1 Corinthians 3:1-9 More than Merely Human

You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsick preaches from his sermon series titled

First Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in. Good morning.

How's everybody doing? I'm Don Filsick. I'm the lead pastor here, and I'm really glad we've had the opportunity this morning together, together in the name of our

Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, to worship Him, to raise Him high. How many of you are glad to be gathered together with others who love

Jesus? All right. Awesome. Every week, we come together for the purpose of growing in our faith. That's what this event is about.

That's why we gather together. Ekklesia means the gathering. That's the Greek word for church. What is a church?

It's a gathering of people who love Jesus. And we do that together here by growing in faith.

We listen to His Word. We believe that His Word is true, trusting it. And then we trust it enough to go out and base our lives the rest of the week on the truth of what we hear from God's Word.

That's what it means to grow in faith. We need to take in His Word. We need to trust it, and we need to live it out.

Faith is exercised only by doing the hard work of listening to His Word, letting the Spirit convict us, let the

Spirit correct us, or let the Spirit encourage us, depending on the intention of the text that we're looking at on any given morning.

This morning, we are going to come to a text that was written with corrective force and a little bit of sarcasm in its original context.

Paul has heard that the church in Corinth is chock full of divisions and strife. They think of themselves as an elite church that has found deeper knowledge.

They pride themselves in having a great rhetorical preacher, a guy named Apollos, and they put his name on the sign, and they think

Apollos is all of that and a bag of chips. He came into Corinth after Paul had left, and the book of Acts lets us know in no uncertain terms.

It kind of goes over the top to express that he was an extremely gifted rhetoric.

He was a winsome guy who won the crowds over really quick and was probably in that a gifted evangelism as well.

They had begun to pit Apollos against Paul, saying some of us in our midst, we follow

Paul, some of us follow Apollo, some of us follow Peter, and they went on through that. And further, they believe that they are ready to move on to deeper things, deeper things than what

Paul was sharing with them. Maybe they even think to some degree by the time that Paul writes this in 1

Corinthians that they have moved on to deeper things. They don't need the things that Paul has brought to them.

They are mature and wise and knowledgeable, and they've got the secret wisdom that they need.

And so, our text this morning is corrected to them. And really, it really ought to… maybe the word that would be better used for this text is rebuke.

Paul will call them in no uncertain terms. He'll say, you think you're the flagship church, you think you're something, and you're actually infants.

Now, that's an insulting thing. And he's going to tell them that they were not even ready for milk, so what makes them think that they're ready for solid food?

But most importantly, Paul focuses on their divisions as a sign of their immaturity. You show me a church that's divided, you show me a church that's warring, you show me a church that has bitterness and backbiting and gossip and slander, and there is indeed an immature church.

And he's indicting the entire church as we go to read this. He isn't calling out a subgroup of the church who's acting immature.

He's saying that the church itself has taken on a character trait of immaturity based on divisions.

And how many of you know that a church gets a reputation? A church gets a feel? Do you know what I'm saying? Raise your hand if you know that.

Like, there are some churches that are really known to be kind of egg -headed and teachy. There are some churches that are known for just like emphatic worship without a whole lot of substance.

Or there's churches that… there's all different kinds of ways that a church can go, right? God forbid that Recast ever be known as that church that loves to divide, that church that loves to split, that church that loves to backbite.

But a church can gain that kind of reputation. The church in Corinth had gained that kind of reputation.

But all of this detail is going to come out later in the message after we sing some songs, but let me ask you a question to get our minds flowing in the right direction as we get ready to read this.

Are you living as a mere human? Are you living as a mere human?

That's a strange question. But is that the extent of what can be said about you is that you live as a person, you live as a human?

Paul wants everyone in Christ to wake up to two realities in this text. We who are indwelt by God's Holy Spirit have access to powerful life that goes so much beyond the resources of fleshly human living, more than merely living as humans.

When I talk about access to the power of the Holy Spirit, it's not some mystical thing that I'm talking about because when the

Word of God, when we take in God's Word, when it's taken in by one who is indwelt by the

Spirit of God, conviction grows, encouragement grows, new insight grows, and our love for God grows.

