WWUTT 1453 Have the Mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16)

You know, it's possible, even as Christians, to read what we read in the Bible, puff ourselves up with knowledge, and think that we're better than somebody else who doesn't understand what's in Scripture.

But if that's our attitude, we do not have the mind of Christ when we understand the text. This is

When We Understand the Text, a daily Bible commentary that we may be equipped for every good work in Jesus Christ our

Lord. Please tell others about our ministry at www .utt .com.

Here once again is Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. So back to our study in 1 Corinthians chapter 2.

Yeah, I'm still going to be in chapter. We got one more verse here in chapter 2. So looking at verse 16 and then going into chapter 3, let me start reading in verse 14, the

Apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth. 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.

The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one, for who has understood the mind of the

Lord so as to instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. But I, brothers, could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.

I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it, and even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh.

For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way?

For when one says, I follow Paul, and another, I follow Apollos, are you not being merely human?

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants, through whom you believed, as the

Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.

So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.

He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor, for we are

God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.

That was through chapter 3, verse 9. We're looking mainly at verse 16 today, and again, this is where Paul quotes from Isaiah, and we also see the same quote in Romans chapter 11, when we were studying through the book of Romans, for who has understood the mind of the

Lord so as to instruct him? That's a rhetorical question, answer, nobody.

No one has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct the Lord. But then

Paul concludes, we have the mind of Christ. And that's really the point, is to have the mind of Christ, that we would grow in the knowledge of God so to have

Christ's mind and deal with one another in the way that Jesus loves us.

We love one another the way that God has loved us through Christ, considering even others' needs ahead of our own.

We have these divisions that have been started up here in the church in Corinth, because each one was putting his own flesh ahead of the needs of others, satisfying the desires of their flesh before looking to the interests and needs of their brothers and sisters in the

Lord in the church. Now, when I say satisfying their own flesh, I don't necessarily mean sexual immorality, although we do get there.

As we're continuing through this letter that Paul is writing to the Corinthians, they do have issues with sexual immorality going on in the church.

He's confronting this issue first, and then he's going to talk about some others as we continue to go on, some other serious issues that exist in the church, all born out of an immature congregation feeding the desires of the flesh rather than having the mind of Christ.

This was a situation that was going on in the church in Galatia as well, a different issue, but still a matter of the flesh rather than being in the spirit.

And I had quoted from Galatians earlier in the week, Monday, I think it was, with regards to the works of the flesh versus the fruit of the spirit.

That's in Galatians chapter five. It's in that same chapter where Paul says, this is

Galatians five, starting in verse thirteen, for you were called to freedom, brothers, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love, serve one another.

Another way of saying that is if you're going after the desires of your flesh, you're not loving one another, but rather put those desires aside and seek the benefit of each other.

Verse 14, for the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You shall love your neighbor as yourself, as you are inclined to want to feed and satisfy your own flesh, rather put the needs of others ahead of your own.

But then Paul warns in verse 15, but if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.

So it's either feeding each other or it's feeding on each other. That's really, really what it comes down to.

You are either looking after each other or you are against one another. And that's what's going on here in the church in Corinth.

Paul is trying to head this off at the pass. There's already some divisions that are going on here in the church.

And if these aren't corrected post haste, then it will spell disaster for this church.

These people will reveal themselves to have never really been true converts to the gospel of Jesus Christ, but rather people who fancied a certain idea for a time that was just a passing opinion before they went right back to entertaining the passions of the flesh that they had before they said that they became

Christians. So as we come back here to 1 Corinthians 2, verse 14,

I want to read this one one more time because I want to make a certain distinction here between the natural person and the spiritual person.

So 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.

The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one.

There's verses 14 and 15. So I made the comment when we started chapter two,

I said that I always had this question in my mind when

I was young and just entertaining the concept of apologetics in about late high school, early college.

I was always baffled by how I could read the Bible and come away from it hearing about the power of God for salvation to all who believe these words.

But then a friend of mine who's an atheist reads it and he comes away from the Bible thinking that it's just utter, utter foolishness.

Why is it that some read the Bible and they see the power of God, but others read the Bible and they just read nonsense?

The answer to that question was given to me in First Corinthians two, where you read it is by the spirit of God that has transformed our hearts, that we have gone from being a person who sees these words as nonsense to a person who sees these words as the power of God for salvation.

Again, Romans 1 16, I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.

And we've come to that understanding by the spirit of God that reveals to us spiritual truths where previously in our flesh, we were haters of God who is spirit.

Remember, Jesus saying this to the the Samaritan woman at the well in John four, God is spirit.

So if we are of the flesh, we hate those things that are of the spirit. And we were haters of God, opposed to God because we are going after the passions of our flesh.

We did not desire spiritual things. We desired our own selfish, sinful pursuits.

And when we were in that place, we were haters of God. We were enemies of God. And yet God loved us despite the fact that we were his enemies and sent his son to die for us as an atoning sacrifice so that whoever believes in him, we're no longer enemies of God.

