1 Corinthians 3:5-10 Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom you believed, even as the Lord gave to every man?… After declaring to the Corinthians that they were carnal in their estimates of God's ministers, the apostle exposes their folly in this particular, by assuring them that he and Apollos were but ministers, or servants, whom God had commissioned to labour in their behalf. Halfway work he never did. To show their error, and prove that it was a worldly sentiment disguised under a fictitious admiration, he sets before them the true idea of the ministry, as an instrument through which the Divine agency of the Holy Ghost operated. No one enjoyed proper sympathy and affectionate regard more than St. Paul, whose heart overflowed into everything that offered a channel for its diffusion. There is nothing about him of Cato, whose virtue runs into the fanaticism of hatred; or of Coriolanus, who looks upon the people as "if he were a god to punish, and not a man of their infirmity." Nevertheless, he guards his tenderness against effeminacy, nor will he accept the slightest tribute to himself at the expense of truth. The hardest thing in our nature to organize is impulse; and yet this man, whose sensibilities were so quick and strong (1 Corinthians 4:14, 15; 2 Corinthians 2:13), could not tolerate the homage paid him by partisans. And in this spirit he asks, "Who then is Paul?" Only a medium used by the Spirit for their faith, and the medium itself valueless, except so far as the Spirit made it effective. Their very capacity to receive St. Paul's influence was the gift of God, and would they now turn the gift against the Giver? St. Paul's figures are not poetic, but practical, and his imagination is always the offspring of the reason; and hence the illustrative image - "I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase" - began and ended in a breath, with no delight in it beyond utility. Two conclusions follow: one, the entire dependence upon God for the increase; and the other, the coworking with him who is the only Source of the increase. Neither the sower nor the seed, however good, can secure the yield; this is from the great Husbandman, who apportions the result according to his sovereignty, and under conditions which St. Paul subsequently points out. The workman is rewarded for his labour; he does not create the reward, but receives it from God; nor could reward have any other basis than free and unmerited grace, seeing that we are coworkers with God. If this were not the law of nature and providence, it could not be a law of grace, nor could the figure of seed and sower have any logical force. But, at the same time, the workman under the gospel has a special relation to God, and, in a sense peculiar to the gospel, is a "coworker." This is one of St. Paul's favourite ideas (see 2 Corinthians 6:1). It is not working, but co-working, that evidences the spirituality of the work and gains the recompense. Among the sources of deception, not one is so insidious as our work. The old man, long a servant of God, looks back upon his labours; his eye is tranquil now; it has grown to be a very honest eye; and nothing in the past surprises him so much as the mixture of self with work that he once thought was unselfish. Early manhood and middle life, if not absolutely incompetent to form a perfect idea of disinterestedness, are yet very prone to fall into a mistake on this subject. No doubt St. John imagined that he was doing Christ's work when he forbade the man casting out devils in Christ's Name; and, likely enough, St. Peter put a special value on his courage in the garden, when he drew his sword for the Lord's defence. If our tastes and self will can be gratified, we are often ready to be enthusiastic workers for what we suppose is the cause of Christ. But God's rule is unyielding. You must labour according to his will, or the work will be rejected. And just here, his thought in transition to another aspect of the great topic, St. Paul brings into view the co-relationship of ministers and people, God being all in all. "We" and "ye" - "we" are co-labourers with God, and "ye" are not our husbandry and building, but God's. What claims he for himself? He is a builder, a master builder, a wise one too; and he is free to assert it, because it is the utterance of humility, and humility is under obligation to speak the exact truth about itself, under valuation being wrong, as well as over valuation. The preface attests the spiritual purity of the avowal: "According to the grace of God which is given unto me," while the elaboration of the figure, taken from architecture, indicates more of the Grecian mode of illustration than the Jewish. - L. Parallel Verses KJV: Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? |
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