Spirit-Powered Wisdom

When I came to you, brethren, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God in lofty words 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 much fear and trembling. And my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the

Spirit and power that your faith may not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

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.

But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification.

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 conceived, what

God has prepared for those who love Him. God has revealed to us through the

Spirit, for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.

For what person knows a man's thoughts, except the Spirit of the man which is in him?

So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God, except the Spirit of God.

Now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the

Spirit which is from God, that we might understand the gifts bestowed on us by God.

And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the

Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who possess the

Spirit. Let's pray. Father, how grateful we are for your words, ancient words.

And Lord, we live in an age that's always looking for a new word, a new plan.

And we rest in your word, the ancient words from the time before this planet began, words that you issued about what you would do in the world as you grew your kingdom.

And so Lord, our ears are ready to hear, and our hearts are ready to obey the word that you'll proclaim to us today through your messenger.

Lord, use him to proclaim your wisdom, not any wisdom of the world. Lord, just guide

Josh by the Spirit and the Spirit alone, that we may see the power again as we have witnessed personally the power that you have to transform us from darkness into light.

Lord, we have great anticipation for your message for us today. In Christ's name, amen.

Corinth is confused. The spiritual gifts are abundant and manifold in that church, as there are prophecies, there are languages being spoken, there is just a massive outpouring of God's power in this church that has the dark world beating down on it around as the city exerts its own force.

But the people of Corinth are confused because while on the one hand they have these illuminating gifts and they have this steadfastness to their way, the world encroaches and they tolerate sin in their midst.

And we've said often in this series, in this young series, that Corinth in many ways would teach us many things, that they were very faithful, they just didn't know a lot of things because it hadn't been written, it hadn't been revealed, they didn't have many fathers.

And I think I can do a little illustration for us to start with that would show maybe our ignorance and where we've gone off the trail.

So I'm going to do this. I don't know that I've ever done this before. I want you to picture in your mind something.

I'm going to say two phrases and I want you to picture what that is. Define it in your minds. Phrase number one, a healthy church.

I want you to picture that. What is that? A healthy church. And the second thing is a mature believer.

A mature believer. So let me ask you in your mind's eye, what are you measuring that on?

What is a healthy church? What is a mature believer? In the reform camp, I think many of us would default to doctrinal knowledge.

This is somebody that has a deep understanding of the scripture, of theology, of systematics, of confessions.

If you're someone in an assembly church, it might be more about a healthy church has a strong outpouring of spiritual gifts and a lot of raised hands in worship, a very strong emotional worship service.

It might be about relationships. It might be about a mature believer has very strong Christian relationships.

It might be about social programs. If we look at our

Methodist brothers, the few of them that are left, it might be about working to feed their neighbor, to take care of the poor, the widows and orphans among us.

That is an admiral thing. It's commanded of us. I think as I was convicted this week, the answer that I've never heard and never thought of is a wise church.

A healthy church is a wise church. And I think in our reformed camp,

I think one of the things that we really struggle with is what does it mean to be spirit -led?

It's a very difficult question for us because we are afraid of what one answer is. We're afraid of waving flags and blowing gold dust everywhere and laying on the ground frothing at the mouth babbling.

But on the other hand, we should be very afraid of our propensity to become the frozen chosen, where we stand solemn and resolute with no heart miming words to ancient hymns and never feeling anything.

In the midst of that, I think we do seek something, but what we are not often seeking is wisdom.

And so as I've thought this week and looked at what Paul wrote to the Corinthians and combine it with what

James wrote, what Isaiah wrote in promising us what is coming, I think

I would like to reframe our vision a little bit and think, what is the marker of a healthy church at Covenant Baptist Church?

I think the answer to that has to align with God's word. It is a church that is wise. Wise with how to deal with discernible things.

We have to make decisions. We have to make judgment calls. Sometimes it's between good and best.

We have to make decisions in our personal lives. We have to be stable. We have to be rooted. And that comes from wisdom.

Being able to take God's law and make decisions based on God's law.

It's easy where it's black and white, is it not? We don't murder people.

We're not struggling with whether we should or not in the church. But when it gets outside of that really strict application of the law, sometimes it gets very difficult.

So I've broken this text into three sections and I want to end with the section that is the the title of this message.

And that is basically that wisdom comes from the Holy Spirit. It's a wisdom that's powered by the

Holy Spirit. But first we have to look at the first five verses and that is going to be the basics of God's power.

