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Amen. If you'll remain standing and open your Bibles, we're going to turn to the first chapter of the book of 1 Corinthians. We're actually going to be reading to the end of the chapter and on into the second chapter today.
We're going to read 1 Corinthians 1 .22 through chapter 2 and verse 5 as the train of thought continues through the break in the chapter. Beginning at verse 22 it says,. 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 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. 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, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.
Our Father and our God, we come to you in Jesus' name, and I thank you for the opportunity to preach yet again. And Lord, I know that it is a fearful thing to step into the pulpit apart from the work of the Spirit, so I pray right now that your Spirit would fill me and use me for this time.
Lord, that you would speak through me by the power of the Spirit and that you would keep my tongue from error. And Lord, that you would open the hearts of the people to hear the truth. And Lord, for those who are believers, that they would be ever more conformed to the image of Christ and for those who have come today and are outside of Christ, that they would be drawn to their knees in humble repentance and faith.
I thank you, God, for the opportunity to preach yet again, and I pray that you would bless it. In Jesus' name, amen. One of the great joys of preaching through books of the Bible, verse by verse, is that you can get a sense of the flow that connects one passage to the next.
You can begin to see the logical connections that the writer is intending to make and ultimately the author, who is the Holy Spirit, is intending to convey. It's important that we realize the Bible is not made up of thousands of tiny sound bites.
It's not a rolling Twitter feed of 140 characters or less of information. The Bible is made up of books that have themes, narratives, backgrounds, contexts that join the message all together. And if all we ever do is look at one verse here and another verse there and another verse over there, it's easy to miss the overarching narrative and cohesive nature and the interdependency of what the Bible says.
For those of you who have been with us, you know, we've been studying Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth. And we've seen in the introduction that he writes and offers a word of thanksgiving for this church, even though, as we're going to see, this church is full of problems and it's full of problem people.
It's full of arrogance. It's full of factions. It's full... Excuse me. Take a sip here. It's full of people who can't talk, evidently. Excuse me. And Paul has made an appeal for unity. He's concerned with the division that is within the church that has led to factions.
And these factions have sought for themselves names of leaders. And one faction says, I follow Paul. And one faction says, I follow Apollos. Another says, I follow Peter. And the really high religious, self-righteous ones say, well, we follow Christ.
And in last week's lesson, we focused on verse 18, where Paul points to the fact that the church should not be divided among itself because the church already has a bigger, more important divide. And that's the divide we have with the world.
The cross is the place that divides the church from the world. And likewise, the cross should be the place that brings the church together rather than a church fragmented among itself. The church should be unified at the foot of the cross.
And as I was examining that text from last week, and I began to read ahead for the text for this week, I noticed a connection in Paul's words. At the midsection of chapter one, in the beginning of chapter two, he makes a statement that brings these two sections together.
And you have to realize the Bible wasn't written with chapter and verse divisions. Paul didn't write, okay, 1 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 1. Those chapter and verse divisions were put in much later. So Paul's train of thought doesn't end at chapter 1 and begin a new train at chapter 2.
It continues on. And I want to show you something in the text, if you would just with me for a moment, go to chapter 1, verse 23. Paul says, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to the Gentiles.
Now hold your finger there and look at chapter 2. If you have to turn a page, I understand, but some of you may be able to just look across or down the page. And you'll see in chapter 2, verse 2, he says, I decided to know nothing among you, except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
So here we have the apostle Paul using very similar language in a very short amount of space, focusing on one thing in particular, and that is Jesus Christ and him crucified. It wasn't enough that Paul make the name of Jesus known.
It wasn't enough that he make the mighty works of Jesus known or the mighty deeds of Jesus known. No, he wanted to make known that this Christ was crucified. And he tells us that it was for that very reason that his message was rejected.
He said, the Jews wanted signs and the Greeks wanted wisdom, but we came with a message which satisfied neither. We came with the message of a crucified savior. And that message was rejected. Now, a little background might help us on this to understand what Paul is saying here when he talks about the Jews seeking a sign and the Greeks seeking wisdom.
Paul separates the world into Jews and Gentiles several times in his writings, and he identifies himself as a Jew. We know he's a Hebrew of Hebrews, according to Philippians 3 .5. And yet he identifies himself also as the apostle to the Gentiles in Romans 11, verse 13.