Now, the alternative to this access to the Spirit is what the Corinthians are doing. Seek out worldly wisdom and follow the world's advice, and the world will be glad to tell us how to run the church and what we ought to be doing and how we ought to be doing it.

Have you encountered that? Is the world ready to tell you how you should behave? Even as a Christian, they're ready to tell

Christians how to behave. They're ready to tell us what we should and shouldn't be doing, right? And yet, in a twist,

Paul is going to denigrate the role of leadership in identifying that the power of leaders only rests in the servanthood of God.

The power within the church leadership is only in as much as those leaders see themselves as servants of God.

And bringing those two things together then this morning, we all have so much more available to us than we can even imagine, and we may just get a wake -up call this morning to our low level of living in the palace.

Are we those who are warming up a packet of ramen in the corner while the king has laid out a banquet of filet mignon and lobster tails for us?

And I think that might strike some of us when we think about this passage when we get in. And as far as divisions go,

Paul calls us all to put our allegiance to leaders in check through this passage. We are all recipients of His Spirit, and those who lead you are merely servants of the

Lord. So, let's open our Bibles or your Scripture journals or your apps to 1 Corinthians chapter 3.

1 Corinthians chapter 3, 1 through 9 is our passage this morning. It's a privilege that I have,

I count it a privilege, to be able to read God's holy word in the assembly, in the gathering of His people.

And this is the power to change us, the very Word of God. 1

Corinthians chapter 3, verses 1 through 9 says this, 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 ready for it. And even now you're 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?

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. Let's pray. Brother, this has been an awesome week of reminder to me to just introspect a little bit and check my role.

I just think of the calling that you placed on me to stand up here, just mere flesh and blood, to get up here and proclaim your holy word.

And it's a weight, it's heavy, and it's glorious.

It is a privilege. But Father, I pray that you would protect us as a church.

You have protected us so faithfully over these 14 years. It's been amazing to see the unity, the love, the care, the gospel going forward, the gospel having a way in building our hearts and our lives and strengthening us and building up our faith in community and service to one another.

Father, I pray that as this text strikes our ears as a very stern rebuke from Paul, that we would take on what your spirit desires to press on each one of us in terms of our understanding about the way that we might be tempted to contribute to division.

We might be tempted to contribute to gossip and slander and back channels, and this church is not immune to that kind of thing.

So Father, it's only by your spirit and only by us taking on your word and individually being convicted by it that we will walk forward together year by year and decade by decade.

Father, we rejoice in the opportunity we have to sing songs to you. We thank you for the fellowship that we have here in this community who loves you and loves

Jesus Christ and has been embraced by him. And so I pray that from that place of recognizing the salvation that we've been granted in Christ, we would be joyful in our worship this morning, that we would be glad to be in this gathering, and that we would show in the vibrancy and even the volume of our singing,

Father, that we would lift up our voices with abandon, not concerned what others around us are thinking, but that we would just be delighted to be before your throne in the gathering of your people.

We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. All right, yeah, go ahead and be seated and make yourself comfortable.

More coffee, juice, and donut holes back there if you need to get up and fill up. I know we just took a break, but if you need that at any time, you're in the message.

And then the restrooms are out the barn doors down the hallway on the left -hand side if you need those. Jumping in, yeah, make sure that you've got 1

Corinthians chapter 3, verses 1 through 9 up in front of you so that you can follow along and see that the things that I'm saying are coming from God's word.

I'm not making this stuff up as I go. I would run out of content quickly if I had to make this stuff up.

And then you start hearing the same message over and over again. Fortunately, the Bible is big and there's plenty for us to talk about.

So I never once in 14 years of ministry have ever scratched my head and said, I don't know what to preach next because there's always the next chapter.

So just kind of could keep going for the rest of my life here. But the passage that we're looking at this morning breaks down into two main points.

And I'm starting here and I'm going to explain those two points to begin with because if we just start with verse 1 and walk through 9, my hunch is that there's going to be a couple of things in this passage that are going to grab your attention and pull you away from the main point.

They're actually going to become so like big in your mind that you're going to kind of go like, wait a minute. So we might get a little lost in Paul's logic.

