From the Spirit

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Don Filcek; 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 From the Spirit

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You're listening to the podcast of Recast Church in Matawan, Michigan. This week, Pastor Don Filsick preaches from his sermon series titled
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First Corinthians, Sinful Church, Powerful Gospel. Let's listen in. Paul is writing a good chunk of First Corinthians to correct the arrogance of the elites who are seeking to marginalize the common folks like you and me.
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But this trend has been around all along, and it's a trend that is alive and well today.
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How many of you have ever been on YouTube? I gotcha. Yeah. No, really, raise your hand.
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I just kind of want to see how many of you are honest. Okay. Gotcha.
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YouTube is full of videos of people claiming to have unlocked the secret code, whatever the secret code is.
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You can find them. They are clever. They have found the secret, and they need you to just click the like and then click the little bell and subscribe, right?
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That's what they need you to do, but they found the secrets. There are tons of people online who are ready to tell you the date
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Jesus is going to return, for example. Or they know the right way, the secret way, the correct
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God -given way to run a church. Or they somehow have been able to tie together the moon landing hoax,
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Epstein's death, and the seventh week of the book of Daniel somehow in one cohesive whole to be able to figure everything out, right?
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You're laughing because you've seen them. So, we're about to read a secondary argument against those kinds of divisions where people are going all over saying,
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I like this guy, I like this guy, I found the secret wisdom, I've got the secret knowledge, and everybody needs to come to me for that.
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And an argument against that kind of division that's going on in the church of Corinth. So, so far, Paul has argued that they ought to follow no teacher but only the teaching of Jesus Christ, only that which is revealed by the
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Spirit through the Word. After all, Jesus was the one crucified for us, right?
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And Paul has said, I wasn't crucified, Apollos wasn't crucified for you, Peter wasn't crucified for you, but only
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Jesus. So, why would you follow other people? Follow the crucified Son of God.
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Further, Paul has argued that we have only one simple message of power to offer to the world around us, only one real uniting factor that brings the church together, and that is the cross of Jesus Christ.
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That is the power of God for salvation. And lastly, last week, we saw that Paul calls the church to unite behind the mission of proclaiming that one simple message of the cross, which is the message to a world that is perishing.
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Now, this week, he's going to add one more simple but profound argument against these divisions.
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We all come to the same message through the same Spirit.
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The Holy Spirit is going to feature prominently in this passage, and this passage stands as a foundational text regarding the revelation of God.
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How do you know? I want to ask you this question. I want you to think about the answer to this question. How do you know?
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And I mean really know anything about God. How do you know?
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We live in a world very different from the Corinthian context. You see, our problem is that people in our world today don't think you can really know anything about God.
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What's the battle cry of our culture? Prove it. Prove it.
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Show me. In Paul's age, the common person assumed you could know a lot about God or the gods, but the truth they thought was elusive, and the deepest knowledge was kept for the privileged, and the educated, and the intelligent, and the wise, and the gods respected people who pursued knowledge, and pursued wisdom, and pursued the higher things.
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And so, that kind of knowledge was preserved for the elites. And Paul is going to suggest that the same level of truth is available to all through the indwelling
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Spirit of God. The way we come to know God is a level playing field, church.
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And this was a radical message in Paul's day and age, but the fact that you can know definitively a message from God at all is indeed a radical message in our day and age.
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Paul's message hits different in 2023, but it still hits really hard.
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And so, open your Bibles, or your devices, or your scripture journals to 1 Corinthians chapter 2, starting in verse 6, and we're going to read all the way to verse 16.
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So, 1 Corinthians 2, 6 through 16. Recast, this is God's holy and precious word, a holy moment for us to take in the very words breathed out by the
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Spirit of God through the Apostle Paul. 1 Corinthians 2, starting in verse 6.
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Yet among the mature, we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age, or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.
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But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.
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None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what
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God has prepared for those who love Him. These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit, for the
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Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts, except the
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Spirit of that person which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God, except the
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Spirit of God. Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.
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And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.
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The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.
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The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.
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For who has understood the mind of the Lord, so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ.
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Let's pray. Father, I thank you for reaching into history, reaching into the hearts and minds of prophets and apostles, through your
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Spirit to inspire the very words that you desire to communicate to humanity, words of life, words of hope, words that bring about real genuine change in individuals, in families, in churches, in communities, in countries, and globally.
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Father, I pray that you would open our eyes to the things that you desire to communicate, of the value of your speech, the value that you are a communicating
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God, who has not left us to just wander about this life and hopeless aim of just the darkness surrounding us.
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And I just can't imagine what it's like to live a life without the knowledge of you, without an understanding that you love us, that you sent your
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Son to die for us, that there is hope beyond this life, and that this isn't all that there is.
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But we can't really wrap our minds around and even imagine what it will be like on the other side of eternity, but we have that hope based on your revelation, based on what you have communicated, based on what you have written.
