They Thought They Were Advanced
The hardest immaturity to spot is the kind that looks like maturity.
There’s a particular kind of immaturity that’s almost impossible to see in the mirror. It’s the kind that’s certain it’s grown up. The kind that points at its own progress and uses that progress as proof.
That’s the Corinthians.
When Paul writes 1 Corinthians 13, he’s not writing for a wedding. He’s writing for a church that had its scoreboard upside down. They were ranking spiritual gifts like baseball cards. Tongues at the top. Prophecy somewhere in the middle. Patience and kindness... wait, are those even on the list?
And here’s the part that we need not miss: they thought they were the spiritually advanced ones.
That’s what makes Paul’s whole argument in chapters 12 through 14 so surgical. He’s not telling them they’re behind. He’s telling them they’re confused about what counts as being ahead.
They had a ledger. Every church has a ledger.
The Corinthian ledger said: the flashier the gift, the more spiritual the gifted. So if your worship was loud and your gifts were spectacular and your platform was visible, you were probably further along than the quiet brother three rows back who’d just spent his Tuesday helping somebody move.
Paul looks at the ledger and says: that’s not the math.
He puts tongues last in 12:28. On purpose. He spends all of chapter 14 explaining why prophecy outranks tongues. And then, sandwiched right in the middle, he zeroes out the whole spreadsheet with one line: if I have all of that and don’t have love, I’m nothing.
Nothing. Not less. Not behind. Nothing.
The Corinthians weren’t immature because they lacked impressive gifts. They were immature because they were measuring with the wrong stick.
What I Keep Coming Back To
The Corinthians weren’t bad people. They weren’t even unspiritual people, in the inventory sense. They had gifts. They had passion. They showed up. They were doing a lot of things that, on any modern church-growth checklist, would put them in the top tier.
And Paul calls them infants (1 Corinthians 3:1).
Not because they were doing nothing. Because they were counting the wrong things as gain (cf. Philippians 3:7-8). That gets me thinking. What am I currently counting as gain that isn’t?
What does my ledger value that Paul’s ledger doesn’t? How much of what I call “growth” is just a different version of what the Corinthians were doing: pointing at the visible, the loud, the impressive, and calling it maturity?
We may not always like the answers we get. Some of the things we might be proudest of look an awful lot like Corinthian gifts under a different name. The teaching or preaching slot. The follower count. The perfect attendance record. The years of membership. The verses we can quote from memory. The reputation for being theologically careful. The error we caught in somebody else's lesson. The number of books on the shelf. None of those are bad, any more than tongues were bad. But none of them is the stick Paul is measuring with, either.
The stick is love. Patient, kind, not insisting on its own way, not keeping score.
If your version of growth makes you harder to live with, Paul would say you’re not advanced. You’re just louder.
The Question for Sunday
On Sunday, I’m preaching from the verse that sits right in the middle of all this: 1 Corinthians 13:11. 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. It’s our text for the fourth Sunday in our Maturity in the Body series. Paul, in his most personal voice in the whole chapter, looks the Corinthians dead in the eye and says: I used to count as you count. I put it down.
But before any of that lands on Sunday, this is the question we should really think about. It’s the same one Paul wanted the Corinthians to ponder.
What if the thing I’m pointing at as proof I’ve grown up is actually the thing that’s keeping me a kid?
Some immaturity is loud and obvious. Some of it never misses a service. Some of it never misses a chance to correct you.
The first step out of it is being willing to ask the question.