Any of you ever get lost in Paul's logic, by the way? Anybody? Okay. Even Peter said some of the things that Paul writes about are tough.

He says that in his letter. So the first thing is verses 1 through 4, rather, acting merely human.

That's what we're looking at in verses 1 through 4, acting merely human. If you're a note taker, the second point is being merely servants.

Being merely servants, verses 5 through 9. So acting merely human and being merely servants. So we're going to start with acting merely human and the main point from verses, the first four verses of chapter 3 can be summarized by this declaration.

Stop living lives of contention and selfish pride because you have the

Spirit. Stop living lives of contention and selfish pride because you church have the

Spirit. Now, I state this up front because the text, like I mentioned, could easily take us down a bunch of rabbit trails that Paul isn't necessarily interested in addressing.

The reason we can tend to get confused in this passage is because Paul introduces a category of people that grabs our curiosity and our attention here in the text.

If you look with me at verse 1, he says that he's not been able to address the Corinthian Christians as people who have the

Spirit, but rather as fleshly, or some translations translate it carnal because they are carnal people or they are fleshly people.

But he calls them brothers and sisters, a term that is only reserved for followers of Jesus Christ.

Brothers in Christ, sisters in Christ. By the time we get down to verse 9, he's even going to suggest that the

Corinthians do indeed belong to God, possessive. They are gods. And they belong to Him in that way.

They're not gods, like as in little g, gods, like they are gods. No, they belong to Him. So, Paul was speaking to this church as a whole, and he uses plural pronouns all throughout.

So, where you see you, think use guys, or if you're more southern, y 'all, however you want to go. But yeah, use guys all throughout this passage.

And to the church, he says, I wanted to speak to you as people who are living out of your spiritual inheritance.

I wanted to talk to you like Spirit -filled people. That's how I wanted to talk to you, but I couldn't.

He wanted to see them strong in the Spirit, living out of loving obedience to Jesus Christ, and leaning into the last phrase in the last passage, just at the end of chapter 2, the mind of Christ.

He says, you have that mind, but you're not living in it. You have the Spirit, but you're not living in Him. And he quite harshly tells them this in verses 1 and 2.

I don't know if it strikes our ears as harsh as it should, that they were over there. What he basically says to them in verses 1 and 2 is, you're over there napping in your pack and play, so I had to warm you up a little bottle and give you a little snacky snack.

Those verses 1 and 2 are intentionally harsh, intentionally denigrating. Paul is not employing a direct allegory, by the way, here.

An allegory is where everything stands for something else, and it's our job to figure out what it stands for. No, we want to take a deep dive into this and make it an allegory instead of what it actually is.

It's trash talk. He's talking smack to the church, and I mean that. I think this passage is more like smack talk, these first two verses, than what we see.

From our vantage point, we think of it as disconnected because we're not the emotional recipients of it. But somebody calls you a baby, how do you feel?

Do you know what I mean? Oh man, oh man, let's just divide up and stuff. I mean, how are you feeling, right? It's not a good thing.

I mean, I relate this to something that I could relate to back in the day. The guy

I'm defending hoists up a three because my lazy rear is playing off of him, right? I'm playing back a little bit.

You've got to make me cover you out there because I'll give that one to you. And then swish, it goes in.

Who should have covered him? And what does he say to me back in the day? In your eye.

In your eye. Smack talk. And I never once, when somebody said in your eye, which happened often because I was kind of lazy on defense, but I never once stopped the game and asked them, what's in my eye?

Somebody quick, get me a mirror. My man over here is telling me there's something in my eye, right? Like, would you do that?

Of course not. You're not going to analyze. Smack talk is meant to evoke emotion, not technical details.

We might not like to see this in scripture, but I'm confident that that's what Paul is doing here. So we're over here tempted to take a deep dive into the distinctions, for example, between milk and solid food and what is the milk and what's the solid food while the

Corinthians are over here going, oh, roasted. Oh, wait, that was us. You see, this entire church thought that they were something.

This is what you need to start off this text with. Hey, you haven't been with us for a while. That's okay. I'll catch you up.

This church thought they were everything. They thought they were the flagship church of the era.

Everybody should do it the way that the Corinthians were doing it. They prided themselves as like the pinnacle of Paul's ministry.

