The Mind of Christ (1 Corinthians2:1-16)

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Christians are an enigma to the unbelieving world around us. Even more so, it seems, with each passing year. The non-Christian can’t make heads nor tails of us, or begin to comprehend the reason for our words and actions … at least not our truly Christian words and actions. Yet the same cannot be said to be true about our understanding of the unbelievers. While we often shake our heads at their words and actions they do not surprise us. We understand them all too well. We’ve been there. In fact you could say that we understand them even better than they understand themselves. But don’t get too puffed up, dear friends. You are not so very wise, nor have you worked all this out in your own mind. You know this because you’ve been given the wisdom of Christ, and the very mind of Christ.

¹And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. ²For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. ³And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, ⁴and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, ⁵that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

It is really very simple and focused – humble messengers testifying to Jesus Christ crucified for us sinners! That’s the secret. That’s the heart. That is the soul and the mind of being Christian. And it confuses the heck out of the world around us. “Why does it always come back to Jesus for you Christians?” atheist debater Richard Dawkins once lamented in a debate. He is not alone in his bewildered wondering.

Why do we not spend more time relying on rhetorical technique or any other worldly strategy for making an impression? Because it is not about winning debating points or putting on a good show. It’s about speaking the truth in Christ and letting God reap the results.

⁶Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. ⁷But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. ⁸None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

Know this dear friends, the secular spirit of this age is always trying to make the church conform to its own agenda rather than letting the church be conformed to the mind of Christ. Always seeking to tell you what the mind of Christ would be, rather than letting Christ tell you what your mind should be! But that wisdom of this age is reduced to nothing in the face of Jesus Christ Crucified, Risen, and Victorious. The power and influence of this world is transitory and already fading from the scene. For even with all their sophisticated knowledge, be it in science or philosophy or in social justice theory they have failed to recognize Jesus as the Messiah.

It is the great secret of human history that is hidden only from the sinful and unreceptive world. It is the great mystery that the Spirit reveals through the Gospel and comprehended in the cross.

⁹But, as it is written, What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him—¹⁰these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. ¹¹For who knows a person’s thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. ¹²Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.

Only spiritual people welcome these spirit-taught words, these deep things of God – His love for us fools shown on the cross. And in the revelation of that cross a spiritual person is able to exercise good judgment in all things, both secular and sacred; for we have a privileged understanding of reality. Both sin and grace. Both what should be and what is. Both right and wrong, good and bad, and the true nature of humanity as it was, is and will be again. Why? Because God has given us a piece of His mind. And we are informed by His Word and the Spirit together.

¹³And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual. ¹⁴The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. ¹⁵The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. ¹⁶“For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

Here … you have the entire essence of God, his will, and his work exquisitely depicted in very short but rich words. In them consists all our wisdom, which surpasses all the wisdom, understanding, and reason of men. Although the whole world has sought painstakingly to learn what God is and what he thinks and does, yet it has never succeeded in the least. But here … God himself has revealed and opened to us the most profound depths of his fatherly heart, his sheer, unutterable love. He created us for this very purpose, to redeem and sanctify us. Moreover, having bestowed upon us everything in heaven and on earth, he has given us his Son and his Holy Spirit, through whom he brings us to himself … We could never come to recognize the Father’s favor and grace were it not for the Lord Christ, who is a mirror of the Father’s heart. Apart from him we see nothing but an angry and terrible Judge. But neither could we know anything of Christ, had it not been revealed by the Holy Spirit. These articles of the Creed, therefore, divide and distinguish us Christians from all other people on earth. All who are outside the Christian church, whether heathen, Turks, Jews, or false Christians and hypocrites, … cannot be confident of his love and blessing. Therefore they remain in eternal wrath and damnation, for they do not have the Lord Christ, and, besides, they are not illuminated and blessed by the gifts of the Holy Spirit.¹

And that is why we don’t get too puffed up, dear friends. We are not so very wise, except that we have been given the wisdom of Christ. Nor have we worked all this out in our own mind but we have been granted the very mind of Christ. And to have the mind of the Lord is to participate in the pattern of the cross. This privileged knowledge given us by the Spirit through the Scriptures results in the renunciation of all privilege, boasting and quarreling.

Knowing better means being better and doing better. It means being that salt and light that this world so desperately needs. It means loving the unlovable and forgiving as we have been forgiven. It means speaking the truth, even when the world around you thinks you foolish for believing it. It means being willing to suffer for the sake of Christ and those others He loved enough to pay for by His crucifixion. This is the mind of the crucified Christ you have been gifted with. It is the calling of your Christian life and it is measured by the cross.

