Eastertide: God's Wisdom & Power, 1 Corinthians 1:10-2:2, Sulmane Maigadi

Good morning, everyone. From now till Pentecost, we get

to say Happy Easter or Easters. Thank you for responding.

Happy Easter. Yeah.

And we celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus

Christ. Focusing on that during this

time. We're going to be in the book of

First Corinthians in this Easter tide period and also all through

the summer. And our passage this morning is

First Corinthians chapter 10, one verse 10 to 2, verse 2.

1 Corinthians 10 · chapter mention

It's found on page 895 of the Pew Bibles in front of you.

Now, why this book in particular?

Well, Corinth was a bustling trade city and was filled with

Romans and with Greeks and with Jews alike.

But it was also a very morally corrupt city.

So that to live like a Corinthian became a synonym for

depravity, basically. And this was where Paul planted

a church. And he stayed in that place for

a year and a half, working with his first converts who were

mostly God fearers from of Roman descents or Greeks and Jews.

And he stayed there for the longest.

He stayed anywhere else, teaching them how to follow

Jesus. But after leaving Corinth, Paul

received two major reports. First of all, some some servants

from Chloe's people. Chloe seems to be somebody

really, really important. And they came to Paul and they

said, yo, Paul, that church you planted, they're fighting.

There's the vision, then there's quarreling.

And then he gets a letter from Corinth as well when he's in

Ephesus. And the letter asks some very

fundamental questions. They're asking, well, since

Christ has lived and he has died and he's now resurrected and has

fulfilled the law, what does that mean for us?

Does that change our moral framework?

I mean, there's nothing that we can do to add to what he's done.

So can we sleep with whoever we want to?

Can we eat food sacrificed to idol idols?

Were all the rules discarded? And Paul responds throughout his

letter saying, no, the answer is no, that's not.

That's not what's happening. And he goes back to the Old

Testament often to reaffirm that the moral framework still stands

because Jesus Christ's resurrection actually enables us

to live out our lives in righteousness.

So the book of First Corinthians is especially relevant to us

because it helps us answer the question.

With Christ's victory over sin and over death, how then should

we live? And at the heart of the

Corinthian problem was the problem of disunity.

There was disunity over leaders, over the Lord's table lawsuits,

sexual immorality, over the use of spiritual gifts.

There were so many things. They were treating the church

like social club where there was like rivalry and status and

self-interest. And they should have been

treating it like a holy temple knit together one body by love.

And so Paul wrote First Corinthians to answer these

questions and to address their disunity.

So our text today confronts a a church that is torn by loyalties

to personalities. And it was a division that was

driven by worldly wisdom. And Paul's remedy to this

message of this is the message of this sermon.

His remedy is look to Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Look to Jesus Christ and him crucified.

So if anybody asks you what I preached on, that's what you

tell them. Look to Jesus Christ and him

crucified. Let me pray.

Your name is beautiful and it's powerful, and you have done a

wonderful thing for us. Lord Jesus, by your death and

resurrection, help us this morning to look to you, our

risen Lord, and shape your word in our hearts to bear fruit.

In your name we pray. Amen.

Amen. So Paul tells the Corinthians to

look to Christ crucified to escape divisions over

personalities. In Corinth, rhetoric oration

were the apex of liberal education.

You had skill orators and they were basically the influencers

and the Ted talkers of their day.

Their YouTube channel was the marketplace.

Their Instagram was the bema, which is the seat of judgment,

and Paul's going to talk about that later on in this book as

well. And they had paid contents at

their schools and their gymnasiums as well.

They had battles, just like people do on Twitter, except

without the word limit. And there were followers.

They had many followers, fierce loyalists who imitated them in

deed and in speech. And these followers, followers,

these loyalists, they treated, they treated rhetorical contests

as if they were sporting events. And they really, really

disagreed with those who attacked their own orator.

And in fact, there's an incident, a recorded incident of

one such group beating an opposing speaker so severely

that he died of his injuries. That's how rhetoric and the

fashions around it could get. Was that bad?

So when Paul writes in First Corinthians one, verse 11, and

he speaks to the Corinthians, he's talking about the habit of

picking a picking a favorite leader and setting yourself

against others as a result. So he says, it has been reported

to me by Chloe's people that there is quarreling among you,

my brothers. What I mean is that each one of

you says I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I follow

Sephus, or I follow Christ. He names himself a Roman

citizen, the founder of the church in Corinth.