He spent 18 months there, a long, long time in Corinth, and they were like, we're privileged to have

Paul here with us for a long time, and we get it now. Everybody should live like us. And Paul says, you're still living as though you don't even have the spirit.

Like itty bitty widdle babies, you weren't even ready for it. And he goes on to say, and you're still not.

You're still not ready for it. Grow up and grasp your inheritance, says

Paul. Grow up and live the life the spirit is calling you into, is empowering you to.

Well, it's good to leave this behind with whatever questions you have in your mind about milk and meat and solid foods and trash talk and all that, because this is all supportive shock language in verses 1 and 2 to get to the heart of the problem in Corinth in verse 3.

Why is he trash talking them? What is the sign and the symbol that they're not getting it? While they think they are strong, they prove themselves to be weak.

And it's because they're still living out of their human wisdom and human pride. Look at verse, look at verse 3 with me.

For you're still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in merely human, only in merely human ways?

Are you not behaving in merely human ways? Of the flesh means behaving in a merely human way.

We could easily be confused over this, but human wisdom says things like this. Like when you think about what is human wisdom, what does it mean to live out of that?

It's the world standards. How many of you know that you're called to a different standard than the world?

There are things that are sin that are not crime anymore. Did you know that? There's a lot of things that are sin that are not crime.

But when we think about this, you can think in just very, very straightforward terms about human wisdom versus God's wisdom.

In human wisdom, the strongest, the smartest, the most famous, the one with the biggest platform is the one always worth following, right?

You follow that one. While spiritual wisdom goes right straight for it.

God's wisdom says, see that guy that's beat to oblivion and hung up on a cross? Follow that guy.

He's going places. Follow him and he will impart in your heart his ways and his truth.

He will transform you through knowledge and trust in his word. He will transform you as you see what love truly looks like in his sacrifice as revealed in his word.

I was listening to a podcast that contrasted this this week very, very clearly for me. The contrast between worldly wisdom and living out of a merely human way versus living out of a spirit way.

Listening to a podcast this week of a famous preacher that I've listened to many times in the past. Won't say his name.

I have the guess that some of you in the room will guess who it is. But famous preacher endorsed a mindset that says you should pick your church according to this criteria.

He was literally suggesting this is a good measure for how to pick a church. He said this, ask yourself, if I walked up and smacked that pastor right now where he stands speaking, would he just take it or would he come back at me?

And he clearly implied in his podcast that you should stay at the church with the pastor who would come back at you.

Now I can't tell you what's going to happen to you if you come up here and slap me in the face. Some of you are thinking about it.

You're like, well, let's see. But I can tell you that there is a very distinct difference between what my flesh wants to do in that moment and what

I know definitively that the spirit wants me to do in that moment. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Do you want to follow a pastor that's spirit led or ready to rumble? Who do you want to follow?

It was crazy to hear him say this because I know what the spirit wants.

How do I know what the spirit wants? Do you guys know what the spirit wants in that situation? How do you know?

Because the Bible tells us what to do. Not only does our Lord instruct us in Matthew 539 to turn the other cheek, but even more than merely his instruction to us is his example.

I can tell you, not just because of his instruction to me, but because what he did when he was struck.

He showed us. He showed us. Worldly church, fleshly.

There is a way of living and leading and leaning into this Christian life that is merely human.

It's merely human. It's living out of the principles that anybody can grasp.

It's common sense made theology, right? How many of us would really just admit that like, man, is there any room for me to defend myself?

Is there any room to fight back? Is there any room for that? How many of you know that there's some questions in that, right? Yeah, and there's all kinds of nuance to that.

It's worth a discussion and it's worth interacting over. Certainly understanding biblical ethics and all of that can be complicated, but there is a way of going about this life that assumes that common sense, worldly wisdom trumps this every day.

And how many of you know that goes the other direction? This trumps worldly wisdom every day.

What I love about this phrase, by the way, merely human is the implication. It's really astonishing when you take it in and really, really see all the way around this idea of you guys are acting merely human, he says to the

Corinthians, and that's that the opposite is possible. Do you see that? There's a way of living merely human, and that means that there's a way of living for his children that is not merely human.