AMEN.

1 Tappert, T. G. (2000, c1959). The book of concord : The confessions of the evangelical Lutheran church (The Large Catechism: 2, 63-66). Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

“The Wisdom of Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:18-31

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¹⁸For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. ¹⁹For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Someone (Bill Gothard) once said “Wisdom is seeing life from God’s point of view.” This, dear friends, was at the heart of the Corinthian Church’s problems. It is also at the heart of so many of our own. They, and we, too often don’t care to see this life from any view point other than our own. We are so much wiser than anyone else … at least in matters of our own life and morals and faith. It is an easy attitude to take with people – they give us so many proofs it it not a big leap to make – but that shouldn’t let us think even for a moment that we can feel the same way about God.

God doesn’t understand me like I do. God doesn’t know what I know. God would think or do otherwise if He were in my shoes! We’ve all thought it at one point or other in our lives. About one part or other of our lives. And it is just plain foolishness! And Paul lets us know why in no uncertain terms: ²⁰Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? ²¹For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

Human wisdom cannot lead to God … only away from Him. Just look at every single “virtue” our society now pursues and how each and every one of them draws us further away from God. Tolerance replaces love. Yet tolerance is blindingly intolerant to real love. Relativism replaces reality. Whatever you feel about yourself is now not only true for you but real too! Emotionalism replaces sound reasoning. Bald-faced stories replace actual history. Islam is a religion of peace and Christianity is the worst threat this world has ever faced. You don’t need to scratch very deeply to see just how foolish human wisdom really is. So what does God do in the face of such “wisdom”? God plays the fool and reveals himself through the message of the cross.

²²For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, ²⁴but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ²⁵For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

The wise of the world who seem to possess every advantage cannot by their wisdom find God. He comes “through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” He comes through the word of the cross. The Jews wanted spectacular signs from heaven so the cross was scandalous to them. The Greeks wanted logical reasoning so the cross was scandalous to them. God doesn’t come through terms established by human desire. He comes on his own terms and that still offends many. Yet what looks like undignified foolishness to us is far above any human reasoning. This word of the cross is the very power of God! God chose what is foolish in the world. God chose what is weak in the world. God chose what is low and despised in the world. He chose all of that so that we do not boast in our own strength (or wisdom), but in Him alone.

²⁶For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, 1 not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. ²⁷But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, ²⁹so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

Thus when God proposes the doctrines of faith, He always proposes things that are simply impossible and absurd—if, that is, you want to follow the judgment of reason. It does indeed seem ridiculous and absurd to reason that in the Lord’s Supper the body and the blood of Christ are presented, that Baptism is “the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit”, that Christ the Son of God was conceived and carried in the womb of the Virgin, that He was born, that He suffered the most ignominious of deaths on the cross, that He was raised again, that He is now sitting at the right hand of the Father, and that He now has “authority in heaven and on earth”. Paul calls the Gospel of Christ the crucified “the Word of the cross” and “the folly of preaching”, which the Jews regarded as offensive and the Greeks as a foolish doctrine. Reason judges this way about all the doctrines of the faith; for it does not understand that the supreme form of worship is to hear the voice of God and to believe, but it supposes that what it chooses on its own and what it does with a so-called good intention and from its own devotion is pleasing to God. When God speaks, reason, therefore, regards His Word as heresy and as the word of the devil; for it seems so absurd. Such is the theology of all the sophists and of the sectarians, who measure the Word of God by reason. But faith slaughters reason and kills the beast that the whole world and all the creatures cannot kill. ¹

This word of the cross is the very power of God! This Word of the cross is the source of our life and being. ³⁰He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness and sanctification and redemption. ³¹Therefore, as it is written, Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.

God grants us revelation in His Word, an acquittal won by His Son, a holiness that follows for us, and full salvation from sin and death. God made Christ our wisdom and our righteousness and our sanctification and our redemption. All these gifts are from God, therefore all pride in ourselves is just plain foolish. Even though Jesus’ death and resurrection appears shameful and foolish, it is the only basis of our salvation. We cannot boast of merits and works, if they are viewed apart from Christ’s grace and mercy. Therefore the wisest thing we can do is to avoid all pride and boasting about anything we do for God or others. We bring nothing but sin into our relationship with God but receive all good things from Him in Christ Jesus our Lord and Saviour. The true and everlasting wisdom for you and me and this whole wide world is that “We preach Christ crucified . . . Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”

AMEN.

1 Luther, M. (1999, c1963). Vol. 26: Luther’s works, vol. 26 : Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 1-4 (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Ga 3:7). Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House.