The second teaching in the series on 1st Corinthians follows immediately. It is entitled Revelation and Judgment, and the scripture references chapters 2 through 4 of 1st Corinthians. We'll take our time with chapter 2, and then run rather quickly over chapters 3 and 4. The title is Revelation and Judgment. And when we see the revelation that God would have us see, it will entirely take our tendency, our propensity, to engage in judgment away from us.

The theme that carries on from chapter 1 is that of God's wisdom. You remember we ended last time by contrasting God's wisdom with the wisdom of this world. And we said that, as a matter of fact, from the world's point of view, from a secular, naturalistic, humanistic point of view, the gospel is absolute foolishness, absurdity.

In fact, it may be worse than that. It may be an offense, a stumbling block. But this foolishness of God, Paul says, confounds the wisdom of the world.

It seems to me that there's something very wistful about his comment in verse 26 of the first chapter. He says, consider your call, my brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards.

Not many powerful, not many noble of birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to confound or shame the wise, and so on. And just stop and think about that for a moment as a transition into the second chapter.

I think there's something terribly wistful about that when you consider who it is that's writing. Paul has to be one of the all-time great intellects of human history. I think even a secular philosopher would have to say that his intellect would rank with Aristotle's. He was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived.

And his insight, from a Christian point of view, he continually refers to this, and he says, consider the insight that God has given me. He's very aware that it's a gift from God. it's not a matter of simply having worked it out in his own philosophical inquiries.

God has given him an insight to which he calls the whole Christian church to come and consider this. Remember, even Peter acknowledges that Paul's insight goes beyond that of the Twelve. Stop and think about that.

That Paul, who never knew Jesus during his earthly ministry, has been given such a revelation of God that it surpasses and instructs the original disciples and apostles. Remember Peter's comment in his second letter. He says, there are some things in Paul's letters that I find very difficult.

You think you have trouble with Paul? So did Peter. He's scratching his head and says, I don't understand him all the time.

So here's a man of enormous intellect and enormous insight, both. And don't you feel something of the frustration as he says, not many of you are very wise. Can you imagine a man of this caliber being called to teach and minister amongst dunces, blockheads, people who just don't understand.

As many times as he's tried to explain it, they miss it. He's gone over and over and over and over it, and still they're obtuse. and he says not many of you were wise not many of you were noble not many of you were mighty not many of you were strong but God has chosen you and it's almost as if he's saying he's chosen you not because of what you are but because of what you aren't if he can do something with you he can do something with anybody yeah I mean just think if God had said now I'm going to come with a message that is so profound that only the very top one half of one percent are even going to be able to comprehend it how different the impact of the Christian gospel would be but the message is God has chosen thunderheads people like you and me to receive a message that will confound the wisdom of the wise.

Secular wisdom. He's chosen people like you and me who have nothing going for them, humanly speaking. We have no credentials and we're going to turn the world on its ear.

As a matter of fact, what we're going to do is turn it back right side up because it's already standing on its head. That's its problem. The world is standing on its head.

Its total perspective is inverted. Its value system is exactly upside down. And so when the gospel comes, it seems to the world foolishness, absurdity.

But to those who would receive it, it sets things right again. It puts them back, right side up. Kind of a natural approach would say, if there's a God, I mean if there is, We want Him to be God.

We want Him to come with trumpets and heraldry and we want Him to announce Himself and to just overtake us by force. And instead, He comes as a little baby in a feed box. And we say, we want Him to overthrow oppression, crush it, destroy it.

And instead, He allows it to crush Him and destroy Him on a cross. foolishness upside down absurdity we expect that following him means sharing in his glory but he says that you share in his glory by washing each other's smelly feet everything's upside down foolishness to the world foolishness and yet it's a matter of setting the world's foolishness back right side up that then is the background as we move into chapter 2 and Paul says this when I came to you brethren I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words or wisdom and we've just acknowledged he certainly could have done that he had the smarts he had the training he had all the credentials to absolutely overwhelm people with his intellectual prowess He says, I decided not to do that. I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

And I was with you in weakness, in much fear and trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, worldly wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power. Why? That your faith might not rest Note that that's a deliberate decision on Paul's part.

