Consider Your Calling

26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. 27 But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; 28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, 29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, 31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” 1 And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

Review

Let me remind you where we’ve been so far in verses 18 to 25, Paul explains why he proclaims what the world considers an altogether foolish message. “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,” he said.

A foolish message. And why he uses to foolish a method. “The foolishness of preaching,” he calls it.

Why do that when what the world wants is wisdom packaged in eloquent words and in displays of supernatural power?

And his answer, this foolish message, the cross, and foolish method, preaching, make God appear as glorious as He is when He takes these foolish things and by them saves sinners.

The world may mock the methods and the message, calling them weak and foolish, but Paul reminds us that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God stronger than men.”

And so we’re to have confidence, Paul says, in the foolishness of the Gospel and in the folly of preaching. That was last week.

Consider your Calling.

1 Corinthians 1:26–28 (ESV)

26 For consider your calling, brothers:

not many of you were wise according to worldly standards,

not many were powerful,

not many were of noble birth. 27

But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;

28 God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,

Why are the Corinthians Christians?

Paul answers that

they are Christians not because, in some flash of remarkable insight, they cut through the spin and the bad publicity

to see the truth for themselves.

It’s not because they were smart savvy or strategic.

It’s not even because Paul somehow persuaded them.

No, they never would have become Christians, never would have joined the church if it were not for this one consideration.

They are Christians because of the sovereign, irresistible, saving intervention of Almighty God in their lives.

“Consider your calling, brothers,” verse 26.

He’s talking about the beginnings of their Christian life their conversion, but he calls it their calling because it is because of the call of God that they are believers.

He’s not talking here merely about the general, universal call that sounds to all people everywhere in the invitations of the Gospel preached but in

The mighty, sovereign, irresistible work of the Holy Spirit that accompanies that call, that works in the hearts of specific people to respond and pass from death into life. The call of God made them Christians.

Why did God call them?

By human standards, nothing about their pre-Christian situation qualified them for the relationship with God they now enjoy.

With few exceptions, they belonged among those generally considered foolish, weak, or despised.11

The only reason anything has changed is God’s wisdom effaces human wisdom. Their present cliquish conflicts are therefore, senseless—a refutation of their own reality.

Few of them have anything to boast about.

If true wisdom and power could be gained through self-promotion, they would not be among the chosen.

The status they now enjoy came as a gift from God.

In fact, God chose them to shame those the world considered powerful and wise.

They themselves are examples of how God’s wisdom works contrary to the very “wisdom” they now seem eager to follow. [1]

Paul possibly went over the membership of the Corinthian church in his mind as he wrote verse 26.

1. He reminded them that they had very few who were famous, wealthy, highly educated, powerful, or influential when they believed in the Lord Jesus Christ.

2. It is likely that when they became Christians, they lost much of the prestige, influence, and income they did have.

Jesus did not accept you as His child because you were brilliant or wealthy or intelligent or powerful.

Paul casts around for an illustration, for some examples of that principle.

“What can I show these Corinthians to help them really see that God’s upside-down wisdom is worth trusting after all?”

And then it hits him. “All they need do is look in the mirror. They are themselves the perfect illustration that God delights to use unlikely instruments for almighty ends.”

And so he tells them, verse 26,

“Consider your calling, brothers. Remember how you were converted. Cast your mind back to the beginning of your Christian life.

If you were any of these things,” he says, “you were saved despite them not because of them.

If anything they were stumbling blocks that hindered you, obstacles between you and God’s grace.” He implies that they should be glad

that not many were wise according to the flesh or mighty or noble.[2]

Does your own experience confirm this very pattern? That God takes the foolish and the weak and the despised, and in and through them does great things?

Isn’t that what He did in you and for you, after all?”

God’s wisdom is a kind of paradox.

In human thinking, strength is strength, weakness is weakness, and intelligence is intelligence.

In God’s economy some of the seemingly strongest things are the weakest,

some of the seemingly weakest things are the strongest,

and some of the seemingly wisest things are the most foolish.

The paradox is not by accident but by God’s design.[3]

Jesus did not think this way when He chose His disciples

Some were probably well known in their local circles and perhaps a few of them were well off financially.

But He did not choose them for their wealth or influence, and in His training of them He did not try to capitalize on any such things.

None of them had anything so great that he was not ready to leave it to follow Christ.

In a.d.178 the philosopher Celsus mockingly wrote of Christians:

Let no cultured person draw near, none wise and none sensible, for all that kind of thing we count evil; but if any man is ignorant, if any man is wanting in sense and culture, if anybody is a fool, let him come boldly [to become a Christian].… We see them in their own houses, wool dresses, cobblers, the worst, the vulgarest, the most uneducated persons.… They are like a swarm of bats or ants creeping out of their nest, or frogs holding a symposium around a swamp, or worms convening in mud.[4]

Celsus thinks the church is full of poor, ignorant, silly people.