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And so Father, I pray that from the knowledge of your Word, that even just a little bit of taking this in this morning, the knowledge of your
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Word would fuel us with delight and joy, knowing that we are loved by you, knowing that we are forgiven by you, knowing that we have a secure future in you, that that would be the basis of our worship, the basis of our praise, the center point of our singing, and the fountain from which all of our joy bubbles up in this next week, flowing from a place of forgiveness and wholeness and hope in you.
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Unite us now as we sing these songs together in your Spirit, and it's in the name of Jesus that I pray.
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Amen. Be seated and reorient yourself to this passage in the
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Bible, 1 Corinthians chapter 2, verses 6 through 16. If you lost your place or you don't have that in front of you,
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I encourage you to open up to that so that you've got it on your lap and you can keep referencing it throughout the message.
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If at any time during the message you want to get up and get more coffee, juice, or donuts, take advantage of that back there. You're not going to distract me if you need to get up for any reason, stretch out, or use the restrooms out the barn doors, down the hallway on the left -hand side back there.
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And I want to start off this message with an important public service announcement about the text.
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Our text this morning is one of the most misapplied and misunderstood passages in Scripture. Often people, when they study this or read this at first blush, they end up making the exact opposite argument of what
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Paul is trying to say here. So often throughout this passage, the interpretation has resulted in divisions within the church, misunderstandings, the idea that there is secret knowledge only for the most mature among us, that kind of stuff.
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But what you need to understand is that this functions, this passage we're looking at functions as part of a longer argument that Paul is making against divisions in the church.
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Not for divisions in the church, but against them. And instead it's often, like I said, been used as a divide between spiritually mature and the less mature or something like that.
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Or even the idea that he's driving towards us having access to God through the Spirit. And some people have actually mined down into this text and found what they wanted to find and said, no, no, there's just secret knowledge.
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The best knowledge of God is to get alone and just listen to whatever voices come to your mind until you start thinking
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God -like thoughts or something like that. Or go off into the mountaintop or whatever.
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And as if it's some mystical experience that we're driving for. And people have gone from this text to that when he's saying the exact opposite.
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So, this is not about secret hidden wisdom and those on the inside getting that and then the rest of us left on the outside.
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Not at all. But this passage is one more argument meant to level the playing field of the church.
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The elders of the church, pastors, authors, bloggers, and everyone who gains any understanding in truth about God all come to that knowledge in the same way.
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Either the Spirit has made it known to us and he has revealed it or we are wrong.
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The key to any true knowledge of God is that he tells us. That he reveals it.
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That he discloses to us who he is or we know nothing of him. Nobody gets to the knowledge of God based on their superior intellect or their investigative skills or anything within them that lets them in on the secrets of God.
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And with that disclaimer out of the way, our outline of the text goes like this. Verses 6 through 9 are going to be an explanation of the wisdom of God.
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Verses 10 through 13 is the key to unlocking that wisdom. And then verses 14 through 16 are wisdom and two types of people or wisdom applied to or in light of two types of people.
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So, here at the start of our text, we see the wisdom of God explained. And we take off in verse 6.
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Paul spent a lot of time in the past section of 1 Corinthians speaking fairly harshly against worldly wisdom and contrasting it with the wisdom of God.
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He defined the wisdom of God as the crucified Christ. So, when we talk about the wisdom of God in solving our problems and the wisdom of God applied to rescuing humanity, it is the cross of Christ that is the wisdom of God.
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But the wisdom of this age is a wisdom that is seeking rescue outside of the methods that God has designed.
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Seeking rescue even from things that are lesser evils than the sin that entangles us.
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When we expect the right governmental reforms to usher in a season of utopia, if we can just find the right governmental system, then humanity will start clicking and then we'll get along and then there will be no more wars and then there'll be no more and no more and no more and everything will go fine.
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Or we expect technological breakthroughs to save humanity if we could just get to this higher level of existence through technology or medical breakthroughs that might help us to live forever.
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This is the type of worldly wisdom that we find in our day and age that God would say is foolish.
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If you're putting all your hope in technology, if you're putting all your hope in medical advancements, if you're putting all of your hope in government, does anybody do that?
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It is foolish. It is foolish primarily because it ignores the one problem that God is most concerned to remedy for us.
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The problem we cannot solve for ourselves. Our central problem in our lives, in our communities, in our state, in our government, in our world is what, church?
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Sin is the problem. It follows you wherever you go, whatever government you are under, whatever technology, however long you live.
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How do you know? Sin has followed you and it is in you and you need a remedy.
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We all do. This is why the cross is truly wise, church.
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God's wisdom applied to solving our greatest enemy, our biggest problem.
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God, in His wisdom, set our biggest enemy in His sights and blasted it with the cross of His Son, Jesus Christ. And sin is obliterated for anyone who believes in Jesus and trusts in Him as Savior and Lord.
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Amen? That is our hope, church. But here we see that Paul is not anti -wisdom here in verse 6.
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He is for the right kind of wisdom. He and the apostles were eager to impart wisdom.
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Clearly, in this context, it is God's wisdom and he is eager to apply it to a group of people he calls in the text, mature, that gets so significantly out of whack and misunderstood.
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Here in this one word, early in this paragraph, the word mature. In this word, so much error has crept into understanding what in the world
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Paul is talking about. How can he divide mature and immature within the church? How in the world?
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What are we supposed to do? I mean, are you supposed to take a test and then the elders determine who here is mature and who here is immature?
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And then we give the good stuff. We impart wisdom to those who pass the test.
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Do you see how silly that would be in a church? Is that what Paul was going on about? Of course not. It sounds, of course, to our ears right away like Paul will only teach certain leveled up mature
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Christians the good stuff. Of course, we give wisdom. We give it to the mature, says Paul in verse 6.
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It sounds like the very type of division that he's been speaking so harshly against. And certainly,
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Paul hasn't been saying, don't divide the church over secret knowledge only to say I'm going to give secret knowledge to only the mature among you.
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The word mature needs some definition in this text. It's a word that can be translated and it's very vital when you dig into the
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Greek and you understand what these words mean. Some of the translations I love, some of them I don't, on the basis of an understanding of how the word was used in common
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Greek during the time of the writer, it can be translated perfect, completed, or arrived at adulthood.
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That's where the word mature gets in there. Perfect, complete, or arrived at adulthood.
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And I am not alone in my understanding that the word mature here as used by Paul means Christian.
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It means Christian. If you're a Christian, then you are in this category of mature here in the text.
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Yes, we give wisdom to those who are mature in Christ, to those who are perfected and being perfected in Christ, to those who are complete.
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The imagery, by the way, of salvation is that it's done for you. You are complete if you are in Christ.
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If you put your faith and trust in Him, then it will all be accomplished and you will one day stand before Him pure and holy and glorified.
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Amen? That's what he's getting at here by the word usage of mature.
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Last week, we were primarily understanding how Paul spoke to unbelievers in that text.
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He didn't try to manipulate them. He didn't try to use worldly wisdom. He didn't try to win them with clever rhetoric or polished presentations.
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He tried to win them with the clear and concise declaration of Jesus Christ and His death on the cross for them.
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But to the mature, when Paul is speaking to a room full of Christians, he says,
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I will impart wisdom there, but not the wisdom of this world. He says, no, that's still out of the question.
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I'm not up here to give you worldly wisdom. Paul was not eager to share with his church his own, the own wisdom from the storehouses of the experiences that he had lived.
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He said, when I get together with Christians, I'm not going to share with them the things that I've experienced in terms of what
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I figured out about life. You can go to churches and figure out what the pastor thinks about life, but I don't think that's very valuable.
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I hope that wherever you go, when you leave, you find a church that is going to explain to you
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God's word. What this says, that's where the power of our lives is found.
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Paul wasn't eager to share his own worldly wisdom. How many of you think Paul probably had some wisdom? He had some experiences.
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He had gone through life. He had gone through tragedies. He had gone through all kinds of things. But he said, I only wanted to know among you
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Corinthians, Christ and Him crucified. So I decided to only speak those things. We saw that in the text last week.
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He didn't preach five steps up the ladder to success or seven ways to grow in financial peace or three ways to prepare a three -point sermon.
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That'd be fun. He acknowledges in verse six that the wisdom of this age that comes from the rulers of this age is all doomed to pass away.
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Human wisdom proves over time how foolish it is by its ineffectiveness.
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How good are we doing at that in our culture, in our society? How effective have we been at combating what even our society says are our biggest enemies?
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We've been working for years, for centuries at attempts at crafting a utopia.
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But we still haven't been able to feed everyone. We've been trying to extend life but we can't seem to eradicate the common cold.
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Nor can we even as we've watched in the last few years the life expectancy of men. We haven't been able to keep that from sliding through suicide and drug abuse.
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We're not on an upward trend right now. Did you guys know that? Our culture is not on an upward trend.
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Human wisdom can make some things better. How many of you are kind of glad you have a smartphone? How many of you are kind of tired of it?
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It makes some things better but it does not fix everything and it cannot by any stretch fix our deepest problems.
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Misunderstandings about verse seven also play into wrong -minded applications of this passage. The word secret and hidden when applied to the wisdom of God can sound like we're moving towards a secret society.
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Well, it's the secret knowledge. It's the hidden knowledge. The hidden wisdom. But Paul is using the words of the
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Corinthians to point them. He's using words that they would use and they were striving for this secret society.
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He uses those words secret and hidden to point them in a different direction.
