What Grows in the Cold
1 Corinthians 3:1-4 - “But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says, ‘I follow Paul,’ and another, ‘I follow Apollos,’ are you not being merely human?”
A luthier will tell you that the secret of a great violin is hidden in the wood, and the secret of the wood is hidden in how slowly it grew. The most prized soundboards come from spruce that grew high in the Alps, in thin soil and bitter cold, adding only a hair’s width of new wood each year. That slowness is the point. A tree ring has a soft, spongy part laid down in the rush of spring and a hard, dense part laid down later in the year; in slow-grown mountain spruce the rings are narrow and even, packed tight, and the wood rings like a bell. Wood that grows fast, in easy warmth, comes out light and loose and dull. Whatever the cause, many luthiers would agree on the principle: the wood that sings is often wood that endured slow, hard years.
Paul looks at the Corinthian church and sees wood that grew too fast. “I could not address you as spiritual people,” he writes, “but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it.” This wasn’t a thin, struggling congregation. A chapter earlier Paul told them they were “not lacking in any gift” (1:7). They had tongues, prophecy, knowledge, the whole impressive display. By every external measure they were the most gifted church in the New Testament.
And Paul calls them infants.
That combination is the trap and it’s so easy to miss. We assume that gifts and maturity grow together, that the more impressive a believer becomes, the more mature they must be. Paul says they’re not the same thing at all. Gifts can arrive fast, like spring wood, in a single rush of the Spirit. Character is laid down slowly, ring by narrow ring, in the cold. And the danger of being gifted is that the gifts feel like evidence. The Corinthians could point to everything they could do and never notice what they had become. We can do the very same: mistake a growing platform for a growing soul, confuse knowing more about God with becoming more like Jesus.
And notice how Paul proves the diagnosis. He looks straight past their gifts to their relationships: “For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh?” The proof was relational, right there in how they treated one another: jealousy, quarreling, lining up behind their favorite leaders like rival fans, “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos.” The gifts were real, and the grain was still loose.
We have all watched gifted people, maybe been the gifted person, whose abilities ran out ahead of their character, and we have felt the wrongness of it. But Paul isn’t asking us to become less gifted. He’s asking us to stop measuring by the wrong ring. The world is rarely moved, in the end, by how much we can do. A watching neighbor is drawn by something much harder to fake: a life that has grown dense and steady and kind through the cold years, that doesn’t need to quarrel to be right, that has quietly begun to ring like Jesus. That resonance is what makes a Winsome Witness. It can only be grown.
And here’s the gospel relief hidden in the cold: the slow growth is the patient work of the Spirit, not a thing we manufacture by gritting our teeth. The Spirit is forming Christ in us a hair’s width at a time, until “Christ is formed in you” (Gal 4:19). The hard season you’re in is doing more than you can feel. It may be the very winter in which the dense, resonant grain is being laid down. So don’t despise the slowness. Something is ringing into being that the easy years could never have made.
Today: Ask yourself, “Where have I been quietly mistaking my gifts, my knowledge, or my activity for actual maturity?” Ask the Spirit to show you one place.
Prayer: “Father, I confess how easily I mistake what I can do for who I am becoming. Forgive me for prizing the fast, impressive growth and despising the slow, hidden work. Lay down in me, ring by narrow ring, the dense and steady character of Your Son, until my life begin to ring like His. In Jesus’ name, Amen.”
-PK