This is a transcript of a sermon I preached Sunday morning at University Church of Christ on August 5, 2012. It was the 5th in a series designed to help keep God at the center of our lives.
I am posting this because several felt confused and/or upset after hearing the message. I hope that by a careful reading of this sermon (I do tend to talk a bit fast at times, so it's understandable that some of what I said may have been missed in the initial hearing - I apologize for that), it will help clear up any confusion as to what I actually said and didn't say. The audio of this sermon and the others from this series can be found at www.UniversityChurchDenver.org
THE WISDOM OF GOD
We’re glad to have our
youth back from Honduras, and our young adults back from where ever they were
last week, they were off doing something.
And if you are a guest we are glad that you are here and hope your time
with us is well spent and a blessing to you.
We are in the middle of a
series trying to reorient ourselves back to God because it’s so easy for us; it’s
our propensity to move ourselves into the center of everything. We have probably all experienced
conversations with somebody, who you can barely get your thought out before
they are already jumping in and they got their own thing, ‘Oh, yea I’ve had
that same experience…’ And everything about the conversation, everything about
it turns back toward them. And they are
truly in their own world, the center of their universe. And we know that’s a problem and we’re
frustrated by it when it happens to us.
But the truth is we probably do that to some degree or another in some
point in our life. It’s just our
tendency to view everything through our own lens, our own experience, and our
own ideas. And whenever we do that it’s
going to get ourselves in trouble. And
so what we need to do as the people of God is to force ourselves to recalibrate
from time to time and make sure it is God who is at the center of our life, God
who is at the center of our thinking, God who is at the center of our actions;
our everything.
And so it takes intentionality
to go back to the Word, to go back to the conversation that God gives and say, “OK,
who is it that is God?” And, “What is it that He is doing?” And so for the past few weeks we have been
looking at this. We looked at the Word
of God; His message to us. We looked at
the Will of God; what is it that God really wants? We looked at the Ways of God; how does God
get the thing done? And we even looked at
the Wrath of God. And the truth of it is
that all of those things are not the way the way that we would naturally do
it. Our natural way is ‘Me Centered.’ So I have to work at listening and paying
attention and letting God finish His thought.
And taking the time to mull over that and to consider the weight of it
and then yield my life to it. And it’s a
hard thing to do.
It was hard for the
people of Jesus’ day because even in the very presence of Jesus, who in some of
his condemnations of the people said, ‘The Queen of Sheba at the final
judgment, she is going to rise up against this generation because she sought out
the wisdom of Solomon, and one greater than Solomon is here’ in Jesus. But there is a story about Jesus who goes
back to home town. And we know the
truism where Jesus says, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own home
town.” And that’s because they know
us. You go back to the place where they
know you, and no matter how smart you have gotten, no matter how sharp you’ve
gotten, they’re going to remember little Johnny and the time he set his sister’s
hair on fire. I mean that’s just the
things they remember. And any time you
encounter someone who knows me prior to High School, it’s, “Johnny.” And you sort of loose some respect. And that’s certainly true for me. It shouldn’t have been true for Jesus though because
he didn’t set his sister’s hair on fire.
He didn’t do those things as a kid.
He is the Son of God. Listen to
what the text says, “He began to teach in the synagogue, (this is back in Jesus’ home town) and many who heard him were amazed. (But
this is their amazement-) “Where did this man get these things?” they
asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been
given him , that he even does miracles!” (And again, so that we know it’s
not in admiration, it says) …And they
took offense at him” (Mark 6:2-3).
They listened to His wisdom. They
saw His power. They were seeing what He
was doing, and it bugged them! They were
offended by it. They didn’t just say, ‘Man
this is amazing, this guy is awesome, and we need to be paying attention.’ No, they did just the opposite. They did the thing most of the word does when
they hear the wisdom of God, they are offended by it. It doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t fit
the wisdom and ways we do things. We
rely on things for power and significance and for accomplishment that God doesn’t
really put much stock in. We need to
learn how to make that transition.
So I want to share with
you this morning just three things that are the wisdom of God. And they are rather unexpected things
again. Very much like when we had our
conversation about the ways of God and the will of God. It’s things that it would not be our first
inclination to go there. But these are
the things that God does.