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They said secret and hidden to support their cliques and their factions and their elitism and the way that they viewed religious thought that only the elite deserve the most elite of information.
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There is an inner circle that God or the gods really love. Paul is going to say secret and hidden to communicate that those things have been laid bare now in the light for all to see.
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Hidden and secret before but being exposed in declaration through Paul and the apostles.
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The we. We impart. Note that very carefully and very importantly that can be so easily skipped over that it makes causes misunderstanding.
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Verse seven starts with we impart. What do you call a secret that's imparted?
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You can call it all kinds of things, but you don't call it a secret anymore. It's imparted. It's given.
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It's declared. It's revealed. The secret things of God are exposed for all church.
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It's open now. Open season on the knowledge of God. No longer a secret.
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What do you call something that was hidden that's now imparted? No longer hidden.
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He's not saying that there is a hidden truth that is just preserved for the really elite and the really intelligent and the really smart and the educated can get this, but the common folk, oh, they're in trouble.
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No, he's saying it's all available to us. The secret and hidden things of God are being revealed now.
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Where? In the pages of Scripture. We, the apostles, Paul and the apostles, he's speaking of him included in that group, but those who are revealing the very words of God through inspiration.
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The secret and hidden wisdom that Paul is imparting is the outflowing of Christ and Him crucified.
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Salvation in the Son of God and a life lived in Him. The wisdom, by the way, this plan, this wisdom of God, this hidden stuff that in the
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Old Testament they didn't quite get that's now being revealed to us in this age of grace, in this time of the apostles, and a time of revelation of the
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New Testament was not a plan B. It wasn't second plan for God. Rather, it was planned way in advance according to the text here.
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Way in advance before time with the focus that we would be sons and daughters of those first sinners Adam and Eve, but brought back into glory.
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None of the rulers of this age understood the purposes of God in this. For if they had grasped the significance of these things, if they had been brought into this knowledge, then they would not have crucified
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Christ who is called in our text, awesome title, the Lord of glory, the
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Master, the King of glory. Now, I want to point out what this verse is implying just below the surface.
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Verse 8 reminds me the ignorance of God's plan is not neutral. We have a tendency to give everybody the benefit of the doubt, but it is not neutral to be ignorant of what
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God is planning and plotting. It is dangerous to be outside of the knowledge of what God is doing.
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Christ, he says, was crucified by people who didn't know who he was, didn't understand what he was doing, and therefore didn't even know what they were doing.
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Jesus said, Father, forgive them. They know not what they do. They undertook the most heinous of sins while being completely and utterly clueless.
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And hear this carefully, church. Let this next thing that I'm going to say drive you deep into the study of who
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God is and how he rolls and what he does. One need not intentionally perform great evil.
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Sometimes it is not enough just to be completely closed off to understanding and ignorant of what
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God is doing in the way he rolls. Sometimes that's all that's required of us in order to find ourselves wake up one day in great evil, and it can just be on the basis of not knowing
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God, not knowing how he rolls, not being a student of the great gift that he has given to us through his
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Spirit and the knowledge of the truth. But now in verse 9,
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Paul concludes this section on describing the wisdom of God by giving us an encouraging example.
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The example is about something so fundamental that it really should affect our every single day, and yet it is a truth that you would not arrive at by natural understanding.
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Let me just start by asking a question as we drive into this. Do you live only for today, or do you truly believe that there's a life after this one?
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How many of you believe that there is a life after this one? You actually are banking on that. You're living for that. You know that that's true.
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If you're banking on a future eternal life in a future kingdom with future peace and future provisions and future health and future holiness, why?
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Why? I'll let it sit with you for a second. Why? Have you seen it with your eyes?
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Have your friends come back from there to tell you all about it and invite you to go with them? Or have you deduced from some research?
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Did you in a Petri dish grow the kingdom of God and observe it under a microscope?
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Is that why you're excited to go there? Because you've seen it? Has it been by deduction?
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Has it been by your wisdom? Has it been by your strength that you believe that you're going to an eternal place?
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Or is it just pie in the sky and the sweet by and by? Just, ooh, well, it'll be good then sometime, hopefully.
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This loose quotation from Isaiah 64 that we find in verse 9 is
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Paul's example of something that is fundamental to our faith that we do not get from eye or ear or heart.
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We get this understanding that there is a life after this one all from the same place, church, from the revelation of God, from Him communicating this to us.
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If you are trusting in new heavens and a new earth in which the righteousness of God will dwell forever and ever and ever, a place prepared for His children, then you got that originally from the
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Word of God revealed by His Spirit. That's how when I ask you to raise your hand, a bunch of people raised your hand, and you all got it from the same source.
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Now, different people might have explained it to you, but all of it comes back to one source, the
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Word of God. And here Paul is being sure to tie the wisdom of God that he imparts with the key that is necessary to unlock it.