I deliberately decided not to try to use all of the tools of intellectual cleverness, of philosophical argumentation. I decided not to try to win your minds with clever arguments, but to win your hearts with the supernatural power of God. and to revel in a message of foolishness.

There was an article in the Milwaukee Courier which paraphrased the encounter at Caesarea Philippi. It said, if Jesus had come and asked the question today to some of our leading theologians that he asked to Peter and the others, who do you say that I am? The answer he would have gotten would probably be something like this.

You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground of being and of the faith community, the kerygma manifested in conflict, the self-realization of personhood, and the motivational encounter for the process of humanizing and socializing mankind. To which Jesus replied, I'm what? And he straightway ordered his disciples not to tell anyone who he was.

For he couldn't recall the formula or repeat it himself. Paul says, I decided not to come among you with worldly wisdom, with philosophical prowess. I came to preach something which both Jews and Gentiles alike considered absolute foolishness.

because in that foolishness is the power of God. Very sobering message there. I think especially to the leaders, but to the church as a whole.

What is it we're preaching? What is it we're proclaiming? What is it we're reveling in?

What is the message that people would hear from us? What is it that we are presenting to the world? When we depart from the foolishness of the cross, we no longer have anything to offer.

No matter how sophisticated it may seem and the temptation is always there to wrap it up in terms that are acceptable to the worldly wise. Paul says, I chose against that. Christ crucified, not just Christ, not just the incarnation for all of the wonder and mystery of that, but Christ crucified, he says, is the key to everything.

That's what I determined to know among you. That's what I determined to preach. That was the sum total of my message.

Christ crucified. The key to everything. Now how is that so?

Let's just reflect on that for a moment. Christ crucified becomes the pattern for all of us who would name the name of Christ. Because, as he goes on to spell out in great detail in 2 Corinthians, it's in the crucifixion of ourselves after the pattern of Christ that God has an opportunity to do something.

That what we see in Jesus Christ above and beyond the paying of a price for sin was the total abdication of any claim to the throne. he said the father will sit there I will abdicate to him he deliberately gave up his desires his own interests any kind of private self motivation to the father and in that process the father himself was able to do something Paul says in 2nd Corinthians it's in our weakness that God's strength can be manifest I don't know if you've ever really thought that through. If you are strong in a given area, you have some sort of a talent, be it speaking or organizational ability or some kind of wisdom, ability to motivate other people to do something, you're very likely to rely on those natural inherent abilities.

And in the process, you just might exclude God altogether. But what if you're called upon to do something, and you have absolutely nothing going for you in that particular area? And then out of fear and trepidation and weakness, you cry out, Oh God, I can't do it.

You do it. And he says, that's what I've been waiting for. That gives me an opportunity to manifest myself.

Your weakness is an opportunity for my strength. Not only if you give it to me. Only if you yield it to me.

But when you recognize your poverty, then my riches have an opportunity to come through. You understand what I'm saying? I think the great temptation to most of us is to rely on our own natural latent abilities whereas God would say die to that and then I have an opportunity to show myself forth in power which is exactly what Jesus did.

We don't think of him as a man with no abilities hardly but he consistently died to himself so that he has the audacity to say in John 5 the son can do nothing of himself but only what the father is doing. The father is working through the son. you see and so he can say on the night before his crucifixion I have completed the work you gave me to do what an extraordinary comment have you ever thought about that the supreme work that God gave Jesus to do was to go die on a cross and yet here he says the night before the crucifixion I've completed the work you've given me to do how can he say that because his whole life is one of self crucifixion he's already done the work.

Now, sure, it needs to be carried out in actual fact, but it's already been done in the area of the motivation, the will. Consistently, consistently, he's given himself over to the Father so that the Father can consistently work through him and manifest himself in him. That's the pattern for us.

