God's Wisdom vs. Man's Wisdom

I was thinking as I work on the sermon how easily it would be to frustrate you guys if I stood up here and gave a lecture on Greek philosophy.

Talk to you the difference between Aristotle and Plato and go through all the different forms of philosophies that have derived themselves from those two men and show you the ins and outs of each of those systems and then closed in prayer. That would be life-giving.

That would be refreshing and help your marriages.

You would be drawn to the Lord and you would hate sin all the more.

It could pique your interest, maybe. It could stimulate a little bit of pride in you because you would think, wow, that's interesting. I know something I didn't know and this is what most people don't know and I know that. That could help you in that way.

But at the end of the day, all philosophies do not assist you in any substantial ways.

Philosophy was influencing the church of Corinth in a pretty substantial way.

They were gravitating towards it because that was what was vogue.

That was the thing that they were saved out of.

Corinth is only 45 miles away from Athens and Athens is the hub, the intellectual hub of that region.

The fact of the world, really. They could boast of some of the greatest minds that have ever lived.

They were students, if you will, of Plato and students of the philosophies that they integrated in the culture.

Plato actually believed that that which is invisible, the realm of the forms, is more real and more eternal than the material universe and it led to different types of people applying that to their everyday life.

Some of them were Epicureans and they said, hey, if the world doesn't matter, the body doesn't matter.

We might as well enjoy food and enjoy our lives. It's all going to perish.

So we might as well feed and the flesh and indulge ourselves.

Others said, no, if the body is bad, we must beat it in subjection and deny ourselves.

So you had some form of Stoicism and Epicureanism and these philosophies were impacting the church of Corinth.

Well, in our day, you're not going to draw a crowd by appealing to ancient philosophies, but maybe you could by putting a movie behind you and stopping the movie ever now and then and bring out some form of truth, engage the audience and draw audience in by the wisdom of the world in some form or fashion and putting the wisdom in the world in the pulpit.

So this is what's going on.

And and there's a reason churches do it is because they don't think the gospel is sufficient.

And Paul is addressing a major problem in Corinth because they're divided over who's the better preacher, their first pastor, Apostle Paul, or their second pastor, Apollos.

And the thing about Apollos, he had a gift of speaking and he was trained in the art of speaking.

And the Apostle Paul himself was not that good of a preacher.

Now, he was wise when it comes to the things of God, but he was an eloquent like the Apostle, as was Apollos.

And so they're dividing over this debate of who they like best.

And Paul, as we saw last week, concluded that the real problem of this division is that they're using the wrong metric in their judgment of who's the better preacher.

They're evaluating things on worldly standards.

Paul says, when I came to preach to you in verse 17, he says, I didn't come with worldly wisdom.

I didn't come with great oratory skills.

In fact, I purposely kept my focus off of philosophy, off of the method of trying to persuade people through oratory skills, kept it on the simplicity of the gospel, unless the gospel loses its efficacy or power.

And as he's correcting them in their false evaluation of these two men, he comes to his person reason why worldly wisdom or the wisdom of man is detrimental to the power of the gospel.

Basically, he comes to verse 18.

We're going to read verse 18 through 25 of chapter one.

And he comes to the conclusion that worldly wisdom, pagan philosophy, is in opposition to God's wisdom.

Read with me in verse 18.

For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved 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 God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?

For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know through wisdom, 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 is 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.

Now what Paul is doing is not simply saying that men think God's wisdom is foolish, nor is he simply saying God thinks the wisdom of men is foolish.

It's not just contrasting.

You think the gospel is foolishness, but God thinks philosophy is foolish.

That's not simply what he's doing.

He's more doing this.

The very thing that you think is foolish, the gospel, is the very thing that shows that philosophy is foolish.

The very thing that you despise, the very thing that you think is contemplable, the very thing that is a stumbling block to you, the very message that you look down upon as backwards, folly, foolish, ignorant.

That's stupid.