What? There is a way for us to live that is not living merely out of our flesh, not merely living out of the common sense, worldly wisdom of the day and the age.

Amen? Now hear me carefully, church. Paul is not proclaiming a division in the church between those who have access to this higher spiritual living and those in the church who have lesser available to them.

And really, just you're immature, you're young, you can't quite get the Christian life. No, the problem is not between haves and have -nots.

Have the spirits, don't have the spirit, but the problem is between those who behave as those who have the spirit and those who don't all have it.

The Corinthians had access to the same spirit that you and I have, and Paul and Apollos and Peter and all the apostles had access to that spirit.

For the one who is in Christ, we've been adopted into the family. We are indwelt by His Holy Spirit. We can keep living like paupers, but we've been given access to the deep and unimaginable resources of our

King through the spirit that lives within us, that we can dig into the Word and be fed.

We can dig into the Word and draw understanding and draw nourishment and draw how we should live and how we should walk that is contrary to the things that our flesh desires and wants.

And so, the critique that the Corinthians are living in, jealousy and strife, is the central indictment in this text.

It's not like, oh, you can't handle, you know, solid food yet, you're too young, you're too immature, you're not in the faith enough yet, or whatever.

No, it's that they're operating out of jealousy and strife. That's the indictment. And before you assume that this is just likely a minority faction within the church, we will see that jealousy and strife comes from both directions and everywhere at once.

And some of you have lived it. Some of you've been in a church where you're like, no, that wasn't just a small group that was stirring things up.

The whole church was on fire in turmoil. I want you to raise your hand, but I know that some of you have gone through that yourself.

You've been the victim of all kinds of strife where an entire church is lit up.

Let me just state it this way. We're going to see later a division, much later in the book, a division between the poor and the rich.

And how many of you know that the poor can disdain the rich while the rich are disdaining the poor? And everybody can be at fault.

Everybody can be upset. And nobody's happy. And everybody is angry. That's a reality.

And jealousy and strife have swallowed up this entire church of Corinth, so that the entire church is caught up in behavior and living out of their flesh, living out of the categories of thinking that come only from the world, not from Scripture, not from the

Spirit. And a good chunk of this jealousy and strife is coming from the church, dividing up along lines of which leaders they prefer.

Verse 4 harkens back to chapter 1, verse 12. And it's where Paul first brought up the issues of division in this book, where some say,

I follow Apollo. Some say, I follow Peter. Some say, I follow Paul. Some say, I follow, well, you should say you follow

Jesus. And Paul says that this kind of division is a sign of the flesh. I think

Paul is in essence saying, can you get more human? Is it possible to get more human than picking your favorite human to follow?

Can you get more human than choosing your heroes? When you're choosing your heroes, you can't get much more human than that.

Your champions, what did the Philistines put forward? Their champion, their hero, the one who no one could take down, right?

Is that not the beat your chest kind of human bravado that comes with our heroes?

And a word of application. I've been listening to the rise, I listened rather past tense to the rise and fall of Mars Hill.

Some of you have listened to that. And more recently, I watched a documentary on the many problems at Hillsong, Australia, and then

New York City. And I'm reminded of how a proper understanding of our next point in this text is vital for our generation that is rife with celebrity pastors.

So many, so many, so many tragically have walked away from their faith and even get deconstructed on the basis of the failure of their hero.

What did the Philistines do when Goliath fell? They fled, everyone running in different directions, right?

Paul would say to them, I think, to those who would deconstruct. And by the way, super sad. You listen to the rise and fall of Mars Hill and you encounter testimonies of people who no longer love

Jesus, who no longer love him, don't want anything to do with the church, primarily because of the fall of a predominant leader.

The same with the ending of the Hillsong documentary. People who are just basically on the screen with an anti -testimony.

We're going to hear some testimonies of people who love Jesus, who want to show you that they have died to their old way of life and our race.

But at the end of those, you hear anti -testimonies. Not saying that they lost their salvation, not sure where they were at in the beginning, especially if they put their trust and faith in a person.

But sad nonetheless. Super sad. And I think Paul would say to every one of them, did you read my letter?

