Fellow Workers
1 Corinthians 3:8-9 “He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.”
In Amish and some Old Order Mennonite communities, when a young family needs a barn, the work doesn’t get hired out to strangers. Word goes around, and on the appointed morning the community arrives: dozens, sometimes hundreds of people, with hammers, teams of horses, prepared materials, and long tables of food. By the time the sun has crossed the sky, the structure that would take a contractor months stands finished against the field. Children carry water and tools. Older men who can no longer climb lend skill from the ground. Women prepare a meal large enough to feed the workers. And when it’s done, no one signs it. No plaque goes up with a name on it. The family has a barn, the community goes home, and the point was never anyone’s individual glory. The point was the barn, the bond, and the God who taught them to work that way.
Paul reaches for pictures like that in verses 8 and 9, and they quietly dismantle everything the Corinthians were fighting about. First this: “He who plants and he who waters are one.” They are not rival brands with competing fan clubs; they are one crew, a planter and a waterer leaning toward the same harvest. The very thing the Corinthians treated as a competition, Paul treats as a single shared labor.
Then he lifts it higher: “For we are God’s fellow workers.” We are workers who belong to God, and we are workers joined to one another in His service, one crew under one Owner. God doesn’t need workers at all. He spoke galaxies into being with no assistance; He could grow His entire field with a word and never involve a single one of us. And He chooses otherwise. He stoops to include us, dignifying our small plantings and waterings by gathering them into His own work, and setting us side by side in His field as His servants. To be owned and used like that by the Maker of everything is no small thing; there is no higher place for a human being than to belong to God and to share in His work.
And there is one more turn, because Paul doesn’t leave us as the workers only: “You are God’s field, God’s building.” The Corinthians, so busy arguing over which leader’s team they belonged to, are told that they themselves are the project, the field being grown, the structure going up. Every quarrel about Paul and Apollos suddenly looks absurd, like bricks fighting over which mason is better while the cathedral rises around them. They were arguing about the workers while they were the work.
This is the beauty the Corinthians missed in their squabbling, and the one we miss in ours. We are at once the workers God graciously includes and the work He is patiently raising, and both are pure gift. We didn’t earn a place on the crew, and we cannot build ourselves into the temple He is making; from first to last it is His field, His building, His doing. And He invites us in anyway, hands us a hammer, and lets us spend our one short life helping raise something that will outlast the stars: a people, gathered and joined and growing, for the glory of God.
Today: Think of someone who serves quietly around you, maybe in your church or your family, whose work rarely gets noticed: the volunteer who shows up early, the person praying behind the scenes, the one cleaning up after everyone else has gone home. This week, tell them. Honor a fellow worker the way God has honored us all.
Prayer: “Father, thank You that You did not have to include me and did anyway, handing me a place on Your crew and calling my small labors Your own work. Knit me together with my Bayside brothers and sisters as one, until the watching world sees Your glory rising through us. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK