but it's a great joy to be with you guys again this morning. The text we're gonna be in today is gonna be 1 Corinthians 3 verses one through nine. While you turn there, I remember back when I was an undergrad, one of the requirements that all the music majors had was that we had to take private lessons on a weekly basis, where you would have this constant reminder of how much you don't know about your instrument. It was a weekly dose of humbling. And the first day of class, my instructor, we didn't even take out our guitars, we didn't take out our instruments. It was him giving me an hour-long admonishment to not become that guy after graduating who would condescendingly look down at other musicians. Because this is all you would see in the jazz community at the time. And for the next five years of school, this is what I would see in every student, myself included. On a daily basis, you'd see the piano majors judging for the percussion majors for not being able to keep up in their ear training. You would see the vocalists judge for how terrible the guitarists were at sight reading. You'd see the jazz majors judge the classical majors for being slaves to their sheet music, and vice versa. And there was actually only one person I met who was not like it. His name was Max, a bass player. And it was only because he was a chemistry major. But the interesting thing is, you look at those musicians, and you would see someone who, as they've taken all this information, as they're blessed with all these instructors, they should have been humbled. But instead, they would become prideful over the musicians that they studied with, the musicians they had a chance to do gigs with. I mean, and that's what we see in the church today so often, especially in solid churches, such as this one, where we hold to the doctrines of grace, but we're blessed with solid theology, where instead of embracing these truths, we become puffed up and arrogant. So turn with me. To 1 Corinthians 3, we're going to read through this text real quick. But I, brothers, cannot address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you're not ready. For you are still of the flesh, for while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, I follow Paul, and another, I follow Apollos, are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What then is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each one will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. You may be here today. And you may not necessarily be a follower of Apollos or Paul, but you may find that you are placing your identity and your pride and your boasting in someone other than Christ. You may find that you're placing it on a certain lecturer or a podcast speaker, or even a preacher, even a solid preacher. Or even worse, you may be someone who's not necessarily following someone like this, but that you're trying to be someone who people will follow as an Apollos. Where your agenda isn't furthering God's kingdom, it's furthering your own kingdom. And even if you're in neither of those camps, this still has application to you guys, to me, to everyone. You know, when you look at what happens when you see divisions and factions and church splits occur, it's almost never an overnight thing. It almost always is gonna be a situation where you have this subtle flame in the corner that no one's paying attention to. where over several months of gossip, of slander, of assuming false motivations, that flame just begins to gradually turn into a forest fire. And if we become people who actually know the devices of the devil, we know what these flames look like. It's not only on the elder's job to put out these fires. When we see them, we're called to be peacemakers. The best way to prevent church division and church splits is to address those flames before they have a chance to grow. And so as we look at this text, that's going to be one of the goals we have today is learning how to nip in the bud these fires that cause division in the church. Because as long as we stand, the devil is going to come after our unity. That's always going to be the case. So we're going to be looking at three reasons why exalting man causes division. Three reasons why exalting man causes division. So before we get into the first reason, let's lay some groundwork just so we know, get a full picture of what's going on here. The city of Cohen, the church that's having all these issues, the church that Paul is writing to, Corinth was a city that, as Al C. Sproul described it, was essentially the Las Vegas of Greece. This was a city that boasted and glowed in its wealth and its money and man, all these things. And it was a wealthy city because of the way it was positioned. This was just a very comfortable place to live. And just to give you more context, this was also the home of the Isthmian Games. Think of it as the modern day Olympics. You would have all these competitions of marathons, of boxing, where at the end of the day, a man would be rewarded a gold medal. That's what this city was like. And not only that, but this was what bridged southern and northern Greece. Meaning that anyone who was going to travel had to go through this city. And what that would lead to is as you have all these people coming in and out of Corinth, in the city of your church, you would have them bring their philosophies with them. So not only was this a city that was engulfed in just man-centeredness, not only was it worshiping