The first thing is that
God has vested His Wisdom in people; specifically His church. Ephesians 3:10 says, “His intent was that now,
through the church, the manifold wisdom of God should be made known to the
rules and authorities in the heavenly realms, according to his eternal purpose.” (Ephesians 3:10-11). That may not seem like a big deal to us,
because we are a part of the church. We
would think, ‘Oh yea, that’s good. God
really is smart because he chose us.’
But we need to remember who “Us” is; who we are. We are nothing particularly special. Paul outlines that in kind of painful detail
in 1 Corinthians where he asks the question, ‘Where are all the wise folks in
your group?’ He asks, ‘Where’s all the
wise people, where’s all the noble people, where’s all the powerful people?’ And he’s looking around the church in Corinth
and he says, ‘Truth is there’s not many.
You are an ordinary group of people.
And even, really, less than ordinary.
You are not very smart, you’re not very noble, and you’re not very
wealthy. And here’s the thing: God
INTENTIONALLY chose you to be his church.
Now that doesn’t mean there are no wealthy people, there are no
influential people in the church. It’s
just that there’s not very many. And
part of the reason is, is because we as humans tend to glorify…
With a little bit of
reluctance I want to bring up last week as an illustration. You know last week was rather a
roller-coaster week for us as a nation with the Chick-fil-A thing in
particular. And a lot of you may have
gone to Chick-fil-A on Wednesday, and if you did, fine, I’m not going to
disparage that a bit. And if you did it
because you wanted to make a statement about the support for traditional,
Biblical marriage, fine. If you did it
because you wanted to support the constitutional right to free speech,
fine. That’s all good. And I know some of you didn’t go to Chick-fil-A,
and not just that you didn’t go Chick-fil-A, you kind of disparaged and thought
it was sort of foolish and not really the best thing to do for those who
did. And that’s fine too; I don’t want
to disparage you either.
What I do want to point
out though is our tendency to take a look at this and think, that’s how we get
things done. It’s the exercise of
political power through a protest or through the support of something, and we
think that’s really it. And I want to
contend to you that that’s not it at all, on either side of the thing. That is not how the kingdom of heaven gets
advanced in this world. But it’s how
that we in our culture tend to gravitate toward and we think that we’ve got to
flex some muscle in some way or other to get things done. That’s not it. God has invested, it was his intention to
declare to the universe, to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly
places (these are both spiritual and I think earthly rulers and powers), that
God’s wisdom is vested in a group of ordinary people that he has transformed
through the world. And we are pretty
much ordinary.
But if we’re going to
accept the wisdom of God we have to resist the kinds of muscle flexing practices
whether if it’s in politics or whether if it’s in education… and you know, it’s
not that the educated… I’m grateful that we have some very educated, sharp,
smart people here in all kinds of fields… I love that, I love to be around you
and learn from you. And it’s not that
there are no wise, educated people in God’s kingdom. And it’s not that the
educated have to commit intellectual suicide to come to Christ, but what the
educated have to do and what the wealthy have to do is to sacrifice the pride
in all of those things, and that’s hard for a lot of them to do. It’s hard for someone who is highly educated
to deal with the pride that goes with that or the wealthy to deal with the
pride that goes with that, and on and on.
That’s the issue, that’s the struggle that people have to embrace
Christ. The people here in Nazareth, and
listening to Jesus, and being offended by him are having to overcome the pride
of familiarity. “Ah, we know that kid…” It’s our pride that keeps us from embracing
and accepting the wisdom of God.
But even those of us,
again who are in the church , we have to pay attention, we have to resist the
draw that we’re going to be God’s kingdom, God’s people, because we are able to
exercise worldly power; Whether it’s political influence, or whether we’ve got
a great budget and a great group of people and we’re very intelligent. And that’s where I get sucked in. I get sucked in thinking we’ve got a great
building and great talent and we can do great things. And all that may be true, but that’s not
where God has vested his power. His
power is simply that he’s transformed a group of ordinary people in a way… as
Paul would say in another place in Ephesians where, they “are God’s
workmanship.” The church stands as God’s
show and tell. And really, its God
saying, “See these folks, see how ordinary they are, see how pitiful they were,
but look at what my grace has done to them.”
So we stand as the object lesson to the powers of this universe that
says, “God can’t do anything.” And God
says, “Really, I’ll show you what I can do.”
And so God’s wisdom is found in His people and we need to rely on being
the people of God, and that’s the key phrase here, ‘of God’. We are not our own people, we belong to God.
The second thing is, is
that God has vested his wisdom in a message.
