1 Corinthians 2:1-5
Please turn in your copy of the
scriptures to first Corinthians chapter two. Today we’ll be looking
at chapter two verses one through five. So far in Corinthians, in this
section, Paul has been comparing the wisdom of the world with
the foolishness of God. He’s been comparing the strength
of the world or the power of the world with the weakness of
God. And he concluded that the weakness of God, the foolishness
of God are stronger and wiser than the strength of men. Uh,
what’s happening in the life of the church at Corinth is that
they are enamored with, uh, human ability, human speaking ability. And they’re saying, uh, Paul,
you, you’re not that impressive. And so, uh, he’s spoken of how
the message of the cross is foolishness to the world. Uh, but it’s the
power of God that saves. He’s spoken of how, um, The people
of God, that’s what we looked at last week, are foolish and
weak in the world’s sight, but God uses what is foolish and
weak in the world’s eyes to show how mighty and strong he is.
Now, today, he’s going to speak of his ministry, his ministry,
his preaching ministry, and he’s going to know nothing except
to preach Christ and him crucified. So before we read 1 Corinthians
2, 1 to 5, let’s ask for God’s help and blessing. Pray with
me. Lord, it has pleased you to begin a work of grace in each
of our lives. And so we pray now that by the
proclamation of the gospel, that you would preserve us in your
grace, that you would continue that great work of salvation
that you’ve begun in each of us. And that now by the hearing
and reading of the gospel, we may meditate on it. We may lay
hold of its promises and its riches of salvation, but we may
also put it into practice in our lives for your glory and
for our everlasting good, we pray. Amen. God’s Word, 1 Corinthians
2, beginning at 1, Paul says, When I came to you, brethren,
I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty
words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing
among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. And I was
with you in weakness and I was with you in much fear and much
trembling. My speech and my message were
not implausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit
and of power that your faith might not rest in the wisdom
of men, but in the power of God. Amen. God’s gracious word. When
I was a kid, eating out was not on our menu. It was not in the
family budget, but when we did eat out, it was with the grandparents. My mom was a true homemaker. She often, if not always, cooked
three meals a day. I can remember For breakfast,
we did not have cereal. Go down the cereal aisle for
grocery, that’s too expensive. She cooked eggs and grits and
oatmeal and all that good stuff. Squeezed orange juice. By the
time breakfast was cleaned up, was probably cutting up a chicken
for supper that night and made sandwiches or leftovers for lunch. But we ate out of the fridge,
we ate out of the cupboard. Eating out in our family only
changed when she taught school. She taught school when I was
in the ninth grade in order to begin to put us all through college. Eating out only came as my mom
and dad got older and maybe had a few extra more bucks. But when I was younger, we ate
out with the grandparents. After church, we went to Biscuitville.
After church, we went to McDonald’s. After church, we went to Arby’s.
And then it was Wendy’s. And then it was back to Arby’s.
And if it was a special occasion, we went to the cutting board.
Or we went out to the country kitchen way out in Snow Camp.
Now, when my grandparents were older, Um, they always went somewhere
for supper where there was a meat and three, you know what I’m
talking about? A meat and three veggies. Uh, as my grandfather
became a widower and lived by himself, I would visit him from
time to time and he, I’d pick him up at his furniture store
where he still went to work every day and slept, I think. Um, but
I’d go pick him up and visit with him. He’d say, take me home.
He was blind and when I couldn’t see, so he wasn’t driving and
on halfway home, I guess his mind got to thinking there’s
nothing good there. Uh, you, you want to go get something
to eat. And so we go to the K and W, uh, canes and walkers, right? Isn’t that what it stands for?
