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The heart of our wretched rebellion is that each of us wants to be number one. We make ourselves the center of all our thoughts and hopes and imaginings. This vicious lust to be first works its way outward not only in hatred, war, rape, greed, covetousness, malice, bitterness, and much more, but also in self-righteousness, self-promotion, manufactured religions, and domesticated gods.
The gospel is not simply good advice, nor is it good news about God’s power. The gospel is God’s power to those who believe. The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross.
wisdom was a public philosophy, a well-articulated worldview that made sense of life and ordered the choices, values, and priorities of those who adopted it.
In both “Jews” and “Greeks,” there is profound self-centeredness. God is not taken on trust. Both the demand for signs and the pursuit of “wisdom,” and all the countless progeny they have spawned, treat God as if we have the right to approve him, to examine his credentials. This is the most reprehensible wickedness, the most appalling insolence, the most horrific mark of our deep rebellion and lostness.
we start to think that success more critically depends on thoughtful sociological analysis than on the gospel; Barna becomes more important than the Bible. We depend on plans, programs, vision statements—but somewhere along the way we have succumbed to the temptation to displace the foolishness of the cross with the wisdom of strategic planning.
I fear that the cross, without ever being disowned, is constantly in danger of being dismissed from the central place it must enjoy, by relatively peripheral insights that take on far too much weight. Whenever the periphery is in danger of displacing the center, we are not far removed from idolatry.
Not only has he shamed and nullified the world by choosing so many people whom the world does not highly esteem, God has taken this step to shatter human boasting. God acts to redeem fallen men and women because he is gracious, and for no other reason. He does not owe anyone in the world forgiveness and eternal life.
Those who truly come to know God delight just to know him. He becomes their center. They think of him, delight in him, boast of him. They want to know more and more what kind of God he is.
We are as foolish as the Corinthians when we make much of what cannot endure, when we promote the values and plans and programs of a world that is passing away as if they bear any deep significance.
the better we know God, the more we will want all of our existence to revolve around him, and we will see that the only goals and plans that really matter are those that are somehow tied to God himself, and to our eternity with him.
What Paul avoided was artificial communication that won plaudits for the speaker but distracted from the message.
they warn against any method that leads people to say, “What a marvelous preacher!” rather than, “What a marvelous Savior!”
He cannot long talk about Christian joy, or Christian ethics, or Christian fellowship, or the Christian doctrine of God, or anything else, without finally tying it to the cross.
Do not put these people into emotional corners that compel decisions; such decisions are seldom worth anything. Do not shame them or embarrass them in front of peers. Deal straightforwardly with the gospel.
The message of Christ crucified is the only fundamental dividing line in the human race.
it is the most astonishing folly for the Corinthians to adopt the positions espoused by the esteemed authorities of a culture that does not know God.
If we “see” the truth of the gospel, therefore, it has nothing to do with our brilliance or insight; it has to do with the Spirit of God. If we should express unqualified gratitude to God for the gift of his Son, we should express no less gratitude to God for the gift of the Spirit who enables us to grasp the gospel of his Son.
What a great God we have! Not only does he redeem us through the ignominious crucifixion of his much-loved Son, but he sends us his Spirit to enable us to understand what he has done. So obtuse and blind are we that we would not have begun to grasp “what God has freely given us” unless God had taken this additional step.
What we must constantly remember is that this human inability to understand spiritual things is a culpable inability. It is not that God makes us constitutionally unable to understand him, and then toys with us for his own amusement. Rather, he has made us for himself, but we have run from him. The heart of our lostness is our profound self-focus. We do not want to know him, if knowing him is on his terms. We are happy to have a god we can more or less manipulate; we do not want a god to whom we admit that we are rebels in heart and mind, that we do not deserve his favor, and that our only
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Those who try to create some middle ground by imitating the Corinthians—who confessed the Jesus of the cross but whose hearts were constantly drawn to one or another of the public philosophies and values of the day—will gain nothing but the rebuke of Scripture. This lesson is especially important when so many Christians today identify themselves with some “single issue” (a concept drawn from politics) other than the cross, other than the gospel. It is not that they deny the gospel. If pressed, they will emphatically endorse it. But their point of self-identification, the focus of their minds
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They must take special pains to avoid giving any impression that being really spiritual or really insightful or really wise turns on an appropriate response to their issue.
We must come back to the cross, and to God’s plan of redemption that centers on the cross, and make that the point of our self-identification.
Christian leaders are, in the first place, “only servants.” In this context, Paul does not mean “servants of the church,” but “servants of Jesus Christ,” for here it is the Lord who “has assigned to each his task.”
No one worker’s task has any independent importance.
he and Apollos and any other workers are simply fellow workers, coworkers, owned by God, used by God.
If anyone tries to lay down some other foundation, then it must be for some other building.
It is possible to “build the church” with such shoddy materials that at the last day you have nothing to show for your labor. People may come, feel “helped,” join in corporate worship, serve on committees, teach Sunday school classes, bring their friends, enjoy “fellowship,” raise funds, participate in counseling sessions and self-help groups, but still not really know the Lord. If the church is being built with large portions of charm, personality, easy oratory, positive thinking, managerial skills, powerful and emotional experiences, and people smarts, but without the repeated, passionate,
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Recognizing the need for the Spirit of God to illumine the minds of men and women who otherwise will not grasp the gospel, we will emphasize prayer.
How would our life goals change if we were planning not only for seventy years of existence here, but also for eternity?
If we truly belong to Christ, and Christ belongs to God, then we belong to God. And what a God! He is sovereign over these petty tyrannies;
This world becomes the gateway to the next.
This present life is no longer merely something to cling to. It is the sphere in which we may serve our God and Redeemer, in anticipation of the life to come.
The present is where I live and serve God, but it cannot devour me.
the future, too, is not something to be feared but to be embraced—simply because I belong to Christ, Christ belongs to God, and God controls the future.
Faithful Christian leaders must make the connections between creed and conduct, between the cross and how to live. And they must exemplify this union in their own lives.
We must adopt as our aim the salvation of men and women. That vision will enable us to avoid cloister Christianity. We need to meditate on Psalms 96 and 98; Isaiah 49:1–13; Jeremiah 12:12–33; Micah 4; Colossians 1:15–29; and Revelation 4–5. We must become global in our awareness and compassion. Cultural sensitivity and flexibility must become tools to enable us to address the challenges of cross-cultural evangelism wisely and courageously, rather than ends in themselves to create a myopic elite of lovely, flexible people.
