1 Corinthians 3:5 Commentary and Bible Study

The apostle then slightly switches to speaking about pastors, ministers, preachers, including himself as an apostle. He is going to deal with one particular aspect of their carnality of their worldliness. Why do you hero worship me? Why are you so worldly that you cannot just listen to the message and apply it to your heart? ‘Who then is Paul and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man.’ The spiritual Christian, the mature Christian assigns everything to God, everything to the Lord, his gospel, his work, his power. He spells it out very slowly; it is so important. ‘I have planted’: he was the first preacher to come to them, preaching the gospel. ‘Apollos watered,’ he continued where I left off, ‘but God gave the increase.’ This is interesting. Verse 5 uses the illustration of servants; verse 6, of farmers. In verse 5 Paul and Apollos are servants. That is what ‘ministers’ means: servants. You can imagine an estate, a larger estate. There is a chief steward. He gives out the wages to all the workers on the estate. It comes to the last day of the week, and that is what they did in those days. All the house servants and the labourers on the farms lined up and received their wages from the chief steward, the chief servant of the master. Whose money was it? It was the landowner’s money, the master’s money. It wasn't the steward’s money. Who determined the wages? The landowner did. What did the steward do? He merely distributed it. And that is what the apostle Paul is saying in verse 5. ‘Who then is Paul, or Apollos? Only servants’, like stewards, ‘by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave.’ It was the Lord's gift to you, salvation in Christ. It wasn't theirs. So we do not credit it to them and start thinking in terms of human endowments. We assign it all to the Lord.