Can I just tell you something? It's hard to start a new church. The Apostle Paul understood
that because he had started a church in Corinth. In fact, he had spent a year and a half of
his life with these people. What happened? He must have wondered what happened? Let's
open our Bibles together to 1 Corinthians chapter 1 as we pick up our text in verse 18.
What happened goes back to the context of their lives. Corinth was not a university city,
but the Greek influence was very strong there. After all, it was only 48 miles from the city
of Athens. And the Greeks love speculation. They loved logic and argumentation. Sort
of sounds like your teenager, doesn't it? The Greek influenced Pagan's valued rhetoric
and debate. And they had perhaps 50 different philosophies that they built their lives around,
50 different parties or groups that they divided themselves into. Each one of them had their
own answers for the significant questions of life. Who am I? Why am I here? What happens
after life? Rick Warren, you see, he wasn't around yet to write his book, The Purpose-Driven
Life. And so they didn't have the answers to those questions yet. Exploring these questions,
they developed sometimes very complex systems of thinking, of outlining the order of society
and the relationships between people. Now, understand that these people were not stupid
because they were Pagans and they were Greeks. In fact, many of them were brilliant thinkers,
but they were blinded by one fundamental flaw. And that was the flaw that they rejected the
knowledge of God. That's what Romans chapter 1 is all about. The spirit and the values
of this Greek Pagan-oriented culture stuck with the Corinthian Christians after they
had believed. Now, look, that's almost always true. Until some work of grace is done in
our hearts by the Spirit of God changing our minds, our spirits, we are very much still
connected with whatever we were saved out of. Like their Pagan neighbors, these Corinthian
Christian converts were prone to pick a favorite preacher or teacher and then divide themselves
into factions based upon their choice. You see, that's what they had come out of, these
philosophers that they followed. And these people still had an ear for clever words,
for sharp arguments of philosophy. And so Paul warns them in verse 17 about mixing the
wisdom of words, talking about human wisdom, mixing the wisdom of words with the revelation
of God and the message of the cross. He says, if you do that, it empties the gospel of its
power. If you mix together the wisdom of man with the revelation of God in Christ, he says
it voids, it neutralizes, it nullifies the gospel message. That is true if we mix the
gospel today with positive thinking, or we mix it with the so-called health and wealth
gospel that people like to hear, or we mix the gospel message with the self-help principles.
When we do that, it nullifies the gospel. It robs the gospel of its power. As in those
days still today, there are two opposing wisdoms, or we might say two opposing worldviews, or
two opposing ways of interpreting the world. There's God's way and there's man's way.
The apostle warns here that one's faith must be based upon God's wisdom, not man's wisdom.
God's wisdom and man's wisdom cannot coexist. They are mutually exclusive. And if you're
following along in the outline and I encourage you to do that, it always helps to take notes
so that you can go back and reflect and remember, we've come now to the first blank to fill
in. God's wisdom and man's wisdom are mutually exclusive. They don't mix. Why is this? Let
me say in the first place, it's because of how the two wisdoms differ in their content.
How they differ in their content. One reason they're mutually exclusive is this, that man
is the center of man's wisdom. And who is the center of God's wisdom? Exactly. God is.
Human wisdom represents any number of ideations or schemes of thinking that exalt human discovery
and human rationalism over divine revelation. I like to leave that statement on the screen
for just a moment so you can copy it down. Human wisdom represents any number of ideations
or schemes of thinking that exalts human discovery or human rationalism over divine revelation.
These are worldviews that define reality or define truth for their adherence. And I want
to give you some modern day examples of what I'm talking about. This is modern day human
wisdom. One example would be naturalism or we might call it evolutionism. This way of
thinking precludes anything supernatural. Reality for the naturalist is based upon chance
and the survival of the fittest. Life has no ultimate meaning to a naturalist. The goal
of one who is a naturalist is to bring everything together as globalism, as world government.
It is the rule of the fittest. This is where Nazism comes from. This is where Communism
comes from. Inevitably, naturalism will lead to despotism, to dictatorship, to the tyranny
of minorities. There's a second modern day example of human wisdom that is dominant.
It's called materialism. This is a way of thinking. This is a way of perceiving reality.
It precludes anything spiritual or supernatural. The only thing real is what is material. Ultimate
meaning is found only in material things. Some materialists are free market capitalists.
They believe very much like the man in Luke's Gospel that Jesus talked about whose only
interest in life was to tear down his small barns and to build bigger barns. Everything
about life was material to him. That was his reality. Certainly we believe in a free economy.
It provides opportunity for anyone who wishes to work hard. I'm not knocking that. But it's
dangerous when we see that the only goal to a free market economy and to capitalism is
to be prosperous and to accumulate things. That's a materialist. There are others who
see themselves in a different light. There are materialists who I would call socialists.