money, but it was engulfed in sexual sin. You know, part of the worship to the false idols was to participate in cultic prostitution. So you would have thousands of prostitutes going all around the city. And so all this toxicity would eventually bleed into the church. And as far as Paul's relationship to the Corinthian church, as we look back at Acts 18, we see that's where he begins planning the church, right after he had debated the Athenians in Acts 17. So he essentially stayed with them for a year and a half. He labored, he pulled himself out on this church. And then shortly after he leaves, he hears back from Chloe's people, as we will see in the first chapter of this epistle, where she's telling Paul that the church is divided. People are arguing, people are suing each other. You have people who are getting drunk on the communion, treating it as a feast rather than something to be reverent about. And on top of that, you have a member who's sleeping with his mother-in-law. This was a church that even pagans would cringe at if they came across it. And so as Paul is writing this letter, he's attempting to address all these issues that are arising from within the church. And in the first chapter, he begins by stating the issue, which is the motive for all these divisions, at least one of the issues, is that you have people who are claiming to be followers of Cephas, of Paul, of Apollos, even of Christ, and they're being divisive over these people. You have people who are finding their identity in their teachers, taking pride in it, starting arguments, getting offended when someone doesn't feel the same way about their teacher as they do. To the point where Paul even asked the question of, was I the one who was crucified for you? You're saying you're following me, but you're functioning as if I was the one who died for your sins. And after that, he begins contrasting in that same chapter, the difference between worldly wisdom and godly wisdom. where eventually that'll lead him to talk about how the people that God chooses to use are not the wise. It's not those who are eloquent in their speech. It's not the philosophers of the day. It's the weak and foolish. It's those who have nothing to boast about in themselves. And then as we move on to the second chapter, Paul begins to recount the gospel that he gave these people when he first came across them. He talks about how this was a gospel completely void of philosophy of lofty speech. This was just straight up Christ that he gave them. And then towards the end of the chapter, leading into today's text, he begins talking about how the natural person rejects the spiritual, and it's only those who have the mind of Christ who can understand biblical truth. So in other words, anyone devoid of the Holy Spirit may intellectually understand biblical truth, but they will never be able to truly believe it. It's only Christians who have the ability to understand and embrace and love scripture truth. So the first point that we're going to look at, the first reason why exalting man causes division is because exalting man leads to carnality. It leads to fleshliness. We see this in the first four verses. As we look at verses one and two, we begin to see just the immaturity of the Corinthians and the way they're handling all of this. And we don't even get past the first word till we see this, but, but I, brothers, cannot address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. So when we see the word, but, that should be a fire alarm going on in our head to see what this is connected to. There's some idea in the previous text this is connecting to. So turn back with me to 1 Corinthians 2 verses 12-16. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given by God. And we impart this in words, not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. The natural person does not accept the things of the spirit of God, for they are folly to him. And he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. For who has understand the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ. And the way this is connecting to it is Paul is writing to these people. He's saying, here you are at the Corinthian church, the church that I labeled over for a year and a half, here you are thinking you're spiritual, wise, discerning, but I can't even write to you as if you're Christians. I have to write to you as if you're unbelievers. I have to write to you as if you're someone devoid of the Holy Spirit, that you know nothing about the actual gospel, because you're not even living it out. And there's two reasons just in this text I would argue that he doesn't actually think they're unbelievers. The first is because he refers to them as brothers. This is a term exclusively used for Christians. Paul's never gonna refer to an unbeliever as his brother. And the second reason is because he goes on in verse one to refer to them as infants in Christ. So a lot of times when you go through the New Testament, being referred to as a child, it has this connotation of humility. It's a good thing. When you are a child, you are conveying this utter sense of dependency upon your father. You're not prideful. You're not relying on your own efforts. You are aware that you are utterly incapable of doing anything. And that's clearly not what Paul is trying to say to these people. When he's referring to them as infants in Christ, this is his way of referring to them as just immature people. These are fully grown