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You get it by His Word through His Spirit. And that's the second part of the text, the key to unlocking
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His wisdom. Verse 10, immediately declares the key right away. Doesn't pull any punches, goes straight for it.
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Look at verse 10. These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.
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These things, godly wisdom, for example, the knowledge of the salvation through the crucified
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Messiah and an eternity with Him, as an example that He's given us in verse 9, have been revealed to us through the
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Spirit. Paul skips here in this text, doesn't skip it in all texts, but he skips here the mechanics of Revelation, choosing not to get into the entire process of inspiration in this immediate text, but a brief study of what
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Paul understood as the mechanism of the way that the Spirit of God speaks to us, shows that he understood that all
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Scripture is God -breathed and inspired and is profitable and useful for our lives.
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The Scriptures are the place to turn if you want the Spirit of God to move in you the truth of the way that God works.
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The Word of God is the Word of His Spirit. And here in this next couple of verses,
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Paul is going to be sure that we connect the Spirit and the Father so tightly that we realize that the
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Spirit is able to convey the very heart of God because He has access to the very depths of God, the inner workings of the thoughts of God, and the way that He rolls, the very deepest things of God are accessible to the
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Spirit who reveals it to us through the inspiration of Scripture. I believe that Paul is connecting the
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Word as the inspired way that God communicates the secret and hidden wisdom with believers.
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It doesn't remain secret, and it doesn't remain hidden, and it is recorded, and we get to keep going back time and time again because the
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Spirit has revealed it in His Word. A Word that tells us, for example, that this is not all that there is.
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So my hope for eternity and the reason that my tattoo reads Carpe Aeternum is because I am living for more than this day.
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Not Carpe Diem. I don't want to merely seize one day, milk this day for all that it is, and cast it aside, and YOLO, and all that jazz.
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I want to seize eternity. I want to live and be reminded regularly to live for the things that eyes and ears cannot take in.
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But living by faith means saying no to some things in the here and now because today is short and eternity is long.
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And I believe that the vast majority of my life will be lived after I die. Why? Because I have wishful thinking?
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No, because God has revealed it through His Spirit to men moved by Him to record it for our benefit and the way to empower our lives with hope for a future that goes beyond this world.
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How many of you take solace in that? You take hope in that? Does it impact your day today? That is the
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Spirit of God pressing His truth from His Word into hearts and minds. We ought not to be seeking some kind of esoterical or mystical experience of knowledge, the knowledge of God, as if we've got to go sit under the banyan tree for a while and meditate and do our
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OMs and get everything together and then God will meet with us. How many of you are glad we don't have to do that?
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It's kind of hard to get this mind to shut down. If that's the goal, I'm in trouble. No, He's not driving for us to just get out in nature and see
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God there, although it's awesome sometimes if you take the Bible with you, that would be great. Get out in nature with the
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Word, that's powerful. But we have a steadfast, hear me carefully church, I think Paul wants us to lean into this.
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We have a steadfast written revelation that has the power to reveal the gospel, has the power to rescue sinners, has the power to teach us to walk in trust with Jesus all of our days.
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The Word has power because the Spirit is powerful.
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In verse 11, Paul is just simply explaining that the Spirit has access to all of the thoughts of God.
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And I'm reminded of the confession of Peter when Jesus asked the disciples, who do you say that I am? What did Peter say?
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Peter said, you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, glory. And how did
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Jesus respond? He said, good job Peter, gold star for Peter. Everyone listen up, why can't you all be as smart as Peter?
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Is that what he said? No, of course not. No, rather he says, flesh and blood hasn't revealed this to you, but rather my
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Father who is in heaven. How did Peter come to realize that Jesus was
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Messiah, that Jesus was the Son of God? Despite the fact that Jesus doesn't credit this understanding to the
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Spirit, but rather gives its credit to the Father, the point remains that correct knowledge of God comes from God.
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One commentary that I read this week said it very pithy and very direct, and to the point,
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God is only known in truth through God. The key to unlocking the wisdom of God is the
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Spirit of God. How does somebody come to the knowledge of God? Because He tells us, or you are just in darkness, groping around trying to find
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God in some way, shape, or form. And is it any wonder that humans down through the ages have worshiped rocks, and statues, and trees, and the sun, and the moon, and each other, and themselves?
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Is it any wonder? Because we are created to worship, and we are longing to find something, and unless He comes down and communicates with us, we will know nothing of Him.
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We will just cast about trying to find different things to worship. But Paul is making a strong case that the key to unlocking the wisdom of God is the
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Spirit, primarily because of a radical thing that is true of everyone who is mature, meaning saved and complete in Christ.
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And that's found in verse 12. We have received. Glory, glory, glory.
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This statement is very missed in a lot of evangelical churches. The churches that I grew up in, we ran from the
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Spirit to some degree. Anybody know what I'm talking about? It's like, oh, the Spirit. He's talking about the Spirit. I'm uncomfortable already.