That very thing, the gospel, is the very thing God has chosen to unveil that your deep intellectual philosophies are foolish.

God's going to use the gospel and is using the gospel to show the folly of philosophy.

So we're going to look at this morning the wisdom of God's folly, the wisdom of God's folly.

Now what do we mean by God's folly?

Well three times the apostle is calling the gospel folly.

Not because the gospel is folly, but it's deemed as folly or foolishness by those who don't believe.

It says in verse 18, For the word of the cross is folly.

And in verse 25, the foolishness of God.

And another verse he says, the folly of that which we preach.

So three times he's looking at this gospel message of the Son of God dying on an old rugged cross in humility and shame.

That which the world sees is despicable.

That is the folly of God.

You see man deems the message of the cross as foolishness.

First Corinthians 2.14 says the natural man does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.

I mean you think about the wise and intellectual people of the world when they hear the gospel message.

They look at it as something unworthy of acceptance.

Voltaire, the great French philosopher, says the true God cannot have been born of a girl nor died, nor be eaten in a piece of dough, nor could he have inspired a book filled with contradictions, badness, horror and superstitions.

Christianity is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

Voltaire did not like a gospel.

Frederick Nietzsche, he said, the German philosopher that was contemporary with Spurgeon, he said when we hear the ancient bells rolling on Sunday morning we ask ourselves, is it really possible this for a Jew crucified two thousand years ago who said he was God's son?

The proof of such a claim is lacking.

Certainly the Christian religion is an antique idea that has come into our times.

The fact that the claim is to believe one can believe that such things are still believed is ridiculous.

Bernard Russell says, there is one very serious defect to the mind in Christ's moral character and that he is believed, that he believed in hell.

I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly human can believe in eternal punishment.

Alfred Whitehead, philosopher at Harvard, said Christianity is the greatest disaster in the history of the human race.

I mean, these are the best among us.

These are the most intellectuals among our race.

These are high IQ men.

No doubt they were brilliant in the eyes of the world.

But they looked at the gospel, not the way you backwoods, arkansans look at it.

You love it.

I mean, we just sung four songs about the gospel.

We're celebrating it.

We rejoice in it.

Why?

They would say, why?

Why do you come every Sunday to focus on this bloody crucifixion?

It's ridiculous, they think.

See, if you skip down to verse 22, the Jews stumbled over the message.

According to them, the message of the cross was embarrassing.

Look at verse 22.

For the Jews demand a sign, demand signs and Greek seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified a stumbling block to Jews.

You see, the Jews, they demand signs and wonders.

You can see that through the life of Christ.

What sign will you now show us?

Remember, after he fed the five thousand, John chapter six, I mean, they just saw a mighty sign.

And Jesus said, I am the bread of life.

They go, OK, prove it.

What sign are you going to show us?

He just showed you an amazing one.

But we want more.

Give us another sign.

Give us another miracle.

We want to see you do something amazing.

Over and over, I wasn't capable of figuring out exactly how many times they asked.

The Jews asked Jesus to show us a sign.

But it was repetitively.

It's almost every time they came to them, especially early on in the ministry, show us a sign, show us a sign.

And the apostle Paul recognized that of his own kinsmen that this was something they wanted.

They were bent towards this.

And it probably was because they were looking for power.

There weren't so much trying to be intellectuals like the Greek philosophers.

But they probably was.

They viewed themselves as superior to the Gentiles.

And they were tired of being subjugated to foreign nations.

They were ready for the Messiah to come with power.

They wanted a powerful king to come in order to free them from the Romans and to exalt them in the process.

One of the problems with the Pharisees, you know, is they were looking for the Messiah and they rejected him because they thought the Messiah would choose them to help rule and reign with him as they conquered the nations.

And so they wanted power.

They were looking for power.

I look back through their history and they could look at the miracles that God had done throughout their history.

And the Gentiles had no such miracles throughout their history.

And in the process, I think they become proud for.