Did you read my letter to the Corinthians? Specifically chapter three, verses five through nine.

And go back and look at that. Because our next point is being merely servants, verses five through nine.

These two parts of the text go together like a diagnosis and a therapy. He has diagnosed them as living weak lives of jealousy and strife and divisions.

All the while, the spirit is available to them. The diagnosis is infantile living that picks out heroes and creates divisions.

The therapy is understanding who those heroes actually are. Paul picks at the fabric of celebrity culture here.

A problem that was obviously still going on, was rather not still, is still going on today, was going on back then.

With all of these public speakers traveling around and people would have their favorites and they would vote with their coins.

And it was very common. It was their form of entertainment. I mentioned earlier in one of the previous messages, like TED Talks on steroids.

And the idea that they were going to find the unifying ideal was a very common Greek thing.

So democracy, for example, the idea of democracy comes out of Greek thought.

A pretty good idea. Whenever you raise your hand and say, pretty good idea. Right? No one wants to raise their hand on that one?

You're like, is this a trick question? I think it's a pretty good idea. And that's the kind of ideal, the utopian. Now, we know that democracy is not utopia, right?

That's what they wanted. And it's got its, well, tons of failures, tons of problems, but it's a fairly decent system.

I know this is in my notes. But Paul is picking at the fabric of their celebrity culture and he says here in the text, what then is

Apollos? What's Paul? And they're looking for this idea and they're elevating their speaker.

They're elevating Apollos to the height. And he says, what is he again? We can imagine filling in the blank with a whole host of names.

What then is? But for Paul's purpose, he's concerned that we are going to elevate each other too much.

He recognizes that human tendency to put too much stock in each other. So within the church, there is no room for rock stars.

It's a problem. There's no room for heroes. There is no room for elites. I can say it.

What then is Piper? What then is Chandler? What then is Eugene Peterson? One of my favorite authors.

One of the guys that I really respect highly. He's passed. Let's ask it more personal.

What then is Don? What's Jesse or Dan or Mike or Mark or Zach or David?

Hopefully you know who I'm naming. Those are our elders. What are they? The only correct answer is found in verse 5.

Merely servants. Merely servants. And in the case of the Corinthians, they are servants through whom they happen to come to believe.

But these are servants that I list that I hope to some degree you have grown in your faith through some of the things that are taught up here.

Some of the interactions you've had with our elders and our leadership and different people who serve you. And it is the

Lord, he says in verse 5, it's the Lord who assigned these servants their roles in the church.

It comes down to His ministry through us. You see, Paul cast out the seed.

He says, I planted. Apollos came along afterwards and watered the seed. And yet, it's the Lord alone that gives the growth, he goes on to say.

According to a recreation of the timeline of Paul's ministry using the book of Acts, it's likely that Paul and Apollos never overlapped in Corinth.

There wasn't a passing of the baton. Meaning that Paul started the work in Corinth and left. He's at Ephesus when he's writing the letter of 1

Corinthians. He's moved along and then Apollos moved in to help the church grow. That's what he means by watering.

But I love the way that Paul follows the Lord in this metaphor of agriculture here in the closing verses of this text.

Paul saw in himself the farmer of the parable of Jesus planting, throwing out the seed of the gospel indiscriminately.

He would throw the gospel out with very little regard for where it would land. Some of it, according to Jesus, lands on rocky soil.

Some of it falls on the pathway. But some of it falls on tilled up soil and grows and produces a harvest.

Despite the fact that this is not the exact analogy found in our text, the agricultural metaphor is there and it's adopted by Paul and it's always struck me the way that Jesus speaks of this.

You see, what you need to understand is that when you give an agricultural analogy, you are talking about the very lifeblood of a society back then.

Seed was both food and the promise of next year's food. It's a hand -to -mouth culture.

You eat what you grow or you don't eat. So, if you didn't grow food, you didn't eat next year.

And so, the reckless sowing of seed in a field shows something of the ministry of an evangelist like Paul.

He didn't save the gospel for people he thought would respond. You know, I won't share the gospel with them because I know they would reject it anyways.

He was out sowing seed and hoping that it would grow, all the while knowing that any healthy growth is going to, in the end, come from God.

