God's Means for God's Glory

I ask you to remain standing in honor of God's Word as we read it together tonight. If you would turn with me please to 1st Corinthians chapter 1, begin at verse 18. I'm gonna read all the way down to chapter 2 verse 5 as we consider tonight God's appointed means of saving sinners and God's motive for using those means.

1st Corinthians 1, beginning at verse 18. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it 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 not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not 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, 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. 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, 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. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that as it is written, that the one who boasts, boasts in the Lord. And I, when I came to you brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom, for I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

Let's pray. Lord, we are backwards and upside down. What you say is wise, we call foolish.

What you say is powerful, we call weak. Thank you, Lord, that in your wisdom you saw fit to rescue us from our own ignorance and pride. You have made Christ to be to us righteousness and sanctification and wisdom. Holy Spirit, we can read about these truths in Scripture, but apart from you illuminating our minds, we can't understand them as we ought, so would you open your word to us tonight that we might know and believe and be changed by your wisdom. Pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Be seated. In some ways, this passage of Scripture we're looking at tonight is like a conversation one might have with a two or three year old when they reach that stage of asking why after every sentence. When my children would go through that phase, I would occasionally attempt to answer as many of their whys as I could just to see how far it would go and how long I could last, and I began to notice something very interesting. I noticed that no matter what the topic of conversation began with, that the answers would inevitably lead to God somehow. These questions of purpose or cause couldn't help but lead the conversation to the ultimate purpose, the ultimate cause. If you keep asking why, eventually you'll get to God.

So, for example, I would say it's time for lunch. My child would say why? Because that's what you do every day in the middle of the day. Why? Because we get hungry and need food. Why? Because our bodies are finite. Why? Because that's how God made us. Why?

So that we would need him and look to him for sustenance, and this phenomenon held true regardless of how mundane or off-the-wall the starting point was. Please hand me the green crayon. Why? Because green is my favorite color. Why? Because it reminds me of grass and plants and summer leaves. It reminds me of nature. Why? Because God put a lot of the color green in nature.

Why? Because that's just what he wanted to do. It pleased him. It all leads back to God. It's almost as if there's a first cause, an unmoved mover built into the very fabric of existence and to which all things point.

And as Christians we say, well duh, of course there is. All things exist by God and for God. All things point to him from the most unassuming crayon to the most magnificent constellation.

God is behind and in front of and above and below and at the center of everything. Paul has just made the point that the Corinthians are enamored with all the wrong things. They're enamored with status and credibility and polished eloquence and name recognition, but in all of this they're missing the main point. They're emptying the cross of its power by looking to things other than the cross for purpose and validation and hope. Paul then in our text tonight turns to the question of what makes the cross so powerful. Why is it that the very thing you're overlooking, Corinth, is the only thing that can save? And what follows then is a series of assertions by Paul followed by answers to the question, why?

We don't actually read the why question in the text, but it's implied. Every time Paul says the word for or since or because or so that, he's answering a why question. And notice how many of these verses that we just read begin with one of these words, almost every one of them.

So our text tonight is a whole series of why, because, why, because exchanges. So as we walk through the passage tonight, we get to be the three-year-old who is asking the why, and Paul is our spiritual dad who is answering all of our questions. And what we'll come to see is that our quest for the ultimate cause of what makes the cross effective is, spoiler alert, God. The cross is effective because God has intentionally designed salvation to work in such a way as to make it impossible for man to take the credit. Now Paul is going to make three central points, and each point begins with an assertion followed by several of these why, because exchanges. Paul's first point then is this, the cross is made efficacious.

I'm going to use that word a few times tonight, it just means powerful or effective, able to save. The cross is efficacious by God's sovereign decree. And Paul makes this point in verses 18 and 19.

So he begins with an assertion. He asserts that the cross is foolishness to some and powerful to others. Verse 18, the word of the cross, the message of the gospel, is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.