They want a new world order that's based upon socialism. As somebody who defines socialism,
it's where everybody shares equally in the misery. Socialism takes from the rich and
it gives to the poor. It's the old Robin Hood kind of a thing. It's the redistribution of
wealth through taxes or whatever. Now certainly helping the poor is a compassionate thing
and a godly thing to do, but not stealing from somebody else to do that. That's what
socialism is all about. Again, socialism just sees the reality as material right now. Sees
nothing beyond that. There's a third example of human wisdom I want to point out and that
is mystical spiritualism. Very prominent today. Now people who are in this camp believe in
the spiritual unlike the other two. They believe in the supernatural, but not in a personal
sovereign God. Reality for them is connecting to the spiritual through some sort of a mystical
experience, whether that spiritual be within oneself or if it be in another dimension,
it taps into the darkness. Life has meaning in self-realization by becoming one's own
God, getting in touch with the God who is within you. You've heard these kinds of phrases
or getting in touch with the God, however you define your God. The goal of a person
who is a mystical spiritualist is to enter into a new age of human harmony or perhaps
differently to experience reincarnation into a higher plane of existence. Now there's
one thing that all of these worldviews have in common and there's some overlapping too.
We acknowledge that. There's one thing they all have in common and that is they contradict
God's wisdom. James comments on these kinds of ways of thinking. He says, such wisdom
does not come down from heaven, but is earthly, unspiritual of the devil. Now God's wisdom
on the other hand centers in the reality of a personal, sovereign, infinite God. This
is God's wisdom now in contrast. This personal, sovereign, infinite God entered the world
as a man through the miracle of the incarnation. He came as the Savior, the Christ. And this
God suffered and died on the cross as a way of satisfying his own justice against our
sinfulness. This God was raised from the dead as a sign of his victory over sin, over death
and Satan. God's wisdom is his own self-disclosure that is found in the Bible. God's wisdom
tells us who we are. It tells us why we are here. It tells us what the end of all things
is. It begins in the book of Genesis and then as the story unfolds through the 66 books
of the Bible, you discover the answers to life's greatest questions. God's wisdom is
his own revelation of the cross. You see, Christ crucified is the very apex of God's
wisdom. Isn't this amazing? God exalts the greatest crime ever committed by humanity,
the crucifixion of Christ, in order to achieve His most glorious work. And it was all for
the benefit of mankind, the one who had done the crime. You see, man's wisdom is his own
self-discovery, whether that be through his own reasoning or rationalism, through his
experience or through his scientific exploration. Man's wisdom is his own autonomy from any
superior being. Man's wisdom says, I am God. I am the captain of my fates. I am the master
of my soul. God's wisdom says, I am God, the infinite, personal, sovereign God. That's
why these two cannot coexist. You can't have two gods. Now, there's a second reason they
can't coexist, and that's because of how the two wisdoms differ in worth. In worth.
The spiritually lost person naturally evaluates God's wisdom by his own wisdom. That's all
he's got. Thank you very much. Got it. Jimmy crunched that ice. It's good. The spiritually
lost person naturally evaluates God's wisdom by his own wisdom. For example, Paul says,
the lost pagan judges God's wisdom in Christ as what? Foolishness. Foolishness. Literally,
the word is moronic. Man looks at what God's wisdom is, the crucified Christ, and he says,
utter nonsense because he seeks for wisdom that meets his definition of what is logical
and reasonable and, get this, which leaves intact his own sense of ego and superiority.
That's what man is looking for. He says, God's wisdom is for simpletons. It's for morons.
God's wisdom is for half wits. God's wisdom does not make sense. It's just too uncomplicated.
It's too easy. And so it writes off the wisdom of God. On the other hand, the lost Jew looks
at God's wisdom, Christ crucified, and he sees stumbling block. Why is this? It's because
the Jews expected the Christ to come and deliver them. The Christ is depicted in the Old Testament
in part as the mighty deliverer who would come and rescue his people and establish his kingdom.
A Christ who is crucified, you've got to be kidding. That is a huge stumbling block to
the Jews. The Jews are looking for signs of his greatness, for proof of his Messiahship.
