May 17, 2012
Please Pass the Meat
Most of us can look at our past and realize that, generally speaking,
the focus of maturing spiritually was better in our yester-year than it is
currently. Today we seem to be satisfied with Bible-Lite – a watered-down
version of the Word. Certainly Paul dealt with something similar when he told
the Corinthians, “Brothers, I could not
address you as spiritual but as worldly—mere infants in Christ. I
gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are
still not ready.” (1 Cor 3:1-2 NIV) At one time we were all infants
in Christ, but leave it to Paul to burst that contentment bubble by suggesting
that being an infant in Christ is no different than being worldly.
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1 comment:
Gail;
-----Paul equated infancy in Christ to worldliness with all due respect to validity. For a valid infant in Christ isn’t worldly. In fact, I often find valid infants annoying, they are so focused on being appropriate in the Lord. Anything they don’t understand by their one dimensional discernment they consider evil. But their purity is in that they then do not do what they consider evil for assurance of remaining with the Lord. That is quite not worldly.
-----But life in the Lord is not ultimately about remaining with the Lord yourself. It is about the possibility of everyone in your proximity being in the Lord, and your treatment of them accordingly, that is, your remaining with the Lord together. It is about more than right and wrong according to your own perspective. It is about right and wrong according to theirs as well. Therefore additional dimensions of discernment become appropriate because all those others around you are each a “you”, too, having unavoidable differences.
-----This is what Paul was addressing in I Corinthians. In as much as we are all bent a little bit away from perfection, none of us are right completely. Yet each of us must have a life with the Lord. But the fact that one’s life with the Lord regards a particular thing one way does not in and of itself mean that another’s regarding it another way is evil or even wrong. Both might be wrong, or one or the other might be wrong. But the important matter is to proceed through the process of life in the Lord: 1) His mercy obtaining you; 2) Relational to Him type awareness of your experiences; 3) Attention to His Word; 4) Relational to the Word type awareness of your experiences. The facts of mercy, Word, and relationship tends lives towards similarity, but the fact that experience is the material of knowledge tends lives towards peculiarity. The mixture of the two brews uniqueness in the Lord. So emergence from infancy is acknowledgment of difference without the necessity of invalidation. Not that invalid is a non-existent concept, but rather that imperfection requires mercy while patience awaits a maturing process. The Corinthians were short enough in this that their gnat straining missed the Titanic sinking in another man's marriage bed.
-----The invalid infant is not worldly merely because his life has not yet progressed into maturity. He is worldly because after obtaining mercy he did not proceed away from relational to himself type awareness, or he did not proceed into the Word of God, or he did not relate his experiences to the Word, or any combination of these three failures. Maturity arrives by a process, and a process is a complete set of interdependent functions. So, although the infant who has not had time in his new life to proceed rests in the same condition of mere mercy as the infant who has had time yet not proceeded. The one is an infant while the other is worldly.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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