Bible Passage: 1 Corinthians 2:6-16
Pastor: Joel Jenswold
Sermon Date: August 18, 2024

Bulletin August 18, 2024

In the name of, and to the eternal glory of, Jesus,

There is an interesting detail tucked into the story of when Jesus went to his hometown of Nazareth and preached in the synagogue.  After Jesus got done teaching on that Sabbath Day, the people said this, What’s this wisdom that has been given to him? (Mark 6:2)  They said this not because Jesus had given them a stimulating lecture on physics or geometry.  But he had spoken to them about the Kingdom of God, about prophecy and fulfillment, about himself being the Messiah.  Jesus had a different kind of wisdom.  A wisdom of heavenly things.  A wisdom of spiritual things.  A wisdom that made people marvel.

In our text this morning, Paul makes this stunning statement, We have the mind of Christ. (v. 16)  We have the mind of Christ!  Certainly, we do not know everything Christ knows.  As true God he knows everything.  But Paul’s point in saying this is that we have wisdom.  Just the same as Christ Jesus had wisdom, we have wisdom like that of Jesus.  What’s this wisdom that has been given to us?  Paul tells us in our text that ours is Wisdom Revealed through the Spirit.

The Greeks loved wisdom!  For them, it was all about “wisdom.”  That’s why what Paul said just before our text is worth our hearing.  He said, When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God.  For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.  I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling.  My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power. (1 Corinthians 2:1-5)  Paul did not come to town to be Plato or Aristotle.  He came to town as a weak, fearful, trembling preacher of Christ crucified.  Earlier in this letter Paul even went so far as to say, [T]he message of the cross is foolishness to those who are pershing. (1:18)  Paul says, “I came as a fool with foolishness!”

But this message that centers on a bloody cross is in reality “wisdom.”  But Paul says in our text, not the wisdom of this age or the rulers of this age who are coming to nothing. (v. 6)  What makes you wise for salvation does not come out of a laboratory or a research facility.  It does not originate in some “think tank” or faculty lounge on a university campus.  Paul says if the “high and mighty” of this world could figure it out, they wouldn’t have crucified the Lord of glory!  This wisdom is not the product of enquiry or observation or hypothesis.  Paul says, What no eye has seen and no ear has heard and no human mind conceived – this is what God has prepared for those who love him (v. 9)  So how do we come to possess this wisdom?

God revealed it to us through his Spirit. (v. 10)  It is wisdom revealed through the Spirit.  “Revealed” is such an important word in the Bible.  To “reveal” something is to uncover something so that it can be seen.  Think about it this way.  Imagine there are five people (the number doesn’t matter) all inside a pitch dark room.  There is one way out, a door.  Trouble is, none of them can see the door because it is dark.  They grope around.  Their eyes and ears and brain are all useless in the dark.  Then a light is turned on.  Immediately they all see the door, the way out.  It was the light that revealed the door.

This is why we sometimes call the revealing work of the Holy Spirit “enlightenment.”  We are all by birth in that dark room.  We do not know the way to God and heaven.  Our eyes and ears and brains are useless in this darkness.  But the Holy Spirit turns on the lights.  We see there is a door out! It is Jesus.  He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life!

This revealed wisdom of the Spirit is referred to in different ways in our text.  Paul calls it wisdom that has been hidden in mystery (v. 7).  He calls it the depths of God (v. 10).  Or some translations say “the deep things of God.”  Paul refers to it as knowing the blessings freely given to us by God (v. 12).  It is only through the Holy Spirit working through God’s Word that we come to know that God’s Son took on flesh, stepped into this world, lived a perfect life without sin, died on the cross as the substitute for every sinner, and rose again from the dead.  And because of this we have forgiveness of sins, a place in God’s family, and eternal life in heaven.  All of that remains “hidden in the depths” unless and until the Holy Spirit reveals it!

Paul goes on to say, We also speak about these things, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual truths with spiritual words. (v. 13)  The Holy Spirit gives us a whole new vocabulary to speak the truths he has revealed to us.  That’s the way it usually works.  Those with specialized wisdom have a specialized vocabulary.  Those with the wisdom to be electricians use words like circuit, and voltage, and amperage.  Wise IT people use words like bandwidth, cloud migration, and DDoS attacks.  Those who have been made wise by the Holy Spirit have a different vocabulary, too.  A Spirit-taught vocabulary.  We use words like sin, repentance, absolution, atonement, justification, fruits-of-faith, peace, joy, hope, heaven, resurrection, eternal life.

The story is told that when Christian missionaries first came to the Eskimos, they found that the Eskimos had no word for “forgiveness.”  It was an entirely foreign concept.  They did not have in their vocabulary a word for this spiritual truth!  They had to invent a word.  So they combined a number of Eskimo words to coin a new word which means “not being able to think about it anymore.”  Not bad!  For God himself describes his forgiveness this way, I will remember their sins no more. (Jeremiah 31:34)  Spiritual truth in spiritual words.

We have the mind of Christ (v. 16)  You ARE different in this world.  You THINK about things differently in this world.  You PROCESS things differently.  You KNOW things this world does not know, but needs to know!  You have wisdom revealed to you by the Holy Spirit!

Amen.