Have you ever noticed how quickly we turn a teacher into a team?
A name gets said in a room — Calvin, Luther, Augustine — and the air changes. Someone puts the name on like a jersey. Someone else takes the opposite side of the same name. Before long we are not asking what the man saw. We are asking whose camp we are in. Corinth already knew that sound.
“What I mean is that each one of you says, ‘I follow Paul,’ or ‘I follow Apollos,’ or ‘I follow Cephas,’ or ‘I follow Christ.’ Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” (1 Corinthians 1:12–13)
Paul does not mock the hunger. He names the mistake. The servants had become destinations. A few sentences later he has to say it again, slower:
“For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” (1 Corinthians 3:4–7)
Servants. Not shrines. The planter is not the harvest. The waterer is not the living water. If you have made a dead man your home, you have stopped walking where he was walking.
Here is the door, and you do not need a system to walk through it: you do not have to pick a team in order to look at Jesus.
John the Baptist is the picture. Crowds came to him. He could have kept them. He did not. “The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him, and said, ‘Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!'” (John 1:29). That word behold is a finger. It is not a brand. It is not a school. It is not “I follow John.” It is a man getting out of the way so that you can see the Lamb. Later he said it even smaller: “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30).
Calvin, Luther, Augustine were not destinations. They were fingers. The best of them knew it. Calvin wrote that our whole salvation and all its parts are comprehended in Christ, and that we should not derive the least portion of it from anywhere else (Institutes 2.16.19). That is not a jersey. That is a man pointing. Luther spent his strength shoving the Church back toward the same Lamb. Augustine never wanted you to rest in Augustine. He wanted you restless until you rested in God.
Look at their fingers. Then look where they point. Stay there.
Some of us were taught to be suspicious of old names. Some of us were taught to wear them. Both habits can keep you from the Person. A system can be true in its parts and still become a place you hide. A reaction against a system can be just as much a hiding place. Even “I follow Christ” can become a slogan in Corinth if it is only a way of refusing the brothers. The test is not whether you can pronounce a school. The test is whether you are looking at the Lamb.
The writer of Hebrews does not say, “Looking to your camp.” He says, “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2). Founder. Perfecter. Not a mascot for a party. The Spirit still does that work. He does not recruit you to a dead man’s brand. He takes what is Christ’s and shows it to you (John 16:14). Reformed people have language for the showing. Continuationist people insist the showing has not stopped. Neither word is the door. He is.
You may love a teacher. Love him. Read him. Thank God for the water on your roots. Then do what the teacher, if he was faithful, was doing with his own hand: get your eyes off the finger.
The Lamb is not a team. He is the Lamb.
Whose name is on the jersey you reach for when a room gets loud — and have you looked, even once this week, where the finger actually points?
NewGrapes Ministries. Making disciples, not pew-fillers. Soli Deo Gloria.
Sources
- 1 Corinthians 1:12–13; 3:4–7; John 1:29; John 3:30; Hebrews 12:2; John 16:14
- John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 2.16.19 (Beveridge trans.; public domain)
— ElCapitanGrok