How do you describe the indescribable? How do you describe infinity? We don't have a picture of it because God's power is infinite.

There is no item, no action, no thing that God cannot accomplish and that He cannot accomplish quite easily.

His power is beyond our grasp. So let's try to take a basic and we're going to look at what

Paul says about God's power. And what he does is he contrasts it with the power and the wisdom of the world.

In a follow -up, the first four chapters of 1 Corinthians, if you're following along, are one argument.

The first four chapters are setting us up and what they're talking about is the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the present age and how the

Corinthians are being pulled by the wisdom of the current age. And they can't help it.

We can't help it. We are all pulled by the wisdom of the current age. It would make you guys all feel feathery in your stomach if I did an hour -long sermon talking about how democracy comes straight from Satan.

Look, we are pulled by the wisdom of the age. If you said that publicly, it makes people queasy, all right?

We love our democracy, right? It's even sacred in some quarters. But the wisdom of the world.

Paul starts by saying this. He sets up a contrast between himself and the wisdom of the world. And he paints a picture of what the wisdom of the world is.

And he does it, as I often like to do, with a negative. He talks about what he did not do in order to explain what they do.

So he did not come with superiority of word or wisdom. But instead what he did was he proclaimed the witness of God.

That word is where we get the word martyr from. And it's used over and over in the New Testament. The witness is something that you have seen.

So Paul proclaimed what he had seen. And he determined to know nothing among the

Corinthians except Jesus Christ. There is a lot of theology outside of Jesus Christ.

There really is. There is a lot of paths that you can go down to try to learn very minute things that are in the scripture, that are theological, but that are outside of the main road of Jesus Christ.

And so to not puff up the ego of a cosmopolitan city that was very proud of their own wisdom, Paul determined to know nothing except the basics of the

Christian faith when he went and planted this church in Corinth. And it was about Christ crucified.

And as we'll see at the end of this letter, it's about Christ resurrected. His word and his preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the spirit and of power.

Now what does that mean? We'll have to look into it. So first we see that the wisdom of the world is what?

The wisdom of the world is found in powerful orators who flatter and aggrandize.

And you'll see it often. Once you hear the pattern for worldly wisdom, you will be able to, in your minds, I see worldly wisdom on display with flowery orators, people who can move the masses with their power of persuasion.

They will flatter their listener because if you flatter listeners, it makes people more willing to bend the ear and hear.

There's nothing we like to hear more than little bits about how good we are. It is like comfort food to hear how good at something you are, right?

How wise you are. Oh, I love to listen to you because you're so wise in your counsel.

And what we do is we start to bend our ear a little further towards that. So a good orator, one that's full of worldly wisdom, will come at you that way.

They will flatter you and they will aggrandize you and they will talk about how important you are. And then they will talk about how they are the answer to give you what you want.

It's always about that. We have no shortage of these in the world today. And I'll give you a new story.

Just as Ecclesiastes said, there is nothing new under the sun. There has never been a shortage of these type people. We're not worse today than we were back then.

These people have always rallied the masses. They have always done it the same way because humans are humans in our fallen state and we love to hear about ourselves.

It's our favorite thing ever, unless it's something bad about ourselves and then we will do violence against you for saying that.

We don't like to hear that, but I get ahead of myself. Doctrines are important. And what Paul does here is he's not diminishing the importance of the deeper wisdoms and the deeper teachings of Scripture, but what he's saying is you can't put the cart before the horse.

You don't start with the doctrines of grace and how no one can come to the Father unless he has called them with his effectual calling.

That's not how you go street preach. You have to make your appeal. So the cart doesn't go before the horse.

What you have to do is you have to start with Jesus crucified. That is the stumbling block.

That is the idiocy that the world doesn't want to hear. Jesus crucified. You are at odds with God.

You hate him. You have sinned against him. And there is one way and that is to trust in Jesus Christ who died for your sins.

And you're going to get plenty of opposition from that because the call of the cross is for you to repent. But for us as we look and we have to be discerning because the whole message today, church, is that we have to pray for wisdom.

And this is the first of a two -parter. Next week we're going to talk about more the nitty -gritty practical application of how we walk in wisdom as we finish this chapter.

But today what I want to do is to cast a vision for what does it look like theologically, what does it look like privately, what does it look like corporately to have wisdom?