And that fact alone, he thinks, proves that the Christian faith and therefore also the Christian God is not worth believing.

“I mean, who would follow a God who welcomes riffraff and dignifies the humanity of the poor and women and slaves like this?”

That was Celsus’ view.

God’s View

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise;

God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong;

28 God chose what is low and despised in the world,

even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,

weakness_is_the_way_by_j._i._packer (Original).mp4

1 Corinthians 1:29–31 (ESV)

29 so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. 30 And because of him you are in Christ

Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God,

righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written,

“Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

No man will ever have a reason to boast before God. The foolish and the weak can do nothing for himself; God has done everything.

your weakness is never a reason for God not doing great things through you and me

its much more an issue of our obedience to what he calls us to do

“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast. For we are His workmanship” (Eph. 2:8–10).[6]

Wisdom entails – righteousness, sanctification, and redemption.

Righteousness for our guilt,

Sanctification for our pollution

Redemption for our bondage.

What’s the point?

Jesus Christ is enough. He is a sufficient Savior.

When the world says you need to be wise and strong and noble and a thousand other things besides, the Gospel says

Jesus is all you need, and in Him, in God’s great wisdom,

there is righteousness and sanctification and redemption.

Not money, not power, not influence, not social standing, not respectability, not philanthropy, not penance, not approval – Jesus.

Jesus is the wisdom of God. Jesus is what you need.

And as we begin to lie in the dust, seeing ourselves as we really are in our smallness and futility and weakness and foolishness,

we begin to recognize that there is a limitless repository of grace for us in Him

so that we don’t need to be strong and wise and noble and mighty.

He is enough. Let us make much of Him.

First, believers are given God’s wisdom. They not only are saved by God’s wisdom rather than their own but are given God’s wisdom to replace their own.

The truly wise of this world are those whose wisdom is not of this world but is from the Lord.

Second, believers receive God’s righteousness. They are made right with God and they participate in His righteousness, His rightness.

Rightness means to be as something or someone should be—right as opposed to wrong, good as opposed to evil, sinless as opposed to sinful. God is totally righteous because He is totally as He should be. He cannot vary from His rightness. When we trust His Son, He shares His Son’s righteousness with us. [7]

Third, believers receive God’s sanctification. In Christ, we are set apart, made holy. We are declared righteous in Christ and are made holy in Christ.

When we receive Christ’s nature, we receive His incorruptible seed, which is not, and cannot be, habitually corrupted by sin. With the flesh still present, we can slip into sin, but only intermittently. As we spiritually mature the frequency of sin decreases. [8]

Fourth, believers receive God’s redemption. To redeem means to buy back. God, by Christ, has purchased us from the power of sin.

1 Corinthians 1:31 (ESV)

31 so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”

Nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

1 Corinthians 2:1–2 (ESV)

1 And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom.

2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Paul was not interested in discussing men’s ideas or insights, his own or anyone else's.

He would proclaim nothing but Jesus Christ, the crucified, risen, and redeeming Jesus Christ.

He did not preach Jesus simply as the perfect teacher or the perfect example or the perfect Man—though He was all of these.

The foundation of all of his preaching was Jesus as the divine Savior.

The apostle was not saying that he preached or taught nothing but evangelistic messages or that he expounded only those parts of Scripture that deal directly with Christ’s atonement. He taught the full counsel of God, as his writings make clear (Acts 20:27). He ministered in Corinth for a year and a half, “teaching the word of God among [them]” (Acts 18:11).

It is the cross of Jesus Christ that is the stumbling block or the foolishness to unbelievers and until a person accepts God’s revelation in the cross, no other revelation matters.

[9]

In Weakness and In Fear

1 Corinthians 2:3–5 (ESV)

3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

Corinth was the epitome of paganism and moral degeneracy.

Though having every human reason to be discouraged and no doubt every temptation from Satan to compromise, Paul would not change his message.

Paul was fearful and trembling only in the sense of being deeply anxious that the gospel somehow finds root even in this most unpromising of places. He was not fearful for his own life or safety or of the gospel’s having lost its power.

Paul was fearful only of the gospel being rejected, and of the terrible consequences of that rejection. Surely, he also feared his own inadequacy and sin which could weaken his ministry. (cf. 1 Cor. 9:16, 27).

determined, therefore, that his message and … preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom.[10]

Paul had great natural abilities, but he did not rely on them.