He names Apollos an eloquent Greek philosopher educated in

Alexandria. He names Kefas a Jew, the first

of the original 12, and a leader in the church in Jerusalem,

Roman, Greek, Jew. And that was also the social

hierarchy in Corinth, Romans at the top.

Greeks were second and respected Jews often marginalized.

The church was reproducing these divisions under the guise of

spiritual allegiance. But then, of course, there were

those who said, I follow Christ now.

Sounds good, right? On the surface, Yeah, I want to

be in that group. But it wasn't good because Paul

includes them in the rebuke. These weren't people who were

lifting up Christ above all and glorifying Jesus.

They were actually lifting themselves above all.

They were like the ones who were like, oh, bless your heart,

we're the real Christians. We can show you how it's done.

And so they were contributing to the quarrels.

They were being divisive as well.

And interestingly, the quarrels weren't about doctrine.

Paul, Apollos, Cephas, they were preaching the same thing.

This was not about doctrine. They were about who was the most

eloquent, persuasive speaker manner of presentation.

That's all it was about. And it wasn't merely a matter of

preference. There are three pastors in this

church, right? And it's natural that each of

you might resonate with our with one particular speaking style

over another. Some of you might like, might

like Dan's dry humor when it lands.

Of course he's not here. Great.

Some of you might like my stories, which I tell.

Some of you might like the way Andrew presents his structure

with three points that all start with P.

You know, maybe that's what she like, and that's fine.

But you're not all fighting about it.

At least I hope you're not fighting about it, You know, but

the Corinthians were, they were fighting about this.

And the Greek word that Paul uses to describe corals is

arides. It's connected to Aries with an

E, the goddess of strife and mischief.

Her brother is Aries with an A, the God of War.

That's the word he uses. It gives a sense of of, of of

combativeness, hostile conflict. And it's listed, that same word

is listed in Galatians 520 right next to jealousy and fits of

anger and rivalries and dissensions and division.

So these quarrels weren't just light disagreements, they were

fighting amongst themselves. Unfortunately, this is not a one

time Corinthian problem. The cult of Christian

personality is a real thing happens today.

It may be quieter, maybe less heuristic, but it's still there.

We may say I followed Tim Keller or NT Wright is my guy.

We may be still tempted to align ourselves with people who preach

Christ. I'm Calvinist, I'm Armenian, I'm

Wesleyan, I'm Zwinglian rather than Christ himself who saves.

And so basically, Paul says in First Corinthians 113, what in

the world are you doing? This is ridiculous.

None of us were baptized, you know.

None of you were baptized in our name.

None of us was crucified for you.

In other words, why are you acting like your salvation came

from a preacher and not from the Savior?

Are we not all sanctified in Christ Jesus called to be Saints

together with all those in every place called who call upon the

name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours?

Look to the cross. He says, look to the one who

actually died for you, Jesus Christ.

Look to the one whose name you're baptized into Jesus

Christ, not to the people who are preaching his message.

That's just ridiculous. And he's not saying that they

shouldn't have mentors. In fact, later on in the very

this very same letter, he tells them, please imitate me, but

only because he's imitating Christ.

We can be thankful for our spiritual leaders.

We can learn from them, but ultimately our allegiance is to

Jesus Christ because mentors, spiritual leaders are signposts,

not destinations. Jesus is the destination.

Now, the interesting thing is that looking to Jesus Christ is

the solution to all sorts of division.

And admittedly, our temptation to division doesn't circulate

around personalities. But yes, I'm going to say

politics and policies because we live in DC, it's important and

we work on on the Hill in these important theme issues.

But what Paul is advocating here isn't for some kind of

uniformity at the expense of truth.

No, he's not saying that we should all agree on everything

and never, ever, ever disagree. Paul had a very strong

disagreement with Barnabas over whether or not John Mark should

join them on a mission, and it was so severe that they

separated for a time. And then when Peter's actions

led to hypocrisy among other believers because he stopped

eating with the Jews, sorry, with the Gentiles, because of

some Jews that came to visit him, Peter was like, no, bro,

don't do that. That's not right.

He confronted the problem. No, we will have disagreements

and we should correct one another, but they should not be

eristic. We must not quarrel.

We must not be combative and hostile to one another.

When we looked at Jesus and him crucified, our disagreements

will not result in division, but in constructive dialogue and

conflict. So look to Jesus and him

crucified to avoid all sorts of divisions.

At the center of the division in Kern was this admiration for

eloquence and wisdom. So Paul tells the Corinthians to

look to Jesus and him crucified so that they would resist living

by the wisdom of the world. Now, I once heard a trial lawyer

say that in a jury case, it often did not matter whether or

not your client was guilty or innocent.

