WWUTT 1426 Through the Foolishness of the Message Preached (1 Corinthians 1:21)

1 Corinthians 1 .21 says For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know

God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe, when we understand the text.

This is when we understand the text studying God's word to reach all the riches of full assurance in Christ.

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Pastor Gabe Hughes. Thank you Becky. We come back to our study of 1 Corinthians chapter 1 and once again

I'm going to be reading verses 18 through 25 out of the Legacy Standard Bible the

Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth. For the word of the cross is foolishness 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 cleverness of the clever

I will set aside. Where is the wise man? 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 through its wisdom did not come to know

God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

For indeed Jews ask for signs, and Greeks search for wisdom, but we preach

Christ crucified, to Jews a stumbling block, and to Gentiles foolishness.

But to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God.

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

Now in last week's lessons I had Wednesday titled that we were covering 1st

Corinthians 119, well that was Tuesday's lesson, Wednesday was actually verse 20. So I've corrected that and we're up to verse 21 today where it says, for since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not come to know

God, God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

When you came to salvation, when you came to faith in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, for fellowship with God, for everlasting life with him in glory, when you came to faith in Jesus, it was not because you discerned for yourself the right answer.

I'm going to lay out all of these options here, I'm going to weigh the evidence in which one it seems to me to be the most right, the most correct, that's the one that I'm going to believe in.

That's not how you came to faith. You may have some testimony that sounds like that, like for example you take somebody like Lee Strobel, he actually set out as a journalist for a newspaper in Chicago, he set out to disprove

Christianity and over the course of that process it turned out to him to be correct.

So he became a Christian, he went from being an atheist, a skeptic to a Christian because he tested the evidence and found out that Christianity was absolutely true.

So he has a testimony that's like that, but it's not because he did that that he came to faith in Jesus Christ.

Nobody has come to faith in Christ that way because they weighed the evidence and Christianity seemed to be the most right answer to them and that's why they came to faith.

You came to faith because the Holy Spirit changed your heart to believe in the message preached.

That's how you came to faith. You were in rebellion against God, you were going your own way, you desired the things of your flesh, you were going after the ways of this world.

That's who you were in rebellion against God before you knew

Jesus Christ. I mean Paul says exactly who we were before Christ in Ephesians 2, 1 and 3, and you were once dead in your sins and your transgressions in which you once walked.

Following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

That's who we were before we came to faith in Christ. But God, Paul goes on to say there, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us didn't leave us dead in our sins, but made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace and kindness toward us in Christ Jesus, that God would get all the glory for this.

Not that we get credit for anything. And then we have verses eight and nine for by grace you have been saved through faith.

And this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not a result of works so that no one may boast.

You cannot boast in the fact that you did all this work and you came to this answer.

And therefore this is true that I have discerned this and I have come about this wisdom on my own.

No, it is not about you. It is not to your praise and glory.

It is all to the praise of his glorious grace, which Paul said back in Ephesians chapter one, this is not for our glory.

It is for his. And even Christ who gave himself for us to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Even he did this to the glory of God, the father Philippians two eleven.

So we are also to do all things to the glory of God. It is not for ourselves. It is not that we may boast in anything.

Let our boasting be in the Lord. Let it be in God only. For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know

God. You did not come to know God through worldly ways, means wisdom, smartness, studying, research, weighing the evidence, testing the facts.

That's not how you came to faith in Christ. There are people who have never done those things. They have never researched the evidence.

All they heard was a gospel proclaimed and they were convicted in their heart of what they heard the preacher saying or whoever it was, it was sharing the gospel with them.

Somebody sitting in their living room telling them you're a sinner. Christ is a savior. Just saying that much convicted of heart.

Well, you're right. I am. I'm a wretched man. I've rebelled against God. How can

I be saved? And that person says, believe in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

And that's as much gospel as they got. And they were convicted in their heart and they turned from sin and they believed in Jesus and they're saved, not having weighed any evidence.