We've all seen this play out in real life. Someone hears the good news of Jesus Christ and they laugh it off as a myth, a fairy tale, a pointless waste of time. Someone else hears the same story and they bow the knee in faith and repentance to Christ. So our imaginary Johnny in Corinth then asks Father Paul, why? Why is the cross foolishness to one person and powerful to another? And Paul's answer is, because God made it that way. Verse 19, for it is written, I, this is God speaking, will destroy the wisdom of the wise and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. So how is it that the same two people can hear the same gospel message and one of them rejects it as foolish, the other stakes their very eternity on it? Well, it's because God for some reason has blinded certain people from seeing and discerning the true power of the cross. A very natural question then would be, why would God do that? Paul doesn't answer that question explicitly in our text, but he does point us to the answer by quoting Isaiah.

Verse 19 here is a quote from Isaiah 29. If we were to flip back into Isaiah 29 and read the context of Paul's quote, we discover God's reason for blinding some people to the wisdom and power of the cross. And what we discover is that God blinds people to the truth of the gospel because their hearts are wicked, but they're wicked in a particular way. God says of these people, you turn things upside down.

So in what way do they turn things upside down? They do it by acting as if man is sovereign and God is not. God says to them in Isaiah, shall the potter be regarded as the clay that the thing made should say of its maker, he did not make me, or the thing formed say of him who formed it, he has no understanding. And it's this wicked attitude of self-worship that motivates God to remove whatever wisdom they may have had and confound them with an inability to perceive the value and the power of the cross. They want to be God, they want to save themselves, and so the way of salvation that the only true God has provided them is made to appear foolish and dumb. Folks, God will not share his sovereignty and anyone who would try to take it from him cuts himself off from the only hope they have of salvation. The fact that the gospel saves some and not others has nothing to do with intelligence or attractiveness or niceness or athleticism or wealth or fame of the sinner.

It has everything to do with the sovereign decree of a sovereign God. To the perishing, he makes the cross foolish. To those being saved, he makes the cross powerful.

Why? Because the cross is made efficacious by and only by God's sovereign decree. Paul continues with a second point then and it's this. The cross is efficacious by God's gracious means. By God's gracious means. Not only is God sovereign over who receives the saving grace, he is also sovereign over the means by which they receive it. We see this in verses 20 through 23 and once again Paul begins with an assertion.

It's an assertion in the form of a question. Verse 20, where is the one who was wise? Where's the scribe?

Where's the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? In other words, we know that God has done what he said he would do back in Isaiah because the movers and shakers of the world are noticeably underrepresented within the church. And once again Christian Corinthian Johnny asks why?

Why are the movers and shakers of the world noticeably underrepresented within the church? Paul's answer is that it's because God made salvation accessible through means that the movers and shakers disregard. Verse 21, for since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. The means by which sinners hear the gospel and are saved is the preaching of the gospel and yet to these self-made worldlings who have succeeded in every imaginable way in the material world, the idea of devoting yourself to someone whose life ended in an ignoble execution and who calls you to give up every vestige of prestige and honor to follow him is silly.

It contradicts every principle that they've adhered to in order to become the rock stars that they are. Corinthian Johnny continues, but why? Why do the movers and shakers disregard God's means of salvation? And Paul gives the answer in verse 22, they disregard God's means of salvation because they love signs and wisdom instead. Signs and wisdom. They love either the supernatural, which is signs, or the rational, which is wisdom.

They love the incredible or the credible. They love the inexplicable or the fully explainable, but not Christ crucified, not that. A man dying on a cross is not sensational and God dying on a cross is irrational. So both Jews and Greeks stumble over this notion of Christ crucified. I was thinking about these two stumbling blocks last week.

You know, they're very different from each other. Sensationalism on the one hand, rationalism on the other, and yet when it comes to objecting to God's appointed means of salvation, these two are the very best of friends. I began analyzing my own tendencies. Am I more prone to sensationalism or to rationalism? Am I missing God's ordinary means of working in my life because I'm too busy looking for miracles, or perhaps because I'm too busy missing the miracles? Perhaps we find ourselves more prone to the the Greek error of rationalism. Maybe we find ourselves given more to the Jewish error of sensationalism. Either way, it is an obscuring of God's exclusive and gracious means of salvation, which is simply this, the preaching of Christ crucified. So the cross contradicts our lust for sovereign control, since its efficacy depends on the sovereign decree of God. The cross contradicts our prized sources of truth, the wise, the scribe, the debater of this age, the miraculous, because its efficacy comes from God's appointed means of grace, the preaching of Christ crucified.