What mattered the most was how you presented your case.

It didn't even matter whether you were right or not, because

the jury wasn't listening just to the facts.

They were also listening and watching you.

He said you could simply win by being likable, regardless of

what you were saying most of the time.

Now, I don't know if that's true.

I'm not sure that it is. I would like to think that if I

were on a jury, I would be able to see through all the eloquence

and, you know, presentation, to see the truth, hopefully.

But the lawyer captured the world of Corinth perfectly, a

place where style eclipsed substance.

It didn't matter what you said as long as you said it well.

And so people ended up believing things not because they were

true, but because the delivery was compelling.

That's it. Now to the Gentiles, the cross

was absurd because it was a symbol of weakness.

They had gods who were wise. And if you wanted to attain

godhood, you needed to enter into this deep knowledge and

engage with deeper wisdom so you can attain to the heights of

godhood. A crucified Messiah?

No way. Foolishness, absurdity.

And then you have the Jews here. The cross was a stumbling block

to them because they expected that when God shows up, there

would be miracles, conquest, restoration of Israel's glory.

That's exactly what happened in Exodus 10.

Plagues, parting of the Red Sea, provision in the in the

wilderness, miracle after miracle after miracle.

That's what they expected to see when God showed up.

A man crucified on a tree, therefore cursed.

That's not the Messiah. Can't be.

Jesus came in a very upside down way.

His way was foolishness in a stumbling block.

So. Logic.

Dictates that Paul, when he gets to Corinth, should do his best

so that they will accept the message to prop the crucified

Christ with as much eloquence and wisdom as possible.

So that the Gentiles would think that Christ was not foolishness

and the Jews would be like, Oh yeah, I get it, I get it now.

But Paul says, no, if I do that, you strip the cross of its

power. And don't get me wrong, Paul

cared deeply about the way he communicated, certainly.

And he's going to talk about God's wisdom in the next

chapter. And in fact, the way he writes

this section, most of the book, it's it's with, it's at like the

height, the, the apex of Greek rhetoric and excellence.

He's using the very tools he's speaking against to make a point

and to and to and to grab the church's attention.

But you see, he cared more about the content, which is why he

resolved to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and him

crucified, so that their faith would rest on God, not on his

eloquence in wisdom. What's bad with eloquence?

What's bad about wisdom? So Paul quotes Isaiah 29.

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the

discerning. I will thwart.

In that chapter God is speaking, judgment over is over Jerusalem.

The people honored God with their lips, but their hearts

were far from him. In fact, they were saying to

themselves that who is God and God was like, can you who are

the, the, the, the clay mock me, the Potter?

They claim to know better than God.

You should read that passage. It's very interesting.

They claim to know better and have deeper understanding than

even God himself, and so their wisdom was dressed up in pride

and that. Is at the.

Center of human wisdom. That's the kind of wisdom that

Paul says the Corinthian church was in danger of adopting.

The kind the bread quarrels, self promotion attracts God's

wrath. And so he reminds us of what

James says, who is wise and understanding among you by his

good conduct. Let him show his works in the

meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy

and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be

false to the truth. This is not the wisdom that

comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, and

demonic. At the core of worldly wisdom is

the desire to boast in yourself, to climb, to dominate, to

impress. And God calls this wisdom

earthly, unspiritual, demonic. And we're surrounded by this

kind of wisdom all the time. Here are some.

YouTube video titles to help you see how that exists in our world

today. Stand out or fade away.

Master the art of being unforgettable.

I should probably watch that. How to gain respect and make

people do what you want. Many more titles like that.

And, you know, more dangerous are the common messages that we

hear from all sorts of places. And these ones have a grain of

truth in them. But at the heart of them, it's

about us. It's about self promotion, it's

about pride. And they they, they breed

division. Believe in yourself.

Everything you need is already inside you.

No one gets to tell you who you are.

Read your. Bible y'all manifest the life

you deserve. Those kinds of things that we

hear all the time. They're in the ether and

sometimes we say them because there is a grain of truth in

them. And.

We see the same kind of self-centered wisdom in the way

that we approach education. So in Nigeria, there is a

booming market for degrees. People get fake qualifications

for the right amount of money just so they can add a title to

the front of their name because without titles, they are

nothing. It's even worse if you if you

actually earned a degree, it's even worse because then there's

no living with you. If you can actually articulate

your system, the degree says you can articulate.

