God's Word, which comes to us from 1 Corinthians 1, verse 18 to 31. It's page 952 in your pew Bibles. 1 Corinthians 1, 18 to 31. God's Word to us today says this. For the word of the cross is folly 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. and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart. Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom. But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise according to worldly standards. Not many were powerful. Not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise. God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong. God chose what is low and despised in the world, even the things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of Him, you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption. So that as it is written, But the one who boasts, boasts in the Lord. Friends, this is the word of our God. Thanks be to him. Please be seated. And I'll pray for us and ask God's help. Father, the mysterious majesty that you've revealed in Christ in this passage. We admit our weakness and even understanding it. And we need your spirit now to come and help us, to apply it to our lives, to help us learn, mark and digest as men have prayed throughout the ages, because apart from your help, everything will seem vain. So help us now to so grasp the beauty of who Jesus is revealed in this passage that we can't help but be changed just a little bit more to be like him. It's in Christ's name that I pray these things. Amen. Well, friends, it is such a joy to be here this morning with you. It is a joy to get to share the pulpit while Pastor Gabe's away. I'm Josh Darin, one of the pastors here, a new guy, as well as some of the other new guys, less new than Ron Brown. Ron Brown's a little more familiar, and Gunther is pretty new as well. But we are so glad to be here on behalf of my family. We're so grateful that we've had the privilege of being called to this ministry to help support it and to work among it. But our passage today actually addresses a very real reality in our hearts that we need to be reminded of as God's people. In his book, after he passed away, Crossway published a book by J.I. Packard. It was a series of his lectures on the Corinthian epistles, and it was titled Weakness in the Way. Weakness is the way. In it, he reflects in the opening chapter on the problem that we as people in the church have at understanding and discussing our weakness with each other. He references a classic exchange between Charlie Brown and Lucy Van Pelt in the series Peanuts. And Charlie, the comic panel opens with Charlie looking worried and Lucy comes to him and says, Charlie, what are you worrying about? You look anxious. Charlie replies in a very vulnerable way, he says, I feel inferior. Lucy then says, oh, you shouldn't worry about that. Lots of people have that feeling of inferiority. And Charlie clarifies further, wait, lots of people feel that they're inferior? And Lucy responds by saying, no, lots of people think you're inferior. If you're a person who loves good wit, that's a pretty wonderful exchange. But if you're also a more tenderhearted person, you can sense some of the cruelty behind Lucy's words to Charlie. She literally took something he had affirmed in his own personality and exposed it and said, actually, it's more true than you think. Everybody sees it too. And it's this spirit of one-upmanship that pervades so many of our experiences in the world today. So common is it that it makes the Sunday cartoon panel. And what's more problematic is when the spirit of one-upmanship is reflected in the context of the church. Because the church is meant to be a community where we're actually able to grow in our weakness together by sharing it with one another and walking in it and the power that God gives us to grow us towards the likeness to Jesus. All of us fear, though, a similar kind of isolating one-upmanship. And so we develop an allergic reaction to discussing our weakness in our communities. We either become similar one-upmen people, like Lucy. We become the Lucys of the world. Or we struggle with a deep sense of our own inferiority, like Charlie Brown. And we worry, if we really were known by the people around us, would they really take us as we are? Would they really take us as we are? But that is exactly why Paul is writing to the Corinthians. A similar culture of one upmanship had begun to develop in their church. And the reality is, is that it was distorting and corroding their relationships in the church because they were adopting worldly ways of chasing glory. But Paul writes this letter so that they can know how better to relate and to reject these worldly glories and to instead glory in the weakness of the cross. That's actually what I want us to see this morning. In order to become a community who rests and rejoices in the weakness of the cross together, we must reject the pursuit of worldly glory as a way of belonging to each other. And my points are slightly different from what's printed in the bulletin. We're just going to look at it through the lens of rejecting worldly glory and glorying in the weakness of the cross. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Epistle to Corinth, the fact is that it was a church that was very status conscience. It had a lot of people that were trying to follow the pursuit of an upward trajectory in their lives. They were trying to get affluence for the sake of establishing their own honor. and they lived for success in the eyes of their peers. And it was a community that was so religiously diverse that it wasn't always clear how you could maybe reflect a value from a different religion that didn't belong in the context of a place like the church. Because people syncretized, they took the buffet of religious ideas and sort of combined them in Corinth. And that's sort of a legacy that Paul is writing to address. That's actually what stands behind how the Corinthians are quarrelsome, as Paul has been written to by Chloe. And in verse 11, Chloe tells him, it's so bad that there's factions that have developed in the church, where one says, I follow Paul, another Apollos, another Jesus. But the reality is, is that they weren't meant to use their relationships or connection to their teachers in that way. And so in this section, Paul begins by reminding them how he preached the gospel to them. He reminds them of how the gospel came to him and why it is that the gospel actually looks so foolish in the eyes of this world. And he picks up in verse 18 by saying, the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved, it is God's power. And then he references an Old Testament passage from Isaiah. This passage in Isaiah comes from a part of his ministry where he was actually predicting how God would similarly deliver his people in an unlikely way. And the problem is that when Isaiah is writing or sharing this prophetic truth of what's going to happen in the community of God's people, the fact is is that they weren't looking for it to come in the way that God delivered it. They had actually been blinded by cultural ways of learning to relate to God that was more common to the patterns of the nations around them than it was to what should have actually defined them as a people of God. And Paul is saying that that's why the cross looks like foolishness still among you, Corinthians, because you too are people who have forgotten The fact that you don't relate to one another through this like influential way of attaching yourself to each other or performing and achieving in the midst of your community. And the reason your community feels like it might have this divisiveness is because God said that's the first reason they can reject this worldly wisdom. God said he would frustrate such wisdom in the world and the ways that he act to deliver his people. God had frustrated. He rejected it. That's not the way his people were supposed to happen. But there's a second reason that Paul is inviting them to reject these worldly glories that you and I chase. Because in verse 20 to 25, Paul talks about the fact that When the glory of the cross was revealed in time, it was a glory that reversed the way that glory is achieved in the world's understanding of wisdom and power. And those two words are repeatedly used throughout this section in the Corinthian epistle, wisdom and power. in Greek society. The way you gained standing was, it was a society that was infatuated with contemplation, philosophy, and ornate speech. There were orators that would travel from city to city in Greek society, seeking to wow crowds with their wisdom. Because the currency of their social status occurred in the denomination of how wise you looked. Essentially Corinth was a place that majored on people trying to be like Lucy in the Charlie Brown comic. You showed how much you were one up over others by how wise you were and how much it appealed to the wisdom of the culture that you were in. But the way that they were related to this wisdom was for the sake of such power over one another. The Corinthians were looking for power through the gospel preachers they had congregated around by attaching themselves in a way that was very common in Greek society through patron relationships. And they said, this guy that I follow and support, this Apollos, he's actually the one that like really gets me standing. Or Cephas or Peter or even Paul or even Jesus. The effect this was having was that it actually made the church one more place where distorted power categories of the world reigned and how they related to each other. Power in this Corinthian paradigm was reserved to what was miraculous or overwhelming. That's why Paul says the Jews sought signs, because they always sought this miraculous demonstration of how God was with them to be sure that his power was manifest to overcome and they could actually love and serve and worship him then. And Greeks sought wisdom as a way of getting strength over others, as a way of becoming an insider into the communities of Greek culture. And the problem is, is that this pattern, this pattern where God has exposed it and rejected it and reversed it through the cross, is how you're relating to one another. And it's making your community very rank conscious. You see this elsewhere in the Epistle to the Corinthians. There was a culture of competitive giftedness where the miraculous gifts got the stage and the less miraculous ones were considered not worthy of honor. There was litigiousness that reigned in their relationships as some had lawsuits against each other. The Lord's Supper had even become one more place to posture. When it was supposed to be a sign of the crucified, foolishly humiliated Savior in their midst, they made it one more place to posture and to partake of while excluding others. And it makes you wonder, how do we live according to these categories of worldly glory today? Well, I mean, it's not uncommon for us to treat the church as one more place to play the power games of our society around us, where we use our influence as a way of gaining standing in the midst of diverse opinions. We might have a legacy to a particular community, like maybe your family's been a part of a church like First Press for generations, and a Lucy would emphasize that as a way to get respect. Or we emphasize what looks successful, the robustness of our numbers and attendance of how many people we're impacting as the measure of what makes a church truly worthy of belonging in the kingdom and a place that's representative of the kingdom. Or we emphasize gifts and talents of our preachers at the expense of the cost of what's required of their characters. And we tolerate far too much among our leaders that is not of Christ. Or we can even cover over the more difficult and unpalatable parts of our church's story or of our individual lives. And what Paul's