1 Corinthians 1:30-31
Hear now God’s word from 1 Corinthians
1, beginning at verse 18. For 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. For it is written, I will destroy
the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning
I will thwart. Where 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 this world? For
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. For Jews demand
signs and Greeks seek wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified,
a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. But to those
who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of
God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is
wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers.
Not many of you are wise according to worldly standards. Not many
were powerful. Not many were of noble birth.
But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the
world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised
in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing
things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence
of God. He is the source of your life
in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness
and sanctification and redemption. Therefore, as it is written,
let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. Let us pray together. Our Lord and God, we come before
you this day. We bow before your great throne,
not only in worship, but also in reverence and awe to your
holy decrees. For you are the God of the universe.
You are the king of the ages and you rule us by your word.
We thank you, Jesus, for being our prophet who speaks the will
of God for our salvation and our growth in grace. We thank
you, Christ, our priest, who has died in our place in order
that we might have access to your throne. And we thank you,
Holy Spirit, that you open eyes, that you unstop ears, that you
soften hearts. And so we ask now that all the
things that you are to us would be very evident in these moments
as you are King, you are God, you are prophet, speak to us
by your holy word. We ask for your help and grace
to understand and most especially to leave this place ready to
live for you. And we pray it in the name of Christ, amen. My family loves watching a certain
sports team. They’re a certain shade of blue.
Others, some of you like light blue. We happen to like dark
blue in our house. And one of our new favorite players,
a freshman on our favorite basketball team, was recently interviewed
by ESPN. And as the microphone was shoved
in his face, a question was asked. He said these words before I
answer your question. I just want to thank my Lord
and savior, Jesus Christ, for without him, I would not be here
today. How often do we hear that from
people in public? Well, sometimes we hear that
a lot and sometimes we just write it off and say, what a cliche. That’s what you’re supposed to
say. It’s, it’s a trademark. It’s something. Just to say it’s
something to give a shout out or a word to almighty God, but
it’s also true. It’s what we ought to say. I
would just like to say that without my Lord and savior, Jesus Christ,
I would not be here today. You see, for us as Christians,
we understand we understand that apart from Jesus, we can do nothing,
that apart from Christ, we are nothing. And that without Christ,
we are lost. We are without hope in this world.
We would die a thousand deaths. We would spend eternity without
almighty God. But as we sang just a few moments
ago, a song of redemption in Christ alone, in Christ alone,
my hope is found. And stanza after stanza, line
after line, we proclaim that which we believe is true in our
hearts, that without Christ, we would be nothing, that apart
from Christ, we would be dead in our sins, lost and without
hope in this world. Now this world, this place where
we live, that God has created, that has fallen into sin, it
speaks to us with many voices. Imagine yourself walking down
this center aisleway here, and that every person, as you walk
by, had a megaphone. And through that megaphone, they
screamed at you, worship this. Follow that. I have the best
wares to sell. Purchase what I have to offer.
And as you walk down this aisle way, voice after voice would
scream at you for your allegiance. Friends, that’s what it’s like
for us to walk in the world. That’s what it’s like for us
to leave this sanctuary, this place of peace, this place where
God speaks with thunder clarity. this place where we can see what
is good and right and true. That’s what it’s like to leave
this place and to walk in the world. We have every voice screaming
at us for our allegiance, for our worship, for our hearts,
for our minds, for our children, for our grandchildren, for our
very lives. And God says to us over and over
in his word, if you want to be wise, know the word of God, know
the will of the Lord and follow me. For you see nothing in this
world can offer you what Christ can offer. This world may try
to offer you wisdom, but it can’t get you into heaven. This world
may offer you riches, but it can’t purchase a seat at the
eternal King’s table. This world may offer you power
and strength and success, and you may pile up a resume with
acclamations and awards and abilities, but it cannot help you enter
the kingdom of heaven. Oh, it may be cliche to say when
a microphone is shoved in your face, I want to acknowledge my
Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. But it is true, isn’t it? For
without him, Apart from him, I would not be standing here
today. It is in Christ that we live
and that we move and that we have our being. Now, who are
the Corinthians? Who is the Corinthian church?