I determined to know among you nothing but Christ crucified. And that becomes the pattern for us that we embrace the crucifixion of Christ, which is precisely what he said, if any man would be my disciple, let him take up his cross daily. Daily.

Die to himself daily. Then he'll be my disciple, which means my learner, the one who follows the pattern that I've given. You with me?

I used to work with a fellow named John Guest, and he used to comment with some frequency, I would love to see God pick a man sometime who had absolutely nothing going for him, that he could then manifest himself in every area of that man's personality. Then he'd kind of look at me. Our weakness, when we really recognize we have nothing of our own to offer, becomes an opportunity for God's strength.

Dwight Moody, the famous evangelist, said the world has yet to see what God can do with one man fully dedicated to him. And I hope to be that man. The world has yet to see what God can do with one man fully dedicated to him.

Not to myself. My own insight, my own wisdom, my own cleverness, my own ability to speak, my own charisma, my own organizational ability, my prayer, none of it. But I'm dedicated to Him.

The world has yet to see what God can do with one man transparent to Him. And I hope to be that man. The question would be, when the world sees us, what does it see?

When it sees you, when it sees me, when it sees the church together, does it see our gifts, our talents, our abilities, our insights, our approach to things, our competence, our cleverness, our charisma, our charm, our persuasiveness? Or does it see the Lord Jesus expressing himself through us? Paul says, I had and have great ability intellectually and in terms of my ability to articulate.

I chose not to rely on that I chose to rely only on the power of God to know nothing among you but Christ crucified and so we come immediately it seems to me to the very heart of the Christian paradox which is that in dying to ourselves we discover what life really is and to the world out there it appears that Christianity is a call to self-denial. It is not. Buddhism is a call to self-denial.

Christianity is a call to self-fulfillment. But it comes in an unexpected way. Die to that independent, rebellious self that would say, I can do it by myself.

Thank you very much. I'll run my own life, captain of my soul, master of my own salvation. Die to that, and then you begin to discover the life that you were created to have and to be.

The person that you were created to be. So our life in Christ begins and so also it continues day by day. Remember the phrase in Colossians, as you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so also live in Him.

Never get beyond the cross. Never get beyond the cross. Come back to it daily, moment by moment.

and so what we begin to discover is that the whole thing is topsy-turvy the whole thing from start to finish the cross condemnation accursed by God turns out to be glory crucifixion turns out to be self-fulfillment death death to self is life and the discovery of self selflessness is self fulfillment servanthood is preeminence he who would be chief among you shall be servant of all the curse is the blessing weakness is strength folly is wisdom lowliness is nobility the very last thing that we would have chosen for ourselves turns out to be the thing for which we were created and in which we'll find our greatest joy. That's the foolishness of the gospel. Totally upside down from the point of view of the world.

I want us to notice two things about this. Let's move on and read from verse 6. Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom.

Although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away, we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification. None of the rulers of this age understood this. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

But, as it is written, and quoting from Isaiah 64, What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him. King James says that, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man, the things that God has prepared for those who love him. It's beyond imagination.

Nobody's heard it, nobody's seen it, nobody from a worldly point of view can conceive of it. It surpasses your ability even to imagine it. if you had imagined it you would never have crucified Christ but the paradox is that in crucifying him you released it isn't that incredible in crucifying him in trying to put him to death you released it the greatest blessing that God had to give God has revealed to us through the spirit for the spirit searches everything even the depths of God For what person knows a man's thoughts except the spirit of the man which is in him?