So even though he makes a distinction between the two groups, Jews and Gentiles, there's one thing that unites them. They both need Christ. By the way, and I hope this isn't a surprise or a debate for anyone, Jewish people don't get to go to heaven just because they're Jewish.
Jewish people need Jesus as much as Gentiles do. You have to understand that. People who are outside of Christ, it doesn't matter what their blood type is or their DNA or whether or not they are actual offspring of Abraham.
Paul tells us that very clearly. And the Jews of Paul's day sought signs, according to the apostle Paul, and to them Jesus was a stumbling block. That word stumbling block in the Greek is skandalon. Skandalon is where we get the English word scandal.
A scandal was the trigger that caused the trap to spring. It was the wire that caused the person to fall. It was that which set off the event which caused the destruction. It was what caused someone to fall into disaster.
So the message of the cross to the Jewish person was a trap. It was a snare. It was dangerous because their assumption was that the Messiah was to be a conqueror. The Messiah was to be a warrior. He would come with a rod of iron.
He would destroy the oppressors of Israel. And some modern Jews still hope for that. I heard a man back in Christmas when I was preaching through Isaiah 53. I listened to the argument of a Jewish man who was not a Christian.
He was a Jew and he was arguing why Jesus couldn't be the Messiah because the Messiah would break the teeth of the enemies of Israel and Jesus didn't do that. So he can't be the Messiah. He wasn't a conqueror.
He wasn't a warrior and thus he wasn't the Messiah. One might ask well what sign were the Jews looking for? Because it says they seek signs. Didn't Jesus give them signs? Well in a sense yes. I mean he fed 5 ,000 people.
He healed the sick. He raised the dead. He turned water into wine. He did some pretty miraculous things. But he also said to them very clearly an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign. And the sign that would be most public and would receive the most attention would be the sign of Jonah.
And he's referring of course to his resurrection. That very sign which they rejected. That very sign which they didn't want was the sign that was given. Jesus wasn't willing to satisfy their wicked desire for a magic show.
He wasn't willing to satisfy their wicked want to have their fascinations addressed. Instead he gave them the gospel. He called them to repentance and he went to the cross. He died and for that they saw him as a failure.
Can't be the Messiah if he dies on a cross. A Roman cross. They wanted signs of power over oppression. Instead Jesus gave them a demonstration of power over sin. They didn't want that. They thought their biggest problem was Rome and the oppression of Rome.
But their biggest problem was their sin and their separation from God and they didn't recognize that. So the Jews sought a savior who would conquer their earthly oppressors and in their minds Jesus just doesn't qualify.
And the Gentiles on the other hand wanted wisdom. They wanted philosophy. You know what philosophy means? The love of wisdom. Philos in the Greek is love and sophos is wisdom, philosophy, the love of wisdom.
They desire a message that would excite their intellect. Their heroes were men like Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato. They were reaching for that elusive wisdom. J. Vernon McGee says this. He compares philosophy like this.
He said a philosophy is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat who's not there. Because they're always reaching. They're always looking for something. What did it say the apostle Paul when he went into Athens?
He says they were always wanting to hear something new. That elusive wisdom. Sounds like today, doesn't it? Always wanting to hear the latest from the latest thinker. Always wanting to hear the latest TED talk or the latest philosophy discussion.
Then comes Paul with a simple message. A message that wasn't clothed in elaborate language. It was a message that was not adorned with the wisdom of the day. It was a simple, primitive, obscene message.
You're sinful. You are because of your sin at enmity with God and your sins are a stench in his nostrils. You are repugnant to him but yet while we were sinners God sent his son to die for an atonement for sin and that atonement was made on a rugged Roman cross and now God has commanded all men everywhere to repent and trust in that sacrifice that was made to bring that atonement.
That's not Greek wisdom and that's not Jewish philosophy or religiosity. It's a simple, profane message and neither the Jews nor the Greeks were willing to receive it. Essentially, Paul is saying that for both the Jews and the Gentiles, a crucified savior, listen to this clearly because this is the thesis of today, for the Jews and the Gentiles that are in Paul's view, a crucified savior wasn't enough for them.
