Christian Living

Babytalk

by Terry Barlow
08/26/14
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    The apostle Paul wrote in his letter to the Corinthians (1 Corinthians 3) that he still was not able to address them as spiritual people because they were still babes in Christ, still subsisting on milk and not solid food. Let's consider that. He was saying also that like babies they were not yet able to talk or to understand fluent speech. Babies can understand tone of voice and some simple words perhaps but nothing of much substance. Instead of talking coherently babies cry out from their sense of need. They cry this way when they're hungry or thirsty, or in pain. They cry when they are tired or confused, or afraid, or frustrated from not getting their ways.

    Babies can't enter into comprehensible dialogue or articulate thoughts and ideas. They are limited to cooing, and when spiritual babies don't grow, the cooing gives way to grunting which is much less cute! There's not much if anything in the way of give and take, but mostly it's take. Babies are self-centered and rightly so at that stage;  they are not expected to stay that way indefinitely, but rather are expected to grow out of that self-centeredness progressively, and that's what the believers in Corinth were not doing in the spiritual sense. The consequence of that stuntedness in their spiritual and moral development was that Paul was unable to converse at length or in detail with them, and that, of course, was especially tragic. It was tragic because there were things in his heart that he wanted to expound to them, things that needed to be expounded. He was like an artist with a beautifully nuanced, multidimensional, iridescent vision in his imagination being forced to limit himself to mere flat,  black and white stick figures.