There is nothing wrong with giving milk to a baby, but now it had been 3 to 5 years since Paul had begun His work in Corinth and he says they still need milk. But they were not ready for all of that, they needed milk. As they grew in faith, these truths would be expanded upon without end, because the riches of the knowledge of God are inexhaustible. They were babies in the faith, so he gave them the truth of the gospel in simple form which was easy for them to take in and digest and use. Most, if not all of them, were new converts through his ministry. Paul says this is what the Corinthians were like when he was with them. He doesn’t have the teeth and the digestive system to handle solid food yet. He can’t handle anything else, because he is just a baby. It’s milk for breakfast, milk for lunch, milk for dinner, and milk everywhere in-between. “So, since you were baby Christians, Paul says, I gave you milk and not solid food, because you were not able to eat solid food.”Īn infant lives on milk those first months of its life. In fact, you were babies in Christ.” Paul calls them “infants” in v. He says “I couldn’t speak to you as if you were mature Christians, because you weren’t. But Paul gives them a very straightforward answer. Remember that the Corinthians seemed to have criticized Paul because his message and style of preaching were very simple compared to the methods of those schooled in Greek rhetoric. Here he contrasts the spiritual person not to the natural man, but to a baby in Christ (a very young believer). Now he uses “spiritual people” to describe the Christian who has matured in the faith and has made significant progress in overcoming his sinful nature. In the last chapter, Paul used the word “spiritual” to describe the person who is indwelt by the Holy Spirit and is a Christian, in contrast to the natural man who is without the Spirit and is an unbeliever. Going in this new direction means two things: 1) Negatively: We must depart from sin 2) Positively: we must focus on God. Or, if we have been following God closely, it is “new” in the sense that it belongs to the new life that is in Jesus Christ, which is different from where our sin and the world leads us. It may be “new” because it is a change from the direction we have been going. He says to them, and to us, that in order to grow spiritually, we must go in a new direction. In our passage today, the apostle Paul writes to the Corinthian church about their spiritual maturity. They make different choices and develop different habits. They begin to pursue different things, in different ways. Many times people will talk about the direction of their lives changing. All of this adds up to a direction of our lives. There are choices we make and habits we form, attitudes we develop and activities and behaviors we join in. There are things we pursue and for which we live. There are things we focus on out of all the rest. Our lives take on a certain direction as we live. As we move into chapter 3, Paul continues his defense by saying that he taught the Corinthians exactly what they needed to know, because they were not mature enough to receive anything beyond it… At the end of chapter 2, Paul defended his simple style of preaching, saying that he did speak a message of wisdom to those who were mature and spiritual, but that his message must be spiritually discerned.
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