But then notice, thirdly, that the cross is efficacious for God's supreme glory. We see this in verses 24 through 31. Paul says in verse 24, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. Paul's assertion here is that the cross is a display of supernatural power to the miracle loving Jew and a demonstration of deep abiding wisdom to the knowledge loving Greek. It's supernatural and rational, but only, Paul says, to those whom God has called.

Corinthian Johnny again, but why? Why is God's means of salvation only effective for those whom God has chosen? And Paul's answer is because God wants to expose the foolishness and weakness of sinful man by choosing to save the unlikely.

Look at verse 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, 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. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are.

I mean, just look around this room tonight. Not many of us are amazingly famous or well-known or wealthy or powerful. We're pretty much just a bunch of ordinary folks, yet we're the very sort of folk that God delights to save, just plain ordinary people. Now, this doesn't mean God never saves people who are, humanly speaking, great. He does.

He absolutely does. In fact, that's Paul's point over in 1 Timothy 2, where he tells us to pray for kings and all those who were in high positions because God desires all types of people from all social strata to be saved. But if you were to chart the different types of people that God saves, you'd find a whole lot more people in the ordinary column than in the powerful and rich and famous column. Now, our pride is so sneaky that it's possible for us to hear this truth that God likes to save the unlikely and perverted and turn it into grounds for pride of a different sort.

That's what we do. There are some who turn this truth into a reason to despise people of greatness, to look down their noses at folks who are rich or talented or well known. One preacher said, let's bear in mind that it was said to the Corinthians, who were puffed up with pride even though they had no great distinction and no reason to be puffed up. God wasn't telling them these things to puff them up. He was telling them these things not so that the illiterate man would gloat over the literate man. He was reminding them that outside of Christ, both the illiterate and the literate, the weak and the great, are on equal footing before God. Therefore, both ought to walk humbly before God. Folks, the church is not overwhelmed with an abundance of noble and powerful and scholarly people.

On the contrary, we are quite ordinary by the world standards. And this brings us to the last why, the ultimate reason behind all the other reasons. Why does God want to save the unlikely? And here it is, verse 29, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

God chooses who he will save, God chooses how he will save, and he does it all so that he alone gets the glory. The question that often gets asked here is, does this make God an egomaniac? Is he really so obsessed with his own greatness or consumed with self doubt that he needs affirmation from us?

Absolutely not. And the fact that we have a difficult time not seeing it that way says more about us and our insecurities and imperfections than it does about God's. The fact is, God is perfect within himself and needs nothing from any of us.

Acts 17 says, God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by hands, made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. For in him we live and move and have our being. Now we can't comprehend that degree of perfection and self-sufficiency.

We can't. We can only accept it as true because God says it's true, and if it's true, then it means God's motive in demanding all the glory and salvation has nothing to do with an inferiority complex on his part, or self-pity, or unwarranted self-centeredness. It has everything to do with its effect on those outside of himself, its effect on us. Folks, God doesn't need our praise in order to be great or feel great about himself. We need to praise him in order to feel the greatest joy and know the deepest love and experience the fullest life. His demand that he get glory and salvation is not because he lacks any glory.

It's because we lack an awareness of his greatness, and therefore we lack the unspeakable joy that only comes when creatures are fully given to the worship of their perfect and all-glorious Creator. When I was in second grade, my sisters and I, along with a couple of other families, rode to school in a carpool, and one particular morning our parents had to be somewhere early. They had left the home early, leaving my older sister in charge until the carpool parent arrived. Well, she never came, and so my sister decided that she would take control of the situation and marched all of her siblings back into the house to do school, and then she appointed herself as the teacher. Well, I was not too keen on that idea, so I let my displeasure be known. I was, I guess, how old is a second grader?

Eight, and so she was probably like 11, you know, not old enough to be in charge yet. So I made it my goal to make Heather's teaching experience as miserable as possible. I cut up. I had an attitude. I disrupted her attempts to redeem the day. I did things that I wouldn't think of doing had I been in my real class with my real teacher.

