October 5, 2008 Sermon

True Power, True Wisdom
I Corinthians 1:18-31

The Apostle Paul emphasized the power of the cross of Christ. Paul accepted no rival to it. His own preaching? Poor, simple, boring. Yet the power of the cross helped people to believe in Jesus Christ through Paul's words. Yes, the cross is foolishness “to those who are perishing.” Yet for those “who are being saved” that same cross holds within its symbolic grasp the very power of God. Paul pointed out that humanity looks for power in all the wrong places. How much money, how much passion do we expend on presidential elections? How much effort do we expend on the chase for Olympic gold medals? How much emotion do we expend on “winning” interactions with others? And all of it comes to nothing. Only the cross of Christ carries true power. And that power saves. Faith in Christ crucified saves.

Faith in Christ crucified saves. Paul wrote to a mixed Jewish and Greek audience. He used generalizations about each group to make his point from two directions. First he addressed the Greek desire for wisdom. Athens had already seen its Golden Age some 300 to 450 years before Paul lived. Back then the Greeks had advanced philosophy, literature, architecture and other arts and sciences with a genius not seen in the world before or since. Philosophy was the Greeks' particular pride. They laid the foundation for practically all western thought to the present day. Their culture valued wisdom. Yet Paul called the cross of Christ foolishness.

Paul then turned to his fellow Jews' demand for “a sign”. Long before even the ancient Greek flowering of philosophy, the Jews had sought “signs”: miracles, events of such impossible, implausible force that only Yahweh, the One God, could have accomplished them. In fact, the Jews' scripture contains a long list of such signs, including the flood of Noah, the parting of the sea during the Exodus, the endless supply of oil for the Maccabees' lamps that originated the celebration of Hanukkah, and so forth. The Jews saw God most clearly in miracles. Yet Paul called the cross of Christ weak.

Why does Paul go out of his way to offend his two primary audiences? He writes, “the Jews demand signs and the Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the Greeks, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” Paul's game is actually rather simple. He insists that all people realize they cannot save themselves. Knowledge cannot save us. Not even that knowledge we gain about diseases, the knowledge that may save our bodies, can save us. Power cannot save us. Not even the power of the United States military, the power that has protected us from tyranny and terrorism, can save us. Only the love of God, as expressed in the crucifixion of Jesus, can save our immortal souls. But we must believe in Jesus as the Messiah in order for that salvation to become effective for us. John Calvin wrote of the “effectual calling.” We don't talk like that anymore, but these verses tell us exactly what he meant. In the cross of Christ, God made salvation available to all, but not all are saved. Only through faith in the crucified—and risen—Christ do we become saved. Only through faith does salvation take effect in us.

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise,” Paul adds; “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong...so that no one may boast in the presence of God.” Faith is a gift. We do not take faith by force. We do not invent faith through our brilliance. We do nothing to earn salvation. We may not boast of our own power or wisdom. We can only, as Paul concludes, “boast in the Lord.” Faith in Christ crucified saves. And God gives us faith.

During my late twenties I got involved with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. We lived in St. Louis, a major league city with a large group of professional athletes active in the FCA. A few of them belonged to the church I served. I heard many an athlete give his personal testimony. (For the Presbyterians and others among us unfamiliar with the phrase, “personal testimony” means telling the story of how you came to believe in Jesus Christ.) I came to realize that most testimonies follow a pattern: the athlete grew up believing he was all-powerful. His parents and coaches and communities told him so. Why would he not believe them? Life went swimmingly. He got the prettiest girl. He won the championships. Somebody paid him a boatload of money to play a game. But then (insert terrible setback here) happened. Maybe he got addicted to alcohol or some other drug. Maybe he suffered a career-threatening injury. Maybe his beloved father or son died. He was forced to admit he could not defeat all his opponents on his own. He had to accept that he needed God. He accepted Jesus with true humility for the first time ever. It changed his life.

I got a little cynical about these personal testimonies. Often the athletes would work in stories about their victories and I wondered just exactly who they thought they were testifying to: God or themselves. As a teen Terry Bradshaw, the great Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, considered becoming a Baptist minister. When he gained fame as a high school football player he started making the rounds of Baptist churches and giving his testimony. But he never felt comfortable doing it. He did not have an especially dramatic story to tell. In order to get a bigger reaction from the churches he started spicing it up a little, or, as he puts it in his book It's Only a Game, lying. But then Bradshaw mentions how impressive it is when you hear an honest testimony. He refers specifically to the testimony of another football player, Reggie White.

When Reggie White retired in 2000, he had been named to the all-time all-star team. He held several individual records. He also had one of the great nicknames: the Minister of Defense. Reggie White played defensive end, and he was an ordained minister of the Gospel. In his personal testimony, which you can find any number of places on-line or in his book Reggie White in the Trenches, he started not with how evil he was before coming to Christ, but how he struggled to stay true to Christ after he accepted him as Lord and Savior. He spoke with gut-wrenching honesty of his addiction to cocaine. He told unflattering stories about his temper. He admitted he did what he wanted, all the while convincing himself it was what God wanted, too. But God kept coming after him. God kept forgiving him. God kept putting faithful people in his life, people like his wife, his mother, and certain gutsy community members who stayed on him about using his celebrity for genuinely godly purposes.

Reggie White's testimony included when he thought he heard God calling him to preach on the streets of Philadelphia. For two years he drove into some of the worst slums, got out of his car and literally preached on the streets. People gave him credit. Television news reporters filmed him doing it. But the lives of the slum dwellers did not visibly improve. White did not feel approved in the Lord. He spoke to the preachers in the neighborhood churches. They thanked him for “coming down” there but said they were already covering the spiritual side; what the people really needed now was education. White recognized this as the whole call of God. He finally understood. He put up a whole lot of his own money, used his connections to raise more, and started academies. The academies start after regular school lets out. They teach discipline, turn students away who dress or act inappropriately, and tutor them in math, science and English. They hold daily prayer and praise worship services. To this day, most Reggie White academies have long waiting lists.

Reggie White died of heart disease at 43 years of age. He lived a large and, at times, controversial life. His willingness to testify openly about God's work made him a target of the secular world. But he never stopped telling that world that his strength, his power, came from Jesus crucified and resurrected. When a Hall of Fame football player says such an odd thing, even a hostile audience must consider the message. The Apostle Paul performed the same service for his Lord and Savior. Paul refused to take credit for God's work. Paul tried to keep others from taking credit for God's work, too. God saved through the cross. God chose to use the cross, a shameful symbol of weakness to the Jews and a nonsensical symbol of futility to the Greeks, to save. Jesus, the Son of God, died on the cross, paying the penalty we owed for our sin according to God's eternal, perfect law: death. But Jesus then rose from the dead, showing God's power and God's wisdom. Do you believe this?

We cannot win salvation through power or wisdom—nor through money, nor connections nor any other lever popular in America today. We can receive salvation only when we have faith in Jesus as the Son of God. Pray for that faith. Read your Bible to strengthen that faith. And thank God for that saving faith once you realize it has become effective for you. Faith in Christ crucified saves. Praise God! Consider the cross. It means shame and death. Demons jeered when Jesus of Nazareth died upon it. But when he rose from the dead he converted that cross into a symbol of the saving love of God the Father. Consider the cross. Faith in Christ crucified saves. Receive your “effectual calling”. Accept the gift of faith. Be saved!