What, after all, is Apollos? And what is Paul? Only servants, through whom you came to believe—as the Lord has assigned to each his task. I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.
1 Corinthians 3:5 NIV
In this third chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul accused the Corinthian church of being worldly and immature, unable to consume the deeper truths of the Spirit. The specific symptom Paul addressed here concerned their opinions on the greatness of individual Christian leaders (1 Cor. 1:12, 3:4). This had resulted in jealousy and quarreling amongst themselves, dividing the church into factions.
Paul’s corrective in 1 Corinthians 3:5-7 pointed them back to what Jesus taught in Luke 22:24-27: the greatest in the kingdom is the one who serves. And Paul makes clear that this is what he and Apollos were. They were servants who had been faithful to the task God assigned to each of them. They had different roles in the life of the church. And they had faithfully played their parts. But it was God who had produced the fruit of their labors.
There are two warnings for us in this passage. The first is the most obvious. We need to guard against becoming so attached to human leaders, no matter how significant they are, that we allow it to divide us. And we should be cautious about those who seem to enjoy the acclaim that comes from human greatness.
The second warning is to those with some leadership role within the body of Christ. We need to recognize that we are only servants of the Lord. In everything we say and do, we should point people to the one we serve. He is the one who is deserving of all the credit.