What do they have? They have a meat and three, you
pick your meat, you pick your three vegetables, you take your
tray to your table and there you go. You have it. And I’ve
always thought something about that. Just plain Jane meat and
three about church. In my lifetime, church has just
gotten big, big, big, big, big. Lots of amenities, lots of events,
lots of this, that, and the other. And they, maybe they’re not wrong
in and of themselves, but they very often eclipse the worship
and the preaching of God’s word. And so in my mind, in the last
25 or so years where I’ve been interested in and participating
in Christian ministry, I’ve thought a lot about church just needs
to be a simple meat and three. It just needs to be meat and
potatoes. I think I stuck that in as the
sermon title this week. Very often when I visit with
somebody who’s checking out our church, I’ll just say, hey, we’re
just warning. We’re no frills. We’re meat and
potatoes. We’re a meat and three. We’re
like K&W. You slide your tray down the aisle and you’re going
to get the same thing every night. Not a lot of change. Just the basics, no frills, meat
and potatoes. Well, the church in the 21st
century has become a buffet. It’s become what we call a smorgasbord. And you go to a church today
and there’s not just one meal, there’s something for everybody.
And I don’t know if that’s a connection to home life. When I was a kid,
we ate what was put in front of us. I think we had chicken
one night, we had spaghetti another night, we might have pork chops
in another, and maybe London broil. We had different meals
based on what was on sale at the Food Lion, I think. But it
was pretty routine, it was pretty the same, and you had no choice
but to clean your plate. Nowadays, young children think
their mother or their father is a short order cook. right
and there’s something for this person and that person and you
know usually involves chicken fingers and ranch dressing something
like that maybe i’m hitting a little too close to home now but but
maybe the same at the supper table at home the short order
cook whatever anybody wants is the same at church. We a la carte,
we pick and choose what we want. And I think today, at least I’ve
observed this, I’ve chatted with other ministers about this, you’ll
find that a lot of people go here and there and they a la
carte church. We go here for the youth group,
there for the women’s ministry, here for the men’s thing, here
for the whatever. And we’ve come to treat church
a lot like the food court at the mall. Now, I want to really
impress upon you this today. What we hear from God’s Word,
what we hear in sermons, ought to be something we highly value. Something that we highly value
and we ought to in a sense, sit at the feet of God, where there’s
just the simple, week by week, meat and potatoes, the meat and
three. It may be that friends do this
and others do that, and they get all kinds of this, that,
and the other. But we want to hear the meat
of the word of God. Now, it’s not only at church
or in churches where we may hear competing voices. We may hear a smorgasbord. It’s
also out in the world. From time to time, we’ll say
something like we’ve come from a busy week. We’ve come from
a noisy world. We’ve come from where the place
where lots of voices are competing for our hearts. And in a sense,
we got the sermons of the church, but we also have the sermons
of the world. The world is calling for our
attention. Our own flesh desires what is
offered and the devil sure is a good whisperer, a good tempter,
a good deceiver. And we’ve got to be reminded
as Christians, we need the word and not the world. We need the
spirit and not the flesh. And we need the voice of Jesus
and not the voice of the evil one. And so we ought to run to
hear the scriptures. We ought to run and hear the
voice of the Lord Jesus. But as we come into church, as
we sit down to hear, perhaps as we pick up our Bibles in the
morning or evening for our own devotions, we’ve been under attack. Maybe the voice of politics.
You get in the car and turn on talk radio. You get in your easy
chair at night and you hear the pundits. And so everything is
about politics and what politics will and won’t do and what politics
is and is not doing. And so we hear the heavy voice
of politicians and pundits and talk shows. And then there’s
social media. If you have that thing in your
pocket and it’s attached to Xs and Instas and Facebooks and
all the rest, you are constantly looking at glamorous lifestyles
that are not your own. You know, your friends just went
to this place and boy, don’t they look nice. or so-and-so
just got a new this or a new that, and the social media message. Or there’s the prosperity message. Sometimes it comes from prosperity
churches, but there’s just the onslaught of you need to make
a bunch of money and save a bunch of money and grow a bunch of
money so you can be 55 and live in one of those Florida communities,
right? Where everybody’s happy, right?