We have here before us a couple of verses of chapter one of Paul’s
first letter to the Corinthians. We believe that Paul wrote four
letters to the Corinthian church. Okay. They were, they were a
bad church. You might say they got four letters
from the apostle Paul. Getting a letter from the apostle
Paul was not a good thing. It was a reprimand. Of course
it was the word of God. So that part was good, but he
wrote four rough and tough letters to the Corinthians. We happen
to have two of them. Now the Corinthians were people
living in the world. They were people living in the
world and all those voices, Screaming at them for their allegiance
had taken their toll. And the things that were taking
place ethically and morally in the Corinthian church would make
every person sitting in a pew today blush. This church was
dead. This church was rife in sin and
debauchery and all kinds of unspeakable things. And the Apostle Paul
writes, he speaks into that church and he says to them all kinds
of things to correct their way of life so that it is fitting
to be the children of the living God, children of the King. Now
they’re also living in a time, they’re living in an era where
you have preachers and street preachers and philosophers all
all peddling wisdom, all peddling what they believe will help you
have a happy and successful life. It sounds a little bit familiar
today, doesn’t it? You know, over the holidays visiting
with family, I like to do a little research. We have the antenna
at our house and so we get about eight, eight and a half channels.
But Oh, when you got a family and they got the satellite, you
know, they got hundreds of channels, most of them worthless. You don’t
want to watch them, but I like to, go through the Christian
channels. I like to see what’s on. I like
to hear what’s being said. And even being peddled under
the guise of Christianity is all kinds of worldly wisdom. And the apostle Paul is telling
the Corinthians, he’s telling us, be careful who you listen
to. The world may seem wise, but
in the scheme of things compared to God, it is foolish. The world
may seem strong, but stand the world up next to almighty God
and you will see who is stronger. And in chapter one of Corinthians,
we read a portion of that. The apostle Paul centers his
argument around this, preaching about a crucified man being able
to save you is utter foolishness to the world. And how true is
that today? How many people today, this morning,
this hour, just in the Eastern time zone, not to mention all
the other time zones around the globe, but how many people, even
within a 50 mile radius of us say to themselves, why would
I go to church and hear a message? about a man who died a heinous
death of execution thousands of years ago. What in the world
does that have to do with me? How can it help me? Instead,
they flock to the university. They flock to the shopping mall.
They load up their electronic device with podcast and with
music and other information that feeds and nurtures their mind
and their heart unto death. But Paul here proclaims that
the foolishness of preaching, it saves centers. The foolishness
of preaching is what God in his wisdom has decided to use to
save man. And so when our friend on the
basketball court, or you as a faithful Christian, have the microphone
shoved in your face or the spotlight aimed at you, and somebody says
to you, what’s it all about? It’s all about the Lord Jesus
Christ. It’s all about who he is and what he has done and how
by faith I have received him and him alone for salvation. Oh, the Jews demand signs. The Greeks want to see works. Oh, and we think that bigger
is better and numbers equal faithfulness. but God is wiser and stronger
than the world. God calls those who are not wise,
those who are not powerful, those who are not of noble birth unto
himself and he saves us. God chooses what is foolish,
what is weak, what is low, what is despised. He calls what is
nothing and makes it something. And why is that? It’s so that
no human, nobody, no person can boast for the presence of God.
A couple of things from this passage that help us understand
what Christ has done for us. There’s an umbrella phrase, an
overarching phrase in this passage, and you see it in verse 30. He is the source of your life
in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom. So compared to all
the wisdom of the world, all the knowledge and education that
you can get in our university system, all the wealth and dollars
and cents that you can amass in your accounts, or maybe you
bury it in the backyard and you go check on it every night, all
the resume that you could stack up, all the achievements and
acclamations, They cannot stack up and they cannot measure to
the wisdom of Christ. So what is the apostle Paul saying
to the Corinthians? He’s saying in an overarching
way, in a sort of an umbrella passage here, Jesus has given
you salvation. He is the source of wisdom. He says it in a funny way in
the language of the New Testament, but he’s basically saying this,
but not for Christ, you would be a fool, but not for Christ. you would be dead, but not for
Christ. You would have nothing. And so
what is the apostle Paul telling us? He’s saying, if you are found
in Jesus Christ, you have this overarching source, this overarching
provision of salvation. And he spells out the wisdom
of Christ. or the salvation of Christ in
three key ways that help us understand what we have in Jesus. Now it’s
very helpful for us as Christians to know words like the ones that
will appear here in verse 30. The men who are studying 18 words
on Mondays, over the course of our study
of those 18 words, you will learn, at least according to the title
of the book, 18 of the most important Christian words you will ever
know. Well, these words, most of these words are in that book.
It says in verse 30, he is the source of your life in Christ
Jesus, whom God made our wisdom. And then he gives a couple of
ands, our righteousness. The wisdom of God has provided
you with righteousness. You can’t earn it. You can’t
buy it. You can’t achieve it. You can’t
make up rules that outnumber the rules of the Pharisees and
make yourself righteous and holy in the sight of God. For we are
all sinners, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory
of God. We are born in Adam. We are by nature, children of
wrath. We love darkness more than light.