And one of the first things we see is that we have to have discernment. Wisdom has discernment. Paul comes and he contrasts himself.

He's the one that they should listen to. And in fact in this letter what he's telling the people of Corinth is you should remember back to what

I did and think about that. Because what that's going to have you do as we saw last week is to consider your calling.

Remember the fundamentals. You guys are trying to put in advanced offenses and you don't know how to block.

It's not going to work. You're going to have to go back to fundamentals. And in order to do this you're going to have to identify the people who are taking you off the trail.

And these people are the wisdom of the world. Beware of those, church, who use these tactics.

There are many of them in the church. There are many of them in the world. They are all over the place.

And we can have a couple of subtle tricks by what Paul does in contrasting. One is we have to beware of people who boast in themselves, even very subtly.

It's very easy to boast in yourself. And remember we were admonished last week to let no one boast in the flesh.

There are some people that are highly gifted speakers, highly gifted. They're brilliant. They understand how to put thoughts together and they can persuade and they can take you over a very short amount of time from one thing you believed to something entirely different based on the power of their persuasion.

Paul warns us about those types. And he says, remember the fundamentals. But we have many in the church and we are afraid to call them out because their subtlety puts us on our back foot.

And we think, oh, are they really boasting in themselves or are they boasting in what God has done? Because they will use very churchy words to hide their arrogance and to hide their pride.

Here's your tool. Repentance is a gift. It's not only for individuals, but it's also for the church.

Churches can repent. Individuals can repent. But bad guys who are self -aggrandizing will not repent.

They will never repent. It's withheld from them. And I've not understood this until recently in my walk, is that God darkens the heart of those who are trying to lead people and they will not repent even of their obvious sins.

Even when they get caught, obviously, with their hand in the cookie jar, they will double down, they will redirect, they will blame someone else, and they will walk on and pivot and hope that you forget.

We have a massive amount of people in the Reformed world doing that even as we speak. Leaders of seminaries, large -scale pastors with public platforms who are trying to make you forget what happened in the last five years as they subtly pivot without ever apologizing.

And I used to get frustrated about this until I realized that God's just giving us a tool to sort this out.

If His people seek wisdom, then they will see how those with worldly wisdom act.

And we should take note. The world of worldly wisdom is one of no repentance. It's one of always doing self -morals.

It's self -righteousness. There's self -help, and we love to hear it, do we not? Churches explode that talk about how you can make your marriage better.

We're going to talk six weeks on how you make your marriage better. Or if you want to get a little more salacious, which many of them do, how to have a great sex life in your marriage.

Five weeks on it. We'll go through the Song of Solomon, and we'll just rip stuff apart.

And here's the thing. People love lists. They love them. You know why, church? This hits very strong.

We don't like wisdom. We like instructions. We like being given step -by -step lists of do this and God will be happy with you.

That's not how the Christian life works. If that was the way it worked, we would not have the wisdom books of the

Bible. Because what we do is we are given black and white law, and then we're given the spirit of power who helps us to test the spirits, make decisions, and walk in trust of what

God has called us to. These are not about self -help tools. The Christian life does not grow through toiling in the flesh.

Do you need to hear it again? The Christian life does not grow. You do not grow in maturity through toiling in the flesh.

That's not what the Galatians were doing. They were trying to be perfected by works of the flesh and putting that on top of something that had already happened spiritually.

Nicodemus didn't understand in John 3 when you're told, how do I enter the kingdom of heaven? You have to be a new person.

How do you do that? There is no self -help book that's going to make you a new person. You cannot become something other than what you are except through a miracle.

The miracle is the fundamentals of the Christian faith. You are dead and you've been resurrected spiritually.

A new person, a new creature, a new thing. When that happens, it's not through self -help and self -righteousness that changes us.

It's that God changes our desires. He gives us new hearts and he gives us faith. I've given you one practical test for how you discern the bad guys.

They never repent and they subtly boast in themselves and they try to tell you great things about yourself.

Let me give you a little bit of a check on your sanctification. How are you growing in the spirit?

Here's the answer. Are your desires different than they were five years ago, three years ago?

Do you love new things or do you still love the same old stuff? If you're not a new creature, then you're going to still love the same things you did before and you're not a

Christian then. Do you understand? If your desires have not been changed, you're not a

Christian because Christianity is about being a new thing. If you hear the law of God and you don't love the law of God, then either you haven't been changed or you need to have some conviction and repentance.