It is in this desire for power, for miracles.

They stumbled over the weakness of the man Jesus Christ.

Here's a man that didn't have a home.

And when you looked at him, you didn't go, man, this is a mighty king.

You looked at him like, who are you? You're from Nazareth?

Nothing good comes from Nazareth.

So they're already despising, look down their nose because Christ wasn't what they were looking for.

They didn't understand how he was a servant.

They was willing to serve and be humble.

He was a poor man that didn't make sense to them.

A king would be rich and powerful and he would put people into subjection underneath him.

But Christ came lowly and meek and humble.

They would say, where is this ruler who serves?

Why is he so humble?

And what's this thing about a cross?

You're going the wrong direction, Jesus.

You're to be elevated. Why are you demoting yourself and humbling yourself?

Why would you be put to death?

Why would you be subjugated to being conquered by your enemies rather than ruling over your enemies?

You see, they're looking at this message of their Messiah dying, a bloody, kind of a pitiful, shameful and embarrassing death.

And that was a stumbling block to them.

David predicted it.

He says, let your table be a snare.

Paul picks this up in Romans 11.9 and David said, let their table become a snare and a trap, a stumbling block.

What does this mean?

Well, the Jews were giving a head start.

They were given the oracles of God.

They had the gospel in the Old Testament.

The way you would look at it is the goal is to get to heaven above.

And so they have a starting block.

They have a table that elevates them above the Gentiles.

So they're being given a head start.

They'd be given these outward blessings that benefited them.

And the Gentiles forever had no gospel.

So they were kind of behind the curve.

And so here they're, think of a race and you're getting a head start.

I think of this table as elevating you a little bit closer to heaven and you're a little bit kind of get this head start up to heaven.

So you're racing to God and you got this table elevates you lift you up.

And the very thing that was designed to point them to Christ and to elevate them became the very thing that was a snare, a very thing that they stumbled over.

They stumbled over the rock.

Oh, here's the cornerstone.

And they tripped over Christ, their table, their head start.

How did this happen?

They should have saw through Isaiah 50 and all the Psalms, they should have saw that Christ would be a suffering servant.

But they couldn't perceive that.

They couldn't receive that.

They couldn't understand that.

They just saw a conquering king.

And in the process, when the suffering servant came to them, had all the signs of being the Messiah, they rejected him.

They picked up the stone.

It was a perfect cornerstone perfected and they looked and examined the cornerstone that the stone that Christ was in God chose the chosen cornerstone.

And God says here, use this to build your foundation.

The Jews looked and met and they rejected it.

No, this is not sufficient.

This is a poor stone that went into the discard pile.

They were they stumbled over Christ.

And many people today still stumble over the weakness of Christ, the humility of Christ, the blood of Christ, the shamelessness of Christ.

You're going to be a Christian.

You have to be willing to follow Christ and his humility.

You have to be willing to deny yourself.

You say, well, I want to be great.

I want to be, you know, I want to be one of the intellectuals of the world.

Well, if you want to follow Christ, you're going to be despised by the world.

You're going to be rejected as he was rejected.

And this message is hard to receive.

But this is the message of the cross.

This is the message of the crucifixion.

If you want Christ, you too must pick up your cross and follow him.

Is this a message that you like?

No, the Jews did not like that one.

They didn't want to go to a cross with Christ.

So they stumbled.

But as they sought signs and wonders, the Greeks, they sought wisdom.

We see that for Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom.

The Greeks were concerned about philosophy.

As we know, Athens had produced some of the greatest minds in the history of the world.

So the Greeks placed their identity in believing that they were intellectually superior to the rest of the world.

And here comes this message of the gospel.

It's not what they're expecting.

In fact, to understand why they do this as folly, especially if Platonism is the philosophy of the day that says that which is invisible is greater and more real than that which is physical, then how can you explain that Christ had a body?

This idea of suffering in a human flesh is the very thing that the Athenians laughed about.

