Immaturity
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2025 · 1 June 2025
We’re going to look at verses 1 to 9, a portion that has been used as a basis of understanding much of what is taught regarding the Christian’s behavior. In fact, the third chapter really is loaded with some very pertinent things in regard to Christian life. When people accept Christ, they tend to think it is freewheeling from that point on, but then they discover it is only just the beginning of life.”
The Christian life is not easy. It is difficult. In fact, maybe it’s harder to live now then it was before you were saved. Why? It is not easy to live a Christian life, with the power of God within us. Why is it difficult to do the thing we know we want to do, to do the thing that is right to do, that God says to be done? There are two reasons, and really everything can be reduced to these two that make the Christian life difficult.
Number one: You are going against the grain of the world. You are finding yourself like a spiritual salmon. While everything else is floating downstream, you’re fighting the current. You keep slamming against the wall of worldliness trying to break through. You aren’t swimming the way the rest of the fish are swimming. You are going against the current, and it isn’t easy. You are going the opposite way.
Now that’s the external pressure of living the Christian life. Secondly, the internal. You are also going against the grain of the flesh, your own humanness. Paul put it this way in Romans 7: “I love to do God’s will so far as my new self is concerned. But there is something deep within me in my flesh that is at war with my mind, and wins the fight, making me a slave to the sin that still is in me.” That’s the internal.
You see, men are born sinful. That’s because they’re born of sinful parents, and it goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. And because we are born with a tendency to sin, this creates a problem. Salvation comes and when we are saved, God breaks the back of evil; neutralizes it, in and gives us the Holy Spirit to subdue sin; but He doesn’t remove the tendency to do evil that is in our humanness.
So, Satan has two things that he works on in the life of a Christian: the world, that’s the external; and the flesh, that’s the internal. And those two things make it very difficult. We are going against the grain. And we have within us a tendency to evil. And though the Spirit of God is there to subdue that, it is still there, and it rears itself; and though we win the battle ultimately, we lose a lot of skirmishes on the way.
That’s why the Christian life isn’t easy. The Christian has to watch for two things: we have to look outside and watch the world, you have to look inside and watch the flesh. And, sometimes they are closely connected, because the world becomes what tempts the flesh. Satan uses that to get to us from the outside and inside. The problem the Corinthians faced was that they were succumbing to the world and to the flesh.
No sin is an isolated sin. Sins are always combinations of other sins. And in Corinth, division was not an isolated sin, it was a product of other sins. Pride, envy, jealousy, et cetera, create division. But division was a very serious thing, and Paul spends a tremendous amount of time on division. He says, “Your division is caused by worldliness and the flesh." Division in the church at Corinth, was caused by worldliness.
Now we think of worldliness usually as things you do, you know: playing cards, getting drunk, you know, whatever you categorize as worldliness in your little category. But that isn’t really what worldliness is. Worldliness is simply buying whatever the world’s philosophies are, whatever their attitudes are. And in the case of the Corinthians, it was that they were following the world’s philosophies.
But there was a second reason. The second reason for their division is in chapter 3, and that is the flesh. And whenever the flesh functions it inevitably is selfish. Division manifests selfishness and that’s what carnality always is. Carnality says, “I will do what I will do; I don’t care what God wants me to do. I will work in the flesh, do what my body says, my nature says, regardless of what God says.”
So carnality and worldliness were creating the division in the church. Perennially, the enemies of the Lord’s work are the world and the flesh, both in the collective and corporate base, and individually. Now Paul is going to tackle the disease of division from the standpoint of carnality, from the internal, from the standpoint of the flesh, because really it’s the key: if you can overrule the flesh, you can also overrule the world.
Some of you are doctors and you use that word diagnosis a lot. Gnōsis the Greek word “to know” and ‘dia’ means “through.” And that’s what diagnosis is: you look at the symptoms, you go behind the symptoms through to the real problem. You have seen through the superficial to the real problem. And this is what Paul did. Here we find Paul diagnosing the Corinthians all the way through the book.
Now he comes to the disease of division, and it’s very contagious. You can have division at the church at a small level and that thing can spread. Not only does it affect the church, but it affects the world, because a divided, wrangling, fighting church loses its ability to testify. Now Paul’s going to give us three things, the cause, the symptoms, and the cure. The cause of division; the symptoms of it, and the cure for it.
Number one: The cause is in verses 1 through 3a: “For my part, brothers and sisters, I was not able to speak to you as spiritual people but as people of the flesh, as babies in Christ. 2 I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, since you were not yet ready for it. In fact, you are still not ready, 3 because you are still worldly.” He speaks to Christians, but he says: “I could not speak to you as spiritual people.”
When we use the term “spiritual,” we use it in many ways. The world talks about the spiritual world. They mean the occult. We talk about someone who is spiritual, and we may mean a guy who is really moving in the spirit, a guy who is spiritual as opposed to carnal. Or when we say a spiritual man, we may just mean a Christian, as opposed to a natural man. And we want to know how Paul uses it here, so watch.
So here is somebody controlled by the Spirit, a spiritual man. All Christians are controlled by the Spirit. Now not all Christians obey the Spirit who is in control, but they are all controlled by Him. He remains in control of your life until the day you die. The only issue is whether or not you’re submitting to His control. A Christian positionally before God is perfect; but in practice we don’t always live up to what we are.
He says to the Corinthians: “You are holy ones,” and then he proceeds to tell them how rotten they are. Well, He’s saying, “Before God, in Christ, positionally, you are holy. Practically, you’re rotten. You’re not living up to what you are.” This is why we believe that you don’t lose your salvation, because your practice never affects your position. You have to make a distinction in Scripture. The practice of an individual.
