“We Are God’s Wisdom” 1 Corinthians 1:26-31

A look at Jesus’ earthly ministry shows an interesting trend. From the moment of His birth through His resurrection, God used the unexpected to further the Gospel.

Jesus’ birth was first announced to shepherds. Shepherds were thought by society to be so untrustworthy that no number of shepherds could be relied on as witnesses in a court of law. Yet, God sent the angels to shepherds to announce the birth of His Son.

When Jesus chose His 12 disciples, He chose men who, for the most part, were barely educated. He called four fishermen, a zealot (a revolutionary), and a tax gatherer. Matthew, the tax collector, was the only professional that we know of. The other apostles had no known careers, but they all gave up their jobs to follow Jesus.

At Jesus’ crucifixion, the only people who stayed with Him through the end were the women of His followers. And it was to one of the women—Mary Magdalene—that Jesus appeared to in the garden on Resurrection Sunday. She alone told the disciples that Jesus had risen. That’s not unusual, but Jewish courts required four women to testify in order to prove a case. One woman alone was not enough. Yet one woman was chosen to give the greatest news to the world.

In this passage of Scripture that we look at, we realize that God doesn’t reach out exclusively to the smartest, the wealthiest or the strongest. Instead, He reaches out to the typical person. He reaches out to you and me.

Background

Paul is writing this letter in response to a list of questions presented to him by messengers sent from Corinth. The letter begins with discussing divisions in the church. Verse 12 reads, “What I mean is this: One of you says, ‘I follow Paul;’ another, ‘I follow Apollos;’ another, “I follow Cephas;’ still another, ‘I follow Christ.’”

Paul then talks about the message he presented to the Corinthians, and that he preached Christ crucified to them. He calls the gospel the power and the wisdom of God. Which leads us to this passage we are looking at today. The key verse we want to focus on is v.31: “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.”

Central Truth: Being God’s wisdom gives us righteousness, holiness and redemption.

What We Were (26)

One of the things about our relationship with Jesus is that we can always remember what we were before we found salvation in Him. We can remember the way we related to the world, we can remember the moment we realized we needed Christ, and we can remember what our life has been since that day.

Paul takes us back to that moment before we knew Jesus. Basically, he tells them there was nothing particularly outstanding about most of the Corinthians prior to coming to Christ. They weren’t the wisest, weren’t influential, weren’t noble. They were just ordinary people living ordinary lives doing ordinary things. There was nothing special about them.

That describes most of us, as well. For myself, I was a typical teenager when I came to know Christ. Sure, I made good grades, but I wasn’t considered wise by any stretch of the imagination. Dad managed a glass company, so there wasn’t much influence or nobility about me. But Jesus reached out and saved me, anyway.

Now, Paul isn’t writing this to make the Corinthians or us feel particularly bad about ourselves. To the Corinthians, Paul was trying to remind them that they were getting puffed up when they had no reason to do so. It was a common problem in Corinth. They had a desire to be the Athens of southern Greece. They aspired to be known for philosophy and the arts, but they were more like the ones trying to keep up with the Joneses. They were wannabes, and that same yearning and aspiration had carried over to the church. So Paul is writing to remind them that they really weren’t all that special prior to coming to Christ.

And there’s a reason God chooses the ordinary over the extraordinary. We see that in the next few verses.

God’s Choice (27-29)

God’s ways are not our ways. He has a way of doing things and planning things that seems the opposite of what we would do or plan. Of course, God’s plans have a way of coming to pass, while ours often go awry.

Paul writes that God opted to reach out to the foolish, the weak, the lowly—even the despised—in order to bring glory to Himself. There’s two things about this that is important for us to realize.

First, it’s the phrase “God chose.” Three times in these verses, Paul reminds us that it was God’s choice to reach out to the ones He reached out to. He reached out to us. He chose us. I can think of nothing that should be stressed more than that we were God’s choice.

When you and I choose things, we generally choose things we like. Would you like chocolate pie for dessert or kale? A hundred dollars, or five pesos? When we choose, it’s because we want it. God chose us. He reached out and touched us, adopted us into His family and made us His own. I can think of nothing that should speak to us about how much God loves us. He chose us.