We're no longer the objects of his wrath, but we are the objects of his love. And we have gone from a a destiny of eternal torment and punishment, which is what we would receive in hell.

And now our destiny is to reign with Christ, enthroned on high by his great mercy and love that he has shown us.

We've even come to this understanding. We're even accepting of this truth and putting trust in Christ because of the transforming power of the spirit that has happened in our lives when we heard the gospel and believed it.

Remember back in Romans three, we read that no one does anything good. There is none righteous, not even one.

No one does good. No one seeks for God. If belief in the gospel is indeed a good thing and no one does good, then how could we possibly come to a belief in this gospel and so be saved?

Only by. That blessing of God, who has poured our spirits into our hearts and regenerated us from being dead to alive, that we may know the gospel and believe it, regeneration precedes faith and repentance, and this is all by the gift of God, it's all by his choosing, for as we had read right at the very beginning of first Corinthians, Paul is called by the will of God to be an apostle of Christ Jesus.

And he is writing to the church of God that is in Corinth to those sanctified in Christ Jesus called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of the

Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours. How did we come to call upon the name of the

Lord? Because he called us first to be his sheep and to follow him.

And we who heard the voice of the good shepherd and followed are his sheep. Repent and believe our commands and those who are his sheep will follow them.

Those who are not his sheep are goats and they will not follow the voice of the good shepherd.

So we have come into this faith by the transforming work of the spirit. Now, I may be repeating myself.

These are things that I've talked about already. But the reason why I come back to this again is because even in that time when

I was in college and I was reading first Corinthians two and I'm coming to an understanding that the reason why one person believes this and another person doesn't is by the will of God, by the power of his spirit.

I still kind of had this understanding that the naturally minded man is a person who thinks of just natural things like the agnostic, for example, doesn't believe

God because he doesn't think that anything is really, truly knowable, which is absurd, because if you know that you've you've contradicted your own worldview there, nothing is really knowable.

Do you know that? Well, yeah. OK, then apparently something is knowable. OK, but but the agnostic will say that it's only those things that we can see, only those things that we can experience.

That's what's truly real. And so you might call that person the naturally minded man because it's only those things that naturally occur, whereas you have the spiritually minded man.

You might even distinguish him as a supernaturally minded man. So we have the naturally minded man who thinks only of those things that are tangible, only those things that can be experienced with your senses, with your five senses.

Those things are real. So therefore, those are the only things that you can believe in, whereas the supernaturally minded man goes beyond what we can experience with the five senses and understands that there are things that exist beyond even our own realm of physical experience.

There is a supernatural realm that exists. So those things that are supernatural, he ponders and considers those things.

Also, you have the naturally minded man thinks only of the natural things. The spiritual man thinks even of supernatural things.

So the the spiritual man therefore has a broader range of observance and understanding because he thinks of not only that which is in the natural, but also that which is in the supernatural.

He thinks of both. He can contemplate both supernatural and natural things, whereas the naturally minded man thinks of only natural things.

OK, now I'm saying that I was pondering these things in my immaturity.

That's not really what's being talked about here. The naturally minded man is the person who, by his nature, is still a sinner.

That's really what Paul is talking about here. He's not talking about a distinction between, well, this person thinks only in natural terms, but the spiritual man thinks even in supernatural ways.

If we take that as the definition of what Paul is talking about in First Corinthians two, 14 and 15, then we're going to wind up making the same error that the

Corinthians were making. The Corinthians, who, again, are thinking with their flesh rather than with the spirit of God, with the mind of a man rather than the mind of Christ, OK, they're creating factions among one another, claiming one is smarter than another because they follow this particular teacher.

Remember, I follow Apollos, I follow Cephas, I follow

Christ. And Paul says to them back in chapter one, verse 13, is

Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you or were you baptized in the name of Paul?

So when we talked about all this, I mentioned that, as it says in Acts 17, the

Greeks just seek new knowledge. They're just looking for the new knowledge out there that's going to make them look smarter than the other guy.

So, Paul, yeah, he sounds pretty good, but Apollo sounds better than Paul. Cephas sounds even better than Apollos.

Well, now I'm going even to the source and I've got Christ, so I'm even smarter than all of you. But if that's what you think that you are gaining by following any of these respective teachers, even attaching yourself to Christ in that way, then you are still thinking with your flesh and not with the mind of Christ.

It's not about ascending yourself over somebody else. I'm better than this person because I follow this teacher.

Following Christ means humbling yourself because there is no greater picture of humility in all of the history of the cosmos than Christ, who is

God. And though he was in the form of God, he did not count equality with God, a thing to be grasped.

But he emptied himself, made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant and being born in the likeness of men and being found then in human form.

He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the will of the father, even to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Therefore, God is highly exalted him and given him the name that is above every name so that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth.

And every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God, the father.

And that that I just gave to you there with a little extra commentary is

Philippians chapter two, verses five through eleven. There's our picture of humility. There's what it means to have the mind of Christ.