Remember before he came to Corinth, he was in Athens and he preached the cross and he says at Mars Hill, he gathered up a crowd and he preached to them and reasoned with them.

And they all listened to him until he got to the cross, until he got to the resurrection.

And it says, then they begin to mock him and make fun of him.

They viewed it as folly. You're saying God took on human flesh and died.

It had to be raised from the dead and he's got a physical body.

That's ridiculous.

That doesn't make sense.

We know that the physical world is is insuffier to the world of ideas and the abstract realm.

And you're making God into a human being who died.

And they looked at this message as folly in his foolishness.

You see, the gospel message many will shy away from, not talk about because the world's not going to receive it.

They're not going to see the beauty and the glory and the wisdom in it.

They view it as folly and foolish and something to reject and stumble over.

That's the folly of God.

But now that we've seen the folly of God, which is the cross, let's look at the wisdom of God.

The wisdom of God in the wisdom of God, he reveals the foolishness of man's wisdom.

We see this in verse 19.

God's wisdom destroys man's wisdom.

For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.

You see, he's quoting Isaiah, Isaiah 29, where the Isaiah is prophesying.

Of course, Isaiah is not living too far away from Aristotle and Plato.

And see, you got all this wisdom of the world circulating and here's Isaiah saying the wisdom of the world will vanish away.

It's all vanity.

It might capture your mind and it might give you a sense that you're you're smart.

It might stimulate your curiosity and these things.

But at the end, it has no lasting value.

He says I will destroy the wisdom of the rise.

In other words, I will bring it to nothing.

You think about the wisest men the world has ever produced.

All their wisdom comes to in the end of the day to nothing but vanity.

You see, philosophers think themselves to be wise.

They take pride in their profession and they see themselves as superior to the rest of us.

Frederick Nietzsche despised the common man.

He wouldn't associate with anyone that wasn't.

He even other professors he deemed as insevere.

There was only like two or three people that he felt could engage him intellectually.

And on his deathbed, he would say stuff like this.

I'll write such good books and he would just read his books over and over again and just delight in his wisdom.

He would come so arrogant and prideful and eventually went insane.

You see, if you don't know the Lord, you may think you're smart.

You're no Plato or you're no Aristotle.

But even they turn out to be fools.

Who do you think you are?

Who do you think your wisdom will bring you in the day of life?

There may be someone here that's challenging the gospel and say I don't believe in that.

I won't receive that. I reject that.

You've got something you're replacing the gospel with and think through that.

God is looking at your conception, your worldview and all the things that you're putting together.

And he goes, how foolish, how silly, how ridiculous.

It will bring you to nothing.

It will lead you nowhere.

It will not help your life in any substantial way.

It's not going to save your soul.

It's not going to free you from guilt.

Now, I'm convinced of this.

I'm convinced that philosophy exists to get rid of God.

I believe that man has universal guilt and he knows there's a personal God.

God's revealed that to them in nature.

Man knows there's a personal God.

And what philosophers do, they take what they know that's freely given to them in natural revelation.

And they set it aside.

They have enough knowledge and the beginning of wisdom is to fear God.

But they don't fear God.

They reject God.

They suppress what they know.

And in the suppression of what they know, they build their own intellectual system of thinking.

They're trying to figure out the world's knowledge and get a system that it can explain everything.

And they view themselves as capable of explaining the existence of all things.

But in the end, no matter how they do it and what ways they seek to arrive to their conclusion, they can't get to a personal God.

But that's okay for them.

They don't want a personal God.

In the suppressing of God's knowledge, if there's not a personal God, there's no guilt.

But the problem is, even for the philosophers, when he goes to sleep and when he wakes up, he's still guilty and he knows it.

And you today, you may be rejecting God and you may have in your mind an intellectual argument to say why God doesn't exist or why my parents are crazy.

You cannot deny you have guilt within your heart.

And no matter how much scheming you have, the guilt still screams at you.

No matter how well you suppress the knowledge of God, the knowledge of God still speaks to you and condemns you.