Secondly, verse 29 is significant: “so that no one may boast before Him.” When God reached out and chose us, we were broken, we were lost, we were at our rope’s end. Maybe we didn’t realize it at the time, but we were. None of us walked up to God and said, “I’m going to give You a break and let You pick me.” As Paul writes to the Ephesians, “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). God extended His grace to us, giving us the faith that we needed—that’s what “this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” means. There’s nothing you or I did to earn our salvation; it was and is a free gift from God.

This means that we have no reason to boast before God. God calls us to walk humbly with Him, and Jesus calls us to learn from Him, because He is meek and humble.

Paul’s words to the Corinthians is his effort to deflate the big heads of some in the church. It was a church consumed with outdoing one another—that’s what was causing the divisions. It was pride that was driving their church, and Paul reminded them that no one has the right to boast before God.

God’s Wisdom (30-31)

There is an English entertainer who is incredibly smart. His name is Stephen Fry. He started as a comedian teamed with his college friend, Hugh Laurie. From there, he has gone on to write books and act in a variety of programs. He is known for his intellect. He is also known to be an atheist. He has no use for God, or at least sees no reason to believe that there is a god, much less God the Father.

On the other hand, there is C.S. Lewis. He was a well-known author, taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, and was a Christian apologist. He wrote several well-known books reasoning that not only is there a god, but that the God we worship is the God.

While I have great admiration for both men, I question Fry’s wisdom. He has allowed his “wisdom” to cloud his awareness of God. And that’s sad.

Fortunately for us, we do not need to have depths of wisdom to come to God. In fact, vs. 30 tells us that wisdom comes from God, that Jesus is the wisdom from God. The promise of this verse is this: We are in Christ Jesus because of God’s mercy, and that Jesus has become our wisdom from God.

No, this doesn’t mean that we can answer all the questions of the universe, but we can know and do God’s will. More than that, the wisdom from God encompasses our righteousness, our holiness and our redemption. Since we know from previous messages that we are righteous, that we are holy and that we are redeemed, we can also add that we are made wise in God through Christ our Lord.

Return to the statement, “It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus.” On the last night Jesus was with His disciples, He told them that when the Holy Spirit came, we would “realize that I am in the Father, and you are in Me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). I’ve always likened this to a sponge in a full basin of water. Think of us as the sponge. Think of Jesus as the living water and think of God the Father as the basin. The sponge is placed in the water; the water is in the basin, and the water is in the sponge. Because we are in Christ by God’s grace, then we become filled with Jesus.

When a person takes a sponge sitting in a tub or vat of water, there are some things we notice. First, the sponge looks exactly like the sponge did before it went into the water. But when the sponge is removed from the basin of water, the sponge begins to leak. It doesn’t leak sponge; it leaks water.

We are in Christ. That’s what the Bible says in v. 30, and it’s what Jesus promised in John 14. We are in Christ, and He is in us. Therefore, because we are safely in His presence, we can allow Him to be poured through us. When a wet sponge touches a surface, it leaves the moisture of the water on that surface. Pick the sponge up and remove it from the surface, but the water will remain.

We are in Christ. It means we are safe and secure. It also means we are to be used by Him to live in and through us. By God’s grace, we are in Christ. And we are blessed with His wisdom, and that wisdom is our righteousness, our holiness and our redemption.

Is it any wonder, then, that Paul should conclude this passage with, “Therefore, it is written, ‘Let him who boasts boast in the Lord’” (v.31)?

Conclusion

There can be no greater promise than that we are in Christ. Being in Christ gives us security. It gives us an intimacy of relationship. And it gives us wisdom from God.

Wisdom from God does not give us all of life’s answers, but it does give us God’s answers for our lives. His wisdom and His Spirit give us words for others as we allow Him to minister through us. Because we are in Christ and He is the wisdom from God, we allow the Living Water to touch the world around us as we allow Him to pour through us. We are in Him, and He is in the Father, and He is in us.