Now the real problem with God's wisdom is that it assails human pride. It assails man's
sense of ego, his sense of control over his own destiny, because we want to be God. That's
the worth of God's wisdom as man looks at it. But on the other hand, God has something
to say about human wisdom. God makes man's wisdom also foolish. In other words, God declares
it foolish because he shows man's wisdom for what it is. It is part of the problem and
certainly not the solution to man's condition. God condemns man's wisdom as ineffective in
eliminating man's problems. He quotes from Isaiah 29, 14. He says, I'll destroy the
wisdom of the wise and the intelligence of the intelligent. I will frustrate quoting
from Isaiah. And then notice the number of questions that follow. Just bam, bam, bam,
one after the other. I hope you're following the Bible as I deal with this. He asks, first
of all, where is the wise man? Now Paul may have had in mind the Greek philosophers that
we know, Plato, Aristotle, and so forth, or he may have had in mind one of those philosophers
as one author said, who stood on every corner in Corinth and spouted his ideas. But Paul
pokes at him. He goads him and says, where is the philosopher? He says, where is the
scholar? Literally, where is the scribe? Perhaps thinking about a Jewish scribe, who is an
expert in the law? He says, where is he? He says, where is the philosopher of this age?
Whether Jew or Gentile, where is that one who engages in this speculation, these intellectual
arguments and debates while ignoring the wisdom of God? Where is he? What's his point here?
Paul is showing, what good have all these worldly wise, well-intentioned people really
accomplished? Isn't the human race still embroiled in the same problems it always has been? What's
different about man? What's different about our world? What has changed for the good because
of all of these people and all of these philosophies? And that's why he concludes with the rhetorical
question, has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? And rhetorical question is answered
in the positive. Yes, He has. For God has allowed the fruit of man's wisdom to be evident,
which is further decay, greater divisions, more wars, more injustice, continued racism
and classism. All the fruits of sin are still present, and more so, after all of man's
intellectual debates and pursuits, all of his ideas. And so God declares man's wisdom
to be utter nonsense. It is unable to make men better or the world safer. Man's wisdom
does not deliver the oppressed. It does not create equality. It does not engender the
common good. It does not stop wars or promote honest politicians or preserve moral virtue
in a culture. If it does in any sense, it's only temporary and partial. Why is this? Because
man's wisdom inevitably ignores reality because it does not include God. And God, the ultimate
reality, answers all of the questions. Who is man? Why are we here? And in the condition
we are and where are we headed? God tells us very plainly. So you see, both camps, if
I can put it that way, declare the worth of each other's wisdom to be foolish. These two
cannot coexist. Now there's a third reason as to why these are incompatible, and that
is because of how the two wisdoms differ in their outcome. I touched on this briefly.
Look at the tragic outcome of man's wisdom. In the first place, it does not bring anyone
into a transformational relationship with God. It leaves man disconnected from ultimate
reality and with a life that is still in bondage to its own corruption. Secondly, it leaves
man's wisdom leaves its adherents in a state of perishing. Paul says in verse 18, but to
those who are perishing, it's a present tense kind of thing. That is the reality of our
world. Our world and the people in it are perishing, being ruined and destroyed, and
man's wisdom is not helping anything. In neither an eternal nor a temporal sense does
the world's wisdom result in good. Now I'm not speaking of scientific achievements,
but the discoveries of the world. I'm kind of glad Columbus discovered the world in the
West. I'm not talking about the progress in medication or in agriculture or manufacturing
or technology and so forth. We all benefit from those kinds of things. What I'm talking
about, what I'm referring to are the philosophical underpinnings that form the world's way of
thinking, its values, its goals, the worldviews of man, these things that are created by his
own wisdom. These are tragic consequences of errors. Human wisdom has not created a
utopian society. It has not created an improved version of the human being. In fact, it's
just the opposite. And so we might join Paul this morning in taunting the world just a
little bit. Where are all these smart people, the elite of our society, the wise intellects
in our universities who claim such superiority? Where are the Freud's and the Marx's and
the Darwin's and the Margaret Meads and the George Soros' and the Carl Sagan's and the
Richard Dawkins? Where are they? Why haven't they produced a utopia? Isn't that what they've
promised us if we believe their ideas? Where are the ones who have claimed if we just spent
more money on education, it would produce the best educational system in the world and
smarter people able to compete in a global market. But the more money we spend on education,
the more our educational standards go down. Where are they? Where are the Margaret's
singers? And she, by the way, is the atheist who founded Planned Parenthood. Where are the
Margaret's singers and the other promoters of sex education who advocated their cause
and told us if we would believe what they say it would reduce teenage pregnancies, unhappiness
in marriage and STDs? Where are they? Have the billions that we have spent on eliminating
poverty since the great society that many of us remember in our lifetime? Where are they?
Has it created a world without injustice and hunger and poverty? No. Has the shrill propaganda
of the anti-military leftists in our culture produced a safer world? No. Here's my point.
Human philosophies based upon human wisdom achieve no lasting good. Man's corrupt nature
produces corrupt thinking, corrupt governments, corrupt systems, corrupt bureaucracies with
corrupt results. That's the outcome of man's wisdom. And we are drowning in it. In contrast,
look at the transforming outcome of God's wisdom. Paul says it is the power of God to
save from ruin, from perishing those who believe. Now, just think with me for a moment about
the contrast between faith-based Christ-centered programs and their secular counterparts.
