No Competition Necessary
1 Corinthians 3:5-10
5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. 9 For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.
10 According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building on it. Each builder must choose with care how to build on it.
Meditation
The church in Corinth had a problem with divisions concerning spiritual hierarchy (See 1 Cor. Chapters 1-4). Even their own questions about marriage, Christian liberty, and worship (see 1 Cor. Chapters 7-14) were tainted with a one-upping dynamic. Somehow the Corinthians felt the need to make everything a ranking of their piety–a competition of righteousness. Paul uses multiple analogies to “admonish” the fledgling church to unity including the hilarious body analogy in Chapter 12.
This text concerns the in-group/out-group bias that revolves around who was baptized by whom—Paul vs. Apollos. Paul planted the church in Corinth and later Apollos came as a visiting preacher and grew the membership. So, various folks felt they were better because they received their faith from Paul and the Apollos crowd was secondary or vice versa). Notice the question Paul poses is what is the significance of the factions. Not who the people are that the Corinthians are using to separate themselves. And what are they? Servants of God! “Through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each” (vs. 5b). In other words, some of you responded to Paul and some of you responded to Apollos—all of you came to believe! Paul points out that in the end God is the master gardener because growth (in this case the act of believing) is God’s doing and really is not about who or what planted or water the seed. The planter and the waterer are equally God’s servants without distinction. So, the “jealousy and quarrelling” (see 1 Cor. 3:3b) about who led you to Christ (or how or when) is not an appropriate response to faithful living. The appropriate response is celebration that God sent servants to secure your faith, then to become a servant who also plants, waters, shines flashlights, and builds the Kingdom of God for the sake of securing someone else’s faith. No competition necessary.