adults who are stumbling as they try to walk. They're functioning just as babies who don't know the left hand from the right. And he goes on to verse two to say, I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you are not ready for it. And even now you're not ready for it. Turn with me to Hebrews chapter five real quick. Hebrews chapter five, verses 11 through 14. And we're gonna see a description of what it looks like for someone to be on milk versus solid food. About this we have much to say, and it's hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing. For those by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the old course of God. You need milk, not solid food. For everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. So there we see this picture that when you are trapped in spiritual milk, where you can't get past that, that's essentially, that means that you are unskilled at handling the Word of God. Here you are trying to handle this double-edged sword that's sharper than anything else, and you're just cutting yourself left and right, you can't even pick it up. But someone who's on solid food, this is someone who is skilled at knowing right from wrong. They know what God's will is. They know how to handle the text and how to live it out. And Paul is saying that you're not at this point. You should have been at this point a long time ago. And when it's referring to milk, you can take this as, this is his, the initial gospel message he gave the church when he first planned them. This is just the gospel plain and simple. And the solid food isn't necessarily any new revelation. It could just be just deeper insight on the nuances within these same doctrines. And in the second half of verse two, he goes on to talk about how his reason for not giving them the solid food, for not giving them this deeper revelation, this more nourishing form of preaching, of teaching is because they weren't ready for it. See, if he had given the people this food, they would have been like a baby choking on a ribeye steak. And this is a good reminder for us. We see here a people whose growth is stunted. We see here a people who, despite the fact they were under the most solid teaching, the teaching of an apostle himself, there is something going on that's causing them not to grow in their maturity. you can go to the most solid church with the most reformed preaching that's a six-point Calvinist church, and you still be just becoming more and more arrogant, where it's almost like all this knowledge is just counterproductive at this point. And a sign that that's happening is if you can hear preaching day after day, if you can be in scriptures weekly, and not somehow change your life, and not somehow help you become more aware of your dependency on God. If it doesn't help you get a greater clarity on just how merciful God is, where that manifests itself in your actions, that's a sign that you haven't learned it. That's a sign that your growth might be stunted. And as you are studying relentlessly, you see this all the time with seminary students, it's just going in your head. You're just becoming basically a cage stage Calvinist. As we look at verses three and four, we see the man-centeredness of the Corinthians. Verse three, he says, for you are still with the flesh, for while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? See, as we look at Galatians 5, Paul fleshes out what it looks like to be in the flesh. And typically, when you read the New Testament, the flesh, this is a way of saying you're an unbeliever, you're of the world, you're not saved. Which as we talked about before, that's not the case here. These are just Christians who are acting this way. Galatians 5, 19-21 says this. Now the works of the flesh are evident. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery. And then we get to the part that is very applicable to this church. Enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, to vengeance, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you as I warned you before that those who do such things would not inherit the kingdom of God. We look at this church and we see a church that really looks like unbelievers. They have all the characteristics that this passage is saying, yet just from his introduction, just from his greeting, Paul is still referring to these people as Christians, as his brothers. He refers to them as his children. And as we look at verse four, it says, but when one says, I follow Paul and another, I follow Apollos, are you not being merely human? See, he's beginning to elaborate on the way their pride is manifesting itself, which is in the form of them being followers of Apollos and Paul. And the issue isn't that they said that these were their teachers. There's nothing intrinsically sinful with saying, I'm a student of someone. The part that was sinful is that that's what they were boasting in. That's what they found their identity in. That's what they relished in. You see this all the time. You're gonna see this during the Super Bowl. Whenever your home team scores a point, what happens? It's almost as if you scored that point. You begin to get excited, you cheer, and it's almost as if you somehow found your identity in that person where every accomplishment they have, that was your accomplishment. And vice versa, every time they fumble, every time they mess up, you become indignant and upset because it's almost like you're the one that made that