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We have received the Spirit who is from God. We have the author of the book living in us and with us.
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That we might understand the things freely given us by God, as verse 12 says.
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Oh, we should rejoice, church, that the Spirit dwells within us. This fundamental ministry of the
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Spirit is often overlooked, and yet I regularly mention that this ministry, I long for it in our gathering, because I regularly say that I hope that the
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Spirit of God presses into each and every one of us what He desires for us to know of Him through His Word in every time we gather.
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And I believe that He can do that for each and every one of you. I can get up here and speak a message and talk for half an hour to 45 minutes, and I can talk to you, and each one here can walk away and hear something different from the
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Word that they need, because the Spirit is alive. And if the Spirit rests within you,
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He has something to communicate every time the Bible is open, something for you, a message for you, something
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He desires for you to take on, to grow in faith and grow in your understanding of who
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He is. I believe firmly that we need the Spirit in order to understand the significance of that which is revealed by Him about the
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Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The gift of the Spirit to us is not primarily about working miracles or speaking in tongues, though those things are going to come up later in the book, and I encourage you, there's going to be a couple of chapters there that is going to be a wild ride.
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It's going to be fun. But the Spirit is given to us to guide us in discerning the revelation of the
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God who made us, the God who speaks, the
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God who has written and recorded His truth, that we might go back a stable.
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How many of you are glad this is stable? A stable source that isn't different tomorrow morning, isn't different next month, and won't be different when you're 50, or when you're 70, or when you're 100.
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It will be a stable word, and it will not pass away, and you can come back to it every day of your life.
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And the glory is, I've studied it, I've read it probably 20 times in my life. I don't think that's an exaggeration, and there's every time
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I read it, there's something new there for me. Every time I read it, it's like, bam! Okay, there it is. It's amazing.
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It's an amazing, amazing revelation, because it's God's Word spoken to us, and the
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Spirit within us helping us to understand the importance and the significance of this.
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Let me clarify some of the limitations of that understanding. This is not a guarantee of accurate interpretation for every believer.
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How many of you have dug into the Word, and you know that it takes some work? It takes some effort. So you go, wait, I have the Spirit. Why does it take me work to get into this?
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The Spirit doesn't overcome laziness by just dropping wisdom or biblical understanding on believers.
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If that's the way He worked, everybody in Bible college would get all A's. I had this study for my
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Bible exams, and I would just say, this is a perfect segue into a pitch for a hermeneutics class.
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That's a big word, hermeneutics. Everybody say with me, hermeneutics. One, two, three, hermeneutics.
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There you go. You got that out of the way. It just means how to study the Bible, how to interpret it. You already have, you already use hermeneutics if you ever read the
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Bible and tried to get to what it means, but it's a question of whether you're using it skillfully or not.
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One of our elders, Mike Biancolana, is going to be leading a class this fall. I hope it's full.
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I hope it's full of people who want to know and want to dig deeper. I know that the fall can be a busy time, but man, if you can carve out time in your schedule, sign up for that class that's going to be coming.
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He's going to be setting the time according to the maximum people that can attend and trying to figure that out.
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Of course, he's probably going to work into his schedule too, but that's going to be a good opportunity to learn how to dig into the
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Word for yourself. How do I study it? How do I understand it? How do I get these nuggets out of it that the
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Spirit desires to press in my life? But it still stands that there is a truth that is only going to be discerned by those who have the
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Spirit. So you can study it. You can try to seek to know it, but if the Spirit is not alive in you through faith in Christ, then there's going to be limitations to what you're going to be able to do with it.
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This doesn't mean that someone cannot understand the words themselves. No, I mean anybody. Anybody with a human brain can dig into this and to some level come to some understanding.
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You can understand the words themselves. I have commentaries in my office written by a man that doesn't believe in miracles.
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He's written about the life of Christ. Imagine writing about the life of Christ and not believing in miracles. Okay, it's an interesting read.
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By the way, he has a doctorate in New Testament history.
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He's brilliant when it comes to the culture of the times of Jesus. He just doesn't believe in any of the miracles.
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He thinks the feeding of the 5 ,000 was a little boy teaching everybody to share, and so everybody shared their lunch.
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And I'm going like, if everybody shared their lunch, then why didn't they just eat their own lunch? I didn't think he got that far down the line of logic or something.
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Every time there's a demon, he says Jesus basically pressed on the person, you don't really have a problem.
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I just got rid of your problem. And they're like, oh yeah, you just got rid of my problem. And he thinks it's all psychology and therapy and all of that stuff.
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He doesn't believe it, but he's a student of it. Do you get what I'm saying?
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A spiritual truth requires the spirit alive in a person to be spiritually discerned and truly grasp it.
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Now, that might be a little too theoretical, so let me land this. For example, what is a person who doesn't have the spirit, has not been saved by Jesus, and has no allegiance to Him, hear when they read the words,
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God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting life?
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What do they hear? What do they hear? They can study this in depth, right?
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They might even be able to do better than some of us and be able to explain the logical flow of the interplay between Nicodemus and Jesus.
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I don't know if you realize that that's Jesus speaking to Nicodemus in that context, and that's where it comes from.
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And you're like, I thought that was just at the end zone, right? Like, I thought that was just a sign. It's got a context. It's got stuff that's going on around it.
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They might be able to spit back to you what the words mean. They may also be able to tell you what purpose this verse serves in the larger context of John and weave all kinds of PhD -type understandings and all of that.
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But will they—think about it, church—will they rejoice? Will they be able to discern the purpose for which it was written?
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Will they bow in glad service to this Son of God that's been sent to rescue them?
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Not at all. They cannot apply, and further, they cannot discern any real significance to the teaching.
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Why? Spiritual truth requires the Spirit to interpret the significance for us.
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So, in the church, we focus on the revelation of God through His inspired word. Spiritual truth revealed by the
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Spirit being translated into the hearts and minds of Spirit - filled people. The church is amazing when we understand how vitally we are all connected together through the
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Spirit of God. Not merely gathering together on Sunday morning for a lecture and some songs, but the
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Spirit orchestrating His will through His wisdom to the betterment of our fellowship, to the betterment of ourselves, to the betterment of our community, to the betterment of our families, to the betterment of the world around us.
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Now, Paul ends with a distinction. Our third point is wisdom in two types of people found in verses 14 through 16.
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Paul goes on to contrast here the person without the Spirit in verse 14 with the person who has the
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Spirit in verse 15. He calls the person without the Spirit the natural person. It's a person tied to the material world.
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The one who would only take as truth whatever could be taken in with the five senses. How many of you see that in the world around us?
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An increase in the people around you that think that these five senses is all that we have.
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And this person doesn't accept the things of the Spirit. This is because they will not.
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They have other loyalties, other opinions, and other priorities. The things of the
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Spirit are folly to them, Paul goes on to say. They are worthy of a chuckle and an eye roll. Oh, there he goes on the cross again.
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To live for eternity is actually foolish. To live in this day and age, this life, and however many years
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God gives you, to live it out for eternity is foolish if we are wrong.
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If I'm living for eternity and there is no eternity, I have indeed wasted my life. Paul's going to say that later in the same letter in chapter 15.
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We are to be pitied and we are like fools and idiots to the world around us if there is no resurrection.
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That's what he's going to say there. And lastly, the natural person is not able to understand the wisdom of God.
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In verse 15, as revealed by the Spirit, they lack the key to unlock the treasure of the wisdom of God.
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So, there are two quick examples of this from the book of Acts. We see it actually play out in Paul's life.
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He experienced this kind of rejection of his message where the world rolled their eyes at him and we've got it recorded for us.
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The Athenians, Paul gives this immaculate, wonderful lecture on Mars Hill, and they actually declare him a babbler.
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What is this babbler talking about? Nonsense. And Festus, Paul had an opportunity to proclaim the gospel to those in power, and Festus called
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Paul insane after his presentation of the gospel. They thought Paul and his message were signs that he was basically out of his mind, that he had gone mad.
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What is this foolish message you're talking about here, Paul? Have you gone nuts? Has your great religious learning tainted your mind so much that you're that far gone that you're babbling this nonsense at the rulers?
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But the person with the Spirit is able to examine all things, it says, and will not fall to any examination.
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Verse 15 is not against accountability where no one, anybody stands above judgment, anybody stands above, you know, accurate assessment of their truth, the truth.
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But later in this very book, Paul is going to lash out against this church for not judging a man in their midst who is caught up in explicit sexual sin.
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But as a principle, this verse, verse 15, it could be easily misunderstood. This verse stands strong against, stands strong as a defense of the power of the
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Spirit to share the truth with all. The one who has the Spirit can examine the scriptures and draw good conclusions for their lives, and they further live in a way that they know they will have one final ultimate judge over them.
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In case verse 15 is confusing, let me use myself as an example. If I'm genuinely born again and the Spirit of God dwells within me, then
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I'm a man who searches all things of God seeking through His Word how to live.
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And I have access to the truth, and I will be searching it and judging my own life and judging all things according to the truth.
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So, in that sense, I'm judging all things, but I'm judging it according to the Spirit of truth. And further, another interesting thing is, he says in the second half of verse 15,
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I will need no judgment from anyone. As a matter of fact, I would say that I need barely a nudge to move toward the truth.
