Walking Together (Friday Devotional)

 

For you are still of the flesh. For as long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you, are you not of the flesh, and behaving according to human inclinations? For when one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you came to believe, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters have a common purpose, and each will receive wages according to the labor of each. For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building.

- 1 Corinthians 3:3-9

In 19^th century Britain, one of the hottest fads was a sport called pedestrianism: competitive walking. Huge crowds would gather at tracks otherwise used for horse racing and watch as a dozen or so men would line up at the starting blocks to, well, walk around in circles. Races could go on for days as the various competitors put one foot in front of the other in a test of endurance.

In 2022, the concept of competitive walking seems bizarre to us. Yet too often believers, from the earliest days of the church until today, make their walk with Christ into a competition, seeking to see whether they can “outwalk” their brothers and sisters in faith.

In the Corinthian church, believers divided themselves up according to which apostle they identified with: “I belong to Paul,” one would say; “I belong to Apollos” the other would respond. Today our splits usually fall along other lines: personal preferences, political differences, and even simple clashes of personality. Whatever the case, we are eager to show that our faith is more sincere and more effective than someone else’s.

Paul makes clear that these comparisons are harmful, not helpful. Ultimately, he reminds us, it is God who empowers us to do His will; it is God who brings about spiritual growth. Our task is not to pit ourselves against each other, but to work together on His behalf.

Competitive walking died out in the early 20^th century, replaced by more exciting forms of recreation, and it seems long past time that its spiritual parallel do the same. In a world where there’s plenty of polarization already, may God’s people trade quarrels for compassion and division for devotion—because nobody wants to watch people trying to outwalk each other.