Paul had to speak harshly to the Corinthian community because the church there was not known for its maturity. The Corinthian church was racked by divisions; some followed Apollos and some followed Peter and some followed Paul. Problems confronted the Corinthian community—immorality, heresy, denying the resurrection. It was hardly a model congregation. In fact, if you go beyond the New Testament and you read the writings of Clement, the bishop of Rome at the end of the first century, you find a letter to the Corinthian congregation that was written decades after Paul’s letters. Clement pleaded with the Corinthian Christians to go back, to read Paul’s letters, and to begin to implement what the Apostle had taught them in the first place because the same problems were continuing in this community. Paul uses two sharp words of criticism for the Corinthian community. He calls them “carnal,” which is to say that they claimed to be spiritual but were actually more in the flesh than they were in the Spirit. Then Paul chastises them for being infantile in their understanding of the things of God and in their behavior. In a word, they were not behaving as mature Christians; they were being childish.
The Bible calls us to be childlike in our faith. To be child-like means to have an almost naive, innocent dependence on our heavenly Father. It’s to have the kind of implicit trust in our heavenly Father that infants have toward their parents. At a very early age, infants and children tend to have a simple trust in their earthly parents, and so by analogy, we are told in the New Testament to be childlike in our faith, having the same kind of trusting attitude toward God that children do toward their parents in this world. That’s also spelled out in greater detail by the Apostle Paul when he instructs the Corinthians, “Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature” (1 Cor. 14:20). The author of Hebrews frequently called the Christians to grow up into maturity in terms of their understanding of the things of God. Believers were chastened for being satisfied with the milk of the gospel and not digging deeply into the Word of God to come to an in-depth understanding of all that God has revealed.
To be infants in evil means that we’re not supposed to be sophisticated, mature, adult practitioners of wickedness. Children sin, but infants are not locked up in maximum-security prisons in America because the sins of babies and of little children tend to be relatively harmless in comparison to the sins of adults. When we’re told to be infants, it’s in this respect: We as Christian adults should be naive in our practice of evil even as we are called to be fully mature in our understanding. Paul chides the Corinthians for their childishness, which had at its root a preoccupation with the spectacular and an ignorance of the deep things of God, specifically the fruit of the Holy Spirit. Isn’t it more interesting and more exciting to focus our attention on the gifts of the Spirit than to focus our attention on the fruit of the Spirit? Yet that which has the enduring value to the church and to the individual Christian is the fruit of the Spirit.
The congregation in Corinth was filled with diverse manifestations of the spectacular gifts of the Spirit, but there was no love there. Paul is saying that it’s time to put things in perspective. It is time to grow up in the Christian faith. He doesn’t directly tell the Corinthians that they’ve been childish. This is a typical type of rebuke for the Apostle. He’s gentle, he’s sensitive, and in this case, he’s somewhat indirect. He points to himself as an example: “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways” (1 Cor. 13:11). It’s important to see that this doesn’t just drop into 1 Corinthians 13 with no bearing on the rest of what the Apostle is teaching. He is obviously making an admonition. The thinly veiled criticism is that just as Paul stopped pursuing childish ways when he became a man, it was time for the Corinthians to stop pursuing childish ways in their Christian lives.
What created so much of the strife in the Corinthian church was the attitude of those engaged in the extraordinary gifts who were convinced that they were on a higher spiritual plane than the rest of the members of the church.
Paul is saying that they were on a lower spiritual plane because they were behaving in an infantile way. They misunderstood the meaning of true spirituality.
The purpose of being spiritual in biblical terms is that we be sanctified. The purpose of the Holy Spirit’s activity in our lives is to instruct us and move us toward righteousness. Spirituality is the means to the end; it is not the end. We must never confuse the two. That’s why the accent in the New Testament is not on the gifts of the Spirit; it’s on the fruit of the Spirit. When the fruit of the Spirit is made manifest, righteousness is there.
Every day, we are surrounded by a numerous variety of things that attack Christian virtue and put pressure on the development of the fruit of the Spirit. It is the work of Satan to sow tares among the good fruit. If he can choke out the fruit of the Spirit in our lives or deceive us into thinking that the gifts of the Spirit are a substitute for the fruit of the Spirit, he has succeeded. He has kept us at a childish level of understanding of what Christianity is trying to make us. Paul says that we all go through different stages of development throughout life. Every adult was once a child. When we were children, we acted like children; we spoke like children, we thought like children, and we understood like children. We still have certain childish qualities that endure in our lives, but Paul insists, “When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.” In putting away the childish ways, he focused his attention on the mature ways.
The mature Christian seeks to live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Spiritual maturity looks like godliness that has been learned over time through making diligent use of the means of grace so that grace has had time to mature and ripen in our souls and our lives as our minds have been renewed by learning to look at life from the perspective of the biblical Word. The child plays with ABCs. He doesn’t have a large vocabulary. He’s at a simplified level of things. That’s why we don’t make children presidents of corporations; their understanding is limited. They haven’t delved into the complex issues of life. There’s a reason that the leaders of the early church were called elders. Yet in Corinth, there were young believers—full of exuberance, full of excitement, and full of themselves—who were like rebellious teenagers and who began to despise the authority of those who were mature and those whom the Apostle had commissioned as the ruling elders of the community. That’s what the problem was all about. This problem was addressed in 1 Corinthians, in 2 Corinthians, and in Clement’s letter at the end of the first century.
In saying that he put away childish ways after becoming a man, Paul states: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (1 Cor. 13:12–13). Paul spoke even of his own heightened understanding of knowledge, and he was the most mature Christian alive in the world in his day. He was a man who had the equivalent of two doctorates in theology by the time he was twenty-one years old, who spent years in the desert being instructed by Christ Himself, and who was made an Apostle to the gentiles. It’s that man who was saying, “Now I know in part.” He understood that even his understanding was limited and not worthy to be compared with what he would enjoy when he entered into heaven.
In those days, mirrors were not quite as brilliant in their reflection as they are today. There was a certain dimness to them, a certain internal distortion, and Paul was saying that this is the way that our knowledge is now. It’s partial; we see in the glass darkly or in the mirror dimly. But all dimness and darkness will be removed when we enter into glory and look at things as they are bathed in the overwhelming light that comes from the presence of God. At that point, we will truly and fully know and experience love.
Ligonier Ministries