Because scripture is soaked through Old Testament and New Testament about how the

Christian responds to the law of God. He sees it as his guide. He sees it as God's holy statutes.

He sees it as the way that we are supposed to go and more than that, he sees it as the way to honor the father who has given him everything.

See, the good son doesn't follow the rules because he's scared of getting disciplined. The good son follows the rules because he wants to reflect on his father.

He wants to reflect righteousness and wisdom on his father. That's the most powerful motivator.

I tell my high school students all the time that affection is the greatest, most powerful motivator of human behavior.

We will do anything, anything for people that we love and have affection for.

It's a powerful approach. And so we see that. What is the boiled down message of the wisdom of this world?

It's this. You are great and you can do this. That is it. And if a church preaches that, then they are a synagogue of Satan.

No apologies. That is the message of Satan from the very beginning, is it not? You got this.

God doesn't want you to have it, but you can get it. Just take it. Just grab it.

That is the wisdom of the false teacher. You can do it. Just work harder.

Just listen to these few steps that I'll give you for a small price and you can follow and be more godly.

It's very dangerous. So in contrast, we have the approach of Paul. What does Paul do?

He starts with something that would have been very foreign to the synagogue and to the Greek philosopher. It says this, and he is talking about an issue.

He's not using rhetoric here when he says he came in weakness with fear and trembling. He's talking about an actual event.

When he went to Corinth in Acts 18, 9 and 10, we see the effect. Paul went to the synagogue, they threw him out, and he was very afraid because this city was dangerous.

The imperial cult had power, and the synagogue of the Jews hated Paul. So he was going to leave, and God comes to him in a vision, and he says the following.

The Lord said to Paul in night by a vision, do not be afraid, but go on speaking, and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no man will lay a hand on you in order to harm you, for I have many people in this city.

How comforting that verse is. But Paul is remembering a moment when he writes this letter to his children in the faith, a church that he loved very much, and he reminds them, when

I came to you, I was afraid. I was shaking. I was kind of,

I wanted to hide. And the Lord came to me in a vision, and he told me to speak, and what

I spoke of was the power of Christ and his crucifixion, because that's where he starts, isn't it?

Paul, unlike the philosophers of the age, unlike the powerful, he came and he was afraid, and he did not aggrandize, and he did not boast in the flesh, but what he did was he talked about his change.

What happened to Paul is that he was a leader and a scribe of the age, and he was knocked down on his butt on the road, and he saw indescribable, unapproachable light, and he was blinded, and he was also skewered.

Wasn't he by the Lord? Remember what the Lord told him? Why are you persecuting me? And Paul was cut to the heart, and Paul, like a maniac for the rest of his life, preached only one thing, and he was dogged about it, and his zeal is something that would be hard for us to imagine, is that over and over again, the words that came out of Paul's mouth were, repent and follow

Jesus. The cross has changed everything. He would write about it in grand ways in Romans, but he writes about it very simply in Corinthians, until you get to 15, and it's not very simple at all, but the cross of Christ is the basics.

What happened is, is that if you believe in a king who died for you, then you will be regenerated.

That faith will be given by God. The power of the resurrection is the power that God has given life power over death, and it's through Jesus, and then he says something very mysterious, and there's a lot of mystery here, is that Paul preached that the power of God to save came through this message.

To hear the message and obey is what causes a new creature to be created.

Can you regenerate yourself? And Paul asks, can you regenerate yourself?

No, he wants the object of their faith to be Christ, and so he depended on the spirit to regenerate a people in Corinth, and it didn't happen in the synagogue except with two of their leaders, and then it started happening with the

Gentiles as this church grows, and he calls for repentance, and this is the offense of the gospel, right?

Everyone wants to hear this through the 80s. I saw this over and over again. God loves you. Very true.

Very, very true, but there is a second part to that.

God loves you. Repent of your sin, and without repentance, there's no salvation, and repentance is the problem, isn't it?

Because the self -righteous one sees no need for repentance, and the one who is at odds with God and loves the world has no desire for repentance, and the crux of the

Christian life is repentance. Luther said that all of the Christian life is about confession and repentance, and I will tell you, he was not off.

The Christian life is about confession and repentance. Repentance is not the self -help of the false teachers, but it's not also the soft

Christianity and the confused Christianity, the totally unwise Christianity of evangelical

America, because what that Christianity says is that we need to get as many people in here as we can so that they can hear a message, so that maybe slowly but surely they start being less worldly, and we attract them in by being worldly.

