the elders here be responsible to put food before them? You think so? Anyone else have any other thoughts?

We got a no here. In this case, mom wins. The elders are not primarily tasked with serving physical food. We see this in Acts chapter 6. You guys will remember this, we've looked at it before, so I won't hold too long on it, but you'll remember that there were the Greek-speaking widows, the Hellenistic Jews, sorry, the Hellenistic widows, and they felt they were being neglected in the daily distribution of food.

And so what the early church did is, the early church had somewhat of a food program for the widows, caring for the widows in obedience to Scripture. What a wonderful thing. But there was a debate or a complaint, I should say, that arose within the Hellenistic Jews.

They felt they were being neglected. Maybe the Hebrew-speaking widows were getting served first, maybe they were getting served more, we don't know exactly. But listen to how the disciples, the apostles, handled it.

It says in Acts 6 -2,. And the twelve summoned the full number of disciples and said, It is not right that we should give up preaching the word to serve tables. And that serve tables is the word diakoneo, which is the verb form of diakonos.

So we shouldn't give up preaching the word to serve tables. Therefore, brothers, pick out among you seven men of good repute, those are the deacon prototypes of the church, diakoneo, full of the spirit and of wisdom, who will appoint to this duty, who we will appoint to this duty.

And listen to how they end in verse 4,. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. And so if we know our New Testaments, we see that this is a consistent priority throughout all the ministers, the leaders of the church.

People don't think of Christ in this way, but even if we look at Jesus in Mark 1 in verse 38, He said this, Let us go on to the next town that I may preach there also, for this is why I came out. One of the central truths, one of the central realities of the Christian faith is that we are a people of the word.

And so you'll remember Christ when he was tempted by the devil. During one of the temptations, he said, Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. And so what are Christian ministers, what are elders, what are the leaders of the church to serve when they're serving tables?

They're to serve the word of God to God's people. When we think, if I were to die and I was going to write a letter to you, Noah, one of the last things that I'm going to ever be able to tell you, or Elise, one of the last things that you're ever going to hear from me, I'm probably going to save the most important message for that part of my letter.

Right?

Well, the Apostle Paul was dying. He was dying in the sense that he was in a jail cell. He was awaiting his execution. And Timothy, who was his young protege, he was writing a letter to him. We call that letter Second Timothy.

And Paul's dying exhortation in the last part of that letter, in Second Timothy 4, verses 1 and 2, specifically verse 2, he says this. He says, Timothy, preach the word. Preach God's word to God's people.

Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, exhort with complete patience and teaching. When Paul described his own ministry to the Colossian church, when he wrote to them in Colossians chapter 1, in verse 25, he said this.

He said, I became a minister according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you. When he says I became a minister, that word is diakonos. Same word that he's using here in 1 Corinthians 3.

I became a diakonos according to the stewardship from God that was given to me for you. For what purpose? To make the word of God fully known. The mystery hidden for ages and generations, but now revealed to his saints.

And if we skip a couple of verses to Colossians chapter 1, verse 28, he says, him we proclaim. They proclaim Christ warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

And I love these words. Some people might not find these words encouraging. I find them encouraging. As someone that seeks to make the word of God fully known amongst God's people, to present them mature in Christ, he says, for this I toil, struggling with all his energy, all God's energy that he powerfully works within me.

And so how do we correct our wrong view if we have a wrong view? If you have a wrong view of the Shames or the Steve Cortezes or I fear counting myself in this category, but the Charles Spurgeons or the John Wesleys, I know it sounds funny putting my name in that list.

I don't think anyone has a problem with that. But how do we correct our error when it comes to looking at Christian ministers, leaders, heralds of the gospel? The very first thing we need to do is we need to see them for what they are.

They are not the master. They are the servant. They are the table waiter. They have a role in God's church to feed God's people. I was thinking about it in the language of a kitchen this week. The Christian leader, the elder who understands his role well, knows that his primary task is to serve God by bringing them the word of God.

Every week he goes into the kitchen, as it were, to retrieve the meal that the head chef, that God himself, has prepared for his people. And leading up to Sunday he labors, often painstakingly, like Paul says, struggling with all of God's energy to prepare it in such a way that it's digestible and a benefit to those who will receive it, that he might present God's people mature to their master.