Even the human words and wisdom of an apostle could not save a person.

He did not want his hearers to identify with his own wisdom, which could give them only another philosophy,

but with God’s wisdom in Jesus Christ, which could give them eternal life.

The unbelieving Corinthians, as all unbelievers, had needed the demonstration of the Spirit and of power, and that is what Paul had brought them. That is all that he had preached and practiced among them.

Only God’s Spirit and power could deliver them from sin and bring them to Himself. He did not want them to have a new philosophy but new life.

Charles Spurgeon said:

“The power that is in the Gospel does not lie in the eloquence of the preacher. Otherwise, men would be the converters of souls, nor does it lie in the preacher’s learning.

Otherwise, it would consist in the wisdom of men.

We might preach until our tongues rotted, till we would exhaust our lungs and die, but never a soul would be converted unless the Holy Spirit be with the Word of God to give it the power to convert the soul.”

The Corinthian Believers Were Foolish, Weak, Nobodies

The temptation has been very real for the church to adorn itself with the trappings of power and wisdom and social respectability.

in the hope of alluring, of drawing in the elite and the brilliant and the influential to her ranks.

I think it’s worth asking if and in what ways we have been pursuing the trends of the culture and adopting the fashions of the world in the hopes that the world will be impressed with us.

The Challenge to Choose

Paul really is challenging us to choose, isn’t he? There’s a dilemma and he wants us to see that we stand on the horns of this dilemma.

Do you remember how James puts it in

James chapter 4 in verse 4? “Friendship with the world is… “Enmity against God.” You can’t have both!

“Friendship with the world is enmity against God.”

Follow Jesus and you will be seen not as elite or wise or mighty, but as foolish, weak, low and despised. Or follow the world and you’ll blend right in.

As you do that, as you weigh those two options, would you please remember the words, the question of our Savior who asks us, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and yet still loses his soul?” That’s the first thing I want us to see – who the Corinthians were. They were foolish, weak, nobodies.

The church should not have divisions based on philosophy any more than it should have divisions based on individuals.

We are to be united around God’s wisdom, not human wisdom. We are one in Jesus Christ and should be one in His Word and power, and in the fellowship of those who are His.[11]

Our Purpose

The purpose of God in the creation of man and the salvation of sinners is that we might boast in HIM.

This is God’s will for you this morning. God is speaking in these words very clearly.

And what he is saying is this: turn this very moment from all boasting in your self.

Don’t seek your pleasure any more in your own wisdom, or your own strength, or your own looks, or your own achievements. Look to Christ crucified and see what becomes of it all.

Paul said in Galatians 6:14, “Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”

So I call you to come to Christ and die this morning—and to live. And the promise of God is this: there is no greater life, no greater joy than to boast in him![12]

For those of us who have known Christ, this is a time to resolve that you will devote your mind to that which is absolutely central from an eternal perspective, the gospel of Christ crucified.

Give up your best to the Master, but understand that at the heart of all that is best is a joyful recognition that Jesus is lord because he died for your sins and rose again the third day.

May the power of the gospel utterly transform all of your living and being for all eternity, amen.[13]

11 Notice that Paul introduces a third social divider. So far, he has mentioned only the two honors that could be acquired in the socially mobile Corinth (wisdom and power). To this list he now adds the honor that was inherited (noble birth). [1]Vang, P. (2014). 1 Corinthians(M. L. Strauss, Ed.; p. 31). Baker Books. [2]MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1984). 1 Corinthians (p. 50). Moody Press. [3]MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1984). 1 Corinthians (p. 50). Moody Press. [4]MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1984). 1 Corinthians (p. 51). Moody Press. 4 See “wisdom” in Willem Van Gemeren, New International Dictionary of Old Testament Theology and Exegesis, vol. 4 (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2012), p. 1277. [5]Um, S. T. (2015). 1 Corinthians: The Word of the Cross (R. K. Hughes, Ed.; pp. 32–33). Crossway. [6]MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1984). 1 Corinthians (p. 52). Moody Press. [7]MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1984). 1 Corinthians(p. 53). Moody Press. [8]MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1984). 1 Corinthians (p. 53). Moody Press. [9]MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1984). 1 Corinthians (pp. 55–56). Moody Press. [10]MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1984). 1 Corinthians(p. 56). Moody Press. [11]MacArthur, J. F., Jr. (1984). 1 Corinthians (p. 57). Moody Press. [12]Piper, J. (2007). Sermons from John Piper (1980–1989). Desiring God. [13]Carson, D. A. (2016). Where Is the Scholar? In D. A. Carson Sermon Library (1 Co 1:18–2:5). Faithlife.

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