Sermon Tone Analysis

Begin with Prayer

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — Pour through me the gift of preaching on this morning… Help me make the most of the Savior of the World in 10 minutes, and forgive me for what I might have overlooked as we ponder on the depths of the Son these past 2,000 years.

Keep us in awe this morning — we pray this in the name of Jesus, the name above every other name, Amen.

Read Scripture

Today’s scripture reading comes from 1 Corinthians 1:18-25

This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Sermon

GK Chesterton, the great English writer, famously said:

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.

It has been found difficult; and left untried.

—G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World

G. K. Chesterton

As it turns out the greatest of our human ingenuity was hardly genius at all.

We’ve done it all.

We’ve given definitive statements on the longevity of God.

It was Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who informed us that “God is dead.”

We’ve conquered the deepest mysteries of science, John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton splitting the atom.

We’ve landed rockets on pads floating on the sea and burst open the dam on human wealth, and we’ll likely see the first trillionaire of our time with Elon Musk.

Don’t get me wrong.

These are great feats.

We’ve contributed so much to the development and flourishing of the world, but we don’t, by any stretch of the imagination, have it all figured out.

Despite Nietzsche’s bold proclamation, he died 18 years after that statement.

We can split atoms but we don’t have a conclusive statement on why we have a pancreas.

And though we have a spectacle in Elon Musk, not even the first soon-to-be trillionaire can solve all the problems of the world.

The Apostle Paul, in our passage today, knows that we’ve all but abandoned the wisdom we need for life, because the life we’ve been living is really no life at all.

There’s a comparison at work, what the pursuits of wisdom leads to.

Really, there’s not a lot of difference in those who are searching for a way to live from Paul’s day to now, we search high and low, scouring the ends of the earth for what we might call “Wisdom from Corinth” only to find out that we’re still hosed.

The reason why Paul quotes the destruction of this worldly wisdom, is despite the resume of human accomplishment, it lacks the juice to really make things go.

Ingenuity would be a poor replacement for real power.

To be sure, there is real power, power — boring in its marketing appeal, power — hardly on the cutting edge, not fresh off of the R&D floor, power — power, never passing the cool test… but real transformative power.

To many this is hardly any kind of wisdom at all.

To be sure, God, in His sovereign exercise of power — He is not simple, He is not foolish, but has offered us the means, the method, and the medium for life — proclaiming the centrality of Christ on the Cross — the mean, method, and medium that we most certainly hadn’t thought of trying yet — and this, this is the wisdom of God at work in the world.

Had we figured it out we would have made it into a multi-level marketing scheme and it certainly would have lost its appeal, making it devoid of all power — but this “lifting up of Jesus on the Cross” is the elimination of every self-imposed royalty by which we hope to scalp off of Jesus, and not only does it keep us away from trying to profit off of the Prince of Peace, but it answers what the wisdom from Corinth could never answer.

Look with me beyond our text in verse 30: 1 Corinthians 1:30

While it may not be the best use of my time to quote a Catholic and now about to quote a Methodist at a Presbytery meeting, but John Wesley spoke fondly of the this not-from-Corinth wisdom that answers the burgeoning human desire to really live.

He wrote in his journal in 1739,

“I rode to Bradford five miles from Bath.

Some persons had pitched on a convenient place, on the top of the hill under which the town lies.…

There I offered Christ to about a thousand people, for wisdom, righteousness, holiness and redemption.”

It would only be the message of the Cross, Christ Crucified, that could satisfy the wanting of a thousand people — and it is the only wisdom that could satisfy the wanting of a lost world.

At the Cross the path was paved for the church to glory in a new kind of wisdom, though largely left untried, it alone has the power for salvation.

It alone is sufficient for all right-living, for all on-going holiness, and for once-and-for-all reparation between God and man.

We glory in this truth, of our Christ, crucified, proclaiming the Good News that there on the Cross the real transformative power begins, the scandalous and supernatural ingenuity of God Himself, and we’d be fools to not test it and believe it.

May the church of Jesus boldly herald this message of the cross, and may many be saved because we do.

Ending Prayer

Father, what I’ve left unsaid concerning your Son, I pray that the Spirit would work powerfully in our churches to fill in those gaps.

Where we’ve been hesitant to trust in the power of salvation for those who believe, correct us and guide back towards all truth.

We give over our time to you.

Come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.