And we’ve talked about this a little bit, so I’m not going to go too
long on this. But in 1 Corinthians 1:17,
Paul says, “Christ did not send me to
baptize…” Sometimes we misunderstand that statement. He said that only because some people were
glorying in who it was that baptized them.
‘Well I was baptized by Paul.’ ‘Well I was baptized by Cephas.’ And Paul said, ‘Are you kidding me.’ Paul
said, ‘God didn’t send me to baptize.’
The truth is every person who accepted the message of Christ was baptized;
it was just that Paul wasn’t doing the physical thing. But here’s the point that Paul is trying to
make: “Christ… sent me to preach the gospel – not with words of human wisdom,
lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power.” Paul’s
preaching wasn’t about eloquence, it wasn’t about building an argument that was
just unassailable, that he preached in such a way that you and I are just, “Ooo
and Ahh.” That’s not what Paul was sent
to do. The message of the cross is
simple, straightforward, and offensive to the wisdom of the world. And if we do anything else with the cross of
Christ, if we try to make the church something really special, if we try to
market it in a way that the world is going to accept it, we have emptied the
cross of its power. Because people will
accept the cross in spite of its offensiveness, because they have been honest
enough with themselves, the message of the cross has impacted them to say, “I
am a sinner, I am the reason Christ died on the cross” at least from my point
of view. God’s love is the reason Jesus
died on the cross from God’s point of view.
And so I have to accept who I am.
But people don’t want to do that.
Because to be encountering the message of Christ, forces me to challenge
the wisdom and ways of this world. And
for a lot of people, that’s too uncomfortable, too difficult. They’re not
willing to sacrifice their pride. So he
says, “For the message of the cross is
foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the
power of God.“ (1 Corinthians
1:17-18)
The
truth is, even in the 21st Century, we find ourselves very much like
the Romans, the Greeks, and the Jews of the 1st Century. For the Romans everything was about
power. They were the Iron Kingdom. So the very notion of the cross is the very
epitome of shameful weakness. In Roman
law in the 1st Century, Roman citizens couldn’t be crucified. They may get the death sentence, but it was
not by crucifixion. Because crucifixion
was not just a death sentence, it was a statement that the Romans were making
to the rest of the world, “We are more powerful than you, and we’ll prove it to
you by killing your people on a shameful, humiliating cross. So the Romans couldn’t get past that. The Greeks, they were all about wisdom and
smarts, and ‘this just doesn’t make sense,’ they would say. How in the world could someone beat death, be
victorious over death, by dying? It
didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense
from a worldly point of view. And so
they wouldn’t accept it. The Jews, they
were looking for signs. ‘We need
something spectacular.’ So they stumbled
over the cross, it just didn’t make sense to them either.
But God goes on in this
passage to say that he intentionally, just like he intentionally chose a
people, he intentionally chose a foolish message -from the world’s point of
view- to declare his wisdom in overcoming sin.
We have to submit our pride to God’s wisdom and that’s a hard thing for
us to do.
And the last thing is
that God vests his wisdom in is good works.
Wisdom is not about talk, wisdom is not about intelligence. You know, sometimes we try to define what really
is wisdom? We know for sure that wisdom
is not intelligence, because there are a lot of very intelligent, highly
educated people out there who are dumb as dirt when it comes to the practical
application of life.
One of my favorite
stores, and I’ve talked about this before, so I’ll give you the Reader’s Digest version of the story of
Ahithophel in the Old Testament.
Ahithophel was a counselor of King David. Ahithophel is described in scripture like this:
to ask of Ahithophel was as if you asked God.
That’s how smart he was. He was
always right. I’m mostly right, but he
was…no, I’m just… until you ask someone who really knows me. But he really was always right. But one of the things that happened was… David’s son Absalom, he had his eye on the
kingdom and he pulled off a coup, David flees, and Ahithophel becomes Absalom’s
counselor. And Absalom says, ‘Hey I
need to secure my kingdom now, so what do I need to do?’ And [Ahithophel] gave
him advice, remember his advice is always right, his advice is, ‘Muster the
army… the army we have right here, go after David, you’ll catch him and you can
kill him and the kingdom will be yours.’
Had Absalom taken Ahithophel’s advice, Absalom would have been
king. But David sent another counselor
back to overthrow Ahithophel’s advice.