And the sun shines and every evening is a neighborhood gathering. Those are the sort of messages
we hear. Or perhaps it’s the Hallmark
message. Life is romantic. Life is rosy. Or the superhero
message. Everything’s going to work out
because somebody’s going to come in and save. Or how about the celebrity
message? What are popular people doing?
What are wealthy people doing? What are royal people doing?
And then we live in a world of algorithms where messages are
tailor-made for you. Yesterday, every time I pulled
up something on the internet, the ads would pop up as they
do. And I think sometimes, maybe
what I said with my phone in my pocket popped up in an advertisement. on another digital device. Isn’t that sinister? But that’s
the way it works. And so we live in a world where
we are under a rainstorm, an onslaught
of all kinds of messages. And then there’s the whole virtual
signaling and the whole political correctness system. And so lots
of things are coming at us and asking us, begging us, demanding
us to act in a certain way. Well, the Corinthians were living
in a culture, in a society much like our own. They had a smorgasbord
of all kinds of things. Now within the church, they were
hearing Paul. And then at other times they heard Apollos. And
at other times they heard the apostle Peter. And surely they
had other voices from other ministers who would pop through the Corinthian
church scene. And so they could pick and choose.
We like Paul. No, we like Apollos. No, we’re
the Peter people. were the ones who followed Jesus.
So there was that within the church, but also in their little
section of the world, they had at least 50 worldviews that were
being argued and discussed and proclaimed all within and around
the city of Corinth. ancient Roman, ancient Greek
philosophies. They had worldviews just like
we did. They just weren’t coming through
on a phone. They weren’t coming through on a television. They
weren’t coming through on a radio in the automobile, but they were
nevertheless hitting their ears, hitting their heart. And there
was a tug of war among the Corinthians. And a couple of things pop up
in our passage today that we want to remember. And the big
thing is this. Paul wants the faith. He wants
not only the belief, but the content of their belief to be
in the power of God and not in the ability of men to speak and
to speak well. He wants the faith to rest in
the power of God that comes through the plain preaching of the cross
of Jesus Christ. And so he wants to, while he’s
among them, give testimony to God just from simple, plain language. He wants the power of God and
the preaching of the word of God to convince and convert sinners
and to comfort and build up saints. And so let me explain one thing
before we dig in, we dive in. When you hear the word of God,
it will do two things. Well, three. The one thing it
may do is it may make you mad and you reject it. You may not
have the Spirit of God at work in you. You may remain dead in
your sins and trespasses. And the more Bible you hear,
the madder you get. That is a possible outcome. But
the great outcome, the one we pray for and hope for, is that
it will convince you of your sin and misery. And it will show
you the way of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. And you
will receive and rest in Jesus alone for your salvation. And
then as you grow in grace, the word will comfort you and it
will build you up. And so we want the word of God,
just as Paul did for the Corinthians, to convince and convert us of
our sin and our need of a savior. but also to comfort and build
us up in our most holy faith. That’s why as Christians, we
live as people under the word for the rest of our lives. You
know, in America, we throw out the easy believism. You don’t
want to go to hell, do you? Of course not. Pray this prayer.
Take this card. Stick it in your wallet. Chariot
swings low. Get that card out and say, I’m a Christian. Take
me to heaven. Well, the Christian life is, yes, coming to faith
in Jesus, but it is living for God and daily and Sunday by Sunday
sitting under his word and letting the power of the spirit remind
us and teach us of the graces. And so when the apostle Paul
came to the Corinthian church, when he came there from Athens,
when he came there for an 18 month ministry, now he’s since
moved on across the water to Ephesus, gone back to Jerusalem. He’s back at Ephesus and he’s
writing to them from, you know, a little way across the sea,
but he’s been getting word about their, their well-being, and
he’s been getting letters from them. But he’s reminding them,
when I came to you, verse one says, when I came to you that
first time, I did not come, brethren, proclaiming the testimony of
God in lofty words or wisdom. The apostle Paul has come to
them from Athens. And when he was in Athens, he
sat in their public square and he listened to all the philosophers,
all the teachers. He listened to all the people
of the day, sort of peddling their philosophical wares, peddling
their mental arguments, their lifestyle arguments. And remember
the statue to the unknown God? They had a God for everything,
a God for everybody, but just in case they missed one, had
the statue to the unknown God. And so he very cleverly said,
I see you’ve got a statue and you don’t know who it belongs
to. Let me tell you about him. And that’s where he gives that
speech in Acts chapter 17. It’s this God who made you. It’s this God who cares for you.