Let's think about substance abuse, for example. Compare the outcomes of these clinics and
hospitals and programs where people go and they pay tens of thousands of dollars for
three weeks or six weeks of treatment for their addictions. And they come out of those
and what do they do? Almost all of them inevitably go right back to their addictions. On the
other hand, think about a program like Celebrate Recovery or Teen Challenge that exists on
a percentage of 1% of the income of these other organizations, but whose philosophy includes
the gospel of Jesus Christ. It changes the lives of people who get into those programs.
They are different. And instead of the massive numbers returning to their addictions, the
result is that 70% and 80% of them experience true deliverance from their addictions and
substance abuse. Let's think about something else. Today, our government creates
bigger prisons to hold more prisoners and it pours increasing numbers of dollars into
expensive rehabilitation programs for these prisoners. We educate them, we give them degrees
and so forth. They get out of prison and what happens in the majority of the cases? They
return to prison within a period of time because they repeat their crimes.
But let a prison like the one down in Alabama, for example, or Mississippi rather, let in
a program like Prison Fellowship that is based upon the wisdom of God. And it begins
on a fraction of the budget of these other programs. It begins to teach men the truth,
the wisdom of God. And what happens? They get converted. Their lives are transformed.
They get a new heart, a new nature. They get some training, the support. They get out of
prison and the vast majority of them stay out of prison. They bring blessing and benefit
to our communities.
Friends, what I'm trying to point out to you is the difference between human wisdom and
man's wisdom in the outcomes. Whoever or wherever the gospel is received, it makes a difference.
Now human wisdom can offer ideas. It can form opinion and it does. It can help diagnose perhaps
the human condition. It can probe for solutions. It can advance imposing arguments about itself.
Human wisdom can dominate the public attitudes and it certainly does in our culture today.
Human wisdom can use the force of law and of military and even terrorism to impose itself
on others. But human wisdom has a fatal flaw. The fatal weakness of human wisdom is this.
It cannot deal with the depravity of the human heart. It cannot change the nature of man.
It can define it. It can pass laws against certain displays of that nature. It can seek
to understand why a man acts the way he does through psychological or sociological research.
But human wisdom cannot transform a single life. And that's why Paul says the foolishness
of God, the so-called foolishness of God, is wiser than man's wisdom because it changes
lives. The weakness of God, the so-called weakness of God is stronger than man's strength
because it can lift a man out of his misery, out of his addictions, out of his poverty
and make him a new creature in Jesus Christ. And everyone, everyone listening to me right
now, everyone in the world has a choice. That choice is which wisdom forms the foundation
of their lives. What you and I need to do is look hard into our hearts, be sure that
we're building our lives by the wisdom of God and not the thinking of man. You will
pick up books by the thousands in bookstores that espouse the thinking of man. You will
hear talk programs. You will listen to television programs during the daytime that will say
things that sound so good and attractive and pleasing to the ear. And all of those things
fail. But the gospel of Jesus Christ cannot fail because it is the wisdom of God. Which
wisdom are you building your life on? God's wisdom in Christ or the wisdom of the world.
Just told a parable one time about a man who built his house and we have sung a chorus
about that. Many of us learned it in Sunday school. Maybe you'd sing it with me. The wise
man built his house upon the rock. The wise man built his house upon the rock. The wise
man built his house upon the rock. And the rains came tumbling. You don't have to do
this. The rains came down and the floods came up. The rains came down and the floods came
up. The rains came down and the floods came up. But the house on the rock stood firm.
Oh, there's another verse. The foolish man built his house upon the sand. The foolish
man built his house upon the sand. The foolish man built his house upon the sand. And the
rains came tumbling. It always does. The rains came down and the floods came up. The rains
came down and the floods came up. The rains came down and the floods came up. And the
house on the sand fell flat. Exactly. And so we say, I'm going to change it just a little
bit. So build your house on Christ crucified. So build your house on Christ crucified. So
build your house on Christ crucified. And the blessings will come ling down. The blessings
will come down as the prayers go up. The blessings will come down as the prayers go up. The blessings
will come down as the prayers go up. So build your life on Him.
Hey, friend, on what are you building your life? It makes all the difference in this
world and for all of eternity. Let's pray together. Oh, Spirit of God, I pray that you
will search our hearts. And wherein any of us are still like the Corinthians incorporating
the world's wisdom into our decisions, into the way that we think and the way that we
live. Show it to us, Lord. So we can get the sand out of our foundation and get the rock
in place. God help us to build wisely and incorporate our lives upon the rock that is
found in the wisdom of God in Christ crucified. And this I pray in Jesus' name. Amen.