And so he appealed to Absalom’s fear of David, the Goliath… the giant
killer. And he said, ‘Your father is
fierce, he’s not going to get caught by just a few guys. You need to take some time and get a lot more
men and go after him. Absalom, David’ son
thought, ‘Yea that sounds like the right thing to do.’ And the question that I always… Well the rest
of the story goes on, Ahithophel goes home and he hangs himself, because he
knows David is going to survive, he’s going to come back and when David comes
back he’s going to deal with the traitors, Ahithophel being one. But I always have struggled with the
question: “If Ahithophel was so smart, why did he ally himself with Absalom and
not stay faithful and true to David?”
Because he may have been smart, but he wasn’t wise.
So wisdom isn’t just
about intelligence, wisdom is an application of truth. And when God calls us into his kingdom the
practical application of truth is not just having really good arguments or
really good tracts, it is having a life that is engaged in the spiritual battle
and warfare of kingdom living, and that warfare looks like good works. That’s always what warfare looks like. It may be prayer, it may be counseling, it may
be comfort. But it is always good
works. And James asks it this way: “Who
is wise and understanding among you? Let
him show it by his good life, by deeds done in humility (see there’s that key that keeps coming
up. It’s our pride that keeps us from
embracing the wisdom of God) that comes
from wisdom… The wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace
loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy, and good fruit, impartial and
sincere.” (James 3:13, 17) Wisdom is about doing good things. And so it’s not about making a
statement. It’s not about a protest or a
support. It’s about actually going out
and doing good deeds, making a difference in the life of someone. And that’s God’s wisdom. And again it doesn’t really make sense to the
world.
I know a lot of people
were being critical in a way of the people who went out last Wednesday and
bought Chick-fil-A. And you know
Chick-fil-A, you know, unless you were living under a rock, set a one day sales
record for fast food restaurants. And
the comment was made several times by people, “wouldn’t it be awesome if all of
those people would have shown up at a food pantry or a soup kitchen to work instead
of going there.” And my only thought
was, “Are you surprised that they didn’t?”
That’s the way of the world. We
love the little things that I can do that don’t require any investment of
me. And we shouldn’t be surprised,
truly we shouldn’t expect it. We should
not expect the world to act like the kingdom of heaven. That’s our responsibility. And we spend a lot of energy trying to get
the world to act like the church. They
ought to be doing… The world is not going to ever, ever act like… the
government is never going to be the church.
We need to be the church. We need to be the church that accepts the
wisdom of God. This is who we are; the
people of God. We need to understand if
we ever… it’s going to be through the presentation of the gospel. Not by voting blocks, not by social justice, none
of those things. It’s going to be
primarily through the preaching of the cross.
That’s the only thing that will change the world. And we need to understand it’s not just about
talk. When we present the gospel, we
need to present the gospel in harmony with, hand in hand with doing good
deeds. That’s the wisdom of God. Centered on the things that God says are
essential to life.
And I stand confessing that I gravitate to
these worldly ways of things that I think, ‘that’s where real power… that’s
where real wisdom is… I wish I was smarter, I wish I was more educated, I wish
I was more influential…’ and I realize at times, I wish for these things in a
way that’s out of step with the wisdom of God, because God chose the things
that are foolish of this world, He chose the things that are ignoble, He chose
the things that are pitiful on purpose so that His power would not be stripped,
but it would stand able to change the world.
Let’s not fight… let’s not get caught being drawn into the way this
world tries to do things. Let’s remember
who we are, let’s remember how God has changed the world through the
Cross. And let’s remember that God’s
wisdom is shown in good deeds. Let’s be
the people of God and by so doing we will have accepted the wisdom that God has
shown in this world. It’s contrary… A
lot of the world, just like in the first century, listens to the message,
listens to Christ and they are offended by it because of the way the world does
things. That’s OK, we should expect
that. It shouldn’t throw us off
guard. But we should continue to stand
in the wisdom of God.
One last verse: Paul says this in the next chapter of 1st
Corinthians, he said, “I resolved to know nothing among you except Jesus
Christ and him crucified... My message and my preaching were not with wise and
persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your
faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on the power of God.” (1
Cor. 2:2-4)
Let’s let our faith rests
on the power of God, not on the way the world thinks this is the way to do
things, but on the power and wisdom of God.
If you need to come to
the Lord for any reason, If you are wanting to accept his wisdom, become a part
of the kingdom, accept the cross as God’s answer to your sin and turn your life
over to him. If we can help you in any
way, please come as we stand and sing.
