So much of the strife in the Corinthian church was created by 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 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.

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