So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the spirit.

two things. One, the power of God, the power of God's Spirit attends this proclamation of foolishness. Paul says, I determined to know nothing among you but Christ Jesus and Him crucified, and in so doing, your confidence, your salvation, your faith was not in mere words, but in the demonstration of the Spirit and in power.

the power of the Holy Spirit attends this message and that means both I'm absolutely sure the power to convict men's hearts first of all but also the attendant signs and wonders when this message is proclaimed God is the one he alone is the one to heal to bless to provide and that's foolishness but as we put our trust in him we begin to discover his power being released amongst us and so Paul goes on to say later when I was among you you saw the signs of the true apostle I was with you in power God's spirit attended this message promises in the end of the gospel of Mark that where such a message is proclaimed faithfully there will be signs following signs and wonders and I want to share with you that just very recently I've begun to make my prayer the one out of Acts chapter 4 when it says grant to thy servants to speak thy word with all boldness while thou stretchest out thy hand to heal and signs and wonders are performed through the name of thy holy child Jesus that's the picture for the church so we proclaim the message that's our part God is able to release his power amongst us. So the foolishness of God is attended by the Spirit of God in great power and nowhere else. And secondly, the Spirit of God conveys the thoughts of God.

The image here is that of a human. You can look at me and you may think you know what I'm thinking. You hear my words and you see my facial expressions and the gestures that I make, but you don't really know what I'm thinking.

I may be fooling you. I may be thinking about something completely other than what I'm saying. It all may be a sham or a hoax.

Nobody really knows what I'm thinking except I myself. The spirit of the man knows what the man is thinking. And Paul says so it is with God.

Nobody can understand the thoughts of God, the message of God, except God himself, his own spirit. And so while we acknowledge that this is a message of foolishness, we have to immediately then also add that only the spirit of God can turn it from foolishness into wisdom. God's spirit takes this truth, which the world would laugh at and consider absurd, and suddenly fills it with meaning, and joy, and power, and life, and light.

And that's not something I can do. It's not something any human being can do. Only the Spirit of God can do that.

So, the division of responsibility is that the preacher is to preach, and the Spirit of God is to convict, and to convince, and to apply, and to make real. Notice what he goes on to say in verse 14. The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him.

And he's not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?

But we have the mind of Christ. He's saying a very strange thing here. he's saying that the gifts are given by the Spirit and then the Spirit of God will come in and interpret them to us look back a few verses verse 12 we have received not the Spirit of the world but the Spirit which is from God that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God now that's not the only function of the spirit of god he does many things in the life of the christian but the one that paul wants to deal with here is that the spirit of god is given to us that we might understand the gifts that leads us to some very startling conclusions the gifts of god's spirit are not necessarily a sign of maturity they may be given to the very, very young in Christ.

The sign of maturity is not the possession of spiritual gifts, but the understanding of them. Now what are we talking about? Some of you are on very familiar ground, and some of you may be somewhat lost.

I'm going to come back to this. This is one of the major themes that runs throughout the whole of 1st and 2nd Corinthians. Let me summarize it this way.

That the two principal things that God's Spirit will do in the lives of Christians are the distribution of gifts and the production of fruit. The distribution of gifts and the production of fruit. The fruit of the Spirit, you're probably all familiar with the passage Galatians 5.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, patience, kindness, meekness, so on, right? The fruit of the Spirit is character traits. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering.

The fruit of the Spirit is the reproduction in the life of the Christian of the character of Jesus Christ. All right? Go back and check it out.

Galatians 5. The fruit of the Spirit is the reproduction in the life of the Christian of the character of Christ. And that leads us to the conclusion that it is God's will that every Christian have all the fruit of the Spirit.

That we become in character like Christ. That he reproduce himself fully in us. So we could put it this way.

All the fruit for all the Christians. Now, please don't look at the neighbor on each side of you and evaluate how far along you are. Well, I've got a little bit more joy than him and need to work on my patience in contrast to her.

That is not the standard. The only one that I'm to compare myself... Well, I can compare myself with two people.

All right? In terms of fruit. The standard is Jesus himself.

That's the one I'm to compare myself with. But the only other relevant one is the person I would have been apart from the Holy Spirit of God. Against that person, I ought to be making some progress.

All right? All right? I may not be doing as well as my brother Paul and my brother Billy or my sister Marge here, but against the John Howe that I would have been apart from the Spirit of God, I ought to be making some progress.