A crucified savior just wasn't enough and this leads me to the the question of the sermon, the question for your hearts, the question for today is this, is a crucified savior enough for you? As I was reading this passage, one word stuck out in my mind and I actually used it for the title.
The word that stuck out in my mind was demand because if again you read verse 23 or rather verse 22 of chapter 1, it says Jews demand signs. There was a demand on behalf of Paul's hearers that his message didn't satisfy.
There was a demand from the Jews for signs. There was seeking or demanding from the Gentiles for wisdom. Paul brought them neither. He refused to meet their demands. Instead, he brought them a message that they desperately needed but also desperately didn't want.
So my question to you this morning and this is sort of moving toward the application, what are you demanding that's keeping you from the foot of the cross? What are you demanding that's keeping you off your knees?
The Jews demanded signs. The Greeks sought wisdom. What is it for you? I got to thinking as I was writing this message about what things people in the world demand and even people in the church. What are the things that people demand without even really realizing it?
I have five things. I didn't give you an outline or anything. You don't have to write them down or anything. But here are the five things. I said people demand these things without even realizing it. Number one, people demand that they be seen as basically good.
People demand that they be seen as good. I honestly do not believe there's a more pervasive belief among people than that they are basically good, at least in their hearts. And people say that, you know what, I don't do the right all the time, but I got a good heart.
No matter a person's behavior, they will claim justification. You go to jail and you talk to men in jail and they'll say, you know what, I know I murdered all those people, but I'm a good man. I got a good heart.
In a recent article by Scientific American, they put out an article that says, yes, we are, in fact, good. That was the title of the article. And they argued that because of certain altruistic acts that human beings are able to accomplish, that those prove that we're good.
Not too many people claim to be perfect, but you get men talking and they will proclaim their own goodness. The Bible says so. They'll argue with a passion their own goodness, and they demand that it be recognized.
The second thing people demand is they demand that their opinions be taken into consideration. And that may seem like an odd point, but consider what I mean. People demand to be heard. Even when they know little to nothing about a subject, people feel very entitled to have their opinions heard and even validated.
Never is this so obvious that when it comes to the subject of God, people make claims about divine truth with nothing except their own vain opinions to justify them. Think about the things people say with no justification from scripture, yet they proclaim them as confidently as if they were a scholar.
They say God wouldn't send anyone to hell. God doesn't care if you attend church. God doesn't really care if you live in habitual sin. God doesn't care if you believe or what you believe, so long as you believe something and you're sincere.
Oftentimes people justify sin by saying, well God wouldn't want me to be unhappy, so I'm going to do this because it makes me happy. This is an attempt to justify one's own opinions because of the demand that God has to hear what I'm saying and he's got to validate my opinion.
Third thing, people demand that their works be seen as meritorious. People demand that heaven is a reward for what I did in this life. I mean I do funerals all the time. I really do and I hear people all the time, they were so good, certainly they're in heaven right now.
Certainly they're in heaven because of what they did. I'll never forget the conversation I had with a man. I was sitting in his living room and he said, I just don't understand how a death row inmate who's killed a lot of people and is a terrible person can believe in Jesus and be saved and go to the same heaven I get after all the good I've done.
Now what did he expect? He expects, nay he demands that God merit his works. No understanding of grace at all. No appreciation for it. I certainly must be bound for heaven. Look at how I raised my kids.
Look at how hard I did. I went to work every day. I never missed a bill. I never missed a payment. I had a credit score of 800. I was I was living the dream. Number four, people demand that they be able to come to God on their own terms.
This one's hugely pervasive. Rather than being made in the image of God, people want to make God in their image. In fact, Voltaire said that. He said, in the beginning, God created man in his image. And ever since then, we've been trying to return the favor.
Men want the ability to place demands on God's will. They want to be able to feel like God thinks like I do. God believes like I do. God is going to address the issue the way I would. And I get to come to God on my own terms.
And when it comes to coming to him, they believe that they should get to set the rules. You've heard this, you've heard people say this. I set the rules on how I come to God. And they might not use those words, but they've said things like that.
