1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Servants of God
3 As a matter of fact, my friends, I could not talk to you as I talk to people who have the Spirit; I had to talk to you as though you belonged to this world, as children in the Christian faith. 2 I had to feed you milk, not solid food, because you were not ready for it. And even now you are not ready for it, 3 because you still live as the people of this world live. When there is jealousy among you and you quarrel with one another, doesn't this prove that you belong to this world, living by its standards? 4 When one of you says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos”—aren't you acting like worldly people?
5 After all, who is Apollos? And who is Paul? We are simply God's servants, by whom you were led to believe. Each one of us does the work which the Lord gave him to do: 6 I planted the seed, Apollos watered the plant, but it was God who made the plant grow. 7 The one who plants and the one who waters really do not matter. It is God who matters, because he makes the plant grow. 8 There is no difference between the one who plants and the one who waters; God will reward each one according to the work each has done. 9 For we are partners working together for God, and you are God's field.
There is a strange psychological phenomenon that can happen when people are kidnapped, that they can start to empathise with the kidnapper. They listen to their opinions, feel their pain and start to defend them. This is called Stockholm Syndrome. By all rights, the victim should be angry and enraged with their captor but somehow the opposite happens.
The Bible speaks about the Church as being strangers in a foreign land. We are children of God, living out the ways of Jesus in a world that is fundamentally opposed to them. We should be living fundamentally different lives to those around us, and yet a little like Stockholm Syndrome, we find ourselves empathising with and enticed by a culture that we know does not have our best interests at heart.
How do you tell a Christian in a crowd? It sounds like the start of a bad joke but it is a question that Paul seems to suggest we should have an answer to. Paul wanted to teach the church in Corinth deep truths about God. However, he realised that they were not ready for that due to their immaturity. He describes immaturity as ‘[living] as people in the world live.’ Their lifestyle, their habits, their activity was no different to other people. There was so much more to their faith available to them but they were not ready because they had not set themselves apart.
Interestingly, this was less about what clothes they wore or songs they sang, as their unity, humility and relationship with Jesus. For Paul, at the centre of it all is the truth that we are followers of Jesus and united with one another.