And the goal is that Christ's character would be fully reproduced in me one day. And I anticipate that will be fully so in glory. All right?

All of the fruit for all of the Christians. It is God's will that I be full to bursting of love, full to bursting of joy, full to bursting of peace and so on. for all of the Christians.

Alright? The other principal ministry of the Holy Spirit in our lives is that of distributing gifts. And gifts are supernatural empowerings for service.

Supernatural empowerings for service. In other words, God will call me to do some particular thing in the body of Christ. He does not call me to do it.

in my own strength, my own natural talent. He calls me to do it in His strength and His anointing, His gifting. When God calls a man or calls a woman to a particular role or ministry, He Himself will supply the gift or gifts of the Spirit to accomplish that ministry.

Which leads us to this conclusion. Different gifts for different Christians. now get that very clearly in your mind this will become more apparent as we move through the rest of the book all the fruit character traits for all the Christians but different gifts for different Christians I'm not to have the same particular role that you have in the body of Christ I'm not to have the same ministry or function that you have in the body of Christ.

I'm not to be jealous of what God has called and equipped you to do, nor are you to be jealous of what he's called and equipped me to do, because God has arranged things in such a way that we're mutually dependent upon each other. I need you, and you need me. If we were both alike, one of us wouldn't be necessary.

I won't tell you which one. Now, are we clear on that? That's absolutely foundational.

Anybody got a problem with that? What he has just said is that one of the functions of God's Spirit is to give us an understanding of the gifts which He's given. Right?

Do you see what that implies? It is no mark of maturity that you have a gift. The possession of a gift is not the mark and measure of maturity.

The proper, godly understanding of that gift may be one of the marks of maturity. God sometimes gives extraordinarily dynamic dramatic gifts of his spirit supernatural wonder working gifts of his spirit to Christians who are very immature he sometimes does that why? I don't know he didn't ask me about it I probably would have advised him differently but it may be that somebody becomes a Christian and starts speaking in tongues, having visions, laying his hands on the sick and seeing them recover, prophesying, having words of wisdom or knowledge, gifts of administration, any number of things.

It may be that those come very early in his Christian life where somebody else has been a Christian for years and he feels like, boy, I've got very little to offer to the body of Christ. And so he has a jealousy about those gifts. They are not the sign of maturity.

And the teaching of 1 Corinthians 12, which we're going to come to in a couple of weeks, is that God distributes the gifts of his spirit severally or individually as he wills. It is in the sovereign purposes of God who gets what? when Neil Labar became a Christian as a senior in prep school we had the remarkable experience of going off on a retreat and kids came up to him for some reason and began to ask him questions about things which he had never studied never been taught about never read for himself never heard about and out of his mouth came biblical wisdom that was absolutely astonishing to us.

And over and over and over I watched this happen. Somebody would ask him a question, he would give the answer and then he would say, Wow! Write that down!

I want to study it! That really happened. I was an eyewitness to it.

God gave him gifts of wisdom, supernatural wisdom, knowledge, insight as a very, very young Christian. and we keep hoping he'll continue to do so. Maturity, Paul says, one of the elements of maturity is beginning to understand what he's given these gifts for.

Now, can you follow the line of implication of that argument with me? We're going to see this more clearly spelled out later, but I think we can see it in implication right here at the very beginning. If he gives different gifts to different Christians, and if the purpose in so doing is that we become mutually dependent upon each other, I have a role to play in the body of Christ.

You need it, whether you like it or not. You need what I have to give. I need what you have to give, whether I like it or not.

We're stuck with each other. Okay? God's wisdom involves understanding precisely that.

So that I don't begin to get all puffed up with how very special I am because look at this gift that I have. But rather, I thank God for the privilege of serving you in a particular way. And at the same time, I am overwhelmed with how much in need I am of what you have to give me.

I am not self-sufficient. I'm not self-sufficient. I am desperately needy for you.

