This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

Hi, this is Pastor Tom and I want to welcome you to our second week of looking
at 1st Corinthians. So 1st Corinthians chapter 2 this week, we're going to look
at verses 1 to 5 today. You might remember last week as we began to look at 1st
Corinthians we saw that in many ways this book is like sitting down to have a
question and answer session with the Apostle Paul.

Some from Corinth had come to Paul on Ephesus, they had a list of questions
about the church, about worship, about their lives, and also about the
resurrection, what was going to happen at the end of time. And Paul takes the
time to sit down and write out an answer to let them know about these things.
Last week we looked at what does it take to make a difference?

And Paul tells us to make a difference with your life, one of the things you
have to do is be in a church that's making a difference. Three things he talked
about last week that make every church great, grace, unity, and God's wisdom.
And this week we're going to take a stronger look at God's wisdom.

How does this wisdom from God make a difference in my everyday life? Last week
as we began to look at God's wisdom, if you're like most people there were some
things that Paul had to say that it left with some questions. Paul goes on to
answer some of those questions in chapter 2.

What does God's wisdom look like? What does it act like? How does it make a
difference in my everyday life?

Listen to verses 1 to verse 5. Paul writes, "When I came to you, brothers, I did
not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony
about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus
Christ and Him crucified.

I came to you in weakness and fear and with much trembling. My message and my
preaching were not with persuasive and wise words, but with a demonstration of
the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on
God's power. " As Paul talks about God's wisdom in these verses, he uses three
words that describe how God's wisdom works.

How you and I experience it. I want to walk together through these three words
today. Paul uses the words proclamation, testimony, and demonstration.

As we look at what those words mean, proclamation, testimony, and demonstration,
they tell us how God's wisdom works in our everyday lives. First the word
proclamation. As Paul talks about the proclamation of God's wisdom, he reminds
us that it is a simple wisdom.

He says it's not with superiority of speech or of wisdom that I came to you. The
beauty of the good news of Jesus Christ is its simplicity. God loves you enough
to die for you, to pay the price, to get rid of the barrier that kept you from
knowing Him.

You can tell the good news in one word, grace. You can explain it in one name,
Jesus. You compare the simplicity of the message of Jesus with the complexity of
a lot of other religious messages.

A Jewish list of laws or a Buddhist eightfold path or a Hindu concept of
nirvana. Very complicated ways of getting to God. But the good news, whether
you're listening or telling, the power of the good news is in the message of
simplicity.

The message paraphrase of these verses, Paul says, "I didn't try to impress you
with Polish speeches or the latest philosophy. I deliberately kept it plain and
simple. First Jesus and who He is and then Jesus and what He did.

Jesus crucified. " You see, a complicated message appeals to our pride. Paul
says, "I didn't try to impress you.

I didn't give you a complicated message because that's just going to appeal to
your pride. " A complicated message appeals to our pride, but it leaves us where
we are. We're impressed that maybe I could understand the message, but we don't
change.

The simple truth leaves us less impressed with ourselves and more impressed with
the truth and where it's taking us, the change that's happening in our lives.
That's the proclamation of God's wisdom. It's a simple wisdom.

It's a wisdom that changes us in its simplicity, in its clarity. Paul also uses
the word testimony in these verses in a very unusual way. And as he talks about
testimony, he's reminding us that it's a personal wisdom.

I don't know if you noticed as I read through these verses, he says, "I brought
to you the testimony about God. " That's a different way of using the word
testimony. Usually we talk about my testimony, your testimony of what God's done
in your life.

But Paul here talks about the testimony about God. He doesn't say, "I came to
you with the philosophy of God. " He says, "I came to you with the testimony
about God.

" A testimony is the news, the news, the personal news of what has happened in
somebody's life. And the testimony about God is the news, the personal news
about God and what he has done for our lives. And what is this testimony about
God?

Paul says the testimony about God is Jesus Christ and him crucified. The
testimony is what happened the day that Jesus went to the cross, the day that
Jesus stretched out his hands and allowed nails to pierce those hands, the day
that Jesus allowed nails to pierce his feet, the day that Jesus allowed his life
to be taken on the cross. He was God.

