Hindrances to Spiritual
Growth; 1 Corinthians 3:16-23
We need to think
about spirituality because that is the basic issue in Corinthians. He carnal
Corinthians did not understand who and what they were in Christ. If we don’t
understand what we have been given at the point of salvation and that is the
potential for everything in the spiritual life, then we will not grow
spiritually because we lack the basic information that is necessary.
Furthermore, they were caught up with all of the ideas that they had picked up
as unbelievers, all of the various ideas and approaches to life that were
dominant in Corinth, and too often what they were trying to do was interpret
the Christian life on the basis of these concept rather than learning doctrine
and then challenging their cultural values on the basis of doctrine. That is
the same problem we have today. People are saved out all kinds of contexts and
human viewpoint and we bring that to the Scriptures. Our job as believers is to
exchange the human viewpoint in our souls to the divine viewpoint in Scripture.
The problem we face in our world today is not unlike that of the Corinthians. That
is, the people want to judge the Bible on the basis of their experience and
their frame of reference rather than judging their own experience and frame of
reference by the Bible.
The doctrine of spirituality
1)
Salvation
is based on a right relationship with Jesus Christ but spirituality is based on
a right relationship with the Holy Spirit.
2)
Salvation
supplies the positional realities that form the potential for spiritual growth.
3)
At salvation we
are the recipients of six salvation ministries of God the Holy Spirit: a)
Efficacious grace where God the Holy Spirit takes our faith and makes it
effective for salvation; b) We are regenerated; c) We are baptized by God the
Holy Spirit; d) We are sealed by God the Holy Spirit; e) We receive spiritual gifts;
f) We are indwelt by God the Holy Spirit; g) We are filled with the Holy
Spirit, but that is the one thing we can lose, and we lose that as soon as we
sin. It is only by confessing our sins (1 John 1:9) that we are restored to
fellowship.
4)
We have to
recognize that spirituality is an absolute, it is not a concept of growth, it has to do with our relationship with God the Holy Spirit.
5)
Failure in the
spiritual life leads to carnality and produces human good or dead works. The
issue is not what the activity is, the issue is
whether or not we are in right relationship with God the Holy Spirit.
6)
When we are in
fellowship, walking by means of the Spirit and abiding in Christ, we are
advancing spiritually, producing divine good—which Paul calls, gold, silver and
precious stones—and we will be rewarded on the basis of that divine good.
7)
The results of
spirituality are many. We have to understand that these are the results of
spirituality. It is the Holy Spirit who produces growth in us and these are the
consequence of that: a) There is witnessing in Acts 1:8; b) Giving; c) Worship,
Ephesians
Paul has made it clear at the
end of chapter two and beginning of chapter three that the problem in the
Corinthian church and the divisions that are there is a consequence of their
walking according to the flesh and not according to the Spirit. He warns then,
starting in 3:9, that there are eternal consequences to their carnality: not
that they will lose their salvation and end up in the lake of fire, but that if
there is no gold, silver and precious stones then there will be no rewards, and
they will suffer loss. There will be shame at the judgment seat of Christ—1 John
The point that he is making
is that because of that positional reality we are given a potential to live the
spiritual live. God has given us everything we need to live the spiritual life.
God in His omniscience knew every problem and difficulty that we would ever
face, and He gave us everything we need to deal with them. So in
1)
They had wrong
teaching and doctrinal ignorance. There was doctrinal ignorance in the congregation.
That is why he asked the question: “Do you not know this?” The implication is,
no, they don’t know it because they are ignorant doctrinally even though they
have good teachers. Peter has been there, Apollos has been there, and Paul has
been there. They have had excellent pastors, excellent doctrinal teaching, and
yet they apparently were negative and they didn’t understand it, and they didn’t
apply it, and they didn’t exchange the human viewpoint in their souls for
divine viewpoint.
2)
Wrong thinking or
human viewpoint. We live in a culture that couches every problem in
psychological verbiage. There is so much psycho-babel
that we have picked up over the years that we don’t realize that that
terminology itself just brings to the problem all of the baggage of human
viewpoint. So we, too, deal with the problem of human viewpoint thinking.
3)
Wrong
perspective. That is, a failure to understand grace and to have grace
orientation.
1 Corinthians 3:17 NASB
“If any man destroys the temple of God, God will destroy him, for the temple of
God is holy, and that is what you are.” So now Paul is going to make
application. “If” is a first class condition, the idea of if and it is true. Some
translations use the word “corrupt” here. The Greek word is PHTHEIRO [fqeirw], and it means to corrupt, to destroy, to harm, and
it can even mean to judge or condemn. It is used twice in this passage and with
different meanings. The first sense is “If any man corrupts the
This runs counter to a lot of
antinomian thinking and unfortunately in grace oriented churches there are
people who pick up a sort of antinomian idea that once I’m saved, I’m saved,
and it doesn’t matter what sin I commit, as long as I confess it everything is
just going be okay.
[18] “Let no man deceive
himself. If any man among you thinks that he is wise in this age, he must
become foolish, so that he may become wise.” The problem of
arrogance and wrong thinking, of human viewpoint and self-deception. The
command in this verse is a present active imperative, and that is going to be
contrasted a little later on with an aorist active imperative. The thrust of a
present active imperative is that this is something that should characterize
the believer’s life day in and day out—standard operating procedure: don’t get
involved in self deception, it is a part of arrogance.
There are four arrogance skills that form a cycle and feed off of each other.