saying is, you don't understand, you've already bought into a mentality when we do this of either pursuing one-upmanship like Lucy, or feeling inferior like Charlie Brown, when what's actually dawned in the gospel is a reversal of the way you get glory. Because in the gospel, this is the beautiful reality that he calls them to remember. In the gospel, you have a savior who was the promised deliverer, who was cursed and hung on a cross to accomplish that deliverance. In the gospel, you have a divine son of God who Gentiles could maybe have a concept for understanding. But he was subject to the tyrannical rule of his imperial oppressors, and he looked like a loser in the eyes of the culture around him. This would have been an offensive gospel to the culture of Corinth. Because of how it exposed the reality that their weakness was the instrumental means by how this inverted dynamic of power over others was turned on its head. In other words, the gospel has revealed a pattern and an age in which glory is achieved not by going high over others and refusing to go low, but the way up and the kingdom is the way down. The way to make things right in the age of the gospel is to make them reverse from the ways that the dynamics of our world work. Paul's inviting them to reject these worldly ways of pursuing glory and instead to live as a community belonging to each other by glorying in the weakness of the cross. And it's in his condemnation of their posturing among one another that he actually reminds them of the greatest cost of this rank consciousness. The cost is, it comes in verse 26. He says, friends, consider your calling. You didn't get into the kingdom because you were wise or because you had a certain family you belong to or because you had a certain power that you demonstrated. You were weak and helpless and you were the benefactor of a gracious gift of God's choosing love that you never could have received. Apart from him choosing you. He emphasizes this three separate times emphatically, he's saying, God chose you, God chose you, God chose you. And it's in this reality of their choice that Paul is actually demonstrating how we begin to rejoice in the glory of a weak savior and glory in the weakness of the cross. because the cross acts like a fulcrum. In physics, the concept of a fulcrum is it's a simple machine, a piece of a simple machine, which is a lever. A fulcrum is what makes other masses lighter and makes the work to lift those other masses lighter, easier on the person doing the work. A fulcrum can be a triangle, like on a seesaw, or a fulcrum can be the center of a wheel. where the spokes all come out of it. But that fulcrum is how the work gets done in a simple machine. And he's not calling the church a machine, he's just saying the church is meant to be a place where the new age of God's different wisdom and power have dawned. And the way that we gain status and belonging in the kingdom of God is through weakness. through a humiliated Savior who was exposed and ashamed in the eyes of the world. Again, he's repeating this idea of how they can relinquish their ways of one-upmanship and their fears of their inferiority because of how the cross has reoriented the values of the age we live in. But the cross has done more for us, and he says so in verse 29. The cross went so far so that we might never have to boast in the presence of God, that we might not be able to boast in the presence of God. Because God has made the nobodies, the somebodies in his kingdom. And because of Christ, he says in verse 30, or because of God in verse 30, he says, you are in Christ who became to us wisdom from God. And then he uses three metaphors for how we actually belong in the kingdom to summarize how Christ works. He uses the metaphor of righteousness and redemption and sanctification, not in that order, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption. And what he's doing is he's giving them word pictures that illustrate how they belong to the kingdom, how they come in, how they grow in the kingdom and how they are eventually delivered fully in the kingdom that God has brought in the gospel. Because Jesus is our righteousness. He's the one who gets us a right standing before God. He is our sanctification because when we are united by faith in Him, He by His Spirit will transform us from one degree of glory to the next. And then He will accomplish His full and final redemption of His people forever one day. so that they never have to fear their inferiority or act like a Lucy over one another again. And the reality of the rich doctrine that Paul is writing about is that he's inviting them to not just memorize this doctrine as a cool couple of points in a sermon or a letter. He's inviting them to live differently because of this reality. because this reality changes the way that we relate to each other. And it warns us about the ways we come to value our belonging in the kingdom. It warns us, it warns the Lucy's of the world, that if we're someone who's really quick to be critical, who's dismissive because of how someone's weakness might expose our own sense of inferiority, Maybe what Paul is having the Lucy's of the world think is he's saying you might have actually drank deeply from an understanding of your identity that undermines your belonging in the community. He's trying to help them understand that the Lucy's of the world have actually bought a false identity that's much more impoverished than the rich belonging that Jesus has given them in the gospel. And so he's warning them, like, maybe you're following the false patterns of this world and chasing glory and it's ruining your rich experience of the gospel. But he's also trying to use this as a way to change the way that they relate. Because what Paul is doing is he's showing in the dawning of the age of redemption. Weakness is the instrumental way that God actually builds his kingdom. This is why it's so offensive to the