That's not going to work, because repentance is never a popular call for people who love ear -tickling.

Repentance is simply this. What you're doing is making God very angry at you. You are a sinner in the hands of an angry

God, and if you don't bow the knee and turn away from your sin, then

God will damn you. He will burn you in the throne of his people.

We will rejoice in him doing so. That's a hard message, but repentance is not for people who want to be flattered.

Repentance is not popular in the modern church broadly, because here's what we like to do.

We like to speak to the sins of others, but not to the sins that are common to ourselves, and we will get very deep in that next week.

But repentance means this simply, Christian, over and over again. We cannot stay as we are, and the call to repentance, as Paul talks about here, he did not come with lofty words.

Do you know what he came with? Very blunt and simple instruction. Repent.

Name your sin in gory detail and walk away from it, and pray that God will release you from it.

See, this is what human beings are for. Human beings are made in God's image, and we glorify

God when we repent, and he changes our hearts and our souls to look more like him. See, the object of faith is what's important.

We have faith in a great many things. Some people have faith in doctors. Some people have faith, well nobody has faith in the government anymore, but some people have faith in other things, and the issue is this.

The object of the faith is all that matters, and the object of our faith, as Paul says in verse 5, it has to be the power of God.

The power of God that is so great that it seems out of grasp and indiscernible. That's why we must pray for wisdom, is so that we can start to understand the power of God.

The wisdom of men is more tangible and seductive. We hear it, we are wowed by it, we seek it, and we are drawn to it like a magnet, because that which is real and in front of us seems more attractive than that that is unattainable.

That's why Paul would write in 2 Corinthians that what we have right here is a tent, and the invisible thing is far more permanent than the tent that we see right now.

So the wisdom of the Holy Spirit teaches us to strive for eternal things, and this striving changes our relationship with the temporal things.

See, if we forget the fundamentals, the fundamentals of the faith, the crucifixion, the resurrection, the need for repentance, the hope of the promises of God, if we forget those, there's no value in any of the rest, because we have no foundation, and they will topple over, and what we see is when we forget the fundamentals of this, right?

Love God, love neighbor. If we forget those fundamentals of the outflow of the gospel, what we do is we fight over the non -fundamentals, and we all look like jackwagons.

We look so stupid. Have you been on Reformed social media?

Guys, it's a dark place. It's a dark place. We should not be fighting our brothers.

We should definitely not be fighting over deeper, more arcane doctrines, and we love to fight over eschatology.

We love to fight over this stuff, and here's the problem. When we do that, we belie and we show what we should see with our wisdom is we should see that why we're fighting about this stuff is we have forgotten the fundamentals, and so we're showboating about speaking in tongues when we've forgotten that the resurrection changed everything.

See, tongues are important, but compared to the resurrection and loving your neighbor, they're of no importance at all.

They're neither here nor there. If you don't love your neighbor, you don't have anything. You're not obeying

God's commands, and so you don't love him. Didn't Jesus say that? If you love me, you will keep my commandments.

Is anyone in doubt that the commandments are summed up in love God and love your neighbor? If you're not doing those things, then you don't love

God. It's a very difficult thing, but Paul doesn't leave us alone. It would be comfortable, and that would be the simple message of the gospel, but then he teases us with rhetoric, and this is verses six through eight.

I've entitled this part the maturity and deeper wisdom. This is what we all want, isn't it? Because here's what we think.

We think, I've got the fundamentals down. I'm the best blocker and tackler in the church. I'm so fundamental, so now what

I want to do is I want to spend all my time on deeper wisdom because deeper wisdom makes me feel smarter than everybody else, and in the reform camp, the most important thing you can do is be smarter than everybody else.

It's just the truth. If it hurts, it hurts. You elevate the smartest people to the positions so that everybody else can be jealous of how smart they are.

It's so stupid. It's ridiculous. It has nothing of what

Scripture teaches us, so what is the maturity and deeper wisdom? Paul tells us in six through eight, we do speak wisdom among those who are mature.

This is a rebuke, is it not? Remember what Paul did. He didn't speak of any of this, only of the power of the cross, but he does speak to mature people about other things, so get it?

Hey, Corinth, you're not mature, and he's going to start rebuking him about their showboating.

