Assisting Apollos With Open-Heart Surgery

Suggested Reading: 1 Corinthians 3:1-9, 16:12

The movie Something the Lord Made dramatized the story of two men, Dr. Alfred Blalock and his assistant Thomas, who developed and performed the first open heart surgery. While Dr. Blalock was recognized as a renowned surgeon, Thomas was his black assistant in a day when blacks were still required to enter Johns Hopkins University through the back door. On the day of the first open heart surgery, performed on an infant with Blue Baby Syndrome, Blalock stopped the surgery. In front of a gallery of other surgeons, Blalock realized that he was going to have difficulty performing the surgery on his own and, even though it could damage his own reputation, brought in Thomas, his black assistant, to talk him through the procedure. No one expected the surgery to work in the first place and Blalock would simply have been thought ambitious for being willing to try it if he had failed and the baby had died. But bringing in a black assistant to talk him through the surgery? That was sure to diminish his standing among his colleagues. In the end, though, Blalock decided that the life of the infant was worth more than his own reputation.

The Apostle Paul planted the church in the city of Corinth. At some point after his departure, Apollos came on the scene and began working in the church of Corinth as well. Apollos' presence diminished Paul's standing among the Corinthians and Paul wrote to them, urging them to stop arguing about whether they followed Paul or Apollos but to focus on following Jesus together (1 Corinthians 1). Paul insisted that he and Apollos were on the same team, working for the same goal, even though Paul had lost some influence due to Apollos' work among the Corinthians. But toward the end of 1 Corinthians, Paul wrote of a conversation he had had with the other famous teacher, saying, Now about our brother Apollos- I urged him to visit you with the other believers (1 Corinthians 16:2, NLT). Even though Apollos' presence had diminished his own influence, Paul urged Apollos to visit the Corinthians again because he thought that the Corinthians would benefit from his teaching.

I've discovered that we often do a great of job of talking about being on the same team but our walk doesn't always match our high ideals. Instead of getting the best replacement at work to fill in for us during vacation, we find someone who is competent but won't become competition. Community churches talk about working together to reach youth, but then won't let their youth participate in a joint worship service at another church because they might get "confused" (often code for: "they might like that church better than us"). Instead of coming up with joint solutions that will help the country, our politicians grand-stand to make the other party look bad to increase their own standing. Instead of picking the best person for a particular task, we reserve it for ourselves because it is a more visible or prestigious task and we want to be seen doing it.

Like Paul, we must learn to put aside questions of personal influence and renown in favor of doing what is best - best for our church-members, best for our co-workers, best for our customers, and best for the people we minister to. Do we really believe that we are all on the same team? Are we really interested in doing what is best for the people we care for? Or are we more interested in maintaining our own influence? We must make our decisions based on what is best for the people God has given us, not what is best for us.

Getting Closer to God by Defying Conventional Thinking

Suggested Reading; Job 21:7-21

Several years ago, I watched a movie called Something the Lord Made. The movie chronicled the journey of a pair of men as they researched the possibility of doing open heart surgery and eventually became the first people to complete the procedure successfully. One of the reasons their work was so groundbreaking was that the accepted thinking of the day said that the heart couldn't be touched. No one believed that surgery could be performed on the heart without the death of the patient. But these two men, together, decided to challenge the accepted thinking of the day and look past it toward reality. Only then were they able to accomplish the impossible.

Job was also a man who was willing to challenge the accepted wisdom of the day. The wise men of the day believed that people who lived righteous lives were always blessed while those who lived sinful lives always received God's wrath. When Job received the "wrath" of God, he began to re-examine the thinking of the day. Knowing that he was on the receiving end of some pretty heavy wrath when he had done nothing wrong, Job began reexamining those accepted notions: In Job 21:17-18, Job said,“Yet the light of the wicked never seems to be extinguished. Do they ever have trouble? Does God distribute sorrows to them in anger? Are they driven before the wind like straw? Are they carried away by the storm like chaff? Not at all!" (NLT). Because Job was willing to challenge the accepted thinking of the day, Job was able to see things more clearly than his friends. Job faced some hard truths and then came out stronger in the long-run for it.

Far too often we simply accept what the people around us say is the truth without ever really examining it for ourselves. We accept what our parents say, what our teachers tell us, what our consensus of friends says to us. But man's wisdom is not the same thing as God's wisdom. What seems to make a lot of sense from a human perspective may be the attempts of our desperately feeble minds to make sense of something that we can't find reason for. That journey for meaning is a good one, but we have to remember that things will make a lot more sense if we look at reality and not just what other people say.

The accepted thinking of the day is often the rejected thinking of another generation. Whatever is accepted, examine it in the light of reality. We learn more when we challenge than when we simply accept.