1 Corinthians 2:12-3:7 / Spiritual Maturity
Renovated from the Inside Out
It is really easy to talk about church, religion, and everything that surrounds it, and completely lose the story in the midst of it all. We need to realize that ultimately, what we celebrate is Jesus Christ, who changes lives. If you find yourself here today in the train wreck of life, or if you are looking around thinking, Man, I don’t think I have any hope, or any friends, or any joy, or any peace in my life, you just need to know you have come to the right place. Not because The Well is the answer, but because Christ is the answer. What we will unashamedly do, every chance we get, is point you to Jesus Christ.
For those who have had their lives changed, there is no greater move you can make in life than to place your life completely into the hands of Jesus Christ, who will renovate who you are from the inside out. If you focus merely on deeds or behaviors, good luck with that. It is a treadmill of moral religiosity that will never truly get to the heart of the issue. The issue is that we have corruption in our hearts. We have a fatal flaw called sin, and apart from Jesus Christ, there is nothing we can do to medicate it. You can’t dress it up. You can’t make it lose weight so it feels better. You can’t put makeup on it, and you can’t help it find its “happy place.” At the end of the day, there is only one thing that makes your heart new, and that is the person and work of Jesus Christ.
So if you are here and you have never placed your faith in Christ, we have no hidden agenda: we would love for you to come to know Christ. We would prefer you not become religious—we are not big fans of religiosity either. We would much prefer you start with Christ in your heart, and everything else will follow suit after that.
The Litmus Test of Spiritual Maturity
If you have your Bibles, turn to 1 Corinthians chapter 2. We have a pattern here of picking a book of the Bible and trudging through it—sometimes ridiculously slowly! We have wrapped up the book of Malachi and celebrated our baptism service, so the question becomes: what is next? As we talked about what was next, the books of 1 and 2 Corinthians came to mind. But we realized that journey is going to be long and arduous, and those books build heavily on each other chapter by chapter. In the summer, that can be tough because when it gets stinking hot, many of you head to the coast, go up into the mountains, or flee to an ice bath somewhere hoping to stop sweating! So we felt like we ought to do something a little different for our summer teaching series.
First Corinthians 2 sets us up for where we are heading. If you look at 1 Corinthians chapter 2, starting in verse 12 and following, the Apostle Paul is laying out a contrast. In verse 14, he talks about what he calls the “natural man,” and in verse 15, the “spiritual man.” He is laying out a litmus test of spiritual maturity.
1 Corinthians 2:14-15 (NASB)
But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one.
The natural man in verse 14 acts as if he is devoid of the Spirit. He thinks by instinct, lives by his own free will and volition, and operates according to his own mindset and preferences. The spiritual man in verse 15 is very different. The spiritual man is submitted to a higher authority than himself. He allows the Spirit of God within him to drive him, and he pursues content over preference, content over style.
Paul lays out that contrast, and then in chapter 3, verse 1, he gives us the context we are working from. He says, “Brethren, when I came to you, I couldn’t speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to men of the flesh—as infants in Christ.”
1 Corinthians 3:1-2 (NASB)
And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to men of flesh, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food; for you were not yet able [to receive it]. Indeed, even now you are not yet able,
There is an assumption in Christianity that when you place your faith in Christ, you may come just as you are, but you will not stay as you are. As you abide in Jesus Christ, God begins to produce fruit through you. If you placed your faith in Christ a decade ago and you still live like the knucklehead you were a decade ago, you might want to double-check and make sure you are attached to the right source.
2 Corinthians 5:17 (NASB)
Therefore if anyone is in Christ, [he is] a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come.
If you were a hothead then and you are still a hothead now, you might want to make sure you truly know Jesus. If you still struggle with the exact same things to the exact same degree, make sure you have placed your faith in the Savior, not just in religion or the concept of “I don’t want to go to hell.” We have so butchered the gospel by promoting an easy-believism that says, “Just check a box, pray a prayer, and you’re good. Now come to church, don’t bring your Bible, don’t participate, don’t serve, just sit because that’s what good people do, vote Republican, pick up trash, recycle if you want, and go home.” As if that is what being a Christian is all about! But life never truly changes, and we are never renovated from the inside out.
Moving Past the Bottle
Paul is suggesting in verse 1 that there is a major problem among the people of God: years after placing their faith in Christ, there is still rampant spiritual immaturity. Notice what he calls them in verse 1: infants, babies.
Now, babies are cute. I was just interacting with little Madison before the service—it’s like a tractor beam with kids! But have you ever noticed how ridiculous we sound when we talk to babies? We use baby talk: “Oh, did you get a boo-boo? Let’s get the boo-bunny!” That is how you treat a toddler. But have you ever noticed how awkward it is when an adult treats another adult like a baby? “Oh buddy, did you get a boo-boo? Come sit on my lap.” It is completely bizarre.
That is the exact point Paul is making. He says, “Look friends, there should be spiritual maturity among you by now, but there’s not. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, because you weren’t able to receive it, and even now you’re still not able.”