You see, the philosophies and your thinking will come to nothing.

We see in verse 20, the apostle Paul is saying, Corinthians, you're gravitating towards this.

You're influenced by this.

But 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?

You know, it's like Paul starts mocking a little bit.

He's asking these rhetorical questions.

Where's the wise one?

Where's the scribe?

Where's the debater?

Where's the, you know, where's Socrates at?

Where's his disciples at?

Now, he could be saying, he could be implying three things.

He's kind of asking for a debate.

Let me debate them, come and rise and let's talk about this.

I don't think he's doing that.

Secondly, he could be saying here in the Church of Corinth, where's the wise one?

Where's the philosophers?

Where's the professors?

Where's the scribes?

You see, we learn later, not many were wise, not many were noble.

You're just a bunch of farmers.

You know, you're not the intellectuals.

You're deemed as the low IQ people.

The Church has not filled it with the, typically, the rich, the noble, and the wise.

So where are they at?

You're trying to gravitate to that, but hey, they're not here.

Oh, and I think primarily he is saying the pagan philosophers, all their knowledge and all their wisdom does not lead to salvation.

It doesn't help them.

It doesn't help them at the end of the day.

Where are they at?

What good has this brought to them?

All the wisdom of Aristotle, what good did it do to him on the day of his death?

He died like every other man.

His sins went with him.

Where is the worldly wisdom that led this so-called wisdom of the world?

What has been the outcome of this?

You know, think about where philosophy has brought us.

Humanism, materialism, a maze of contradictions, post-modernism, relativity, meaninglessness, hopelessness.

You know, classic philosophy led to modern philosophy, and out of modern philosophy led to post-modern philosophy.

And it's not like these are disconnected.

What happened in the modern period, they come to the conclusion, if we're building off the foundation of Plato and Aristotle, then we really don't have a God.

And so in the modern period, they rejected God.

They become deists and atheists.

And after you reject God, based upon the foundation of the ancient philosophers, all you have left in the modern time is, wait a minute, if there's no God, there's no meaning and there's no purpose.

And the end conclusion of all of human wisdom is meaninglessness, nihilism, that life means nothing.

This is where it brings you.

Where are the scribes?

Where are the philosophers?

Where does it bring you?

Where does it help you?

Does it comfort you?

At night, when you go to bed, does it help you relieve your conscience?

Does it save your soul from your sins?

Does it make you right with God?

These are the ultimate questions of life, and the wisdom of the world ends up leaving you empty and helpless.

You see, we see this in verse 21.

The wisdom of God, in God's wisdom, man's wisdom is incapable of leaving man to God.

Look at verse 21.

Persistence in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom.

I mean, think of this as how wise God is.

He says, the only way you're going to get to me, if you submit to me, you submit to Revelation.

I'm going to communicate myself freely to you in nature and in the Bible.

It's not up to you to figure me out.

This is not according to your intellectual ability to demonstrate that I exist.

You're not going to get to me if you think that you can get to me on your own powers.

The only way you're going to get to me if you submit to me, the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.

And so God, in His wisdom, says, I'm going to make it so that you and your wisdom cannot know me.

And that's how wise God is.

He's going to leave man to his own wisdom, and the wisdom of man only leads him into greater darkness.

It leads man away from God, not to God.

And that's why God is wise.

If you reject me, you're going to go further away from me.

You will not get to me.

And this is the wisdom of God in revealing how foolish the wisdom of man is.

You see, it was God's wisdom that man and his wisdom cannot know God.

Not only is every philosophy inherently inconsistent with itself, the way to God is you submit to what you already know.

Third, in the wisdom of God, God uses his folly to save those who believe.

Look at verse 21.

It pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

That is, God uses the very thing that the world deems as foolish to expose the actual fullestness of their wisdom.

Now, could you imagine if you were Noah building an ark?

I mean, you're building this huge, massive boat, and it's taken you years to build.

