1.
Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation
of our hearts be pleasing in Your Sight, O Lord, our Rock and our
Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word today comes from
1 Cor. 3:1-9 and is entitled, ‘Got Milk
or Solid Food?” Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2.
When you were a child, didn’t it
seem to take a long time to grow up? I remember always wanting to be older and
bigger than I was. Before I was 10 years old I remember longing to be a
teenager. That magical age seemed to be a long way off. Then it came, and I
longed to be 16 and have a driver’s license. Then it was 18, so that I would be
old enough to vote, and then 21, so that I could be of legal drinking age. In the same way, have you ever noticed how
young children play? They love to
pretend to be adults, whether it’s cowboys, sports, or playing house with dolls. Likewise there are many in the church who
hunger to grow. They desire a deeper awareness of Christ and His truths. They
long for a stronger faith and a more meaningful spiritual maturity.
3.
Just as there are those in church
who long to be spiritually mature, there are also those who are spiritually
immature. We often refer to spiritual
immaturity as worldliness. It’s thinking
and behaving just like the people of this world, who lack the Holy Spirit’s
working in their lives. This type of
thinking may lead to idolizing and following the leaders of the Church more
than our Savior Jesus Himself, or that there is jealousy and quarreling among
those in the church. Here in Corinthians
Paul says it’s foolish to idolize those who are only servants, when God is the
source of all spiritual growth. What’s
even worse is to quarrel over which leader within the church is better than the
other.
4.
Paul
writes in 1 Corinthians 3:1-5,” 1But
I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the
flesh, as infants in Christ. 2I fed you with milk, not solid food,
for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, 3for
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? 4For when
one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” are you not being
merely human? 5What then is
Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned
to each.” Chapter three begins with
Paul scolding the Christians in Corinth since he could speak to them only as
infants. He had to feed them with milk and not with solid food, because they
couldn’t digest anything stronger. (I Cor. 3:2)
Paul reminds us that God wants us to grow! He wants us to move beyond
the elementary stage of milk into the maturity of the meat of God’s Word.
5.
Paul was writing to a congregation
that had divided into factions. The groups had distinguished themselves from
each other by an appeal to their “leaders.”
You can almost hear them shouting at each other: “I follow Paul! . . . Apollos! . . . Peter! . . . Christ!” That’s
why Paul asked them in 1 Cor. Chapter 1, “Is
Christ divided?” Their bickering and
their one-upping each other, Paul said, was a result of their immaturity and
worldliness. They were spiritual babies
as far as their understanding of the mystery of the Gospel was concerned.
6.
And yet the situation of
the Corinthian Christians forces us to ask ourselves where we are in growing in
grace and in the knowledge of Jesus Christ and determine to do something about
moving toward maturity in Christ. We can refuse to be content with a “Jesus loves me, this I know . . .”
mentality and pursue the Scripture’s teaching further about how God continues
to make us righteous in and through His Son our Savior Jesus Christ. For instance, Jesus’ parables are full of
encouragement to growing in our lives as one of His disciples. Hebrews 5:12-6:3 says, “12… by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you
again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid
food, 13for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of
righteousness, since he is a child. 14But solid food is for the mature, for
those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to
distinguish good from evil. 1Therefore
let us leave the elementary doctrine of Christ and go on to maturity, not
laying again a foundation of repentance from dead works and of faith toward
God, 2and of instruction about washings, the laying on of hands, the
resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment. 3And this we will do if God
permits. “
7.
In
1 Corinthians 3 Paul used two analogies to show the process that God was using
to build His Church in Corinth. Both emphasize that while God used apostles and
other Church leaders in carrying out the process, they were really only His
servants through whose proclamation of His Gospel the Holy Spirit accomplished
His saving purpose in people. 1 Cor.
3:6-9 says, “6I planted,
Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7So neither he who plants
nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8He
who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according
to his labor. 9For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field,
God’s building.”
8.
Notice that Paul’s first analogy is
from farming. Paul said that he, as the first to bring the Gospel to them, had
planted the seed. Apollos, an eloquent preacher who had come to Corinth after
Paul had left, had watered the seed. But, Paul explained, it was God who made
the seed grow into what it had become in the lives of the Corinthian
Christians. This was being accomplished
through the preaching of Christ and Him crucified among them and through the
sacraments of Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. God has produced spiritual growth within you
through your parents, pastor, teachers and maybe even your friends with the
Spirit’s power. God has used these
people in your lives to tell you the message of Christ and Him crucified on the
cross of Calvary for the forgiveness of your sins to cause your faith to mature
and grow.