mistake. A few months ago in Indonesia, there was a soccer game where after the game ended, the response of the losing home team of the fans was not to go home and just move on with life. It was to start a riot and to storm the field. where you, when you watch the video, you see smoke, you see police officers all over the place, and you see these fans beating each other with their belts, with chairs, you see them punching and kicking each other over a stinking soccer game. That's essentially what's happening at the Corinthian church right here. A people who are so prideful of these people that they're studying under, that they're strangling each other. They may not be beating each other with belts, but they're certainly committing murder in their heart towards their own Christian brothers. And maybe you're not a follower of Apollos or Paul necessarily, but maybe you're a follower of John Piper. Maybe you're a follower of Wody Baca, maybe you're a follower of Calvin or even Spurgeon. People who I love, but maybe that's who you're actually finding your identity with. If you find that as you study scripture, that you rely more on these people and what they have to say about scripture, that's a sign that you're doing the same thing the Corinthians are doing. That's a sign that what you're doing is not interpreting scripture with scripture, but you're interpreting them with Spurgeon. You're interpreting with Calvin, because that's what's functioning as authoritative in your life. And here's the danger. When we are blessed with solid teaching, with solid theology, and it's not sinking, it's not going from our heads to our hearts the way it should, there's a danger that it becomes so much easier for us to mask our idols. Because as we grow in this theology, we have this facade of a theologian. We can justify our motives, our righteous anger, all these things with just doctrine. Where it's harder to detect the actual heart issues that are at play here. The second point, the second reason exalting man causes division, is that exalting man leads to a lack of dependency. When you exalt man, when you raise him to a higher standard of what he actually is in God's eyes, you're no longer relying on God's power. You're relying on the power of man. In verse five, we see that the ministers are just the instruments of God. What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each. And as we look back at Acts 18 again, Paul's relationship to the church was to do the initial planning and then to leave. And then going into the first verse of 19, we see Apollos then jumped in and took over essentially. And the word used here as they describe themselves as servants is the word diakonoi, which is where we get the word deacon from. So many churches have this mindset that the pastor is essentially the rockstar of the church, where everyone is so excited that they get a chance to shake his hand, they get excited that they have an opportunity to actually have lunch with him, when that's not what the pastor is. The pastor is not this super rockstar in the church. He's not someone to be exalted. He's not someone that you should put on a pedestal. He's not someone who's above stacking the chairs after a fellowship lunch or mopping the floors or anything like this. This is the person who is on his knees, washing the feet of others. This is a person who is not only counseling the grownups, the adults, but he's on his knees counseling kids. And notice the phrasing he uses here. It doesn't say that they are servants by whom you believed. What does he say? He says, through whom you believed. They were just the vessels that God worked through that brought these people to salvation. In fact, Philippians 2.13, he makes it clear that, for it is God who works in you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Meaning these disciples, as they are bringing the Corinthian church to faith, not only did God empower them, not only did he enable them, not only did he give them the opportunity, but he just gave them the desire to do it. These are people that are completely helpless unless God does all the work, essentially. A minister trying to do ministry without the power of the Holy Spirit is like me trying to speak through this microphone without electricity. You're just gonna look ridiculous. And as we look at verse five, towards the end of it, we see that the minister's giftings come from God. It's not coming from within themselves. When it says, as the Lord assigned to each, this is referring to the giftings that God has assigned to each minister. When God calls someone to ministry, he equips them with everything they need to do the task that he set before them. He's given them the giftings they need, and not anything more, and not anything less. See, when someone is first brought to salvation, when someone first comes to Christ, God gives everyone, not just the ministers, but just the lay people. He gives them a spiritual gift that needs to be flushed out in the context of a local church. It needs to be practiced. It needs to be skilled and sharpened. but everyone has some gifting that is meant for the purpose of building up and strengthening the body. It's not something that you had the freedom to bury your talent and not to do anything with it, like the wicked servant. Turn with me to 1 Peter 4 real quick. 1 Peter 4 verses 10-11. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another. As good stewards of God's varied grace, whoever speaks as one who speaks all codes of God, whoever serves as one who serves by the strength that God supplies. In order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ, to him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. You see there that God has given certain ministers the gift of serving. While for others, he's given the gift of teaching. There's a dispersion of gifts that are spread out among different ministers. And they perfectly complement each other. And as we look at verse six, we see that God uses ministers in different roles. He doesn't just give them different giftings. He places them in different positions. Verse six, I planted, Apollo's watered, but God gave the growth. And not only does he place them in different positions, not only does he give them in different giftings, but he gives them different capacities to use these gifts. Some pastors are gonna be much better at preaching than other pastors. And one thing we need to be on guard against is that regardless of the capacity of gifting God has given the minister, regardless of the position he's placed them in, a pastor is still a pastor. So often, even in the most solid churches, it's easy to fall in this trap where the pastor who's behind the pulpit is the pastor, and the other ones are just his helpmates. No, each pastor, regardless of the role, is gonna have to give the same account. They have the same responsibility. They may be functionally different, but they are still all equally pastors. And another implication from this text, as we see about how Paul is planning and Apollos is watering, is it's clear that the minister is laboring. I remember several years ago, I visited a church and someone went up to the pastor and asked, what are you preaching on? This is about 10 minutes before the service started. And his response was, I don't know, I'm probably just gonna make something up. The minister does not have freedom to be presumptuous and not to labor. The means God uses to feed his people, to serve his people, to bind up the wounds as the sheep have is through the hard labor of the minister. And as we look at the end of this verse, we see that God is the one who gives the growth. It's not the skill of the minister. It's not the skill of the pastor. It's nothing within himself. It's only God who's doing it. John 15, Jesus says, I'm the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. The thing that makes preaching effective is not you dimming the lights. It's not by you having a piano that's playing soft music in the background. It's not by pulling out your smoke machine. It's just by preaching the word. When people are changed, when people are ministered to, it's not because of anything I'm saying, or Pastor Rob, or whoever's behind the pulpit, it's because of what they're hearing in God's word. I remember a while back, me and Delano were talking, and he made a statement that I think is really important to remember. And that is the thing that makes a sermon helpful. The thing that the preacher can do to make sure that his sermon is as helpful as it could possibly get is not to try to muster up emotion from the text, hoping it's infectious to everyone else. It's not his illustrations. It's not his sense of humor or his jokes. It's by taking a text and making it as clear as it can possibly be for the people. The job of the preacher is to take a text and to cut this meaty ribeye steak. And his job is to cut it up into bite-sized pieces where it's easy for us all to swallow. So that anyone from the toddler up to the theologian can understand it so that they can all benefit from it to some degree. And on top of that, because it's God's who give, God is the one giving the growth and not man. This means that it's in his timing, it's not in our timing. One of the most powerful sermons that Jonathan Edwards had ever preached was in the hands of an angry God. When you look at the after effects of that sermon, the way he preached it, what you see is thousands of revivals. You see conviction and repentance and weeping over their sin. You see, it's like you're watching a modern day pulling out of the Holy Spirit. It's like you're watching Pentecost all over again. And the interesting thing that I don't think a lot of people know is that was not the first time he preached that sermon. He had preached that exact same sermon before at his home church. And what he met was not thousands of revivals. It was not people coming one after another to the altar to give their life over to Jesus. The sermon just fell flat. So what changed? Because you have the same man, you have the same heart, you have the same motives to administer God's word. You even had the same sermon. So what was the difference? And the answer is the wind blows where it wishes. There are gonna be times where God sees fit to give the church a ribeye steak of a sermon. And there are gonna be times unknown to us where he chooses just to give them a bologna sandwich. Where he still feeds the sheep, but he's given different degrees of nourishment. And we never know why he does this, but one thing we see in this text, is that the reason this church is not on the stake and not receiving the stake is not because of a lack of teaching. It's not because of bad Sunday school teachers or bad preachers or anything like that. It's because of their own pride. It's because you have people who are becoming so prideful over how much knowledge they're getting. They're thinking that they're the