We love death more than life. We love worshipping ourselves
more than worshipping almighty God. But it says here under the
wisdom of Jesus who has given us life. He is our righteousness. Now, in weeks past, as we have
spoken through the solas or the alone statements, we have looked
at scripture alone. We’ve looked at justification
by faith alone. We’ve looked at the subject of
what it means to have the righteousness of Christ. It is a righteousness
that is not from within us. It is not something that we drummed
up, that we earned, that we created. It is an outside righteousness
that has been given to us. Some of you may have had gracious
parents. Mine are sitting here today.
You may have had parents that filled up your bank account. Mine didn’t.
I had to work for everything, didn’t I? But the righteousness
of Christ. The righteousness of Christ is
given to us. It’s like a parent filling up
your bank account with enough money, with enough credit, with
enough of what you need in order to get into heaven. And so by
faith, when we come to Jesus, we receive a righteousness, an
outside righteousness, an alien righteousness, a righteousness
that we did not earn by or achieve. but a righteousness that comes
from Jesus. How did we get that righteousness?
First of all, Jesus lived a perfect life. Jesus lived a faithful
life unto God. He did not sin once. And when
he died on the cross, there was this great exchange. He took
your sin and your unrighteousness. And when you come to faith, you
get his righteousness. He took your filthy rags and
gave you a clean robe. And so you see how the preaching
of Jesus The preaching of the foolishness of the cross is so
counter cultural. It’s out of this world. It is
other worldly. It’s not apples to apples. There’s
no way to compare or compute it with the wisdom of this world.
You have a righteousness that is outside yourself and it is
apart from you, but it comes from Christ. He goes on in verse
30. He is the source of your life
in Christ Jesus, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness
and sanctification. That’s a fancy little word, but
it’s a little word that you need to know. Sanctification, being
made holy, being sanctified, being set apart. And there’s
two ways in the Bible that we have to understand sanctification.
One is a sort of instant sanctification. And then one is a progressive
sanctification. First, the progressive, when
you come to faith in Jesus, you are set apart, you are made holy,
you are made clean, declared clean. You are a child of God,
no longer a child of Satan. You are a child of the kingdom
of light, no longer a child of the kingdom of darkness. And
so there is this sanctification, this cleansing that takes place
when you receive the new birth, when you are regenerated. But
then there’s this progressive sanctification where throughout
the rest of your life, you fight against the world and its voices
that scream at you for your allegiance. You fight against the devil and
his hatred of God, his hatred of Christ and his kingdom, and
his desire to see you dead and in hell rather than alive and
in heaven. But you fight in the remainder
of your life against your own flesh. What do we mean by our
flesh? Well, the apostle Paul speaks
of it in several of his epistles, his letters, and he means this,
not your skin, not the flab on your arms, but the flesh, the
remnant sin that is in you. When God justifies us, he pardons
our sin. When God justifies us, he subdues
our sin. And it is only subdued. But if we feed our sin, if we
nurture our sin, if we get out of church, we stay away from
worship, we put ourselves in not habits of grace, but habits
of darkness, sin will grow in us. And so the job of the Christian
in progressive sanctification is to continually hate your sin
and to rely on the spirit and to trust Jesus, to be in the
word and to say, oh, I hate, I hate what is before me. We’re
like the apostle Paul in Romans 7, where he says, I know what
I ought to do. I know the right thing to do, but that is what
I do not do. And then he goes on to say, this
is a tongue twister, I know what I ought not do. And that is the
very thing I do. And don’t you know this in your
life? I sure do. I know what I ought to do. And
it’s a struggle to do it. And I know what I ought not to
do. Oh, and isn’t that the easy way? Satan whispers in your ear,
Brian, don’t you want to be happy? Don’t you want pleasure? Don’t
you want joy? And you can have it now. You don’t have to wait
until heaven. And you see, dear friends, that
is the struggle of sanctification. The world does not understand
that. It is foolishness to them. But aren’t we grateful that God
has given us his righteousness and that he has given us sanctification? growth in grace, growth in holiness,
growth in what is good and right and true. And friends, it is
a struggle. It is a battle. It is a perpetual war in our
heart that we will continue to worship Jesus, that we will continue
to hate our sin, that we will live by the spirit and not the
flesh. You know, if it weren’t for the restraint of the Holy
Spirit, we’d be just like the Corinthians. If it weren’t for
God at work in our lives and daily giving us grace, we would
be just like the people. I mean, come on, admit it now.