And those who have been given the kind of upfront leadership roles within the body of Christ, please believe, I know most of you won't believe this, but it is true, are the most needy. Are the most needy. We've been given a certain amount of public honor because we need it.

But we are absolutely dependent on the ministry of the body of Christ. And when I forget that and I start to glory in who and what I am and in my special role, look at me, then I have utterly, utterly missed the point of God's anointing. Totally.

And I may have a great gift from God. I may have. I'm not saying I do.

I may have a great gift from God of teaching or preaching or evangelism or prophecy or whatever it might be, healing, miracles, and be a terribly immature babe in Christ if I don't understand what it's for. Are you with me? It is not the possession of the gift, but the proper understanding of what it's for that constitutes maturity.

And that's not an intellectual understanding, obviously. It's a matter of a motivational understanding that I begin to see the integrated mutual dependence of the body of Christ. Now, it's precisely that that the Corinthians lacked.

And so that theme is going to follow us all the way through the book. This was a group of people who had received from God a tremendously rich anointing of his gifts, supernatural empowerings. And yet they were missing the boat over and over at precisely this point.

They were quite clearly reveling in their own particular specialness. looking down on each other, dismissing each other as second-class Christians, and saying, I'm the special one because of what I've been given. And so Paul comes back to this over and over and over again.

There are at least 20 specific gifts mentioned in the New Testament. Perhaps we'll have time to enumerate those later. At least 20, depending on what are synonyms with other things.

There are at least 20 mentioned. most of the time we've centered in on a few of them and been all involved in controversy over tongues and healing and prophecy and maybe one or two others there are at least 20 and when I say that I really have to emphasize at least because nowhere is there an exhaustive list the simple fact that the various lists of Holy Spirit gifts that are recorded in the New Testament don't precisely identically agree with each other, but they simply partially overlap each other, would indicate to us that none of the New Testament authors anywhere tried to give an exhaustive list. He's simply saying, here are some of the gifts.

These are what the gifts are like. And the purpose of God's giving us his gifts, the gifts of the Holy Spirit, is that we would use them to build up and edify each other. Peter, in his first letter, chapter 4 and verse 10, says, As each has received a gift, employ it for one another, which indicates that every Christian has received at least one gift, maybe more.

As you have received your gift or gifts, use them for building up each other. That's their purpose, that we might be the better servants. And the beginning of maturity is understanding just exactly this.

the gifts of the Holy Spirit enable us to be in the metaphor of chapter 3 living stones in a living temple we move into chapter 3 and there are really two questions for us the first is are you building on the right foundation Paul writes in verse 11 for no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid which is Jesus Christ is that the foundation you're building on Or are you trying to build your life on some other value, some other goal, some other purpose, some other desire, some other vocation or avocation? What are you building on? Are you building on the foundation of Christ?

Nothing else will endure. Second question is, what are you building on that foundation? He goes on to say, now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or stubble, or in the RSV, straw, each man's work will become manifest.

So what are you building on, and what are you building on it? Are you doing things which are legitimate, but not particularly worthwhile, not particularly valuable? a double question for us now sometimes we hear people saying I am the temple of the Holy Spirit that is a misunderstanding it's always corporate Paul's question in verse 16 do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's spirit dwells in you that's a plural you we corporately together constitute the temple of the living God together it's up to us to build up that temple it's not up to us to choose what part of the temple we'll be individually where God will place us or how he'll use us he arranges the stones in the temple just as we'll read in chapter 12 he arranges the organs in the body it's up to him It's his sovereign pleasure where he puts us and how he uses us.

And so the burden of chapter 3 is that we would not destroy the temple of God. Now, you're not going to destroy it totally, but you can work destruction in it by failing to see this, precisely this, central truth. Verse 17, if anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him.

Are you building up the temple, or are you tearing it down? Are you working life and support, or are you working destruction within it? So, are you building on the right foundation, the foundation of Christ and Him crucified, dying to self, allowing God's strength to come through our weakness?

