Pastoral Letter 204

Dear Members of St. Andrew’s Uniting Church, Friends and Adherents,

Grace and peace to you all.

Now we are already in the third week of Lent as we move forward to the Triumphant Entry of Christ into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, only to start the passion week and retell the story of the pain and the agony of Jesus, which He went through for our sake. On Good Friday we will recollect the final hours of His earthly life, before He died on the Cross, only to rise from the tomb on Easter morning to bring hope to this broken world and the alienated people, who need to reconcile with God.

Today, we reflect on the wisdom of God and our foolishness, as Paul explains in his letter addressed to the believers in the church of Corinth, a church with many issues, divisions and conflicts. Paul reminds them not to trust and boast in their abilities, but trust and boast in the cross of Jesus Christ. As humans we are always tempted to do so, but the Word of God reminds us to humble ourselves, not to boast with our talents, abilities and achievements, but instead consider them to be foolishness in the eyes of God and see the wisdom of God demonstrated in the Spirit and the Cross of Christ.   

Just make a note that our Bus trip to Wentworth Falls Lake scheduled for Wednesday 6 March, is now rescheduled to 20 March at 9:00 am. Please note and put your name down if you plan to join us on the trip.

Please continue to pray for those who are going through difficult and tough time, seeking God’s presence, help and healing.

We were informed that Winnie Tonkin has passed away on Wednesday 28 February 2024. Please remember her daughter Christina and the loved ones in your prayers.

If you are not able to join us tomorrow, please light a candle, have a small roll of bread and a small cup of wine for Communion and join us following the attached Order of Service.

Please let me know if you or anyone else has prayer points.

Here are some prayer points for this week:

1. Pray for this Lent season, as we ponder and reflect examining our faith in Christ.
2. Pray for the Middle East, and the conflict between Israel and Palestine.
3. Pray for the people Artsakh who are refugees in different parts of Armenia facing many challenges.
4. Pray for the poor, the sick, the struggling and the stressed.
5. Pray for those who are going through a difficult time with health and financial issues.
6. Pray for Winnie Tonkin’s family, as they morn her loss.
7. Pray for our church and our future plans as we seek God’s guidance.

Best Regards

In Christ

Krikor

MESSAGE

Our Foolishness and God’s Wisdom

1 Corinthians 1:10-2:16

When the PRC asks a church to revisit their Congregational Profile, usually the Church Council forms a sub-Committee to do the task. The sub-committee works hard hoping for a positive outcome. It is difficult to accomplish the task which involves many hours.

Imagine yourself to be a member of God’s heavenly selection committee and God gives you the job of putting together a profile of the sort of person that Heaven is looking for.

What sort of person should you be keen to select?

Smart people? – God knows everything. Surely, He’ll want to surround Himself with intelligence.

Good looking people? – God’s beautiful in His holiness, so it makes sense to select attractive people.

Powerful people? – Doers! Movers and shakers; active people who know what they want and how to get things done.

Wealthy people? – Power comes from wealth, doesn’t it? Better get some rich folk in.

Noble people? – People of perfect background, upper class. You just can’t surround God with arrogant character.

You submit the list to God’s office, only to get it back ripped to shreds.

So, what sort of person is God looking for?

The problem in the Corinthian church was that they thought God was using that sort of list. They were a very talented, spiritually gifted church but they became proud of themselves, and they lost sight.

They displaced Christ with wisdom, replacing the cross with their human ability. They became arrogant and proud for their own wisdom. But Paul turned their world upside down when he wrote:

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate’.” (18-19).

“For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength”. (25)

Paul wanted to tell them two things.

1. He wanted to demonstrate to them the truth of the gospel being foolish to the world, and that God chooses and uses weak foolish people by the world’s standards to show Himself as wise and power.

2. He wanted to tell them about real Christian wisdom; wisdom that comes from God and not from humans.

The Demonstration of God’s Power and Wisdom

Paul starts by reminding them of what God has done in and with them: “Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth” (vr. 26).

Paul’s holding up a mirror to the Corinthians. You are proud of your new wisdom and gifts from God – but don’t forget where you started from. Remember – you weren’t wise by human standards. You weren’t powerful. You didn’t have noble origins.

Paul said God chose a bunch of nobodies; the overlooked, the ignored, the unwanted.

When wealthiest people throw a top wedding reception for their sons or daughters, they invite a top of guests, notables from overseas and very well-known artists and musician to perform. Only important, special and significant people are invited. Even they use cutlery made from gold.

But when God sent out the invites to join the church, to come to God’s great party, He invited people who would never make it to the society pages of the papers. He invited people who weren’t the talk of the town. It’s like inviting the homeless or ordinary workers to a wedding banquet.

God doesn’t choose how we would.