They think they're very mature because they have these gifts going on. A wisdom, however, not of this age nor of the rulers of this age who are being abolished.

This wisdom that the rulers of the age, more specifically, this wisdom that's inside the synagogue, it is being destroyed.

This is a harsh word in our day today as this fight flames on in an unbelievable sense.

What's going on with the synagogue? What about Judaism? Abolished. Abolished.

We still don't believe it today, but we speak God's wisdom in a mystery.

Get this, he connects this. This is a mystery that Corinth has forgotten, but that the synagogue didn't know.

If the synagogue had known this wisdom, they wouldn't have done what they did. This wisdom which has been hidden, which

God predestined before the ages to our glory, which none of the rulers of this age has understood, for if they had understood it, they would not have crucified the

Lord of glory. Understand here, there is a wisdom that is deeper than the fundamentals, but if you don't have the fundamentals, you're never going to learn this wisdom because it's only for the mature, and the only people who are mature are the people who cling to the cross of Christ, and they never let go of it.

But there is something deeper than that. Should you want it? I think you should want it.

Should you be a mature Christian? What is a mature believer? Well, very simply, we know this. A mature believer is one who does not forget the power of the resurrection and the need for constant repentance.

If you are a repenting person, you are a mature Christian. It's a good litmus test.

When's the last time you repented? When's the last time you came clean to a brother that you had sinned against?

When's the last time you didn't blow up in anger when a brother pointed out the sin that was in your life, and you apologized for it, and prayed, and turned around, walked the other direction?

If that's been years, you are a fool, and you need to stop it. You need to cling back to the cross and pray that God would give you conviction.

We're not to walk this way. There is a wisdom, though, that is deeper than the fundamentals, and that is the wisdom that Christ made visible and manifest out of the shadowy words of the prophets.

So what Jesus did was he came, and he instituted, and he illuminated the new covenant. And the new covenant had been promised hundreds of years before Jesus came.

In fact, it had been purposed and promised before the foundation of the world, that this was going to be the way that God redeemed mankind.

But his illumination of the new covenant came through the gospel and the message to the apostles. So the rulers of the age were a title that was claimed by the elites and their peoples.

So if you went to see the power brokers of the synagogue, they would call themselves the rulers of this age.

It was a position of pride. But they really, in a paradoxical way, the powers, the rulers of this age did not understand the wisdom of God.

Why? Because God hid it from them. So even as we speak the gospel today, it's a mystery to the rulers of this age.

They don't understand. But here's what happened. Here's what happened. The rulers of the age had gotten confused.

They thought because they were descendants of Abraham that they were eternal recipients of the covenant of Abraham outside, outside of the sacrificial lamb of Jesus Christ.

Understand that? Many have this problem today. Let me speak bluntly. If you believe that the

Jews today have a claim to Christianity or to salvation through the promises given to Abraham, you believe the same falsehood that was believed in Galatians and that was believed by those in the synagogue in Corinth.

Here's the thing. Salvation is found only in Christ. Never through a birthright.

Never. Never was, never will be. It's not genetic. It's spiritual.

There's only one way to approach the throne of God, and that is through being declared righteous. And righteousness did not come through circumcision.

It came through circumcision of the heart. The outward sign only was helpful if it matched the inner reality.

So it is today. Being baptized does not save you unless the outer matches the inner.

You have to be baptized by the Holy Spirit. You had to be circumcised in the heart.

And friends, today, if you call on the name of Christ, you've been circumcised in your heart, and you've been baptized by the

Holy Spirit. But the rulers of this age thought they had a birthright, and they thought that the promises given to Abraham were theirs through inheritance.

But all that they inherited was the oracles of God, as Romans tells us. They inherited first the message.

But if you don't believe the message, it's like denying the inheritance and throwing it away, and so you get none of the riches.

Why would they not have crucified the Lord of Glory if they had understood that he was the sacrificial lamb given to fulfill the spiritual inheritance?

They never would have killed him. But they did kill him because the reality of God's covenantal promises was hidden from them, and it's hidden from many today.

And that's why we fight about Israel. Have you had your head out of sand and see the argument that's raging?

Still today, still today, people think that the covenant of Abraham comes through physical birth.

When in Galatians, we know that Jesus Christ is the seed of Abraham. He is the one that all of those promises were fulfilled in because Paul says it's singular.

It's a seed. It's not the seeds. A seed, Jesus Christ. So Paul disarms them, and he says, these who claim themselves to be wise, these who trouble you, the debater of this age and the scribe, they are troubling you.