spiritually mature ones, that they're the ones used for God. And that very thought is making them unuseful to God. That very thought is causing them to not understand the actual doctrines that are being taught. And the great encouragement from this is that when it is God's timing, regardless of the preacher, God is so sovereign that he can use any sermon to do his role. You know, just think of Jonah. I always think it would be very interesting to watch the way he preached to Nineveh when God finally brought him back from running away. Do you think, when you imagine the way Jonah preached, that you would see a man who was spending hours laboring over his outline, figuring out what illustrations to use, how to make this most appealing to the people? Do you think you would have seen someone who was weeping as he was just pleading with them to repent? No, the whole reason he ran away was because he didn't want God to grant them repentance. He hated these people. He wanted nothing to do with them. If you watch this preaching, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the most monotone, if it was the most disingenuine, if it was the most apathetic sermon that we would ever hear in our lives. Yet despite his motives, despite how much he was trying to run away from preaching these people, God used it to revive an entire city. And not just NEC, but the city of Nineveh. And here's one encouragement that we can all take from that. Parents, you are gonna spend years preaching to a dead person. Your kids, it doesn't matter how good your homeschooling is. It doesn't matter how good your catechisms are, how great your family worship is. Unless God gives the growth, you're just screaming at a dead person. You relying on your own ability as a parent for your kid to repent and to trust in Jesus and His works rather than their own. It's like me trying to resuscitate someone who's been dead for a week. That doesn't negate the fact that we still have responsibilities, that we're still to labor over them. You know, you see that in Job. He woke up early every morning offering sacrifices for his children. But that does tell us that as we labor vigorously, we need to plead that God uses the work and that it's just lifeless otherwise. In verse seven, we see that because God's the one doing the growth, that man has no means of boasting. Verse seven, so neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. God does not need ministers. God does not need people to do ministry for him to achieve his will, for him to save the people that he wants to save. You know, in Acts 17, as Paul is debating the Athenians, the argument he uses is, here you are making all these false idols out of silver, brass, gold, and then you're worshiping them. But, you know, you're worshiping gods that were dependent on you in the first place to make them. How is that logical? And then he follows up with talking about how we have a God who is not needing anything of man, who is not created by man's hands, who does not need your oxen, your sacrifices, nothing of this. He's completely self-sufficient. And that applies to ministry as well. The motive for a minister, when he is preaching, counseling, doing anything like this, doing missions, missionary work, it's not because he feels that God won't be able to do it unless he helps. That's prideful and arrogant at that point. He does it because he wants to be used. It's a privilege to be able to do God's work. Imagine a father trying to rake up leaves. He's in his backyard and you have his little five-year-old son who's running out with this play school baby rake. And he wants to help his father rake the leaves. And the whole time he's helping him, he's just spraying the leaves. He's just messing up all his work. Nothing's getting done. That's what it looks like for the minister as we do ministry for God. But the great thing is the whole time that little kid is messing up the leaves, the father is still loving the fact that his kid wants to help. He's joyous not in the fruit that his kids bring, but in his heart. That's how our father is. And the people, as I said before, that God is gonna use for ministry to whatever capacity is gonna be those who have nothing to boast about in themselves. Turn back to 1 Corinthians 1 real quick. 1 Corinthians 1, verses 26 through 29. Verses 26 through 29. For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise. According to worldly standards, not many of you were powerful, not many of you were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being may boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that as it is written, let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. The people who God appointed to be the teachers and preachers of the Corinthian church, were specifically placed in that position because they were quote-unquote foolish, because they were weak, because they were by lowly standards unwise. The whole reason Paul was put in that position in the first place was because there was nothing worth praising him about. And so you have the Corinthian church who are looking at these people and praising the ones who have the very least reason to be praised. And a quick side tidbit is the quickest way to stop being used by God for fruitful ministry is to think that you are in yourself contributing something. It's to let pride get in the way. So we talked about how exalting man leads to carnality. We talked about how it leads to dependency. The third and