Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro:

Transition:

Context:

This section continues to deal with the problem of disunity in the church at Corinth and in particular with the continued allegiance to human philosophies and leaders that contributed to the disunity.

Human wisdom was keeping believers from divine wisdom, and from spiritual growth and unity.

Almost every form of spiritual elitism, ‘deeper life movement,’ and ‘second blessing’ doctrine has appealed to this text,” even though each of these is “nearly 180 degrees the opposite” of Paul’s intent.

CAMPUS CRUSADE FOR Christ has popularized the concepts of 1 Corinthians 2:6–3:4 with its well-known circle diagrams for the natural, carnal, and spiritual persons.

The natural person does not have the cross of Christ anywhere in his or her life; ego is on that person’s throne.

The carnal Christian has the cross inside the circle of his or her life, but ego still remains on the throne.

The spiritual Christian has the cross central and ego dethroned.

These diagrams are both helpful and misleading.

They correctly remind us that believers do not automatically have Christ in charge of every area of their lives.

Christians are free to take back a certain measure of control and in essence do so every time they consciously sin.

The diagrams also correctly capture the fundamental difference between Christian and non-Christian, though it is perhaps worth noting that ego is not always on the throne of an unbeliever’s life.

More noble, family-centered or humanitarian concerns may be central, but the point remains that God is not.

READ

The cross reveals not only that we can know God but that He knows us, that he came for us on a puruit, that he knows everything about us and still loves us but also like a doctor realizing you need a radical procedure (Radical medical procedures) knew our state was so radical we needed a radical response and that is the cross…

(Bird Box) … I haven’t seen it but saw it was a trend, craze… not my thing… but the concept people driving cars with blindfolds look some of yall cant drive without blindfolds… foolishness, but the image I got of God’s pursuit of us is we are going through life with a blindfold on, not fully experiencing all god has for us… then we start to sense someone or something is after us, we don’t knwo what or who and it is terrifying so we run and resist, but when we are caught the blindfold is removed and we realize it is God our heavenly Father who is scary but He is good… (Aslan) He is terrifying, but what does it say about Him that He comes after you?

Can I tell you something (husbands love wives) God never stops coming after you. he is pursuing you. he is chasing your heart...

The only way to know God personally is to know that we have been known personally by God.

God has already come for us and wants to know us and to be known by us.

God’s love for us is expressed to us in his initiating grace that does not wait around for us to show interest.

And what are his terms?

There are no terms.

Limited knowledge

Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books.

American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year.

This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years.

Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books, and you get a bookshelf-warping total of twenty-eight million books available for an English reader in the next fifty years!

But you can read only 2,600—because you are a wildly ambitious book devourer.…

For every one book that you choose to read, you must ignore ten thousand other books simply because you don’t have the time.

In many respects 2:6–3:4 is parallel to 1:18–2:5.

In both sections Paul contrasts God’s wisdom with human wisdom (1:18–25; 2:6–16), and in both sections Paul shifts from the plural “we” to the first person singular as he recounts his initial ministry in Corinth (2:1–5; 3:1–4).

Who are the “mature” (2:6), the “spiritual,” and the “natural” man (2:14–15; 3:1), the “worldly” (3:1), and the “infants” (3:1)?

While the Corinthians may have defined maturity in terms of knowledge, Paul is far more interested in defining maturity according to behavior in community.

The passage aims at defining who is mature/wise and who is not.

At the present time, based on their internal rivalries, the Corinthians are not.

Mature

We saw last week, justification has changed us, sanctification is changing us glorification will change us

Can I tell you something about the cross that may be new information for some people?

The veil was torn for every believer to have direct access to God… if some teacher tells you some special knowledge that is contrary to what you can read for yourself in the Bible they are misleading you they may be mislead or they may just be dangerous false teachers but you have just the same access to God that I do… teh young lady who trusted Jesus at church last week has the same access to God I do and

What does it mean to be mature?

Down in 3:1-4 going to talk about immature believers… but Paul not trying to rank i.e. classify believers… Its not once you have an end times chart together and understand prophecy concerning Jesus return now thats a mature Christian… immature just trusts and obeys for theres no better way… Here is reality for Paul and the Bible, maturity is not measured by knowledge but by behavior...

Your trust reveals your maturity

Mature (teleios) can mean “perfect” (KJV) or “complete,” but can also refer to a person who has full membership in a group, one who is fully initiated.

Here Paul uses this term in the same way it is used in other forms by the writer of Hebrews (6:1; 10:14) to refer to salvation.

Those who are mature are those who are redeemed and are completely trusting in Jesus Christ.

True believers are the only ones among whom the gospel can be wisdom.

To all others it is a stumbling block or foolishness (1:23)

We saw this last week (above) how foolish the cross is to non believers...

Paul shares with the most immature Corinthian that which all Christians today therefore share: an ability to commune with God, understand his will, and make sense of the foundational truths of Scripture.

It is deeply ironic that the generation with the greatest number of accurate, understandable translations of the Bible, replete with study helps from brief annotations to massive commentaries, should be one of the most biblically illiterate societies in the history of the church.

When we are dependent on a handful of prominent leaders, we then become unable to reject false teaching or to discipline immoral behavior by our favorite authorities.

The second temptation involved believers trying to separate the beginning of the Christian life from the living of the Christian life.

As Paul reminds the Corinthians, our lives as Christians begin with absolute dependence on God’s powerful, saving work.

We hear the gospel of Christ crucified and respond to it in faith (1:17; 2:1–5).

This response is the result of the Spirit’s work, who gives us true wisdom so that we can understand, rather than reject, the gospel (2:12–14).

We are also baptized in the name of Christ, the only Savior and Lord (1:12–15).

Yet this dependence on God’s provision is not a temporary stage in our spiritual development, for the gospel is both the gracious gift by which we begin the Christian life and the source of ongoing power for living the Christian life (cf.

15:1–4).

The truth about “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (2:2) is therefore not a basic teaching to be left behind as we mature but a lens through which to view all of Scripture (1:19, 31; 2:9, 16) and all of life.

In light of the aforementioned parallels and the prior assertion that the message of Christ crucified is God’s power and God’s wisdom (1:24) and that Christ became wisdom for us from God (1:30), the claim in 2:6, “We do, however, speak a message of wisdom,” flows well with the context, even if the first impression is a bit surprising since Paul has repeatedly disavowed wisdom in the proclamation of the gospel (1:17; 2:1, 4).

Yet Paul does not reject all wisdom, only the wisdom belonging to this age and the rulers of this age.

Here he speaks of God’s wisdom.

Ciampa and Rosner think that the “message of wisdom” is not to be associated with the gospel in the sense of the message of salvation for all and that “mature” refers to more experienced Christians.

“God’s secret wisdom” in 2:7 is to be equated with the “mind of Christ” in 2:16 and “both refer in context to the wisdom of the cross applied to everyday life,” which is “precisely what Paul offers to the Corinthians in the letter as a whole.”

This position, they claim, does not entail a two-tiered view of the gospel or the introduction of any sort of elitism into the church.230

The problem is behavioral, not an issue of one’s “status.”

The context clearly indicates that behavior is a primary issue and that the distinction Paul makes is between maturity and immaturity as 3:1–4 shows (see also 14:20).

Others, however, make the case that “mature” is a term applicable to all believers, just as Paul speaks elsewhere of all Christians as “saints,” “beloved,” “elect,” “called,” and “faithful.”

The “mature” are those who love God (2:9) and those who have received the Spirit (2:12), who enables them to understand God’s wisdom.

The only wisdom Paul preaches is the wisdom of the cross, not more sophisticated instruction for a select group.

It is the same wisdom for beginners and more advanced Christians, but the measure of this wisdom is one’s grasp of the deep things of God embodied in the cross that manifests itself in behavior.

Paul’s reference to the mature in 2:6 is the first in a series of terms critical to the argument running through 3:4.

Verses 14–15 contrasts the “man without the Spirit,” who cannot understand the things of God, with the “spiritual man,”235 who discerns all things.

In 3:1–3 Paul employs “flesh” and “infant” language to describe the Corinthians since he could not, he claims, speak to them as “spiritual.”

It is this collection of terms in the overall argument that provides the best clue to the meaning of “mature,” a term that finds its opposite in the term “infants” in 3:2.

In context, “mature” is parallel to and synonymous with “spiritual,” and perhaps somewhat interchangeable with “wise” as used in Corinth.

The term itself, in principle, can refer to all believers, who have received the message of the cross, but the Corinthians’ behavior was not in keeping with who they were in Christ as the letter so ably demonstrates.

While Paul does not advocate a two-tiered gospel, a distinction in different “classes” of believers, he does recognize stages of growth in Christlikeness as manifested in the fruit of the Spirit.240

Paul does not advocate a wisdom beyond the cross, but he does urge the Corinthians to embody the message of the cross.

The Corinthians’ failure to live out the reality of the cross in their relations to one another deemed them as mere “infants” in Christ.

Maturity is related to behavior, living out the paradigm of the cross in love, rather than knowledge.

“Mystery,” as noted in the discussion on 2:1–2, is a common Pauline term used to describe something previously unknown but now disclosed by revelation.

Paul develops the term more fully in Colossians and Ephesians and explains the mystery as the inclusion of Gentiles in God’s salvation.

God’s mystery is not a riddle that men can solve but rather a secret that the human mind by itself is wholly unable to penetrate.

Mystery… did not know.. Jesus prayer, Father forgive them they know not… what do you mean?

Of course they know… they have perfected this torture..

That the rulers did not know God’s secret is demonstrated in the crucifixion (see Acts 3:17; 4:25–28; Luke 23:34) of Jesus, the “Lord of glory,” a title applied to Christ by Paul only here.

In referring to “our glory” and Jesus as the “Lord of glory,” Paul implicitly connects the destination of God’s people with Jesus.

This is the first mention of “glory” in the letter, which anticipates Paul’s emphasis on glory elsewhere, culminating in the focus on resurrection in chap.

15 (see esp. 15:40–42).

The glory of Jesus remains hidden to the rulers of the world, as does the final destination of God’s people.

If “us” refers back to the more immediate “those who love him” in 2:9, then all believers are in view rather than an inner circle in the early church.

The contrast is not so much between “us” and “them” as it is why they cannot know and we can.261

Paul does not elaborate further here on the content of the revelation as he does elsewhere (Col 1:24–28; Eph 3:8–13) because this is not his intent in the present argument, which focuses more on the fact and the means of revelation rather than the content.

The context, however, supplies that Paul is speaking of God’s plan of salvation in Christ crucified.

Furthermore, what God has prepared for those who love him is “glory” (2:8; cf. also 15:20–28).

Paul’s language of the “deep things” of God corresponds to his analogous exclamation in Rom 11:33, “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out!”

In Eph 3:8 he speaks of preaching to the Gentiles “the unsearchable riches of Christ,” and in 3:18 of the same letter he prays that believers might be able to grasp “how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.”

2:9.

Here Paul quotes Isaiah 64:4, which was part of a prayer for God to intervene in history again on behalf of the remnant who hoped in him; Paul adapts the wording of the quotation slightly, as was common in ancient citations.