And maybe over the course of their life, they've never done that. They've never done research and looked into history and studied languages and all this other kind of, they've never done any of that, but they've read their

Bible and they've come from the words of scripture to believe exactly what was said.

And the spirit through this word convicts hearts, changes minds, makes fellow heirs of the kingdom of God.

This is the, this is the work of God in the life of a person. And it all comes through the word, right?

Nobody comes to faith by any other way, but through the message of God. Romans 10, 17 says, faith comes by hearing and hearing through the word of Christ.

So it's when you've heard the word spoken or read, you know, open up your Bible and read it and the spirit helps you to understand it changes your heart that you may know it convicts you of sin, desiring the holiness of God, growing in sanctification.

All of these things being works of the spirit. It's when this work is done in a person's life that they come to faith.

It's not by worldly ways. It's not why what, it's not by what we see other people doing whenever they examine evidence or, or even you, you know, people putting forth a particular narrative, even it's, it's not some sort of a cultural stigma sort of a thing where I see everybody else in the culture doing it.

So I'm going to do it too. It's not by worldly ways. It's not by through the world's wisdom.

It is through God that we've come to faith in Jesus Christ. For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know

God. The way the world goes about doing things would lead them away from God, not to God.

Because remember what James said that friendship with the world is enmity with God and saying you adulterous people, when he's confronting

Christians who are trying to be friends with the world and thinking that they can have their Christianity at the same time.

Paul later to the Corinthian saying that you cannot dine at the table of God and at the table of demons.

There is no fellowship with light and darkness. And I just read yesterday in church.

In fact, first John two 15 do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the father is not in him for all that is in the world.

The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life is not from the father, but is from the world.

So you go about doing things the world's way, and it's not going to lead you to God. It's going to lead you away from God because that's who you were before you came to Christ.

Anyway, you were of the world. You were doing worldly things. The world and its wisdom is never going to get to God.

We've studied Romans chapter three when we were going through our Roman series last year.

How long did we take in that Roman series? I don't quite remember anyway. So we were in Romans three verses 10 through 12.

There is no one who does good, not even one person. No one seeks for God.

If there's no one that does good, then wouldn't you agree that seeking for God would be a good thing?

That turning from sin and believing in Jesus Christ, wouldn't that be good? Of course it would be, but no one is good.

No one does righteousness, not even one person. None are righteous. We have all sinned and rebelled against God.

Romans 3, 23, four, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, but we are justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus to be received by faith.

As it goes on to say in verses 24 and 25. So we have all sinned.

We can't do anything good. There is no one who does anything righteous. Seeking after God would be a good thing, but we don't do that.

Being of the sin nature of Adam, being worldly minded the way that we are, no one does good.

So no one seeks after God. Those two thoughts go hand in hand with one another. Since there's no one that does good, there is no one who seeks

God. We don't seek for God. He sought us out and he sent somebody to preach the gospel to us that we might turn from our wicked ways and believe in Jesus Christ and so be saved.

And it is the sheep who listened to the voice of the good shepherd, as Jesus talks about in John chapter 10.

And he previously said to the Jews, why is it that you do not believe in what I say?

It's because you are not of my sheep. The sheep hear the shepherd's voice and they follow.

They don't follow a stranger's voice. We hear the voice of the good shepherd and we believe it because God has so changed our hearts to believe it from being worldly minded, from going after the ways of this world.

And now we go after the ways of God. So this is the first half of verse 21 that we've explored here.

For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not come to know God. Now look at this next part.

God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

We have come to faith in Christ because of the foolishness of this message message that was said to us.

Now, that almost seems very irreverent to say it that way, right? We're calling the gospel foolish.

Well, in the mind, in the minds of everybody who is in the world, yes, in the worldly minded, they don't see the gospel as being anything wise, anything that allows, which is why it is through the spirit that we come to believe it, not through our examination of this.

