Give Up Your Milk And Start Eating Solid Food

1 Corinthians 3:3-4 -  For you are still only baby Christians, controlled by your own desires, not God’s. When you are jealous of one another and divide up into quarreling groups, doesn’t that prove you are still babies, wanting your own way? In fact, you are acting like people who don’t belong to the Lord at all.  There you are, quarreling about whether I am greater than Apollos, and dividing the church. Doesn’t this show how little you have grown in the Lord?

 

Paul gently chides the Corinthian Church for their lack of growth. He uses the analogy of babies who still need simple milk to eat.  Instead of growing and starting to eat solid food…they were living on the milk they first started with.  He tells them the evidence of this is their quarrels and divisions within the church.

 

Paul repeats how important it is to remember that God gives us all different jobs to do for Him. Paul was a seed planter….Apollos watered the seed to give it the nourishment it needed to grow.  Neither of them were the source of the lesson…their intent was for them to bind together to follow Christ…not an individual man.  God is the only one that could make that seed within them grow….so that the solid food they ate from others would help them discover the work God wanted them to do for Him.  

 

It reminds me to never get so caught up in a person’s teaching that I begin to see them as the only authority on God.  God raises up many people to help us discern and apply His great words from the Bible….but none of them should ever be raised on human pedestals to have their own religion. We worship God…but listen to the men and women he chooses to give us solid food to eat…so we will grow and find our own jobs to do for Him.

 

Father…thank you for the reminder that you intend for me to grow into a mature Christian that becomes a worker for your kingdom. Forgive me for the times that I wanted only milk to eat…and let myself stop growing for a time. Help me to be controlled by what you want and not my own desires….so I can become what you planned for me to be when you came into my heart. Amen.