Now, I'm not trying to justify my behavior at all. It was wrong, but the reason I would obey and respect my real teacher when I wouldn't obey and respect my sister, other than the fact that I was just being a knucklehead, was that my sister was my sister. My perception of the situation as a wise second grader was that she was on a power trip and just like being in charge. I realized looking back, she really did love her younger siblings and that my parents really had left her in charge, so shame on me, but my real teacher, from my perspective, wasn't motivated by a need to be in charge.

She actually was in charge. She came by her authority honestly, and so her motive in requiring obedience and respect was not so that she could wallow in her power, but so that she could help her students learn. She didn't need us to be in her class. In fact, she would often kick us out of her class.

If we were being disrupted, she'd make us go stand in the hallway. We wanted to be in her class because she made it clear that her rules and her instruction and her standards of behavior had our best interests in mind and were all for our good. Now take that analogy and increase my second grade teacher's motives and character to perfection. Multiply her love for her students by infinity and you begin to see that God's demand for praise and glory, for obedience and devotion, for repentance and contrite-ness of heart are not coming from the heart of a pathetic God who feels dejected and overlooked. They come from a God who is perfectly content and sufficient within Himself and yet graciously desires to share the exquisite delights that can only be found in His presence. God makes the cross efficacious in such a way as to bring supreme glory to Himself and the beauty of it all is that as we learn to live and yearn for God to have that glory, we become more and more gratified in Him. This brings us finally to chapter 2 in which Paul spells out the implications of these principles that he's just articulated in chapter 1 and he applies them specifically to the task of evangelism.

If the cross is made efficacious by God's sovereign decree and by God's gracious means and for God's supreme glory, then how should we, for example, evangelize? Paul answers this question first five verses of chapter 2 and his answer is that we should faithfully insist upon using God's means for God's glory. Or to put it in the negative, we should avoid using the world's means for our own glory. First, we should avoid using the world's means.

Verse 1 says and I when I came to you brothers did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom for I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. In our evangelism, in our bearing witness to the gospel, in our seeking to bring glory to God through faithfully living exemplary Christian lives before a watching world, we need to intentionally avoid the temptation to dress the gospel in the world's clothes. And we were dressing the gospel in the world's clothes whenever we cater to the world's tastes and values in order to make the message of the cross less offensive and more attractive.

We fail when the world's way of doing things becomes our standard of effectiveness. For example, the world loves fame. We prize the world prizes fame and so when famous people are converted to Christ we perhaps get a little overly excited for all the wrong reasons as if their fame and notoriety adds credibility to the gospel. We ought to rejoice over their conversion but not over the prestige of their social status as if that status makes their their testimony or their witness more effective. We need to remember that it's the message of the cross that converts not high-profile conversions that convert.

It's good when Christian athletes who win the Super Bowl or break the world record at the Olympics give glory to Jesus but it's good because Jesus Christ deserves the glory not because their fame or their success or their public platform somehow adds credibility or effectiveness to the gospel. Paul tells us that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. It's foolishness to them when they read it in the Bible.

It's foolishness to them when they hear it from the rich and famous. Jesus said in Luke 16 that it would be foolishness to them even if someone rose from the dead and bore witness to the gospel. So the gospel witness of a famous person on TV is no more credible or effective than the gospel witness of an obscure Christian next door who will never be interviewed by Good Morning America.

Why? Because the effectiveness of it the power of it comes from the message itself not the person proclaiming the message or the platform from which it is proclaimed. If its effectiveness lies in the message itself then our goal in public witness ought to be clarity of that message first and foremost not attraction not bigness not impressiveness not credibility not pizzazz but clarity. We're not called to peddle the gospel we're called to proclaim the gospel. We're not called to embellish the cross we're called to take up the cross and follow Christ whether or not the world is impressed.