And it’s in him we live, move and have our being. Well, apparently
when Paul was giving testimony about God, they ridiculed him
so greatly. The wisdom of God was foolishness
to men and he really made no impact there at Athens. They
were so eaten up. with their social media. They
were so eaten up with their prosperity gospel. They were so eaten up
with their philosophies and politics and their rhetoric and all their
different things they looked at. Their smorgasbord, their
buffet was overwhelming to them and they could not hear Christ.
And so Paul says when he came to the Corinthian church, he
made a choice. He made a decision, I’m not going
to do anything but plain and simple, preach Jesus. Now they
were accustomed to lofty words, he calls it. They were accustomed
to wisdom. This would be cleverness. This
would be using all the right words in all the right ways,
sort of in a superior or more excellent way. And it wasn’t
the content that convinced you of a message. It was the form. Now, Christians
can become idolatrous towards the form of their ministry. And
I’ll speak first about Reformed people. Reformed people rightly
love expository preaching. We read the word, we explain
the word, and we apply the word, and we go through the Bible systematically.
And you’ll hear people from time to time say, oh, you know, Dr.
So-and-so, they’re such a great expositor. You know, they speak
up all this language. And you wonder, do they like
the form Or do they like how that word of God has changed
their lives? And that’s the question, isn’t it? It’s the question for
the Corinthians and it’s the question for us. Are we into
the form the way it said or how it said, or are we into the content
and what it does by the power of God in our lives and our hearts? And Paul says, you know, I’m
fed up. I was at Athens. They love the big words. They
love the big speeches. They love all the flowery cleverness
and excellency and whatever. I’m just going to come and I’m
going to just talk to you Corinthians, just plain Jane. Some of y’all
will know the name of the preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. He was a very gifted, eloquent
preacher in London for many years. He would fill the tabernacle.
I think 5,000 or so people would come to hear him preach. But
the story of his conversion is very interesting. It was maybe
a wintry or stormy day. He was making his way to church
to the place he regularly worshiped and heard God’s word. He couldn’t
get there. And so he stopped short at another church. I think
it was maybe a Methodist church. And he went in and their regular
preacher had not even made it in that day. The weather was
so bad. And so one of the men of the
church just stood up and very plainly spoke about Jesus. It
was not a prepared sermon. Apparently this man was not educated.
All he knew to do was to read the Bible and talk about the
Bible. And that’s what convinced and converted Charles Haddon
Spurgeon, who would ironically turn out to be one of the most
eloquent preachers of his day, there is just something about
the meat and potatoes of scripture, isn’t there? Now you go to seminary,
you go to preaching class, and you learn how people think, you
learn how people respond, and you do take some classes on this,
that, and the other. I think they make too much of
it, personally. But there’s something about the
simplicity of just reading the Bible, explaining the Bible,
and applying the Bible. A little K and W, right? A little
meat and three, a little meat and potatoes. Well, when Paul
came to the Corinthians, he wanted to tell them about God and what
God had done in Jesus Christ. And he didn’t want to do it in
big words. He just wanted to do it in plain language. And
if they didn’t like what they heard, they would reject it.