Oof, pride. I've actually been told by some

that I should not. I shouldn't make sure that I get

a PhD because a demon just doesn't cut it.

It's not worth. It in our society and that's the

problem with human wisdom, this pride, this self glorification,

this self advancement, this division and the quarrels that

it that it that it causes to happen and worse off, it leaves

us trapped in our sin and division, always competing,

always comparing, never satisfied.

And Paul's solution is to look to Jesus and him crucified to

resist living according to human wisdom.

You see, in God's wisdom, the world's wisdom could never find

him. So out of his justice and mercy

he makes foolish the world's wisdom.

He shames the strong, he shames the wise, he shames the noble.

And that's shaming, that bringing low is the prerequisite

to salvation, because unless the unbelievers are brought low,

they will think the cross's foolishness.

But once they are brought low, whether they be Jew or Greek,

they will surrender to God and see it.

Oh, this is the power of God, because they are being saved.

God's shaming leads to salvation.

If we surrender to it. It's not just bringing us down a

peg for the sake of bringing us down a peg.

Human wisdom beckons us to make much of ourselves.

Our city runs on ambition and boasting.

We're taught to climb, to network, to Polish our resumes

until they shine. We're told that if we don't

attend the right events, if we don't meet the right people or

say the right, things would be left behind.

And if you haven't made it, if you're in a, if you're not in

the room where it happens, if you are stuck on an assembly

line or in a cubicle somewhere, you sometimes feel like you

don't matter. And sometimes, even if you do

achieve it, the so-called thing, the promotion, the platform, the

recognition, you can still feel empty.

You feel anxious, disoriented, even unqualified, especially if

you've tied your identity to your success.

Because human wisdom promises glory but can't deliver peace.

It tells you that you'll finally, you'll finally feel

secure once you arrive. But when you're there, the goal

posts move again and insecurity settles in.

And so that's why Paul's words in verse 26 matter to you and

me. He reminds the Corinthians and

us that not many of us were wise by human standards, or

influential or noble, And yet God chose us.

He chose the lowly, the overlooked, the unimpressive, to

shame the strong, so that no one can boast in anything except the

Lord. You may be small in the world's

eyes, you may be small in your own eyes, but because of your

allegiance to the foolishness that is the cross, God uses you

and will use you to flip the script on human wisdom.

So don't buy into the lie that you need to boast to belong or

to network to matter. Walk through the city with

confidence, not because of what's on your resume, but

because of what's written on your heart.

You are redeemed, you are chosen, you are useful to the

Lord. Boast in the Lord.

So look to Jesus and him crucified to resist divisions of

all sorts and to live according to human wisdom and to not live,

not live according to human wisdom.

Our gospel lesson was John 20. And Thomas's example is very

instructive to us. After the resurrection, the

disciples told him we've seen Jesus and he's like, unless I

see the hands, the holes in his hands and in his feet and touch

the hole in his side, I'm not going to believe.

And you know, we call him doubting Thomas, but he was

simply asking for the same thing that Jesus gave the other 11

because they were in disbelief until they saw there was the

Lord in front of him in front of them.

And so when Jesus shows up and says, here I am, you notice that

the pastor doesn't say that he actually inspected the the the

nails and the wounds when he saw Jesus.

There was no analyzing. There was no arguing.

He simply felt his knees and declared my Lord and my God.

And that's the posture that Paul is calling the Corinthians and

us to recover. Whether we see clearly or feel

unsure, whether we're tempted by eloquence or tribal allegiance,

we return again and again to Jesus and say, my Lord and my

God, whether or not we are fractured by pride, whether or

not we are, we are struggling with with struggling with

disunity amongst ourselves, whether or not we are striving

to attain something because we are believers.

Remember, we are knighted by the cross of Christ.

And so we come to Jesus over and over and say, my Lord and my

God, because God's wisdom in Christ Jesus is stronger than

human strength, wiser than human wisdom.

Jesus Christ and him crucified. That's the point.

That's what we celebrated last week and that's what we're

celebrating throughout Easter Tide.

Let's look to our risen Lord and say with Thomas, my Lord and my

God, let. Me.

Pray for us. You have told.

Us, that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of all wisdom.

And. We pray that you would help us

to approach you to enter into the true wisdom of Jesus Christ,

Him crucified and risen forever, so that, Father, we are living

as those in the world who are boasting in the Lord and nothing

else. We want.

To give you glory, this we ask in the name of your Son Jesus

Christ, Amen.