9.
In 1 Corinthians 3 Paul is also
reminding us of what Pastors who are called to shepherd God’s flock go through.
At times a Pastor may feel like he’s in a pressure cooker within the
church. Some people may say that
Pastor’s only work on Sunday. They may
think that from the outside looking in, a pastor’s life can sometimes seem
pretty comfortable. But, when is it ever
comfortable to hold people accountable for their sins? Is it easy to tell a couple who’ve been
living together outside of marriage that they’ve been committing adultery? Is it a simple thing to tell a man who is
addicted to pornography or drugs that he’s sinning and needs to repent? What about when the church begins to fight
about how it spends its money or that the church services are just getting too
long. The church may even demand that
the pastor work on growing the number of people within the congregation. The truth is that many pastors today live
with the pressure of making the church more like the world than being the
people of God, our Lord wants us to be. Unjust
criticism and infighting can make a pastor’s life miserable. But even worse, Satan can use it to suck the
heart out of the ministry of a congregation.
10.
Paul reminds us that we shouldn’t
make requirements on our spiritual leaders what God Himself doesn’t require. Of course, Pastors are responsible for
shepherding the flock, for feeding God’s people with the milk and the meat of
God’s Word pointing to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and for calling
God’s people to live out a Christ like life.
But, notice here in 1 Cor. 3 that God alone is the one who produces the
growth. He’s the one who brings us to
saving faith through the hearing of God’s Word.
He does this not only in your own life when the Holy Spirit creates and
sustains your faith in Christ through the hearing of the Word and the
Sacraments, but also in the life of your pastor and your own congregation.
11.
Why do we continue to read, study
and inwardly digest the Word of God and seek to hear it from our pastor? Because Paul says in Romans 10:17 17
…faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.” And also Romans 1:16 says, “16 For I am not ashamed of the
gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to
the Jew first and also to the Greek. For we who have the Scriptures are to
study them actively, not stand idly by and neglect them. Contrast the Corinthian Church with the
Berean Church in Acts 17:10-12 where it
says,10 The brothers immediately sent Paul and Silas away
by night to Berea, and when they arrived they went into the Jewish
synagogue. 11 Now these Jews
were more noble than those in Thessalonica; they received the word with all
eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so. 12 Many of them therefore
believed, with not a few Greek women of high standing as well as men.
12.
Notice how eagerly the Bereans
studied the Scriptures. They wanted more
than just the milk of Holy Scripture, but also the solid food. In Acts 17 we learn that the Bereans “examined the Scriptures every day.” They
even went home and checked what Paul was saying against the Word of God. They didn’t stand idly by and just believe
Paul because of his credentials as an apostle.
And what moved them to do that?
The Bereans knew what was at stake: eternal life and death. They knew what they would find in the
Scriptures: certain truth, assurance that
their sins were forgiven for every day. They
knew whom they would find there: their promised Messiah, their Savior, Jesus.
13. What a beautiful encouragement
for us to be like the Bereans in Acts 17 to seek the solid food and be active
students of God’s Word. Although, we
probably have to admit: that too often God’s Word sits around our lives
collecting dust. We may not be in Church
every week and when we are, it may be our only exposure to Scripture that
week. We may not even take the time to
study God’s Word in depth with other members of our congregation in Adult Bible
Study or Sunday School.
14. If we don’t diligently study
and hear the Scriptures how will we ever judge whether the teachings and
practices of our church and in our own lives are true and right like the
Bereans did in Acts 17? For neglect of
the Scriptures too, we beg forgiveness; we’re not innocent. But in the Scriptures are above all God’s
Word of forgiveness through His Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Even one single sentence of forgiveness in
Christ, heard only once, cleanses us of a whole lifetime of neglect of the Word
and of every other sin. One single
sentence, heard only once, heard right now: For the sake of Jesus’ death and
resurrection, you are forgiven, you are innocent. Now live as the people God has called you to
be seeking the solid food of God’s Word in Christ Jesus. Amen.
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