I determine. Number five, and finally, very similar to the last one, but a little different. People demand that God receive whatever kind of worship they provide. People demand God is going to receive whatever kind of worship I provide.
And I've heard people say, I can worship God just as good in a fishing boat as I can in a church pew. In fact, there's a famous internet meme that went around and it said that religion is sitting in church thinking about fishing and relationship is sitting in a boat fishing, thinking about God.
And doesn't that sound great? Except God didn't prescribe worship in a fishing boat. Now, can you worship in a fishing boat? Yes. But God prescribes the gathering of the saints. God prescribes worship to be done in community.
God prescribes coming to church, folks. Forsake not the assembling of yourselves together. It's in there, but it's not just coming to church. It's God's way of worship. Beloved, I'm going to tell you, you look up the story of Nadab and Abihu, and if that don't scare you, you know who Nadab and Abihu were?
Leviticus chapter 10. They were the sons of Aaron. Aaron was the high priest. Nadab and Abihu were priests working in the tabernacle, and they decided they were going to worship God on their terms. They were going to worship God according to their way, not his way.
And the Bible says in the King James Version that they offered a strange fire before the Lord. Now, the later translations say unauthorized fire. We don't know what it was, but whatever they did was not according to the prescription of Almighty God.
And the Bible says the fire of the temple came out and consumed them. And you know what Moses said to Aaron as Aaron stood there looking at the dead corpses of his two sons? He said, God has said, among those who approach me, I will be seen as holy.
God sets the terms for worship, not us. That's the demand, folks. Everybody wants to bring a demand before God. God is the one who sets the terms. So when the Jews demand signs and the Greeks demand wisdom, God provides neither because they are not the rule setters.
In the face of all of our demands, there stands a crucified Savior. In the face of all of our demands, a crucified Savior forces us to understand these things. We are not good. Our opinions do not change the truth.
Our works are woefully insufficient. God appoints the terms for our relationship, and God sets the standard for the worship he will receive. That is God's prerogative. And Jesus stands in contradiction to our demands.
The Jews had their demands. The Greeks had their demands. Jesus didn't meet either. So what demands have you brought today? What unrighteous demand are you clinging to that's keeping you from trusting him?
What ungodly expectation are you using to salve your conscience and keep you from repentance? I remind you, it's not you who sets the demand. It's God. If you came today with demands set on God, you have it backwards.
If you demand for God to see you as good, know that he won't. If you demand that your opinions influence the truth, know that they can't. If you demand that your works be seen as meritorious, know they never will.
If you demand that God come to you on your terms, know that that's not how he works. And if you demand that he receive worship according to your standard, know that you've got it backwards. You're in no place to make demands.
That role belongs to God. And his demand is thus, repent and trust the Savior. He may be a stumbling block to the Jews. He may be foolishness to the Greeks, but there is no other name under heaven given among men by which you must be saved.
Let's pray. Father, I thank you for your word. I thank you for your truth. I thank you, Lord, that you have created us and that you have provided for us a way of salvation through your son, Jesus Christ, by repentance and faith.
We know, oh, God, that there is no other way of salvation. There's no other person through whom we must be saved. There is no other way to you except through him. So I pray today, Lord, I pray, Lord, that we would not set demands on you that are wrong.
In fact, I pray that we wouldn't set demands on you at all, but that we would understand that you are the one who sets the demands. You are the one who sets the standard. You are the one who says that you have commanded all men everywhere to repent.
Lord, if there are those here today who know not Christ, maybe they've been in church for a long time. Lord, maybe they have confessed you with their mouth, but not received Christ in their hearts. Maybe they have not been born again.
Lord, may today be that day. May today be the day that you reach down into the muck and mire of their sin, reach down, pick them up, wash them clean in the blood of the lamb and give them the gift of the Holy Spirit, whereby they are regenerated unto life and come to faith in the sun.
And Lord, if there be that person, may it be that that person not hold that in themselves, but let it be known that Christ has changed their life. And Father, for those who know Christ, Lord, may we never set a demand on you.
But Lord, may we understand that you are the one who sets the term. And may we understand that you are God and we are not. You are God and there is no other. You are God and there is none like unto you.
Lord, draw us close to you. In Jesus name. Amen. Well, let's stand and sing as we prepare for communion.