But what you're doing is as you pull towards them, you're pulling away from God, and you're forgetting wisdom and your babies.

So what you have to do is you have to pray that God will reveal the mystery to you. And the mystery is this, that God loves his people, that he saves his people.

God knew this from the very beginning, and this is a hard message for us, but Paul preaches it. God foreknew his own children of inheritance, and he foreknew the vessels of wrath, and he hid spiritual wisdom from the vessels of wrath so that they would kill his son.

Do you understand that? Pilate, Caiaphas, the whole structure. The wisdom of God was withheld from them so they would increase their wrath by killing the

Lord of glory, because God had ordained it to be so, and they did exactly what they wanted.

We get it very clearly in Mark chapter 4 as Jesus speaks in parables. It says this, when he was alone, his followers, along with the twelve, began asking him about the parables, and he was saying to them, to you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but to those who are outside, everything comes in parables, so that while seeing, they may see and not perceive, and while hearing, they may hear and not understand.

This has messed with me for years. Lest they return and be forgiven.

Do you understand this? It's in God's power to reveal the parables, and if he doesn't reveal the parables, then you will be lost.

But if he does reveal the parables, you will return and receive them. How are you doing,

Christian? You didn't decide to become a Christian. God revealed the spiritual mystery to you, and you became a

Christian because it was all his work. There it is in scripture. If you don't like that, argue against it.

What did Jesus say very plainly to his followers? He said, I speak in parables because if I did not speak in parables, these people who are outside of the kingdom of God by foreknowledge of God would come and repent, and they're not to repent.

How do you get around it? I don't know, and that's why I became a dirty doctrines of grace guy years and years ago, because these things, they don't make me feel good.

The reality of the situation is some people are ordained for destruction from before the beginning of time.

So what is this? We should seek wisdom. We should seek maturity, but the way we do that, understand this, and this is where we go, and hopefully propel us into next week, is this.

We do not gain deeper wisdom. I think all of you guys want it. Do you not? Do you want to stop at the fundamentals?

I hope not. Can you be a decent team knowing only the fundamentals?

Of course you can. Can you be a great team only knowing the fundamentals? No, you cannot.

Do we want greatness unapologetically? Here at Covenant Baptist, I am not afraid to say this. I want this to be a great church.

I want it to be great in the estimation of God, where we are a wise church, where we understand

God's law, and we never let go of the fundamentals like the church at Ephesus, where they forgot their first love.

I don't want us to forget our first love. That's why we try to preach a hot gospel, and I hope you've heard it this morning, but there is a thing.

When you're in those fundamentals and you trust in Jesus Christ, there is greater mystery, and there are greater things that will edify us, but we do not get them by reaching back to the traps of the blind hard -hearted.

We must not be hard -hearted. If you want spiritual sight, the number one indicator of being spiritually 20 -20 is that you are not hard -hearted.

Here's the last point. Wisdom that is powered by God. I'm obliterating my time,

Brady. I'm very disappointed in myself. I will have a stern talking with myself later. Last four.

Wisdom that is powered by God. Just as it is written, things which the eye has not seen, the ear has not heard, and which have not entered the heart of man, all that God has prepared for those who love him.

Here's what I want to tell you. God has tremendous things in store for those who love him, and we've forgotten them, church.

We get wearied down and bogged down by what we see day to day, but I want to tell you the two places where Paul is paraphrasing here in this scripture.

I want you to hear this. Isaiah 64, 1 -4.

Do you get that? If you wait for God, the mountains quake and tremble. Sinai was a foretaste of Calvary, and that mountain shook and was smoke -filled, and to touch that mountain was death.

But guess what? To touch Calvary was death, too, only for the sacrificial lamb, right? It was death.

Blood was spilled on Calvary, but this blood was eternal blood, where God fulfilled the law by bringing out its terrible punishment on his own son.

But there is something waiting for you that an eye has not seen and an ear has not heard, and that is going to be the coming of God that will make the mountains tremble and will make water boil.

Isaiah continues the thought, 65. For behold, I am creating a new heavens and a new earth, and the former things will not be remembered or come upon the heart.

But be joyful and rejoice forever in what I create. For behold, I create Jerusalem for rejoicing and her people for her joy.

Listen, we have an eschatological break point here, but I'm going to unapologetically promote my own.