When a baby is born, you don’t hand them a thick piece of tri-tip. We were at dinner doing teppanyaki recently, and my youngest, Kendall, got a piece of filet mignon. I told her, “That’s so good, you’d better enjoy it!” She chewed on it for a while and then said, “I can’t finish it,” and spit the filet right out into her bowl of miso soup! What a waste of a good filet! She couldn’t digest it. If you gave solid food to an infant, you would choke them and end up doing the Heimlich maneuver. So you give them milk. But the assumption is that someday that child will grow to appreciate real food.
If a baby is sitting in the sanctuary sucking on a bottle, we all think it’s adorable. But can you imagine a grown adult sitting there sucking on a baby bottle with milk dripping down their beard? You would look at that and say, “Something is terribly wrong here.” That is what Paul is saying: “I am trying to talk to you about spiritual things, but you are still sucking on the bottle.”
Hebrews 5:12 (NASB)
For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God, and you have come to need milk and not solid food.
We all agree that if a twenty-year-old man is still living at home, sucking on a bottle, having his mom make his breakfast, pack his sack lunch with his name on it, and iron his clothes, the first lesson he needs is: “Get a job, buy your own cereal, and move out!” You raise children so that they eventually walk away equipped with the maturity to handle life. That same progression is expected in the spiritual life.
The Symptom of Immaturity: Fighting Over Preference
How do we know the Corinthians were spiritually immature? Look at verse 3. Paul writes that they are still fleshly because there is jealousy and strife among them. Depending on your translation, it might say quarreling or disputes. There was this zealous passion in them, this fighting and envying.
The problem wasn’t their zeal; the problem was what they were fighting over. Scripture tells us that we need to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints. There ought to be passion in us to stand up and say, “That is not right!”
Jude 1:3 (NASB)
Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints.
Paul told Timothy to preach the word in season and out of season, to reprove, rebuke, and exhort with great patience, because a time would come when people would not endure sound doctrine but accumulate teachers to tickle their ears.
2 Timothy 4:2-4 (NASB)
preach the word; be ready in season [and] out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but [wanting] to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.
It is right to contend for the major, closed-handed issues of the faith—the deity of Christ, the substitutionary atonement, the inerrancy of Scripture. Fight for those! But that is not what the Corinthians were fighting over.
Look at verse 4 to see the real issue. One says, “I am of Paul,” and another says, “I am of Apollos.” Paul asks, “Are you not mere men?”
1 Corinthians 3:4-7 (NASB)
For when one says, ‘I am of Paul,’ and another, ‘I am of Apollos,’ are you not [mere] men? What then is Apollos? And what is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, even as the Lord gave [opportunity] to each one. I planted, Apollos watered, but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but God who causes the growth.
Paul came to Christ in Acts 9, wrote a massive portion of the New Testament, was a Pharisee of Pharisees, trained under Gamaliel, and was brilliant. If you read Romans, you see his theological magnum opus—point A, point B, illustration, tightly argued. Apollos, in Acts 18, was a skilled and eloquent speaker with a completely different style. What the Corinthians were fighting over was not doctrine; they were fighting over their favorite communicators! They had their team jerseys on, waving their foam fingers, arguing over style and personality. Paul looks at them and says, “Who are Paul and Apollos? We are just servants through whom you believed. I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused the growth!”
One of the greatest challenges we face in our market-driven, retail-oriented culture is consumer preference. Yesterday, I spent four dollars on a cup of coffee—ridiculous, I know. But when they handed it to me, they said, “If it’s not perfect, let us know!” In a customer-service society, everything caters to the client. We want it our way, and if there is a pickle on the burger when we said no pickles, we send it back.
We bring that exact same consumer mentality into the church. We say, “The music was a little too rock-and-roll this morning,” or “The lighting is too dark, it feels like a man cave,” or “That communicator isn’t my favorite; I like the other guy better.” Those preferences become stumbling blocks to hearing the Word of God. Add the internet to the mix, and now we can podcast the best communicators in the world instantly. We find ourselves saying, “Yeah, but he’s no John MacArthur,” or “He’s not Charles Stanley,” or “He’s not Mark Driscoll.” We put on our jerseys and miss the point entirely.
Every person who stands behind a pulpit to open the Scriptures is teaching the living, inspired Word of God. What you need to see and hear is Jesus beyond personality and Jesus beyond style. When worship begins anywhere in the world, your first thought shouldn’t be about the drums, the hymns, or whether the soprano is off-key. What matters is the content: Is it exalting Christ? The sign of spiritual maturity is the ability to look through preference to see Jesus.
The Parables: Truth Thrown Alongside
This summer, we are going to put our maturity to the test. We are going to have a variety of communicators step into the pulpit. You are going to hear campus pastors who haven’t had regular opportunities to teach, our junior high and high school youth pastors, Dom the “bearded wonder,” Mike and Jared from our teaching team, and Pastor Sam Freshwater, who brings over forty years of pastoral experience.
