“Wisdom in the Spirit”

Scripture: 1 Corinthians 2:1-16

What is wisdom? We read “Wisdom” literature in scripture. Society places a high regard on wisdom. Many people claim to have it, but few can actually describe it and personally, I don’t believe that any of us actually has it. Wisdom has been confused with knowledge – but knowledge is simply the accumulation of facts. Wisdom isn’t intelligence – that is the measurable potential for understanding. And it isn’t even understanding – that is the ability to comprehend what someone else is saying.
For me, Wisdom can only be a “ideal and perfect insight” – it’s the ability to put all that there is into order, into context, into a perspective that can bring all that exists into focus. We don’t have it and couldn’t handle if we did! God has it, though, and He blesses us through it.

Read 1 Corinthians 2:1-5

As the story goes:
An angel appears at a university faculty meeting and tells the dean that in return for his unselfish and exemplary behavior, the Lord will reward him with his choice of one of three things: infinite wealth, infinite wisdom or perfect beauty. Without hesitating, the dean selects infinite wisdom.”
Done!” says the angel, and disappears in a cloud of smoke and a clap of thunder. Now, all heads turn toward the dean, who now sits surrounded by a faint halo of light. At length, one of his colleagues whispers, “Say something.”
The dean looks around the silent room and replies, “I should have taken the money.”
- Homiletics Online

The ability for humanity to deal with wisdom, in its purest sense, is feeble, at best. I don’t recommend that anyone settle on money as their choice of God’s blessing, but we would probably have a better chance of success with infinite financial resources than the dean had with “infinite wisdom”!
Even Paul tells the church that he came without wisdom – that he was filled with weakness, fear, and trembling, and that he was neither wise nor gifted with persuasiveness. He relied totally on the power of God that flowed through the Spirit. Why should the people of today think that they are smarter than Paul? The truth is that we aren’t – we just think we are.

Read 1 Corinthians 2:6-10a

If we really think about verse 6, we see that it is very obviously a stinging rebuke of what the world looks to as “wisdom”. He says that the insight that the rulers of the world have is worth nothing. And his evidence is this - that their lack of insight into God’s ways is what required the Lord to give His all on Calvary. If we – not only the wise of earth, but everyone – had a good grasp on the goodness and glory of God,
if we all had a true sense of God’s plan for His creation, Jesus could have been spared His horror on the cross. But we don’t, and Paul’s quotation from Isaiah makes this failure on our part very clear – “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (Isaiah 64:1-5)
Our only hope to even come close to understanding the Lord’s plan is to lean on the teachings of Jesus Christ and the leading of His Holy Spirit. And what an incredible gift that is! God didn’t have to give us a view into His plan, but in His gracious nature, and in His desire for us to be active in His plan, His glory has been revealed to His created.
What an incredible and blessed God we serve!

Read 1 Corinthians 2:10b-13

No one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God, and the Spirit has been given to each of us. And we have received that Spirit so that we might understand – that we might comprehend what God is saying to us! And the converse is also true – if a person does not have the Spirit of God, they will be unable to understand. The wisdom of God will remain a mystery to them.

Wisdom in the Spirit is much more than some incomprehensible concept – it is a gift and a promise of even more to come. Some might say that verse 13 – “expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words” - is about speaking in tongues, but I believe that it is more than that, that this refers to anyone who receives the truth of God through the Spirit, and then speaks, in one of many ways, those same truths to the people of this world. They may not be able to understand the wisdom of God in a direct manner, but they just may begin to understand through us. We can’t keep those truths to ourselves, we can’t hide our Light under the proverbial “bushel”, we can’t sit back and revel in these amazing gifts of God. We have received them so that we might share them with others, so that they may receive the Spirit of the Lord, so that they might come to understand God’s plan for their life, and to accept it as their own.
But if we surrender to the temptation to put ourselves and our human spirit into those words, our Christian witness is going to be strangled. The world’s wisdom will shut out the truth of God, and the spiritual truths contained in these spiritual words will be muffled. The spirit of the world has no place in our walk with Christ, and we have to constantly be aware of our words and our attitudes and our actions! Our pride, our arrogance, our pains, our failures must all be surrendered to the Holy Spirit so that He can work within us.

Read 1 Corinthians 2:14-16

This passage has been an ideal and perfect view of what the church should be about. Mature, sensible, focused on God, listening and learning from the Spirit, being reborn and remade in wonderful ways, and never allowing ourselves to be corrupted by the false wisdom of the world.
The church at Corinth was, apparently, failing in these very things, and Paul was challenging them to see beyond themselves. The church was falling into a very worldly mode, and Paul was teaching them in the Spirit. They were failing in their understanding of spiritual matters, and in a human way, Paul was pointing out first, where they should be, and second, why they must correct their ways. It was to be his challenge to the church to get back in the Spirit.

During his presidency, Abraham Lincoln regularly attended worship services at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. The pastor was Dr. Phineas Gurley. Barry P. Boulware [A writer]relates how on one particular evening, while walking home from church, an aide asked President Lincoln about Dr. Gurley's sermon.
The President replied in fragmented phrases: The content was excellent...he delivered it with eloquence...he had put work into the message... Then you thought it was a great sermon? asked the aide. No, replied the President. Dr. Gurley forgot the most important ingredient. He forgot to ask us to do something great!
- Homiletics Online

And so, with the words of the Apostle Paul and President Lincoln still fresh in our minds, I’m going to ask you to do something great in the coming week. For the next 7 days, I would like each of us, and that includes me, to consider everything that we do and say in light of our scripture lesson today. Are we walking in the Spirit of God, or in the wisdom of the world? Are we listening to the Holy Spirit, or are we depending more on our human spirit? Do our words come from the Lord’s truth, or are we giving the ways of the world legitimacy in our lives? Are we loving as Christ loved, or as the world demands that we love?
When we do these “great things”, when we can truthfully answer these questions to the glory of God, then even more great things will begin to happen. I won’t presume to know what those “great things” may be, but they will happen!

Give God the glory! Give Christ the glory! Give the Spirit a chance to work in your life! And set the world’s wisdom far, far behind.