He is God. He could have chosen anything, but he chose to come to this earth. He
chose to live his life for us and to give his life for us.

That is the testimony about God. And that's the only message that can bring real
and lasting change. We need to be reminded that we proclaim in many ways a very
single-minded message.

It's the message of Jesus. There is, by the way, a difference between being
single-minded and being narrow-minded. Never apologize for being single-minded,
for having the truth that's shown by God so clearly.

Some people want to confuse single-mindedness and narrow-mindedness.
Narrow-mindedness is prejudice against others. The southern slaveholders were
narrow-minded, but Lincoln was single-minded.

He had a single-minded purpose, and I'm glad he did. I'm glad he didn't say, "I
don't stand for anything. I'm glad he stood for something.

" And you and I, we stand for something. We stand for this personal message,
Jesus Christ and him crucified. That is the message we stand for.

That's the wisdom of God that makes a difference in our lives, the testimony
about God, the proclamation of God. And then Paul uses a third word here,
demonstration. Proclamation, testimony, and then demonstration.

And in that word, he's reminding us that the wisdom of God is a spirit-powered
wisdom. Paul says, "I didn't come to you with persuasive words of wisdom. " It's
not human-powered.

It's not advertising-powered. Paul did not need any Madison Avenue hype to sell
his message. No, it is spirit-powered message.

We're called to tell the message, not sell the message is what I'm saying. A lot
of people, they don't tell the message of what God's done in their lives because
they don't understand the difference between these two. And they think, "I'm not
a very good salesman.

" Well, Paul says, "Neither was I when I was with you. I was with you in
weakness," he says. "I wasn't with you with persuasive words.

" But it was the spirit that convinced people. Paul was just a witness. God has
not called you to be a salesman.

He's called you to be a witness. The method is not human persuasion. The method
is practical demonstration of the spirit's power.

How do you see the spirit's power in somebody's life? Changes, differences that
are made, hope where there was not hope, confidence where there was not
confidence, peace where there wasn't peace, a loss of anxiety, replacing anxiety
with prayer. You see what somebody has seen happen in their lives because of the
love of Jesus Christ.

So when you tell what he's doing in your life, that is what rings true. And Paul
says, "Even as I told, I was with you in weakness and in trembling. " Paul felt
weak, but God was strong.

A lot of people feel like if we're going to experience God's wisdom, it's going
to make me feel smarter than I've ever felt before and stronger than I've ever
felt before. But Paul says here, "I felt weak, and yet God was strong. " And
many times God's wisdom is so great, his power is so great, it actually humbles
you.

And you actually feel weak in the midst of sharing in what God is doing in your
life and in other people's lives. Don't mistake that feeling of weakness for a
lack of power. The truth of the matter is when you're proclaiming the good news
of what God's doing, that is the spirit's power at work.

And however you feel about it in that moment, God is at work in that moment. So
what does God's wisdom look like in my life? It looks simple.

It's not some complicated thing. It's the simple truth of God's love in your
life. That's what his wisdom looks like.

It's reducing life to the simple truth of his love. It looks personal. Jesus
Christ and him crucified, what he did for you on the cross, that is God's
wisdom.

It looks powerful, but not the kind of power that we usually think about. It is
the power of the spirit at work in your life, through your life as you tell this
message. Him doing things that you never expected he could do, that you thought
there's no way he could do because of how you felt in the moment, but he's still
at work.

That's what God's wisdom looks like as it works in our everyday lives. Now I
don't know about you, but I need, and I know you do too, I need the spirit's
power in my life today. And the only place to get it is from him.

I can't conjure it up. I can't make it happen. So let's turn to him right now.

Holy Spirit, we ask for your power in our lives today. We want our lives to be a
demonstration of the spirit's power in the words that we say and the reactions
that we have. But Lord, we're mere human beings.

How could that happen by our own power? It cannot. And so we come to you and we
humbly ask for your power, your power to do what we could not do, to think what
we could not think on our own, to act in ways that we would never act on our
own.

Lord, we're not asking to feel powerful. We're asking for genuine power, the
person of your spirit working through our lives in ways that we could not work
on our own. And we ask for this in Jesus' name.

Amen.