Now, now let me back up on that and say, if you were to go through the Bible and you were to examine everything that's in there, none of it is a lie.

So you're not going to come up with anything that reveals this stuff in scripture is a myth.

It's absolutely true. So don't hear me saying that way. It doesn't matter if it's true or not. Well, it does matter because Jesus said in John 14, six,

I am the way, the truth and the life. And he said, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

So the truth absolutely does matter. What I'm saying to you is that it is through these worldly ways of examining things for yourself and making sure the

Bible passes your test. You did not come to faith because the Bible passed your test.

You came to faith because God changed you.

The message of the gospel was preached to you and you believe it because God intervened in the course of your life.

But God, right? Just like Ephesians two, four. But God did this to the praise of his glorious grace, to the glory of God, the father that none of us may boast, but we boast only in Christ.

So it's absolutely true. It is facts that have been presented to us when we hear the gospel.

But you can put faith in it now. You don't have to go weigh the evidence, find out if this is true, and then

I'll believe it. It might be too late when you do that. If you have to wait to go through all this stuff and I got to get my test tubes out and I got to run my experiments and I've got to do peer reviews and you go through all that process and all that work and you might die before you get to the end of that.

Before you come to the conclusion for the Bible, the gospel passes all your tests and then finally you can sit back and go, okay, now

I can say conclusively before all my friends without looking like an idiot that the

Bible is true because I've tested all this and I mean, okay, none of your friends are going to be impressed by that because they're all worldly and you're a

Christian. And once, you know, kind of going back to what I was saying before, if you, if you wait too long, it could be too late.

God in his mercy saved you now, not two or three years after you heard the gospel, but when you heard it and believed you are saved through the foolishness of the message preached foolishness in the world's eyes, certainly not in God's eyes.

It is the greatest wisdom that we could ever behold. The wonderful workings of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ, all the things that God did from the time that Adam and Eve sinned in the garden.

Well, yeah, God was working way before that too. Absolutely. But let's just start there after the foolishness of Adam and Eve going after this thing that God told them not to eat from listening to the serpent instead of obeying

God, Adam listening to his wife, instead of leading her, being the head of his household, the way that he was supposed to be.

Since then, God has been working to bring about the salvation of his people to cleanse us from all unrighteousness and present us holy and blameless before him.

This is a work that he had set out even before the foundation of the world. But we see throughout redemptive history,

God doing this and you read about it in the Bible from Genesis all the way up through the gospels.

It's an incredible thing to behold how God was working in all of these ways. And you will spend the rest of your life reading your

Bible, marveling at God's work of salvation in your life, in the life of any unbeliever to make them a believer.

This is the gracious working of God. We will marvel at that. So it is an incredible wisdom, an incredible work that God has done.

And as I've heard James White say, when we enter into eternity, we could spend all eternity marveling at all the little tiny things that God did throughout redemptive history to bring about the salvation of his elect.

And we could do that for the rest of eternity and never come to the end of it. Just how intricately

God has put all of these things together to bring about the salvation of those who would believe.

It's foolishness in the eyes of the world, but it is the greatest wisdom that could be found in the universe.

And it's through the foolishness of the message preached that God was well -pleased to save those who believe because God did it.

Not you. God was well -pleased to save those who come to faith.

There was one time I was sitting around a fire pit with some friends of mine, family and friends that were sitting around in this backyard, and we're just talking about anything and everything.

A few people were drinking. I was not partaking in any drinks, but one of my family members was.

He got a little bit tipsy, still able to hold a decent conversation though, and he came and sat down next to me and he said, so you're a pastor.

And I said, yeah. And we started talking about that. I started sharing the gospel with him. Something that he said at one point in his life, he did believe, but he doesn't believe it now.

And I asked him, after sharing the gospel with him, talking about his sin, talking about Christ as Savior, I asked him, why don't you believe this?

And he said, well, I just, I haven't come to the conclusion that it's true yet. And I said, well, it is.