Imagine people walking by, you know, they've never seen rain.

I mean, it's never rained the day of their life.

And they're watching Noah build this large boat, and it must have been hard.

And look at that thing.

How ridiculous has Noah become?

He's lost it.

This boat is ridiculous.

What are you going to use this for?

Is this a house?

What do you mean, float?

There's no rivers around here.

I mean, could you imagine they're mocking this thing, they're ridiculing it, they're shaming Noah for this that he's doing?

And then one day it starts raining, and the very thing they laughed at, the very thing they mocked, that very boat was the very thing that saved Noah.

You know, this is what Paul is saying.

You laugh at this bloody crucifixion, this shameful death of Jesus, how God took on human flesh and he died a weak man.

He emptied himself of, if you would, of his power and became so weak that he perished.

You think that's silly?

Well, that's not the only thing, that's not the very message that saves us.

That's the very message that exposes your folly.

You see, three times he repeats this.

In verse 18 it says, For the word of the cross is fallen to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved is the power of God.

Verse 21, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.

Then in verse 24, But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God.

You see, this very message that you despise is the very message that is the power and wisdom of God.

You know, you think about the gospel, it really solves the greatest dilemma in the world, how God can be just and merciful.

Now, philosophy had no solution for that.

They ran from God, they suppressed the knowledge of God because they had guilt, but they understood God to be a just God.

And therefore, if God is just and they're unjust, then they have no salvation, no solution.

They had no way to free themselves from the wrath of God.

Intellectually, the only thing they could do is act like God doesn't exist.

They have to prove that if He doesn't exist, He's more abstract idea.

He's an impersonable force.

He's not a personal being.

If they can get rid of a personal God, maybe their conscience would be not so convicting.

But here's the gospel, the very thing that actually I think philosophy is trying to do, the gospel does without contradictions.

It shows how God can be just and how He can save us from our sins, how He can take someone like you, someone who's resisted God and run from God and despises God and viewed God as foolish and in the Word of God as foolish, He can take you and your foolishness and save you because of this wonderful message, because of Christ died in your place, because this very God who's just and holy can take care of justice and holiness through the very death of a substitute, through the death of His Son.

You see, this is the most amazing message in the world.

And you and I might be attempted to be ashamed of it because the world looks at it and despises it.

We may want to run from it and it's like, let's not talk about that.

You know, you can talk about every weird belief in the world and people will give you an ear.

You bring the gospel in and they somehow think you're nuts.

But Paul says I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

I'm not ashamed of it.

I'm not coming to preach something else.

I'm not having to integrate my message with philosophy to somehow grab the intellectuals and make them curious and somehow hook them in and eventually maybe throw the gospel in.

Eventually, I don't have to have signs and wonders.

You know, there's two temptations that we have.

It's just like the Greeks and the Jews.

We're prone to one or the other.

There's a group of us that are prone to intellectualism and we would prefer, you know, these very neat, nice, tidy lectures and all the worship to be nice.

No amens, you know, that's too charismatic.

We want it very structural.

So we love education.

We love intellectualism.

We're prone to that.

And when we hear intellectual sermons, we gravitate them.

It's like, man, that was wonderful.

The other side of us were more like Charismatics.

We're more like Jews.

We want emotionalism.

We want power.

We want to see signs and wonders.

We want something to be spectacular.

We want to go away going, wow, wow, what power?

What signs and wonders?

What's amazing?

So you got both of that in our culture today.

And so what the church is seeking to do, they're seeking to substitute the gospel with intellectualism or substitute the gospel with charismatic chaos or looking for something to appeal to people, entertain people.

Paul says, I don't come preaching that way.

I'm keeping my message focused on this message of cross, of Christ crucify.

Why?

Why focus on this when most of the world is going to reject it?

He says, because those who do believe, or unbelievers, those who are perishing, find they reject it.

But for those who do believe, it is both the power and the wisdom of God.