Now the word “spiritual” here is used of your position. Before God, you are a spiritual person, you are under the control of the Spirit, as opposed to an unsaved person who is not. You can know the word. You can discern the Word. You can read the Word. You can study the Word. You are controlled by the Holy Spirit. The word then “spiritual” is used in the New Testament several times to speak of this positional aspect.
Now when I say to you the word “mature,” what kind of Christian do you think of? Somebody who really knows the Word, really growing. Did you know that every Christian is mature? Positionally you’re all full-grown. Did you know that? When you became a Christian you were a whole thing. There is not any halfway about it. A Christian is somebody who is a Christian; and he’s a total Christian, right?
Now here he’s saying your practice isn’t spiritual, 1 Corinthians 3:1, “For my part, brothers and sisters, I was not able to speak to you as spiritual people but as people of the flesh, as babies in Christ.” It is used in this reference to refer to the basic nature of man, to refer to that which is subject to sin: his Adamic self, his rebelliousness toward God, his self-centeredness, his proneness to sin.
And when you were saved, that was not eradicated. It doesn’t dominate you anymore, it’s been neutralized, and you can use it or not use it; but it’s still there. And he’s saying, “I have to talk to you like you were carnal.” The unsaved man’s dominated by the flesh. He says, “I’ve got to talk to you like you’re unsaved, like you are sarkinos, made of the flesh, fleshy.” That’s the definition of unbelievers.
And, you know, when a Christian sins, there’s no difference in quality, and there’s no difference in definition between his sin and the sin of an unbeliever. You see, a sin is sin; and the same flesh that functioned before you were saved will produce the same kind of sin. It will be less frequent, but just as bad when it happens. So a Christian who is spiritual could never be natural, but he could behave fleshly.
So he’s saying to the Corinthians, “You know, you’re so messed up I have to treat you like a bunch of unbelievers.” Now who is a babe? Babe implies spiritual stupidity, ignorance. Verse 2 says, “I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, since you were not yet ready for it. In fact, you are still not ready.” Verse 3, “because you are still worldly. For since there is envy and strife among you, are you not worldly and behaving like mere humans?”
You know who the pastor was they followed? Apollos. The Bible says things about Apollos it says about no man. He was so eloquent he was probably above all men in eloquence, and teaching of the Word. Now here Paul is not really rebuking them at the first of the verse, he’s just recalling. I gave you some milk and brought you along. But the thing that shocks me is you still can’t handle the meat.
You say, “How could they be spiritually stupid if they’d been under all that teaching?” If you walk in the flesh long enough, you will shift your spiritual gears into reverse, and you will become what James 1:25 calls a “forgetful hearer,” and you will literally lose the ability to function on the things you once knew. They forgot the things they should have known. Their carnality had stunted their growth.
Well, you know, the Catholics felt that way. They didn’t want to get too deep. They made a distinction in this verse between milk doctrine and meat doctrine, and they said the only thing the people could have was the milk doctrine, and the meat doctrine was for the clergy; and they kept the whole of the Catholic Church in ignorance for centuries. Anything that’s good to know is good to know by anybody who needs to know it.
What is the difference between a milk and a meat doctrine? There’s no difference. No difference in the doctrine, just a difference in the depth of it. The same thing that’s milk to you might be meat to somebody else. To keep spiritual ignorance is a crime against the Holy Spirit. And you are insulting the Spirit of God when a guy gets in a pulpit and gives nothing but milk all the time. He is ignoring the Holy Spirit in divine revelation.
The saddest thing in the church is to see somebody who has grown up physically and grown along in years in Christianity and has the mentality of an infant, and never known the deep things of God. Spiritual ignorance and carnality are tied inseparably together. I believe that the greatest tragedy in the church is manifest immaturity from people who know better, who have been around long enough to be mature.
Now in verse 3 they mention only two of them “envy and strife,” or if you want a different definition “jealousy and wrangling.” Now carnality doesn’t just cause this particular symptom. It will manifest itself in other ways, right? It’s like cancer. Cancer causes many malfunctions in many ways to many different organs. You can have leukemia or basal cell carcinoma, hepatoma, all of that referring to different organs.
Verse 4: “For whenever someone says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not acting like mere humans?” You’re operating in the flesh.” Division can only happen where there’s carnality. Immature people split over personalities. People will start following other people, it’ll manifest carnality. You don’t want to get your eyes on personalities, you want to get your eyes on God.
And that leads us to the cure, verses 5 - 9. It’s going to be a quick cure. Verse 5 says, “What then is Apollos? What is Paul? They are servants through whom you believed, and each has the role the Lord has given.” And what he was implying was, “What did they ever do for you?” Here he says, “They did nothing.” He says, “They are diakonoi.” You know what we servants are? Spiritual busboys.
Well, don’t exalt ministers. We are tools; we are channels. Don’t honor the man, you honor God. And as long as the church keeps its focus on God, everything is okay. We’re just agents, even as the Lord gave to every man. The only reason I am what I am is Lord gave it to me. The only reason you came to Christ through me is that’s the way the Lord designed it. Don’t honor me; I’m just being used as a tool.”
Verse 6, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” Don’t honor me, don’t honor Apollos; honor God.” Verse 7, “So, then, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” And if anything happens in this ministry you focus on God. Verse 8, “Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his own reward according to his own labor.”
Your rewards aren’t based on your success, they’re based on your labor. Verse 9, “For we are God’s coworkers. You are God’s field, God’s building.” If you really get your attention on Him, not only will it eliminate division, it will eliminate carnality. Please pray and ask God to deliver you from carnality, to transform your life into the walk in the Spirit consistent with your position. Let us pray.