Our commitment to you is that every one of these men will study to show himself approved as a workman who accurately handles the word of truth. We have met with them for weeks, working through outlines and exegesis as a team. They are going to bring their best. They won’t all preach like me or anyone else, and they shouldn’t. They will be themselves, and our challenge as a congregation is to look beyond the communicator’s style to hear Christ.
2 Timothy 2:15 (NASB)
Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, accurately handling the word of truth.
Throughout the summer, we will be studying the parables of Jesus found in the Gospels. In Matthew 12, after the religious leaders accused Jesus of doing miracles by the power of Satan, He began speaking to the crowds in parables. The word parable comes from the Greek para-ballo—ballo meaning “to throw” and para meaning “alongside.” Parables are truths thrown alongside everyday life.
They are not allegories; they are stories with a specific meaning in an original historical context. When Jesus was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” He told the story of the Good Samaritan.
Luke 10:30-37 (NASB)
Jesus replied and said, ’A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among robbers, and they stripped him and beat him, and went away leaving him half dead. ’And by chance a priest was going down on that road, and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. ’Likewise a Levite also, when he came to the place and saw him, passed by on the other side. ’But a Samaritan, who was on a journey, came upon him; and when he saw him, he felt compassion, and came to him and bandaged up his wounds, pouring oil and wine on [them]; and he put him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn and took care of him. ’On the next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper and said, ‘Take care of him; and whatever more you spend, when I return I will repay you.’ ‘Which of these three do you think proved to be a neighbor to the man who fell into the robbers’ [hands]?’ And he said, ‘The one who showed mercy toward him.’ Then Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do the same.’
That parable answered a direct question while challenging us to care for hurting people rather than acting like the religious elite. In the same way, the parable of the Prodigal Son draws us into the narrative from multiple angles.
Luke 15:11-32 (NASB)
And He said, ’A man had two sons. ’The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the estate that falls to me.’ So he divided his wealth between them. ’And not many days later, the younger son gathered everything together and went on a journey into a distant country, and there he squandered his estate with loose living. ’Now when he had spent everything, a severe famine occurred in that country, and he began to be impoverished. ’So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. ’And he would have gladly filled his stomach with the pods that the swine were eating, and no one was giving [anything] to him. ’But when he came to his senses, he said, ’How many of my father’s hired men have more than enough bread, but I am dying here with hunger! ’I will get up and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me as one of your hired men.’’ ’So he got up and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion [for him], and ran and embraced him and kissed him. ’And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ ’But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’ And they began to celebrate. ’Now his older son was in the field, and when he came and approached the house, he heard music and dancing. ’And he summoned one of the servants and [began] inquiring what these things could be. ’And he said to him, ‘Your brother has come, and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has received him back safe and sound.’ ’But he became angry and was not willing to go in; and his father came out and [began] pleading with him. ’But he answered and said to his father, ‘Look! For so many years I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours; and [yet] you have never given me a young goat, so that I might celebrate with my friends; but when this son of yours came, who has devoured your wealth with prostitutes, you killed the fattened calf for him.’ ’And he said to him, ’Son, you have always been with me, and all that is mine is yours. ‘But we had to celebrate and rejoice, for this brother of yours was dead and [has begun] to live, and [was] lost and has been found.’’
Some of us identify with the rebellious younger son who squandered everything and came home broken. Some identify with the loving father who runs with open arms to restore his child. Others might recognize the attitude of the older brother, standing with arms folded in bitterness. Parables draw us in so that the truth takes hold of our hearts.
Moving Forward Together
As we move into this season, we are also intentionally moving forward in our worship. Culture and style are always shifting. When the church drops an anchor and says, “We will only do what we were comfortable with ten years ago,” we lose our connection to the culture we are trying to reach. What is contemporary today becomes old school in just a few short years.
We are choosing to be progressive in our worship style because we are called to seek and save that which was lost. There are generations of junior high, high school, and college students in our community who desperately need the gospel. Biblically, the spiritually mature are always called to lay down their preferences for the sake of the less mature.
Luke 19:10 (NASB)
‘For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.’
If your attitude is, “I’m a tither, so it has to be done my way,” you are missing the heart of the mission. It is not about our personal comfort; it is about reaching our city for Jesus Christ. We are challenging all of us to grow in maturity, to look past the external shell, and to focus on the eternal mission.
Let’s commit to praying for our short-term mission teams heading out overseas this summer. Let’s pray that God opens doors no one can shut and shuts doors no one can open. And let’s keep our eyes fixed entirely on Jesus.
Hebrews 13:8 (NASB)
Jesus Christ [is] the same yesterday and today and forever.
Father, thank You for Your Word and for the privilege of being Your people. Teach us to look beyond style, preference, and personalities to see the heart of God. If we have erred by exalting our preferences over Jesus, we repent. Styles come and go, but Jesus remains the same yesterday, today, and forever. May our lives and our church be centered entirely on Him. In Christ’s name, Amen.