And I want to point out that this passage, you know, someone plants, someone waters, but the growth comes from God.

And there's a little point of caution that I want to identify here. Paul is giving credit for the growth of the church to God and that's a really good model.

Where you see church growth that is healthy, that is good, that is right, always give

God the credit for that. But this is not here to teach that everything that appears to look like church growth is from God.

Satan has his counterfeits of everything, does he not? Satan would love to counterfeit growth.

And further, I would suggest to you that not all church growth that is healthy is giving credit to God.

But I could draw a crowd by giving out free iPads and we could have every single empty seat here filled up by just giving stuff away, right?

Is that church growth? That's not healthy. The church grows by one thing.

The church grows by faith. And I, just with all humility would suggest to you, cannot produce an ounce of that.

I can't produce that. I can't make that happen. I can stand up here and declare the word which is the seed and hope that it takes root.

That's where either God gives the growth or there will be none. I was thinking a lot about growth this week with gladness, but also caution, especially as I listen to that entire

Hillsong podcast this week, I didn't realize I was preparing for a sermon. And it really was lodged in there as a significant caution to us.

And as I was thinking, I'm fairly confident that there are two ways to grow a church on healthy and healthy growth.

One is highly intentional, and the other is relatively passive. I truly believe that there are church leaders who have big dreams for a big church, a big paycheck, and maybe even eventually a big jet.

But I truly believe that there are other church leaders who love Jesus, love his word, and God just gives growth.

And I'm quite confident that none of us have a nose sensitive enough to smell the difference. I think they both look relatively the same.

I think you can start to suss it out a little bit, but I think it does very little good for me to stand up here and try to convince you, guys,

I'm one of the good guys. But I don't know if you've noticed, but Recast has been growing lately.

And those of you who have been around me for any length of time can testify. Some of you who have been here from the very beginning know better, and you know me well enough to not give me any credit for masterminding a plan with finely crafted strategery to grow the church so that I can get that private jet in the next few years.

I don't have it in me. I asked my wife a very direct question at lunch yesterday. I said, have

I done this? Have I produced growth here? And she said, no. Not a bit.

And we know it. We know it. I mean, again, I'm kind of up here defending myself. I don't mean to do that because I'll just let you guys figure things out as you go.

But I can tell you that my heart is just as prone to temptations as yours. But I can also tell you that I believe that God has given the growth here full stop.

And I praise Him. And I rejoice that so many over the years have had the opportunity to gather together and hear

His word. I'm convinced that no one comes here to be entertained.

I don't think. If you do, I've got a little secret for you, and I'll just share it with you right now.

There are much more entertaining churches within a very short drive of here. I'm not trying to get you to leave.

I want you to stay. But I'm being honest, this is not that entertaining. There's also golf courses.

What? The pastor doesn't say that. No, if it's about entertainment, I don't believe that.

I don't believe this is about entertaining you. I think this is about the word. But here's how we ought to think of church leaders and Christian celebrities.

They are nothing, says Paul in verse 7. They are absolutely nothing. In a world where everyone builds themselves up in pride,

Paul here is including himself in that. And he's denigrating his own role. And I think that's otherworldly.

I think that is not living like mere men. Not living like mere humanity.

That is the Spirit. Because what does the flesh always do?

Builds itself up. The flesh will always overemphasize its own importance.

Paul's self -denigration and denigrating his own role and saying, I'm really, people who are sowing, people who are planting, people who are preaching, people who are teaching, people who you see as leaders, they're not anything.

Consider how frequently you hear that in the world. How frequent is that at your workplace?

Do the drivers say the one who delivers the package is nothing? Do the teachers say the one educating the kids, nothing?

Does the engineer downplay his role at product launch? Does the sales force suggest that they are just not that important?

This is a shocking statement that I believe lends credibility to the spiritual, not merely human nature of the ministry of the early church and particularly

Paul. Paul says my role in proclaiming the gospel, really not anything at all. Just a servant of the

Most High God. And in solidarity with Apollos, Paul says the planter and the water are united as one, one in purpose, one in focus.

They both just want to see growth. And yet they will each receive a reward according to the heavy toil that they put in.