“But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong; God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things- and the things that are not – to nullify the things that are” (27-28).

Why does God do this? Is He just difficult in His selection criteria?

The reason God chooses the people He does, is so that His people are on the same footing: “so that no one may boast before him” (29).

That no human being might boast before God. God is the wise one; the mighty one. God chooses people to show to them, and the whole universe, that He is God. He owes nothing to anyone. He’s not won over by human wisdom or power. He wants the world to know He’s God, and the one who saves.

“It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God – that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts boast in the Lord’” (30-31).

God has made wisdom for the unwise; righteous for the unrighteous; sanctification for the unholy and redemption for captives.

We contribute nothing. God chooses who He wants on His own terms – not ours. And He loves to surprise the world by choosing the people the world overlooks.

The Corinthians have been boasting in all the wrong things. They think they were mature, but Paul told them to grow up. To boast in God and not in themselves. And Paul also reminded them of when he first proclaimed the Gospel in Corinth. “Remember how I came to you. In weakness and fear. In much trembling” (2:3).

Paul came to Corinth with a message without worldly wisdom and expression, and God brought people to Himself through Paul. What Paul brought was the simple message of Christ crucified. God on a cross. Of the empty tomb. Of Jesus’ kingship. That was Paul’s message.

Paul knew this too. “My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration pf the Spirit’s power.” (4). His message wasn’t framed with reasonable words of human wisdom. But rather framed by a demonstration of the Spirit and of power.

What does that mean? A demonstration of the Spirit? It means that Paul’s words had God’s power. They weren’t the cultured, rhetorical words of the Corinthian philosophers, but people still became Christians.

Without the Holy Spirit there would have been no power. People would not have responded. For Paul, it also meant signs and wonders – those strange and wonderful acts of God. Speaking in tongues, healing.

So, in the examples of both the Corinthians and Paul himself, God is the wise, powerful one. We are to boast in Him, and not in ourselves. “Therefore, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord”. “That your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (5, 31).

The nature of real Christian wisdom.

^“We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. No, we declare God’s wisdom, a mystery that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (6-8).

Who are the mature ones Paul is talking about here? Was it the Corinthians? I don’t think so.

Paul isn’t contrasting mature and immature Christians, but the rulers of that age, who killed Jesus, against those who recognised Jesus for who He was and is.

Here the mature are the Christians. Paul’s saying that there is wisdom in Christianity, and he talked about it. Christianity is only foolish to those on the outside who don’t understand it.

But there is real God breathed wisdom for us. But you only get it, if God gives it. You can’t find God’s wisdom by your own effort. God is too great, too wise, too good, too holy, too immense, for us to see or grasp without Him telling us.

To people in love with human wisdom, God’s wisdom is foolishness. Only God’s Holy Spirit can reveal the truth about God. And God does indeed give His Spirit to Christians so that we can know Him and understand what He has done for us and given to us. That’s something non-Christians cannot do.

The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, “Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct him?” But we have the mind of Christ.

The Christian message is foolish without God’s Spirit to understand it.

But what does Paul mean by the Spiritual person not being judged by the unspiritual? Or that the Spiritual person discerns all things?

I think Paul means that Christians discern and know the truth from and about God unlike the wisdom of this age. The unspiritual person has no right or ability to tell Christians how to know God. This is about knowing the things from God and as believers having the mind of Christ.

To have God’s Spirit means to have the mind of Christ.

In the rest of this letter Paul gave a lot of very practical advice for the Corinthians, and us too – but here at the outset he’s saying that only by having the Holy Spirit can we receive God’s wisdom. The practical, ethical, and theological teaching of this letter is foolishness unless God opens our eyes.

What we’ve heard today from 1 Corinthians is about changing the way we think about ourselves. About the sort of people God chooses. And about what we need to understand the rest of this letter, indeed all of the Bible.

Sometimes God is merciful to the wise, and powerful of our age. But that’s the exception, not the rule. And for them to become a Christian actually means denying that God chooses them on the basis of their wisdom, power or position. For both the Corinthian Christians, and in Paul’s ministry, God wanted people to boast in Him, not themselves. To acknowledge and respond on the basis of His power, and not their own.

The Christian message is foolishness to our world. But God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom. Christians can only boast in God, and not in the self. And Christians’ maturity is about having God’s Spirit, not our own wisdom. It’s about having the mind of Christ.

Let me ask a few simple questions:

What are you taking pride in?

What are you boasting in?

What are you trusting in?

We need to hear these words again:

Maybe we don’t admire secular wisdom, but is there something we boast in other than God?

There’s the temptation that we boast for our achievements in life or the position we are in.

“It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God – that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, ‘Let him who boasts boast in the Lord’” (vr. 30).

Amen!