Now last week we looked at the foolishness of the people who
came to faith in Jesus. Many of them, what does he say,
not many of you were wise, not many of you were politicians
or powerful, not many of you were of noble birth. Most of
you were nobodies and nothings, and the plain Jane, meat and
potatoes of God’s word saved you. That’s the impact of Paul’s
ministry there, just plain and simple Bible. plain and simple
salvation and plain and simple growth and grace. But he comes
to them to give the testimony about God and in verse two, he
says, I decided to know nothing among you. except Jesus Christ
and him crucified. Now, he’s just spent a whole
chapter. We’ve gone through this in two
other sermons. The cross is foolishness. The world doesn’t get the cross.
The Romans don’t get it. The Jews don’t get it. The Greeks
don’t get it. Regular old people don’t understand
why you would talk about a coming messianic king, a king who’s
supposed to come and be big and exciting and powerful and make
things better for his people and how he got executed in the
worst possible way by the worst possible nation of executors
in human history. Why is that such a great thing?
That’s rubbish. That’s foolishness. That’s craziness. But he says, you know, when I
come into Corinth, you can imagine he’s walking from Athens. He’s
been ridiculed. He’s been made fun of. He’s worn
out and weary. All right, I’m going to Corinth.
I’m going to quit it with the flashy words. I’m going to quit
it with the big speeches. I’m just going to tell them simple,
simple Jesus, plain and simple Jesus. Just give me Jesus, we
say. And so he says, I decided to know nothing among you except
Jesus Christ and him crucified. I’m going to give it to them
straight. And so he comes into Corinth. And he speaks of the
Messiah. He speaks of the coming conquering
king. And he speaks of how he became
cursed and hanged on a tree, hanged on a cross, despised,
rejected by men. A man of sorrows acquainted with
grief. It was for our sins he was chastised. It was for our
iniquities he was bruised. And the people would not even
look at him. He was so marred and so ugly
in a sense. And so the word of the cross,
the message of Jesus and the crucifixion of Jesus is the thing
he wants to preach. And isn’t that our lifeblood? Isn’t that our life beat? You
know, we don’t think anything of it today when we wear a cross
around our neck. I bet if some of you look down,
you’ve got one around your neck. We think nothing of a cross in
the back of the church. We think nothing of having a
cross out on the church lawn, or maybe having a cross as a
decoration in the house. Now, if somebody said, do you
have a little electric chair in the curio cabinet in your
living room? What? Why would I do that? Maybe a
little miniature of a firing squad, or a hangman’s noose. Or some other, you know, a gurney
with, you know, the injection things. I mean, we don’t do that. That would be weird. So why is
it we have a cross? Why is it we have a form of execution? In fact, it’s a shameful one.
It’s a weird one. Well, it’s because the cross
is everything to us. And if it weren’t for the cross,
we wouldn’t have church. If it weren’t for the cross,
we wouldn’t have salvation. If it weren’t for the cross, we
wouldn’t have growth. grace. And so the message of the cross
is not silly, not ridiculous, not reductionistic, not just
a little side thing. It is the thing. It is the main
thing. And we know, don’t we, from reading our Bibles that
when sin entered the world, God had to deal with sin. And the
way he pointed Adam and Eve to his dealing with sin is he says,
you know, you can’t cover yourselves with fig leaves. That’s self-covering
for sin, Adam and Eve, and it won’t do. And so God slaughtered
an animal and that animal died. Its blood was shed. Its skins
were taken and Adam and Eve were covered with the skins of an
animal that lost its life. Now with those, coverings cover
their sin and their shame and their naked nakedness. No, but
they pointed to one who would come. And it’s, you know, as
soon as the Lord did that, he told Adam and Eve of, what was
to come. Eve, you’ll bear a child and
that child will war against the evil one, Satan. And Satan will
nip at the heels of Jesus, but Jesus will crush the serpent’s
head fully and finally. The little story we read from
Zechariah, Joshua, the high priest with dirty clothes. His change
of clothes shows us what Jesus does at the cross. At the cross,
our sins are placed on Jesus. And by faith, Jesus’ righteousness
