✝️ Foundational Truth

1 Corinthians 2:2 — For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

If our lives are based on the wisdom of the world and we allow the clever and persuasive skills and philosophies of men to influence our own thought processes… in preference to the Word of God... our lives will be characterized by spiritual weakness, doctrinal error and a tendency towards an inflated ego.

Paul was a man that had acquired a lot of worldly wisdom and religious knowledge.

But, in five short words, Paul gave the foundational truths contained in the glorious gospel of God - JESUS CHRIST AND HIM CRUCIFIED.

Let me give you a simple illustration:

My husband has a 4-wheeler; and this is his work horse. He uses it to hauls logs and dirt and even uses it to plow our driveway in the winter. Not too long ago the battery was not staying charged after each time he used it.

It couldn’t hold power. To get the engine started, he had to connect jumper cables from a live battery in our SUV to the dead battery on the 4-wheeler.

After a few minutes of charging, he would turn the key of the 4-wheeler, and the engine would fire up and come to life.

And individually we also face a similar challenge because, on our own, we are dead in our sins. The only way our lives can get fired up is by stretching the power cables back to Christ’s sacrifice for us on the cross, an event that took place two thousand years ago.

That past event has power.  - The message of the cross… is the power of God.

Paul says in 1 Cor. 1:18 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.

The problem is that we often try to bypass God’s power and try to rely on our own strength and intelligence.

1 Cor. 2:5 tells us – “that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”

It’s distressing to think that God’s power in our life can be disconnected [so-to-speak] because we are wandering from Christ and trying to rely on our own strength and intelligence.

Paul counteracts human foolishness as our bible verse for today tells us: “For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.”

We live in a world where the God of the Bible is being eliminated…

Which makes it crucial that we remember and realize two important parts of Christs work of the cross - that He not only died FOR our sin…

but He died TO sin on our account…  breaking the POWER of sin as well as paying the PRICE of sin.

Christ identified with us so that we could identify with both His death and His resurrection –

HIS death became OUR death (death to the self-life)

HIS life became OUR life (our eternal life in Christ).

And He bore our sins in His body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live to God, through the power of Jesus Christ our Lord and our Life.

 

The message of the cross will either be foolishness in your life, or it will have life-giving power…

When it comes to our eternal destiny… the one who rejects the gospel of Christ… the Word of God calls a fool…

The one who believes in Christ and commits his life to Him… the Word of God calls wise. (see Matthew 7:24–27).

The believer discovers that the gospel—and what he thought was foolishness—is in reality the wisdom of God providing him eternal salvation.