God's ministers serve God's word to God's people for God's glory. It's not about us. It's not about the guy that you listen to on the radio. It's not about the guy on the podcast or on YouTube. It is about God.

I remember I heard a story Joe Beeke shared. I think it was early in his ministry. And someone came to him and they said, You know, Pastor, you're not my favorite preacher. I don't know who would have the gall to say that, but he said, You're not my favorite preacher.

And I loved Joe Beeke's response. He said, I don't want to be your favorite preacher. I just want to bring you the word of God. And that's the role of a minister. Now I want to ask you, do you come on Sunday ready to be served the word of God?

Noah, I think about you. Do you mind if I share this story, buddy, about what you do when we're going to go out for a birthday dinner or something? What do you do? No, no, you don't have goal horns. Sometimes when you're expecting like we're going to have sushi for lunch, you say, I'm not even going to eat breakfast.

I want to have an appetite for when we have sushi at lunchtime. You get ready for the meal, right? And I want to ask how many of us, if you look at yourself, do you come on Sunday ready for the meal? Do you come with an appetite not to hear from me?

You don't want to hear me, but to hear from God. To hear in his word, to learn, to study, to apply yourself. Do you come well rested? Do you come ready to digest? The Puritans had this practice where they would take a loaf of bread and they would put it on their mantle.

Back then, Noah and Elise, they would heat their homes with a fireplace. They didn't have a furnace. They just kept their fire going all night, and if the fire went out, what happened to the house? It got cold.

And what the Puritans would do is they would set a loaf of bread on their mantle above their fireplace so that when they woke up in the morning, that loaf of bread was nice and warm for breakfast. And they said that in the same way the Christian on Saturday night should prepare their hearts for what they are going to feast on on Sunday.

And so preparation to hear the word of God, to digest it, to apply it, doesn't begin, in our case, on Sunday at 3 p .m. It begins Sunday morning. It begins Saturday evening. It's throughout the week looking forward to hearing from God.

The Christian elder does not exist for himself. The true gospel minister does not seek to be a celebrity. He seeks to make Christ famous, to be like John the Baptist who said he must increase and I must decrease.

If I had to choose a symbol to represent the Christian ministry, it's not the stage. It's not the pedestal. It's not even the pulpit. That is not the symbol of the Christian leader. It is the cross. The Christian servant leader, when he is serving at his best, points not to himself but to Christ who came to serve.

We call Christ the great prophet, priest, and king. He is also the great servant, the suffering servant who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. In verse 6, we'll move along.

God Gives the Growth in Ministry

I want you to see this. Paul says, I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. The next heading I want us to look at is this. The Christian minister is a gardener in some ways. We're going to see Paul use other analogies, but the minister is a gardener.

And I want now to apply this to all of us in this room, the few of us in this room. Paul likens himself to a humble agricultural worker. Again, not a very flattering or impressive comparison by the Corinthian standards.

But what Paul wants to demonstrate when he says that I planted and Apollos watered is that neither his job nor Apollos' job is especially noteworthy. Perhaps borrowing from the parable of the sower that we read earlier today from Matthew 13, Paul says that he sowed seeds amongst the Corinthians.

You could say he planted the church and along came Apollos and he watered those seeds. That's it. That's all. And as we've studied in the past, you remember when we looked at planting churches according to biblical patterns, if God does not cause the growth.

Noah, if you were to plant Cheerios in the ground, and you water them every day, how many Cheerio trees are you going to get? Exactly, because you can make that Cheerio grow, right? Well, in the same way, what Paul is saying is this.

I planted, Apollos watered. It might as well be Cheerio seeds. It can be marbles. It can be nickels and pennies. But if God does not cause the growth, might as well plant that because nothing is going to happen.

He says, again looking at verse 6, I planted, Apollos watered, but, see there's another but, but God gave the growth. And if it's God who gives the growth, this is both a humbling and an emboldening truth.

It humbles us because we cannot take credit for anything that God does through us. I remember that the first time the Lord used me to save someone. It was such a wonderful experience. I always wondered what it was going to be like for someone to come to faith in Christ through my witness.