is given to us. It’s the great exchange. His
clean, righteous robe for our filthy, dirty rags. And so the message of the cross
is everything to us. And it’s not, hear this, it’s
not just the way of salvation for the first time. I came to
faith in Jesus. I believe in the cross and that
is that. I’m good to go. No, the cross, is the power for
daily living. Everything Jesus did, everything
Jesus accomplished at the cross gives us the redemption that
is ours, that takes us safely all the way home to heaven. You
know, you think for a moment about how you could grow a church,
use a bunch of big words, do a bunch of fun things, show a
bunch of cool things, and you can get a crowd. But what are
they enamored with? They’re enamored with the form
and not the content. And unless the content is the
cross, unless the content is the savior, unless the content
is the suffering Messiah, unless the content is how to have faith
in Jesus and how to grow in grace, the form just over shadows it. And so Paul came and he decided
he made it a point in his head to know nothing but Jesus and
him crucified. That may be foolish to the world,
that may be weak to the world, but it is powerful in God’s sight. You know, the other side to that
Zechariah story in chapter four, Israel was rebuilding the temple
after returning from Babylon and they built a smaller footprint.
Remember, there was Solomon’s big grand temple and people from
all over the world came to see it. But they’re rebuilding the
temple now that their exile is over 70 years. They’re back in
Jerusalem and they’re building in the The footprint is small. They built the foundation and
we’re told in the scripture that the old men who saw the former
temple, they wept. They wept because it was, it
was small. It was not grand. It was not
glorious like it used to be. And so that’s why Zachariah,
the prophet says, don’t despise the day of small things. And
okay, we’re a small church. We, we, we try to preach the
cross. We don’t have all the flash and
the whatever of other churches. And sometimes we might get a
little church complex, right? Well, they have more people up
the road. They have this, they have that. But what does scripture
say? Don’t despise small things, preach
Jesus, preach the cross, be comfortable in your skin, be satisfied with
that. Well, the third thing the apostle
says here that’s very interesting, he says, I came to you in weakness. I came to you in fear and I came
to you in trembling. You know, we all like somebody
decked out, makeup, makeup up. You know, we watch the news.
What did Rush Limbaugh call the news presenters? He called them
info babes. Y’all remember that? They go
through hair and makeup. The guys too. And these info
babes present the news to us with smooth, effortless ease. Their faces are perfect, their
clothes are just right. And what you didn’t see is the
team of producers. You didn’t see the team of writers.
You didn’t see the people entering it into the teleprompter. And
so we’re so enamored with those sorts of things. And what does
Paul say? He says, I came into you. I cruised into Corinth in
my Gulfstream ministry jet. You know, I came in a Rolls Royce.
I came in a Cadillac. And he says, I came in weakness.
He comes from a couple of beatings with rods. He comes from a stretch
in a Philippian jail. He comes from walking up and
down the roads, thousands of miles from Jerusalem and Judea
and Samaria, because he’s taken the gospel to the ends of the
earth. He’s a short stubby guy. He’s not good looking. He’s never
been married and his body from the travel and the ministry and
the travails of ministry have taken a toll on him. What do
we sing at Christmas? Beneath life’s crushing load,
forms are bending low. And you could say about Paul
beneath ministry’s load, his form is bending low. There was
nothing impressive about him. He says, I came in weakness and
I came in fear and in trembling. Was he afraid of the next mob
that would grab him? Was he afraid of the next prison
stint that might keep him from the ministry of the cross? This guy was not strong. He was
not flashy. He did not have his teeth whitened.
His clothes had not come from the dry cleaners. In fact, he
had been making tents with Priscilla and Aquila. His fingernails were
probably broken. His hands were probably calloused. There was nothing impressive
about him, but he gave them Jesus plain and he gave them Jesus
straight. He says, I did not come with
plausible words of wisdom, but I came in demonstration of the
spirit. I’ll build