final reason that exalting man leads to division is that it leads to disunity. Those who are one, it causes it to just to spread out and to divide the church, which is dividing Christ. When we look at verse eight, we see that the ministers are united. Turn back to chapter three, verse eight. He who plants and he who waters are one. and each will receive wages according to his labor. See these ministers, even though they have different giftings, even though they're placed in different positions, they are united in the same purpose. They have the same motive and their work is complimenting each other. You know, just think of James and Paul. You know, you have James over here in scripture that's saying that faith without works is dead. And then you have Paul over here saying you're anathema if you believe works save you. They seem to completely contradict each other, but the reality is they give a holistic view of repentance, of salvation. They perfectly complement each other. You know, same thing for John the Baptist and Jesus. You know, John the Baptist is over here eating crickets and preaching judgment, judgment, judgment, judgment. And then he gets thrown in prison and he starts second guessing if Jesus is even the Messiah they're waiting for, because he sees them eating with tax collectors. He sees them healing the sick. He sees them preaching mercy. But even then those two things are perfectly complimentary to each other. And the ministers being united, being one doesn't mean that they're always gonna agree. We look back at Acts and we see that Barnabas and Paul had a sharp disagreement over on whether or not to take Mark with them. And this wasn't just, we can agree to disagree. This caused them to separate from each other and to go on about their own ministries. But there's a difference when disagreements arise among ministers, when it's motivated by seeking God's will versus when it's just out of pride. And as we look at verse eight, we see that each minister, even though they are one, even though they're united, is gonna receive their own word, their own wages. The minister has no freedom to piggyback off the labor of his co-minister. You know, this isn't like a picture where you're in your high school group project where you have five people just working hard and you don't do anything and you still end up with an A. That's not how ministry is. Romans 2.6 says, he will render to each according to his own works. And notice here, it doesn't say that they're gonna be rewarded according to their success. It doesn't say that the minister is gonna be rewarded according to the amount conversions you see. It says that they're gonna be rewarded according to their labor. Faithful ministry and faithful obedience to God is the goal behind ministry, even though it's a side effect we're just striving for. You're not prioritizing man-centered things. I remember I was talking to my old pastor. And he told me that he was convinced that when we get to heaven, the people you're gonna see seated most closely to Christ, the ones who are most exalted, are not gonna be the Billy Graham's of this world, who had thousands of conversions. It's gonna be that old elderly woman who spent hours a day in her prayer closet. As we look at verse nine, we see that all ministers are God's fellow workers. And this has two possible different meanings. It could mean that the ministers are coworkers with each other who are employed under God, or it could mean that we are coworkers with God, that we are united with Him and with each other. And either way you interpret it, it has the same biblical truth that ministers are united with each other as well as with God. We all have the same motivation. We all have the same purpose. We're all doing everything for God's glory. John MacArthur says, genuine unity of any soul must have a purpose. Trying to achieve unity just for unity's sake is an exercise in futility because it must have the motivation and focus of a common cause and objective. The church's only true unity is grounded in the faith of the gospel, which refers to Christian faith. And this is a good reminder that the unity among ministers is gonna be what helps most with the unity of a church. You know, the devil is always gonna try to attack the unity in the church, the fellowship, the friendships, the relationships, all these things. And the reality is it's the elders who are always gonna be under the most attack. Because the devil knows if he could take out the commander of an army, the rest of the army is just going to dispense. And this should be a good reminder. Mike Racky talked about this a few months ago, that we need to be praying for the elders. Unity is something that needs to be fought for and needs to be prayed to preserve. We should always be praying that God places his hedge of protection around our unity. And if we don't do that, we're presuming that we're sufficient in ourselves to keep that unity, which is never going to be the case. And as we look at the end of verse nine, we see that the minister's project is the church. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. The project that the minister is working on is God's field. It's his husbandry. It's this picture of you have all this property where your job is to cultivate the crops and it's to tend to the flock. You're gonna have sheep that are hungry, that you are responsible for feeding. You're gonna have sheep that every other day they're running away, getting stuck in ditches or in trenches, and you're gonna have to go out of your way to pick them up, to recalibrate them. You're gonna have to protect the sheep from wolves that come from within your own church, confronting false doctrine, confronting false teachings. And a lot of times you're just gonna have to get on your knees and bind up the wounds of the sheep. These are the responsibilities of the minister. And it goes on to further illustrate this as not only is the church God's field, but it's God's building. You know, Ephesians 2 talks about how Christians are our fellow citizens and we're the building blocks of the church. The church is not the building in itself, it's the people in it, it's the Christians in it. And the job of the minister is not to glorify himself. It's not to exalt himself. It's to equip the saints for every good work and to constantly refine the dwelling place of God. And at the end of the day, the minister is going to have to give an account of God on how well he managed his household. And that leads us to the next text that I'll, Lord willing, preach on next time. which is how the minister goes about building upon this foundation, how he goes about building this dwelling place. And so I want to conclude with two things. To the unbelievers here, we want you to be as exposed to the gospel as possible. We want you to be exposed as much to solid preaching as possible. But don't think just by coming to church, that means that you have the same unity that we have through Christ. The unity that someone has is not by going to church, it's not by being a good person, it's not by reading your Bible enough. It's by trusting in the perfect work of our God, Jesus Christ, and trusting in His righteousness rather than your own. And what's always gonna happen is the longer you are exposed to the supernatural unity that you see among Christians is that you just begin to get uncomfortable. It may not be today, but if you sit under the preaching long enough and you see more exposure to this kind of unity, you would become very uncomfortable. And my plea with you is that if you call upon the name of the Lord, he would never turn your way. Trust in the works of Christ and you will receive eternal life. And to all of us believers here, when Christ did his perfect work, he tore down every wall that separated Jew, Gentile, man, woman, slave, master, all these things, where we have no excuse not to be in unity with one another. And when we don't understand the gospel, the way that's intended, the unity, the redemption that I brought, we're not gonna be able to live out this unity. The second we start getting our eyes off of Christ and off of his works and onto man, onto ourselves, onto some famous speaker, some theologian rockstar, anything other than the creator himself, we would never be able to maintain the unity in the church. And the thing we need to remember is that still on this side of heaven, the people, the brothers and sisters in Christ we're uniting with are still sinners. James Wright did a documentary on a man named Fritz Erba. I'm gonna close with this, but when you look at Fritz Erba's story, you have a man who was thrown into a 30-foot dungeon for seven years, and that's where he died. And the reason he was thrown into this pit was not because he rejected the deity of Christ. It was not because he rejected substitutionary atonement. It was not because of some primary issue. It was because he had convictions about baptizing his children. And the dark reality is that the people who threw him in that pit were not atheists. It was Christian brothers. That's something that we don't think about. You look at church history and you're gonna see Christians themselves throwing each other in pits, imprisoning each other, sometimes even killing each other. And as James Wright is standing over this pit talking to people, he made a point that we should never forget, which is once we get to heaven, the very same people who threw us in the pits, wanting us to die, that cost us so much grief, so much suffering, Those are gonna be the same very people that we worship God with, with a deepness that we've never known. Those are gonna be the same people that we, our love for them is gonna surpass all understanding because when we look at them, we see Christ rather than that person who caused us all the grief. And then when they look at us, the very people who threw them in the same pit, they're gonna see the same thing. And we don't need to wait to heaven before we start living according to that truth. Let's go to God in prayer. Father, I pray that you make the Bible Church at Calvin, not a people who boast in Calvin or Piper or Wayne Grudem or any man, any creation. Make us a people who boast only in Christ and his finished work. Make us a people who don't pride ourselves in theology, but that we embrace it, Father, I pray that you make us into a spiritual people who can understand just the spiritual milk truths and that you give us the greater nourishments of the solid food. And Father, as I pray this, I ask that you make us all into a people who are humble. That as we receive these truths, we don't receive it puffed up, but that we receive it with a greater sense of dependency, a greater desire to serve you. And Father, I pray that most importantly, you make us into people who study scripture, not to be better at talking about it, but for the purpose of knowing you better. And it's in your son's name we pray, amen.