And in one aspect, it was celebratory. It was joyous. But in another sense, there was no sense of personal accomplishment because I knew that I did nothing to bring about that person's conversion. Perhaps I planted, perhaps I watered, but it was God who caused the growth and it was God who gets the glory.

And so, this is a humbling truth, but it's also, I would say, an emboldening truth. I wish there were more people in the room to hear it right now. But this means that success in ministry is not dependent on our performance.

It's not dependent on the eloquence of our speech. Noah and Elise, you guys can be used by God with the knowledge of the gospel that you have to lead your friends to Christ because it doesn't depend on you.

It depends on God. It depends on Him working His power, His will, His plan, His purpose through you as an instrument. And I find that tremendously encouraging, tremendously emboldening, that we can go out this afternoon if we want and we can knock on people's doors and we can share the gospel with them.

We can go home and share it with family. We can share it with our friends. We can share it with our neighbors, with our co-workers. We can share it with all of these people. And guess what? Some might reject it.

Some might receive it. But God is going to use that one way or the other as a seed, as water. And we don't have to cause the growth. Just like I've used in times past where when we deliver the message, we're like a letter carrier.

We take the message to the people. We don't convince them to open it. We don't convince them to pay the bill inside. We just deliver the message. And that's all that is within our power as sowers of seeds and as waterers is to bring the message of the gospel and God causes the growth.

And it should make us patient ministers of the gospel. So often people give up on evangelism like a fad diet because they don't see immediate results. But I want to share a story about a man named John Flavel.

John Flavel was a Puritan, born in 1628, died in 1691. And I promise I don't try to bring up Robert Murray McShame too much. He just is all over the place. But Robert Murray McShame tells a story about a man named Luke Short.

And forgive me if you guys have heard this. I know that some of our brothers and sisters on this side of the room haven't. But when Luke Short was just 15 years old, he heard John Flavel preach in England.

Have you heard this story? No? Okay, good. He heard John Flavel preach in England, preach the gospel. And the text of John Flavel's message was, If any man love not the Lord Jesus, let him be anathema, maranatha.

Let him be accursed. And this man, Luke Short, he later moved to America. This was in England where he heard John Flavel move to America. He grew to be an old man. 85 years after he heard John Flavel's sermon, we're told that God effectually converted him at the age of 100 as he meditated on that sermon.

And so, this should make us patient sowers. John Flavel planted that seed 85 years before it grew. I'm not much of a gardener. I don't know if you can plant a seed and have it pop up 2 or 3 or 10 or 15 years later.

But you can, apparently. But it's true of the gospel that 85 years later, and there are still people now, actually I remember hearing a brother that listened to a sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards.

And he was converted in the last 20 years by that sermon. Preached hundreds of years ago. It's neither he who plants nor he who waters, but it's God who causes the growth. Verses 8 and 9 says this, 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. You are God's building. The next thing I want us to see is that the Christian minister is a co-laborer. They are cooperative. They work in company with other brothers and sisters in Christ.

Paul says, He who plants and he who waters are one. The Corinthians saw Paul and Apollos as two men in competition with each other. Just like we see that sometimes amongst Christian ministers, or we see that amongst other brothers and sisters in competition with each other.

Always, are they more effective than me? Do they know more than me? Are they a better preacher than me? Are they a more powerful prayer than I am? But Paul sets the record straight. God uses one man's gifts and abilities to plant gospel seeds.

He uses another man's gifts to water those seeds. But despite their differing skill sets and gifts and functions within the church, these men are one. They are united in thought and in purpose. They work together to accomplish the same end goal.

They are co-laborers who find unity in one overarching purpose. And that purpose is God's purpose to save and to sanctify sinners. Verse 9, Paul writes, We are God's fellow workers. For a number of years, I misunderstood the meaning of this text.

I misunderstood it to mean that Paul and Barnabas were laboring together with God. So alongside God, that's what I thought, that God had partnered with them as fellow workers. And so even in recent years, I remember saying, one of the amazing things is that we are God's fellow workers, that we are working alongside God.

That's not at all what Paul means when he says that we are God's fellow workers. When Paul says that, he's saying we are God, God's, God apostrophe S. In the Greek, it's a possessive genitive. It means that these men are fellow workers in God's possession.