I mean, it's lasted 2000 years. So what are you waiting for? And he said, well,

I just, I have more research that I got to do. There's things that I have to look at and, and I just,

I need to know that it's the right answer. I need to know that it's correct. He was a very intellectual guy, would later go on to pursue a doctorate in his particular field.

But so, so very heady kind of a guy. He always wanted to test the evidence and always wanted to know what the right answer was.

He hung out with a lot of guys that were unbelievers. So he felt like I need to look impressive in front of my friends.

I can't just believe this by blind faith. I have to test it and I have to know that it's correct. Now, this man was also a husband and a father.

And I said to him, you know, it's noble that you want to seek out the truth. That's fine. But just understand something here.

You may not have a lot of time and you have a wife and children to think of. And we're also talking about eternity here.

We're not just talking about you accepting a new religious belief tomorrow so that you can have a new moral code and a new ethical interest.

That's not what we're not what we're discussing here. We're talking about your eternal soul. When you die, you will stand before God in judgment.

How will you know that you will hear God welcome you into his eternal perfect kingdom and not cast you from his presence into an eternal hell?

And whatever you decide here could have an impact on your wife and your children.

I said, in fact, it will. It will have an impact on your family. This is not just your soul you're thinking about here, although that would be enough.

We're also considering the souls of the members of your family who will follow where you lead them so you cannot just continue to shrug this off as being no big deal.

You've got to think about this and you've got to come to a decision soon. And he thanked me.

He said, you're right. You're right. I do. I can't just continue messing around with this. I have to come to a decision soon.

I did not see him the next day as our like family gatherings continued over the course of that week.

I did not ever see him again. And none of his family to this day, none of his family is following Christ.

But I pray that a day is coming in which they will again, a very intelligent, a very heady guy just had to test everything to know that it's true.

But his testing did not bring him to the right answer because his testing was of himself.

It was that Christianity had to meet his requirements, not that Christianity actually proved itself to be true.

This is not an easy message to believe. Christianity is not an easy message to believe that Jesus is

God who became human flesh, who was born of a virgin, who dwelt among us and lived perfectly and sinlessly.

This is the creator who became incarnate man himself and then allowed himself to be crucified by the very people that he created in his own image.

He lived a poor man. He was not born in a palace. He was treated like a criminal, though he had done nothing wrong, allowed himself to be crucified on a cross.

He gave his own life, was buried in a tomb, and he rose again.

He did all these incredible miracles that defy science and logic and reason, according to what scripture says.

Then he rises from the dead. And even the Greeks said the dead don't rise. So they didn't believe the stories of the resurrection.

He appeared to more than 500 brothers over a span of 40 days before he ascended into heaven before their very eyes.

And angels appeared to those men and said, the same way that you have seen him go into heaven is the same way he's going to go.

He's going to come back now, go into Jerusalem. And they did. And they received the power of the Holy Spirit. And they were able to speak in other languages that they did not previously know.

Does any of this sound like a logical reason that you would just automatically believe? Of course not.

It defies what we know in our natural minds. And that's why Paul gets to this point that he makes later in chapter two, verse 14, that the natural man cannot discern spiritual things for they are spiritually discerned.

And we need the Holy Spirit of God in order to know this and believe it. So it is not by worldly wisdom that we came to this.

It's foolishness in our worldly minds. But God was well pleased through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe.

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this good word today. And I pray that it just continues to strengthen our faith hearing this said, that it is not about us.

It's not about what we've done. It's what God has done for us. You even arranged that somebody would come to us and share the gospel with us, that we would believe it and so be saved.

You arranged our own hearts that we might understand what is being said, be convicted of our sin and put faith in this crucified

Savior who has since risen and ascended into heaven and has promised that he's coming back again to judge the world.

And we believe it because you have changed our minds and hearts so that we may believe it.

To you belongs all the praise and the glory forever and ever.

Amen. You can find a complete list of videos, books, devotionals, and other resources online at www .tt