Are you building on that foundation? Secondly, what are you building on it? Are you building things that are inadequate or things that are going to be very precious indeed?

Are we building up the temple, which is to say supporting and edifying each other? Or are we working destruction within the temple of God by our self-centeredness and pride? Finally, chapter 4, Paul applies this truth to his own ministry.

He says in verse 6, I have applied all this to myself and Apollos for your benefit, brethren, that you may learn by us not to go beyond what is written, that none of you may be puffed up in favor of one against another. You see how the theme runs straight through. For who sees anything different in you?

What have you that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if it were not a gift? And he draws a devastating contrast between himself and the other apostles and the Christians in Corinth.

Already you are filled. Already you have become rich. Without us, you have become kings in your own estimation.

Would that you did really reign. Would that you did. So that we might share the rule with you.

For I think that God has exhibited us as apostles as last of all, as men sentenced to death because we've become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to men. We are fools, for Christ's sake. But you are wise.

We are weak. You are strong. You are held in honor, we in disrepute.

To the present hour, we hunger and thirst, we're ill-clad, buffeted, homeless, we labor, working with our own hands. When reviled, we bless. When persecuted, we endure.

When slandered, we try to conciliate. We have become and are now, as the refuse of the world, the offscouring of all things. You begin to sense the attitude that was pervasive in this church of Corinth.

We've got it made. We know how to do it. We are the ones, those poor unwashed peasants out there, we're the ones who know how to pray we're the ones who know how to preach I mean we've got the true theology we know how to worship I mean we know how to set the altar we know when to bow and when to genuflect and when to cross yourself we know all of the liturgical words we know all of the right theology we've got all of the gifts of the spirit I mean when we pray people get healed.

When we preach, people get converted. When we speak, people are confounded. And the world view that they had was one of their own incredible preeminence.

And Paul says, we apostles know ourselves to be utterly impoverished. How extraordinary that you Christians at Corinth would have arrived. but his final paragraph he says I do not write this to make you ashamed but to admonish you to cause you to see that nothing that you have you can take credit for that nothing you have can be a source of pride or boasting or self-centeredness but it's a gift of God for service and I ridicule you in love that you might repent of it.

I ridicule you in love that you might repent of it. The foolishness of God is wiser than the wisdom of the world. The weakness of God is stronger than the strength of the world.

And we have absolutely nothing of our own for which to take credit. If we've been given a gift, an insight, an ability, it's for service. It's his gift.

It's not ours anyway. And he's given it not that we might have a place of preeminence, but that we might be the better equipped to serve somebody else. That's the message of 1 Corinthians.

That's the message of the cross. And Paul says, I determine to know nothing among you except that very message. let's bow our heads and I'm sorry I've held you so long you may have a question or a comment and I'd be glad to stay and chat but obviously some of you need to deal with your children Father in heaven we recognize the terrible temptation that each one of us has from time to time succumbed to, to glory in how much better we are than others.

In our insight, in our ability, in our wisdom, in our understanding, in our faithfulness, in the answers to our prayer, in the power of our testimony, in the sophistication of our worship, in the charisma of our personality, in the ability of our particular efforts to organize something to happen, forgive us. Lord, to the extent that that has been true of any one of us, move amongst us tonight by your spirit that we might see that he who receives a gift receives it for the sake of others. It's no sign of maturity or specialness but simply your grace to allow him to serve.

Forgive us, whatever extent we've ever indulged in such self-congratulation. Cause us to begin to see in a fresh and basic way how completely and totally we have need of each other. That we might be members of a living temple, the body of Christ.

That we might build each other up. That we might support each other. that we might take greater pleasure in each other receiving credit and honor than when we do ourselves.

Help us to long for the opportunity to serve and to be quick to admit our weakness that your strength might be manifested in us. That Jesus Christ might be uplifted glorified in our lives and personalities and especially in our fellowship and that he might thus draw all men to himself for we ask it in his name Amen