world. It's why it's so confusing for us. Because what it means is that it transforms the way we approach our weakness. It transforms the way we understand our standing in the community. Because this means that in every place where you know a personal weakness, moral, spiritual, personal, that is actually the soil where you can be certain that Jesus is most powerfully at work. So that now you can actually relate differently to the community around you. We don't have to perform for achieving status in the context of the church community. We don't have to be anxious about exposing where we're vulnerable. But we can rest in the fact that we have a standing that we never earned, and that is the functional way for how we can actually relate and connect with each other. And this is incredibly important. Because, I mean, our mission statement and vision as a church is that we seek to be a healthy church, exhibiting the fullness of Christ as we disciple believers to develop spiritually, connect relationally, and engage missionally to reach Chattanooga and the world with the gospel. We will never be able to connect relationally if weakness is something we fear being exposed in front of each other. We'll never be able to develop in our weakness if we cannot use the context of our relationships to grow in that weakness. And this doesn't mean we have to walk around to everyone and say how weak we are about everything, but it means that the church should be a place where in our relationships we are known fully and are understood how we belong in the standing that we have, that it's a standing that Christ is at work in. To sanctify us despite whatever weakness we have. But this also changes the way that we relate to the world, doesn't it? Because when you buy into a pattern of being OK with weakness, it feels a lot like buying into a pattern where you're OK being humiliated in the eyes of our society. And that's the beauty of the gospel. is that the only reason our society actually wants to humiliate us is because of how their values have already been exposed and destroyed and defeated in the context of the cross. So we don't have to be anxious about the ways that our world might humiliate us. We can be confident and certain that no matter what weakness we have faced in accomplishing our mission as a church, That's the very soil where Christ wants to work. And so we have to ask ourselves today. Friends, who is it that truly knows you? What are the places in your life where you want to open up to others, but feel like Charlie Brown? and aren't really able to because of your sense of your own inferiority. Friends, it's those places that Christ looks on us as his people and would remind us today that in the ways that we feel inferior, he himself has been exposed and humiliated for that similar inferiority. And so we have refuge and rest in his presence. Not anxious shame that makes us feel like we don't belong. And this is the only way that our church can actually fulfill its mission. To demonstrate this, it's kind of like what Malcolm Gladwell calls the Rosetto effect in his book, Outliers. Rosetto, Italy was a place where Italian immigrants, Italians lived in Italy. During the great migration that happened, I think it was in the 20th century, early 20th century sometime, they developed another community in Pennsylvania where all these Italian immigrants migrated to Rosetta. And they actually had these beautiful ways of institutionalizing their rich connections as a culture. Like their young were taken care of by how closely they lived in proximity with each other. Their old were taken care of because of how closely they lived their lives together. And everyone actually flourished in this tiny little immigrant community in Pennsylvania who had so committed to their Italian identity that they didn't want to take on the values of the American culture around them. And what was so fascinating was that they did studies on the men of Roseto. And they found that what was a common issue back in the 50s and 60s, studies of these communities showed that the men of Roseto who lived these richly connected lives, fully clothed in their Italian identities that never really adopted or assimilated to the American values of the culture, They actually flourished longer and they actually beat the standard norm of what men's ages were. I think the average age was somewhere in the early 50s that men lived at that moment, but they were living into their 80s. Because it's in this community of Italian immigrants that they found a resilient identity to be able to flourish in a world that was foreign to them. And that is the same thing that Paul is inviting you and I to hear this morning. And he wants us to be a community that revels in the Rosetto effect of the gospel in a world that will vilify the very weakness as the way he would change us. Only God by his spirit can help us do so. So let us ask his help as we close our service today. Gracious Lord, we confess. When we see the patterns of how we would relate to the world, it's far easier to make the church a place where what reigns is one upmanship. To use our power as something to demonstrate over others rather than to follow the example of our savior, who, though he was able to insist upon his rights, laid them aside that he might serve others. And in doing so, he exposed himself to weakness and humiliation. And so God, would we cling tightly to the cross as a community and as individuals in our lives so that we can flourish in the ways that you intended us to in the gospel? And would you so help us to be so changed by the values of weakness in our culture? That we can't help but experience a revival in our midst. Of the glory of how we come to belong, and may we see the realities of the kingdom that you were bringing dawn just a little bit quicker in our lives and in the city's life and beyond. We ask this all for the sake of your glory and our good in Christ's name. Amen.