And Paul begins that chapter, Philippians two, by talking about putting one another's needs ahead of our own.

For our example is Christ, who considered our need and gave himself for us because of his sacrifice.

Our sins are forgiven and we have everlasting life with God. These things we receive by faith in Jesus.

So as Jesus humbled himself for our benefit, so we need to humble ourselves for others benefit.

And if we look at being spiritually minded as being better than the guy who's naturally minded, then we're still divided.

Now, of course, we who are Christians are divided from people who are of the world. We are divided as the sheep will be separated from the goats, definitely.

But we cannot be lording ourselves even over those who do not have knowledge of God, for we did not have knowledge of God at one point of Christ, his son, who is

God. We did not have this knowledge until God blessed us with this knowledge through the giving of his son, through the giving of his spirit.

And then we have come to the knowledge of these things. And so it is only by God, if there's going to be any boasting, it needs to be in God.

Therefore, we do not boast over others, for we were as they were. We were by our nature, children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

So there's no cause for boasting here. And you don't win people to the faith by saying to them, if you just have this knowledge, you'll have greater knowledge than you have now.

As a naturally minded man, you don't have the knowledge you need as a spiritually minded man.

Now you have all the knowledge, both of the supernatural and of the natural. That doesn't save anybody, because my friends, there are plenty of pagans out there who believe in both the supernatural and the natural.

Now, it may not be the supernatural God that they believe in. They probably believe in some other sort of spiritual entity or something.

This past Friday, Becky and I talked about Buddhism on the podcast. And of course, there's like a spiritual ascent that happens even in Buddhism when you become the enlightened one or even through Hinduism, achieving nirvana, things like that.

All of that is spiritual. So thinking it's it's wrong spiritualism, but it's nevertheless spiritual.

It's beyond that which is natural. So just attaining a knowledge of supernatural things or a knowledge of spiritual things doesn't save anybody.

It's specifically knowledge in the Lord Jesus Christ. And we need to humble ourselves to share that knowledge with those who do not know.

It's not about who has the greater knowledge. It's about knowing Christ. So therefore, once again,

I caution you on reading First Corinthians 2, 14 and 15 as the naturally minded man only thinks in natural ways.

The spiritual man thinks in supernatural ways. And so therefore, you need to ascend to this higher knowledge by becoming a

Christian. And then we're still going after that same selfish pursuit of knowledge that the

Corinthians were doing. What we're talking about when we read in First Corinthians 2, 14 about the natural person, we're talking about the man who is still by his nature, a sinner going after sins, going after the passions of his flesh.

He only thinks about that which is opposed to God, even if we could look at him and say he's a nice person.

It's still a self -righteousness that he is attaining rather than the righteousness of God that has been given by faith in Jesus Christ.

The spiritual person is the one who has humbled himself and realized he cannot come to this knowledge on his own.

He needs Jesus Christ to save him from his sins, his natural self, which was coming into destruction and make him into a new person born again by the spirit of God to become a spiritual person.

And he judges all things, but is himself judged by nobody. The person of the world, the naturally minded man cannot tell him that he is wrong for the truth that he has is truth that comes from God.

And we'll even talk more about how the spiritual person judges all things when we get to chapter six.

Paul talks about how we who are of Christ will one day judge even angels.

So we judge all things, but we are judged by no one.

And concluding once again with this verse in 16, for who has understood the mind of the

Lord so as to instruct him, there is no one who has ascended to God's level of knowledge, certainly not above God.

We don't even get to the level of the knowledge of God. So who are we to instruct

God as to what he should do, what he does? And that's what a naturally minded man does.

You need to give me this, God, what you have in store for me is not good enough.

I need this in order to be happy. That is a man that is still full of himself and still chasing after the passions of his flesh because he is by his nature opposed to God.

We are not to instruct God. We cannot instruct God at anything. So if we have the mind of Christ, who can instruct us in spiritual things?

No one but the word of God that has been given to us. And we've come to the understanding of this, the word of God and specifically the

Bible, we've come to an understanding of what the Bible says because of the spirit of God that is given to us.

So let all boasting be in God and not in ourselves.

Amen. Heavenly Father, we thank you for showing us such kindness, for opening our minds to see the truth that we would see and become knowledgeable of our own sin because of what your word says about us and that we would come to the knowledge of Christ, our savior, who forgives us of sin and rescues us from the wrath of God.

The judgment that is coming against all sinful man, again, because of what the Bible says to us.

May we be bold and confident in these things that we read, not shrinking away from them, not being not letting anybody shame us because they can't judge us for the things that we read in scripture.

Rather, we are the ones who will be the judges of all things with Christ, who is judge over all.

And so may we humble ourselves, give glory to God, and in this humility also reach out to those who do not know

God, that they would be convicted of their sins and put faith in Christ and believe. Teach us these things in Jesus' name.

Amen. You've been listening to When We Understand the Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, Gabe will be going through a

New Testament study. Then on Thursday, we look at an Old Testament book. On Friday, we take questions from the listeners and viewers.