The word labor at the very end of verse 8 is a very strong word. It's a very strong Greek word that means back -breaking labor.

It's the way that Paul viewed his work. And I'm not telling you to be impressed, and neither is Paul, in the ministry of people over you.

But he is here identifying that he worked hard in his work for his master.

We ought to take that on in whatever role that God gives us to work hard at whatever ministry

He has given to us. At the end of the day, all church leaders are merely servants belonging to God like tools in His tool belt,

God's fellow workers. When he closes verse 9, he says the leaders are God's.

They belong to Him. They're possessive. You are God's field, God's building.

We belong to Him as His workers, and you belong to Him as His field. So what is the hired hand?

What is the servant? What is any church leader when any and all growth only comes as a direct ministry at the hand of God?

So what is this text? Stop living low when you've been called into such a high place, and stop elevating men as heroes when they are merely servants.

And some may find Paul's balance here a bit confusing, but I find it beautiful because the gospel will both put you down while lifting you up.

We are all cut from the same cloth, church. We are all born sinners, actively rebellious against our

Creator. And the cross shows us the gruesome, bloody gravity of our sins, the

Son of God slain there for us. Can you feel any lower? Can you ever feel lower than taking in what

He did for you? I don't know how it's possible. How is it possible to ever get lower than the foot of the cross, where you look up at the

Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, dying for you?

Never lower the Son of God slain for us. How much humility should we live with day to day?

But, church, the cross also reminds us of His great love and grace toward us, merely servants with access to the power of God through His Spirit.

The cross reminds us of His great love and grace toward us. We who are nothing are elevated to royalty.

All of us, not just the special ones, not just pastors and missionaries and leaders and elders, all of us brought into an equal status at the foot of the cross, redeemed and indwelt by His Spirit, knowing how terrible our sins are and knowing how much we are loved by Him.

Redeemed and indwelt by His Spirit when we're regenerated through faith in Jesus Christ. So, let me encourage us all to come to communion this morning, to remember

His body that was broken for us and His blood shed for us. If you've asked Jesus Christ to be your

Lord and Savior and are at unity with His church, then I encourage you to go to the tables during this next song, take the cracker and the cup of juice to remember what

He did for us. You can take that back to your seat or you can take it standing someplace or whatever, but just do that on your own.

But together in the assembly, it's meant to be a powerful thing to bring us back to what

Christ did for us. And then after communion, we're going to get prepared to have some baptisms.

So, let me just encourage you, after you take communion, there's still going to be some singing, especially among those of us without kids back there, but go right after communion and go get those kids.

They're ready for us. They knew that we were going to be ending a little bit early. We're going to have a couple of songs to sing in here.

So, let me just say this as a caveat. If you're here and you're like, my kids are going to have a ballistic meltdown and I don't really want to stay for another 25 to 30 minutes after this, after communion, or you're here for the first time and you're like,

I didn't sign up for that. Just please feel free to leave. It's totally okay.

You can bounce right after communion and that's all right. But if you plan to stay for baptisms, we're going to get the opportunity to sing a couple more songs together.

I'm looking forward to that and then we'll all come back together here. We have nine people who are going to be baptized this morning.

So, praising God for that. So, and we know, we know,

I note that we applaud from time to time and I know that Dave doesn't take an ounce of that and I don't take an ounce of that.

When we applaud, let that praise just be for God. It is the growth that comes from Him.

It's been awesome to have a front row seat to it. So, let's pray. Father, I thank you so much for your grace and your mercy that we do all of these things in an effort, in a work, and we know that it can very easily come to nothing without your spirit, without your working.

We could plant all day long in the, in water all day long and have no produce.

But it is only in your movement. I rejoice in seeing these lives that you have transformed that want to testify to the congregation that they are yours.

They want to show what has transpired in their lives. But before we get to that, we have the opportunity to remember the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the place where we are both brought low and then elevated in great love.

We thank you for that hope that we have in Christ that our sins are forgiven and we are washed clean.

And so, as we come to those tables, Father, I pray that you would receive it as an act of worship, that you would impress on us. I know that it can become routine doing it every week.

I pray against that, Father, that you would meet us here in this moment of reflection on the great sacrifice of your