The first is self-absorption. As soon as you begin thinking about yourself,
focusing on yourself and your ideas and not God’s ideas, your needs and not God’s
needs, your truth and not God’s truth; as soon as you begin to focus on your
emotion, on how you feel, on your own situation and problems, then what happens
usually is you go right into the second stage which is self-indulgence. Self-indulgence
leads to self-justification. They begin to justify their behaviour: It’s not
really my fault. Then they get into self-deception. What happens in
self-deception is you become divorced from reality, you are not longer thinking
according to doctrine and according to truth, you are thinking according to the
lie. Because you have a lie in your thinking, a distortion of the way things
are, then it just feeds back to self-absorption again and you get caught up in
a never-ending, self-destructive cycle of arrogance. This was a key problem in
False systems of spirituality
1)
The most common
false system of spirituality that we are familiar with is just legalism. This
is technically the idea of using the law, the idea that we are under the Mosaic
law, as a means of gaining approval with God.
2)
Spirituality
based on ritual.
3)
Spirituality is
based on morality. But spirituality cannot be based on anything that an
unbeliever can do, and an unbeliever can be moral. Spirituality goes far beyond
human morality. It is the life of spiritual virtue based on the production of
God the Holy Spirit.
4)
Spirituality
based on Christian service. This is common among many evangelical churches.
5)
Then there is the
Pentecostal crowd. They get involved in ecstatics, emotion, and mysticism, and
somehow if you have certain experiences or feel a certain way then that is
evidence of your spirituality. Yet the Bible never describes spirituality in
terms that are defined by emotion or ecstatics.
6)
Then there are
those who get into doctrinal churches, people who distort grace and think that
all you have to do to be spiritual is know doctrine. They learn a lot of doctrine
and they memorize all the verbiage and the technical terms, but they don’t have
a clue. There is no grace orientation there.
“…If any man among you thinks
that he is wise in this age.” It is an interesting word for “thinking” here. It
is not the word we will find later on in this section, LOGIZOMAI [logizomai], which means to think objectively, it is the word DOKEO [dokew] which has the idea of thinking without foundation,
thought without evidence, thought without fact. This is typical of arrogant
believers to think without evidence, to think apart from the facts—“in this
age.” That is what Paul is talking about. Scripture has much to say about wisdom
but wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord, putting the Word of God first, it
does not begin with man and human experience. So Paul is once again returning
to the contrast between human wisdom and divine wisdom. On the basis of human
wisdom, divine wisdom appears to be foolishness because in divine wisdom the
emphasis is on God and God doing everything and man doing nothing, it is based
upon understanding who and what we are, and that is that we are nothing in the
sight of God, that we can do nothing of value. It doesn’t mean that we are not
important because every individual is created in the image of God.
“…he must become foolish, so
that he may become wise.” This emphasizes humility. “He must become foolish”
doesn’t mean acting like an idiot or embarrassing yourself in public, it means in the eyes of human viewpoint standards. When
human viewpoint emphasizes humility it is a pseudo-humility
of simple self-effacement that is grounded in arrogance: ‘I’m going to be
humble so that everybody will be impressed.’ It is just a reversal of the
priorities of Scripture. The emphasis from Paul here is that there must be
genuine humility. You have to have genuine humility to understand grace, you
have to have genuine humility to be teachable, you
have to have genuine humility and teachability to be able to grow by means of
the grace and knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. So Paul is emphasizing the
fact that if you don’t dump the human viewpoint in your soul you will never get
past self-absorption and arrogance and self-deception, and you will never make
it anywhere in the spiritual life.
[19] “For the wisdom of this
world is foolishness before God. For it is written, “{He is} THE ONE WHO CATCHES THE WISE IN THEIR CRAFTINESS”. All of the human erudition that you are so
impressed with, Corinthians, is nothing as far as God
is concerned; it is all foolishness because it doesn’t start of end with God. He
understands human wisdom and he is going to destroy it through the wisdom of
the Scriptures.
[20] “and
again, “THE LORD KNOWS THE REASONINGS of the wise, THAT
THEY ARE USELESS.” The word translated “useless”
is MATAIOS [mataioj] which means vanity.
All that human viewpoint thinking, no matter how impressive it may be in terms
of intellectual erudition is meaningless as far as the spiritual life goes and
as far as spiritual growth goes.
[21] Wrong perspective or
lack of grace orientation. “So then let no one boast in men. For all things
belong to you” – that is emphasis once again on human ability, human strength,
and a failure to appreciate grace orientation. This is the problem of every
human viewpoint system of spirituality.
[22] Then Paul comes back in
his conclusion to remind them of everything they have been given in positional
truth: “whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the
world or life or death or things present or things to come; all things belong
to you” – he goes back to then fact that they have been given all spiritual
blessings, a vast array of spiritual assets to enable them to face and handle
any situation or difficulty in life. He gives them two categories of examples. He
mentions, first of all, their teachers, God’s spiritual provision for them in
terms of those who can actually teach the Word. Then he talks about “the world
or life or death,” another group of three, and these are examples in the physical
world and related to God’s provision of sustenance or physical life-support
grace. He provides for them in life and He provides for them in death. God has
supplied everything they need both for spiritual life as well as for physical
life—“ all things belong to you.”
[23] “and
you belong to Christ; and Christ belongs to God.” Well, if you belong to Christ
and Christ belongs to God, then you belong to God. That is the logic. His point
is that if you as a believer belong to God then that should change the way you think,
should change what you do, and that should have an impact because you realize
that eventually God is going to evaluate you at the judgment seat of Christ. So
every decision you make today is going to impact on what you will be and where
you will be in eternity.