It's the very gospel message that has saved your soul.

What message was it that caused you, it worked within you power to turn from sin to the living God?

It wasn't a message that we find in the writings of Plato or Aristotle.

The thing that changed your life and continues to change your life is the message of the cross.

That caused you to pick up your own cross and follow the Lord Jesus Christ.

It's the message of the cross that changes your marriages, changes your life, husbands.

The most sanctifying message you can hear is not a message on marriage.

The most sanctifying sermon you can hear is a message of Jesus denying Himself, dying for His bride.

Hearing the acts of Christ and His humility and the moments of embarrassment and shame, are you willing to take that same message onto yourself and say, I love my wife in the way that Christ loved the church.

I'm willing to be mocked and ridiculed.

I'm willing to take on this shame and disgrace.

I'm willing to be a humble servant for my wife.

You see, that's a message that changes us.

It's not the message of the world.

It's the message of power.

It's the message that will sanctify our lives in every area of our lives.

You see, it pleased God through the folly of that which we preach to save those who believe.

This is the message that will bring forth conversion.

You know, that's why we sing about it.

For some, it's folly, but we see the glory of God in it.

I'm amazed at God's glory.

And sometimes I think of His glory as His eternal glory that He's had, that the Son of God has had with the Father from the beginning.

Then think about when He created the angels and the angels stand before Jesus, the Son of God, and say, Holy, Holy, Holy.

And think of all the majesty and the splendor and the light that shines forth from His very being.

That's glory.

But you know, another aspect of that glory is that that God who has that glory made Himself of no reputation.

And dealt that glory and humbled Himself and became a servant.

And not just a servant, but a servant that was willing to die for you and for your sins.

You and I who mocked Him, remember there was two men on the side of the cross, they were both mocking Him.

And those who mocked Him, this God of glory humbled Himself to save.

Now that is glory.

That's worth singing about.

That's worth praising God for.

You see, this is the wisdom and the power of God.

And let me end with the conclusion.

I think Paul brings everything, ties it all together in verse 25.

This is his conclusion.

This is the main point of this passage.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

You see, the weakness of God is His death.

That's what he said at his most weak moment.

But at that very weak moment, it's more powerful than all the might of the world put together.

The foolishness of God is the idea that God, very God, would die for man.

That's foolish.

You see, that is wiser than all the wisdom of the world put together.

Here's some application for us to consider.

One, never be ashamed of the gospel.

Two, never try to make the message of the cross more intellectually appealing.

Three, you never have to take and put artificial power and signs and wonders to the gospel.

It's the gospel itself, not the preacher, or the art I preach, or the performance of the service that saves sinners.

It's the message of the gospel.

Fourth, do not despise the day of small things.

You see, God has chosen the weak, the base, the despised, to put to shame the wise, the strong of this world.

Right now, you may be going through something that you just don't understand, and it's humbling you.

It's exposing your pride, or it's unveling that you have no power that you think you had.

In your own estimation, you're becoming smaller and smaller and smaller.

You're going, Lord, I don't know how much more of this I can handle.

I'm being stripped and stripped and stripped, and I'm getting so low, becoming so debased.

These days are not glorious.

These days are difficult.

These days I do not enjoy.

Do not despise those days, because God has chosen these very days, these hardships, the weakness, your weakness, and the difficulties that you experience.

He's chosen to bring forth His power in your weakness.

Let's pray.

Dear Lord, we're so grateful for the beautiful gospel of the message.

We reject the wisdom of this world.

We see it as folly.

More importantly, you deem it as folly.

But your wisdom, dear God, is saving, refreshing, nourishing, wonderful.

We praise you for the message of the cross, the crucifixion, the death, even the weakness of your Son.

He who was rich, He became poor, and we thank you for His poverty.

Lord, we thank you for His sufferings.

May you be given all the glory, all the power, all the majesty from our hearts and from our voices for the great wisdom and power you have revealed to us and your Son.

Amen.

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See you next time.