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I may need some reminders. I may need some corrections, but I will need no judge if I am that kind of person who is digging into the
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Word seeking the truth with the Spirit alive in me. As a matter of fact, if someone comes to me with judgment, if one of you at the end of this service were to stand out in the lobby and say,
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I judge you to be an unbeliever, Don, or I judge you to be wrong in your understanding,
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I will go back to the Word and the Spirit as my judge. Does that make sense? I'm going to go back here, and we're going to discern it according to the
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Word. We're not going to discern it according to your word or mine. We're going to see what the Word says. Is that making sense?
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And what the Spirit has revealed to us. In that sense, I judge all things, and I am judged by no one.
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Oh, I can be corrected. I can be nudged. I can be pushed to look back at the Word and say,
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I think you've got something wrong here. That happens. That happens. The one who loves
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God, loves His Word, and is indwelt by His Spirit is going to respond to that. The passage ends with a final shock to our system.
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Paul quotes a rhetorical question from Isaiah 40, 13. Look at it with me, verse 16, for who has understood the mind of the
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Lord so as to instruct Him? Isaiah 40, 13. And that is in its context supposed to have one answer, and Paul here gives the opposite.
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Who has known the mind of the Lord? Expected answer, no one. Paul's answer, we have the mind of Christ.
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Why did you just say that's a bit of a shift from the Old Testament answer?
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Who has known the mind of the Lord? Answer by the rabbis, no one. Paul, we have the mind of Christ.
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What do we have available to us through the revelation of the Spirit Church? The secret and hidden knowledge of God now revealed.
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What a privilege. The depths of God revealed by His Spirit. The thoughts of the Almighty exposed in writing.
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Spiritual truths revealed to us who have received the same Spirit. The ability to examine the
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Word and receive its significance. We have at our disposal the very mindset of Christ, especially, especially, especially through the written
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Gospels. You want to know how Jesus rolled? You want to know the way that He thought, the way that He perceived situations, the way that He looked at crowds, the way that He responded in circumstances, the way that He would respond to the woman at the well, the way
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He would respond to the rich young ruler, the stories and the parables speaking of His Father and speaking of the kingdom.
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You want to know that stuff? It's in here. You can know the very mind of Christ as revealed through the pages of Scripture.
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So, I hope you know what to do with this message. I'm going to give you a couple suggestions. Let me start by just saying, man, oh man,
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I think we would be missing something if we didn't walk out of here with thankfulness in our hearts, to thank
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Him for rescuing us from our prior status. What was true of us prior to receiving the
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Spirit? We were perishing. We did not accept the things of the Spirit. His Word was folly to our natural minds.
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We were unable to understand, and through Christ, He has given us His Spirit and unlocked the treasures of the truth to us.
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And so, one more application, dig into the feast of the knowledge of His Holy Word.
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Get in here. Get into this Word. Examine, study, rejoice, and grow your roots deep in this truth that produces within us faith.
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And in this Word, we find the glory and the power of our crucified Lord. The central unifying principle of Scripture is the cross of Christ that brings the sinful people to peace with the
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Holy God through His sacrifice. That's in here. So, if you're trusting in His sacrifice for your sins, and if you're trusting in Jesus Christ as your
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King, your Master, your Lord, and your unity with others here in this church, then let's remember
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His body broken for us and His blood shed for us by going to these tables during this next song. And I encourage you as you line up to just be prayerful and thoughtful, maybe make some eye contact with rejoicing with others around you as we see how needy we all are.
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Take the cracker, take the juice, go back to your seat, and as you feel led, just take that on your own in prayerfulness before God.
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And then let's go out from here rejoicing in His Spirit who continues to reveal to us life -giving,
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Spirit -fed truth through His Word. Let's pray. Father, I thank
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You so much. I just think about the trajectory of my life and where I would be not for Your Spirit, pressing in the truth, giving me ears to hear and eyes to see in that moment of salvation when
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I was eight years old in a church basement. And from there, a trajectory of life that trusts
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Your Word, a trajectory of life to study it, to know You, knowledge that I couldn't have without Your Spirit.
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Father, I pray that You would move us all in our hearts to thankfulness and gratitude for the great gift that You've given us in giving us the key of Your Spirit to unlock the truth of the
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Word, the importance, the significance, the application. And then,
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Father, I pray that You would give us all hearts to take advantage of that. We could easily be wearing our floaties, swimming on the deep end.
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You've given us all of that fun to have at the bottom of the pool and we just stay up at the surface just skimming along because we don't realize what depth is available to us through the knowledge of Your Word, through the
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Spirit alive in us. So, Father, I pray that maybe even this message would be an awakening for some here who would say, yes,
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I need to dig deeper. Yes, I want to study. Maybe even, yes, I want to sign up for that hermeneutics class.
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Yes, I want to spend time with You in the morning and let Your Spirit wash over me fresh with new insight and transforming my desires from the inside out.
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Father, I pray that You would be with us as we take communion together. We rejoice together in the unity that we have at the cross.
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Jesus Christ's body broken for us, His blood shed for us that provides us unity and draws us together in Him.