First Letter to the Corinthians 3

¹ Brothers, I myself was unable to speak to you as people of the Spirit: I treated you as sensual men, still infants in Christ.

² What I fed you with was milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it; and indeed, you are still not ready for it

³ since you are still unspiritual. Isn’t that obvious from all the jealousy and wrangling that there is among you, from the way that you go on behaving like ordinary people?

⁴ What could be more unspiritual than your slogans, ‘I am for Paul’ and ‘I am for Apollos’?

⁵ After all, what is Apollos and what is Paul? They are servants who brought the faith to you. Even the different ways in which they brought it were assigned to them by the Lord.

⁶ I did the planting, Apollos did the watering, but God made things grow.

⁷ Neither the planter nor the waterer matters: only God, who makes things grow.

⁸ It is all one who does the planting and who does the watering, and each will duly be paid according to his share in the work.

⁹ We are fellow workers with God; you are God’s farm, God’s building.

¹⁰ By the grace God gave me, I succeeded as an architect and laid the foundations, on which someone else is doing the building. Everyone doing the building must work carefully.

¹¹ For the foundation, nobody can lay any other than the one which has already been laid, that is Jesus Christ.

¹² On this foundation you can build in gold, silver and jewels, or in wood, grass and straw,

¹³ but whatever the material, the work of each builder is going to be clearly revealed when the day comes. That day will begin with fire, and the fire will test the quality of each man’s work.

¹⁴ If his structure stands up to it, he will get his wages;

¹⁵ if it is burnt down, he will be the loser, and though he is saved himself, it will be as one who has gone through fire.

¹⁶ Didn’t you realise that you were God’s temple and that the Spirit of God was living among you?

¹⁷ If anybody should destroy the temple of God, God will destroy him, because the temple of God is sacred; and you are that temple.

¹⁸ Make no mistake about it: if any one of you thinks of himself as wise, in the ordinary sense of the word, then he must learn to be a fool before he really can be wise.

¹⁹ Why? Because the wisdom of this world is foolishness to God. As scripture says: The Lord knows wise men’s thoughts: he knows how useless they are:[*a]

²⁰ or again: God is not convinced by the arguments of the wise[*b]

²¹ So there is nothing to boast about in anything human:

²² Paul, Apollos, Cephas, the world, life and death, the present and the future, are all your servants;

²³ but you belong to Christ and Christ belongs to God.