We like to point fingers. I’m thankful we’re like the public
and I’m thankful that I’m not like them. Our passage from Titus and our
assurance of pardon is the most helpful verse in that regard.
For we ourselves were once foolish. Disobedient, led astray, slaves
to various passions and pleasures. We passed our days in malice
and envy. We hated others. We hated each other. It’s the
Romans one of Titus. We were sinning and we were good
at sinning and we got efficient and effective at sinning. And
if we could get better at sinning, we got better. That’s what God
has saved us from. And that’s what sanctification
is. It is a war, it is a fight, it is a reminder of all that
we once were and all that we are now in Christ. He goes on
in verse 30. He is the source of your life
in Christ, whom God made our wisdom and our righteousness
and our sanctification and redemption. Here is a picture, a picture
that’s in the New Testament and also in the Old Testament that
we often forget. I doubt that in this life, in
the United States, in the 19 or the 20th century, and now
the 21st, that any of you have ever been stood on an auction
block and sold to someone else at a price. I know it’s happened
in our history. I know that it still happens
in the world today, but this is a picture of the slave trade. It was big in the Roman world
into which Paul wrote the letter to the Corinthians. But the picture
in the Old Testament and in the New of redemption is this. You
were slaves You were enslaved to Satan and all his ways. You
were enslaved to sin and misery. You were enslaved to Baals and
other gods. You were enslaved to everything
opposite. And then Jesus came to the auction
block when you were up there for sale, miserable and unhappy
and lost. And he said, I will pay the price
for you. We don’t think of that because
we’ve never been a commodity. We’ve never been traded. We’ve
never been bought or sold. But yes, you have. You have been
bought at a price. Jesus came to that auction block
and bought you as a slave and he has freed you and he has redeemed
you. He has purchased you. He has
bought your manumission or your freedom from enslavement. It’s
what he did to Israel and Egypt. Oh dear God, they prayed, we’re
slaves to Pharaoh. We’re making bricks without straw. They’re beating our backs. They’re
not feeding us help. And so God comes and what does
he do? He redeems Israel from Egypt. And so brothers and sisters
never forget, never forget that you have been bought at a price.
And that price was the blood of Jesus. That price was the
life of the son of God. That price was an innocent man,
a holy man who died in your place. He died and was condemned to
death, the death that you should have died. He paid a debt that
he did not owe, but he paid a debt you could never pay. And he has
freed you. And so you should walk from this
place today, never forgetting, I’m a free man. I’m a free woman. I have been freed from something,
from an entanglement, from a predicament, from a situation that I on my
own never could have removed myself from. And what a miserable
life that would have been were it not from Christ. Notice how
he ends this passage, verse 30. Therefore, as it is written,
let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord. Every time I watch
the end of a game or a NASCAR race, I poke fun at it, especially
NASCAR. What do they say? I’d like to
thank Coca-Cola. I’d like to thank Chevrolet. I’d like to
thank Goodyear Tires. They name every single advertiser under
the sun. It’s kind of a funny moment.
But what would you do in the spotlight? What would be the
most important thing to you? Would it be your education? Would
it be your life experience? Would it be the dollars in the
portfolio that comes at the end of every month? Would it be your
achievements in this world? Would it be worldly things that
may amount to much? Or would you simply say, in Christ
alone, my hope is found. He is my strength. He is my life.
He is my song. Friends, that ought to be the
words that come from our lips. Pray with me. Our Lord and God,
we thank you for the Lord Jesus Christ, who took on flesh, the
fullness of God, came as a helpless babe. He was made under the law. He lived righteously. He suffered. He was dead. He was buried. But
you called into that grave, just as you called Lazarus from the
grave, and just as you call each of us, and you called Jesus back
to life, and it is in him that we have life. And we thank you
for that. Lord, remind us over and over
and over again every day, every night upon our pillows at the
noonday meal when we give thanks, may we never forget. that we
were once slaves and that we have been freed. We were once
dead and have been brought to life. Keep that on the forefront
of our minds, that we might praise you, but also that we might live
for you. Help us, for we’re weak and we’re
forgetful. We’re even prone to wonder. We’re
even prone to shake our fist in your face, the one who saved
us. And we’re even willing to go
and live a different way. Keep us close. Call us to our
senses. Remind us that we’re children
of the light and no longer children of darkness because of Christ
and what he has done for us. It’s in his name we pray. Amen.
Let’s stand now and sing of our Savior Jesus using hymn number
88, Fairest Lord Jesus.