So we should use God's means not the world's means but we should also do it for God's glory not for our own glory. Now we know this of course we shouldn't evangelize for our own glory but how how do we detect and avoid that selfish motive in our proclaiming of the gospel? Well I think we do it by admitting first that it's not the courageousness of my witness that saves. Paul says in verse three, I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling. Even the Apostle Paul had moments of inadequacy and even terror as he sought to fulfill his calling yet he faithfully and simply proclaimed the cross. It wasn't his poise or confidence that persuaded the Corinthians. Likewise it isn't my sense of self-assurance or courage in following Christ that saves people. It's the message of the cross. Furthermore it's not the skillfulness of my witness that saves. Verse four, my speech and my message were not implausible words of wisdom. In other words God doesn't need our skill set.

He gifts us with particular abilities and he uses those abilities but not because he needs them. We're dispensable. Our family spent three years when I was in elementary school in a rural town that had an annual parade every October but the town was so small that there really just weren't enough entries for the parade. So the city manager scrambled to find as many entries as they could to fill out the parade and one of those parade entries was the city trash truck. They were so proud of that trash truck. I remember the first time we watched the parade in disbelief as there came the trash truck with the drivers waving big smiles on their faces. It wasn't even a new trash truck.

It was well used, broken in. Folks we are the trash truck in God's parade. God welcomes us to be a part of it but not because we're something special. We aren't here to flaunt ourselves. We're here to flaunt the cross and the Christ of the cross and the moment we begin to believe that it's our skills or our courage or our charisma that makes the gospel effective, we've just rendered our witness ineffective.

Why? Because we are called to rely solely on God's means for God's glory. Paul concludes with the admission that his preaching was in demonstration of the spirit and of power so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

If his preaching had rested exclusively on the power of eloquence then it could have been overthrown by a superior eloquence. Whatever it takes to get someone saved is what it'll take to keep them saved. And so in proclaiming the cross and in receiving the proclamation of the cross we rely on God's message delivered by God's means and all for his glory.

So we wrap this up. Sometimes we see a principle in Scripture. We can accept it but we aren't sure how it specifically applies in real-life situations.

How do these principles in this text play out in real life? Just very briefly, I think it means that using God's means for God's glory doesn't imply that we have to preach an overly simplistic gospel. There's a street preacher in Charlotte that Steve McCullough has told me about whose gospel presentation is nothing more than just repeating, Jesus loves you, Jesus loves you, over and over and over and over again. You certainly can't accuse him of relying on plausible words of wisdom or of obscuring the gospel behind polished eloquence but neither can you say that his repeating of this slogan is an adequate proclamation of the gospel.

It isn't. The Great Commission, Matthew 28, gives us the scope of the message that we were to proclaim. You know what it says? It says, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them all that I have commanded you. That means in a nutshell that the proclamation of the gospel to which we were called includes anything and everything that the Bible addresses. So avoiding the pitfall of empty rhetoric doesn't mean that you must convey some sort of minimalistic gospel.

No, the gospel we believe and the gospel we proclaim is as deep and as wide as Scripture itself. Nor do these principles imply that all use of rhetorical excellence or style is of no concern. I made the point last week that eloquence is not bad.

Misusing eloquence is bad. There is a right and a proper use of oral communication. What Paul is warning us of in these verses is that the aim of our speech ought to be to clarify the gospel, not to dress it up as if it needs our help. Becoming all things to all people means speaking in terms they can understand, not speaking in terms they want to hear. And there's a radical difference. Finally, and I think most importantly, these principles mean that we need to learn to delight in and rest in the very ordinary ways in which God works.

And this may be the most difficult of all. The temptation which was so prevalent at Corinth and which we face today is to be so concerned with our reputation and the impression we're making that sometimes we begin to measure our faithfulness in terms of other people's reception of us. But church, we're not called to preach ourselves.

God never commissioned us to meet a quota. We are called to rest in the sovereign purposes of God by using the gracious means that God has given us and all so that God's power and God's mercy and God's greatness is put on display. God's means for God's glory.

That's how the kingdom is built. Let's pray. Father, we have no doubt that you are omnipotent, but we're so often tempted to act like you need our assistance. We confess that those attitudes are wrong and betray a spirit of self-sufficiency in us. Lord, you are the potter, so help us to act like the clay that we are. And as we do, may we find immeasurable joy and confidence and purpose in you in order that we who boast might boast in you. I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.