Here's what I think. We are in the new heavens and the new earth because Jesus instituted them, and they are crawling through time, okay?

And here's the idea. What is the key thing of the new heavens and the new earth? That is that God comes to live among his people.

And we can all agree on this. What is it to be in heaven? God dwells among his people.

What is it to be in the new kingdom, the new heavens and the new earth? It is this, that God's adversaries know his power, that he can knock down mountains and cause fire in the brushwood that they would see and they would fear.

And the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. So God made manifest, we will see this.

So there is tremendous things. Be of heart, Christian, when you believe the fundamentals and when you search for wisdom, you will see, begin to see, the deeper treasures of what

God has for his people. The wisdom in this world introspects and is blind to sin, while the mature

Christian is convicted of his sin and sees God's plan in the world. We have got to stop introspecting so much.

You are righteous. You have been declared righteous. He has forgiven you of your sins. And so what you need to do is trust what he says that you are forgiven of your sins and go do something.

Go do something. Go build. And here is the thing. Let me sum it all up here. It is a lot about wisdom. Paul wants his people to get wisdom, does he not?

Obtain it. Grasp onto it. I came to you with this simple message, but when you are mature, there is something more here.

So how do you get this something more? Well, James tells us very simply. Let me read it to you. You have all heard it.

If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him.

If you want wisdom, just ask for it. Have you? Have you been doing that?

God, make me wise. God, let me give you a better prayer. God, make me wise so I can properly live out your commands.

Does God want you to live out his commands? Of course he does. Does God want to give you wisdom?

He tells us to ask for it through his holy word. So if he wants you to follow his commands and he wants to give you wisdom, then if we ask for wisdom so that we can follow out his commands and give glory to him, he will give that to you.

And if we are a church of mature believers who have wisdom, then there will be greatness here because the kingdom of God is mountains quaking.

Doesn't it scare you a little bit? It does. That's the immaturity. Because what we want to do is get on the boat, have our

Jesus circle here where we feel all comfortable. Oh yeah, are you redeemed? Let the redeemed of the

Lord say so. What are the redeemed of the Lord supposed to be saying? They were taking out Canaan. They were making war on God's enemies.

And here in the New Testament age, in the New Covenant age, what we do is let the redeemed of the Lord say so.

Yeah, what do we do? We seek wisdom and we go make disciples. Because wisdom overflows.

James 3 17, but the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruits, without doubting, without hypocrisy.

And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. I want to end there and I want to ask you this question for next week before we get very specific.

How is your conduct? Does it follow what

James lays out? Are you a hypocrite? Or is your conscience clean?

If you seek wisdom, God will give it to you. And I hope that he gives you a heart that's courageous enough to deal with what happens when he gives you wisdom.

It's going to change your life and it's going to be amazing. And we're going to spend it out here and you're going to be tired, but it's going to be the right kind of being tired that we look forward to glory.

Let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you. Thank you for the scripture. It is powerful.

It's incredible, Lord, that we who are reformed, we have neglected the need for the spirit and we've replaced it with an idea of attaining knowledge.

But Lord, we in that quest have forgotten that knowledge comes from the Holy Spirit, that we know zero spiritual things without the illumination and the wisdom of the

Holy Spirit. Lord, thank you. Thank you for giving the spirit to us that he is our comforter or that he takes resonance in us, the foretaste and the first fruits of your kingdom, or that those who are your children, that you dwell with us daily, that you never leave us or forsake us.

Lord, help us to be a people that are not cold towards the reality of what you've given us in your spirit.

Lord, I dare pray. I dare that we would be a people who are filled with the

Holy Spirit and who exhibit all of those gifts in your church, or that we would trust in what you've told us and that we would use discernment and wisdom in the power that will be unveiled through your

Holy Spirit. Lord, make us a wise church. Help us to not look at this for a second and then turn away and forget, so that we would be tossed around by different doctrines.

But instead, Lord, you say that wisdom is a precious jewel, a treasure that we're to seek, or that we should ask for it, that we should dig for it, and then you will give it to us.

So Lord, help us to be a people that diligently pray that to seek wisdom and to not forget it, but instead to attain it and to use it.

And all of this would be to your glory as disciples are made, as your gospel goes forth, as more and more gratitude is given for your provision of salvation and sonship.

Lord, we thank you for these treasures of heaven, and we pray that we would not be distracted in seeking them.