The Power of the Cross (1 Cor. 1:18–25)

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Don Carson: What would you think of a church building adorned with a fresco of the mass graves of Auschwitz, the worst of the Nazi death camps? Even to ask such questions is grotesque. The very suggestions are abhorrent because of their shocking, powerful cultural associations. But that was the sort of shocking overtone that was connected with cross and crucifixion in the first century. If you read the ancient Greek and Latin writers, whenever they mention cross and crucifixion, they are always scandalized. It’s not a datum. It certainly isn’t something you sing hymns about cross crucifixion. These are horrifying notions. No Roman citizen was permitted to be executed by crucifixion apart from explicit written sanction of the Emperor himself. This form of execution was reserved for slaves and barbarians, traders, the scum of society. And then it’s not just the pain, it’s the shame, the degradation that’s associated with the notion you would no more wear jewelry sporting across than you would do any other equally grotesque and scandalous thing along the line that I suggested at the beginning. Yet today, crosses a door in our buildings. They great our bishops. They shine from our lapels. They dangle from our ears. We wear them in gold chains around our necks,

and no one is shocked. Now relax. I’m not suggesting you should take them all off.

The cultural associations have changed. I know that, yet. That is why it is so hard for us to come to grips with this passage, because we’re not shocked. We read a passage like this. 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. And we say Uh huh, because we’re Christians. But if we’re to understand how the cross functions in the life of believers in the first century, we must think our back our think our way back into how grotesque it was to the first men and women who believed in these four weeks. I want to talk about the cross and various aspects of Christian ministry today, the cross and the word, all aspects of teaching, preaching, witness and the like next week, the cross and the spirit. The third week, the cross and factionalism. And finally, the cross and leadership. This morning, then the cross and the word. It will be helpful to follow the theme in three parts, equivalent to the three paragraphs in our text. First, the message of the cross. 118, to 25 essentially, Paul makes two points in this paragraph. First, the message of the cross, Paul says, By God’s determination, divides the human race Absolutely. Now every society has various polarities. We think in terms of England versus Wales, depending on which side of the border you’re from, Britain versus the continent, Europe versus America. On a more racist note, what? No whites versus everybody else, we still enjoy humming ancient Flanders and Swan songs, the English, the English, the English, are best. I wouldn’t give chuppance for all of the rest. Every society has its polarities. And in ancient Rome, there were polarities as well. There were Romans against barbarians, that was everybody else. There were Jews versus Gentiles. There were slaves versus free and, of course, men versus women. But Paul set forth the only polarity that is of ultimate importance, the only polarity that extends into eternity. He says, 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 those who are perishing and those who are being saved that is for him, the ultimate polarity, and it is the only one that really interests them. And it all turns on this dividing point, this word of the cross to the one group. The whole notion of the cross is stupid. It’s foolishness. It doesn’t really make sense to the other group. It’s not. Simply wisdom. It is powerful. Indeed. Paul emphasizes God’s determined purpose in this respect by citing Old Testament, scripture, he immediately says, For it is written that is, God has already declared himself on this sort of question. So far as Paul is concerned, the message of the cross is nothing other than God’s way of doing what he said he would do, set aside and shatter all human pretensions. And now he quotes Isaiah 29 I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, the intelligence of the intelligent. I will frustrate. What does this mean? Is God against intelligence? I Not exactly. The problem is that human beings this side of the fall think of themselves as at the center of all things, no matter what sphere we think about our companies, our extracurricular interests, our leisure time, our families, our church. We inevitably think of everything as to how it relates to us. I think of how things relate to me because I’m at the center. The trouble is, you people think you’re at the center, and out of this stems all kinds of conflict and tension. Our desperate Folly is that we think we are so much at the center we can actually stand in judgment of God. We want him to meet our standards. We want him to be, what we define. We shall set a certain kind of prescription for God, and if God is up to lives up to our expectations, then we’re ready to take him on board. But of course, that’s simply another way of saying that we remain God for ourselves. Do we not regularly hear people today say, Oh, I can’t accept a God like that. Now that is, in all fairness, the one thing you can’t say, not reasonably. The question is whether he is like that.

Indeed, in the light of the cross, what is left of the pretensions of this world. Paul drives the point home with three stinging rhetorical questions. First, he says, Where is the wise man? Now in the ancient world, the wife the wise man was not someone mightily endowed with British Common Sense. The wise man was in the first century, someone who had a whole public philosophy of life, and used it to explain everything. There was a cynic philosophy and an epicurean philosophy and a stoic philosophy. And there were teachers of these and other philosophies who went to the marketplaces and started their schools and drew their various disciples to them and charged fat fees and were wildly admired. And within the framework of each of these philosophies, they could explain everything that was going on that was the wise man in the ancient world. The modern equivalent would be communism or capitalism or hedonism or pluralism or any other ism that becomes a whole way of looking at reality. Now Paul says, Where’s the wise man? That is, which of these isms somehow fought its way through to a God who resolves the human dilemma by sending His Son to a cross?

Did the stork philosophy do that? Does communism have a central place for the cross? Does capitalism think through its explanations of reality on the basis of the cross?

Does pluralism, modern pluralism, which insists that the only wrong view is the view that says that anybody else is wrong. You have your view of truth. I have my view of truth. Does pluralism think its way to the cross? Does materialism really love the cross? So where’s the wise man? Did any of the public philosophies in the in the open, naked public square in the on the village green. Did any of these philosophies teach us the cross? Well, then Paul says, Where is the scholar? What he means, here is the expert in the law. This is looking at things from a Jewish side. We might call this sort of person the religious ethicist. Have our great ethicists led us to the cross. Oh, we have manufactured utilitarianism, and we have produced various systems of ethics based on natural law.

Are ethical structures, but I don’t know of one that leads men and women to the cross, not one. Well, then Paul says, Where is the philosopher of this age? And in the first century, this was the person who was very able in rhetoric and debate. It wasn’t always so important. What you said is to say it well, something like the British senior common room at a decent University, it can be great fun. Endless witticism, gentle. Put down some not so gentle. But you’re not supposed to know that endless footnotes squished in parentheses, wonderful illusions. It can be good fun. It can be innocent fun. But when that style of life, that approach to Outlook, becomes the center of all that you value and cherish, what British senior common rule leads people to the cross, or in the ancient world, the same sort of rhetoric was also that by which you changed and molded public opinion. It was the equivalent of our media. Do the media lead people to God’s way of reconciling men and women to himself. Paul wants us to realize that at the end of the day in the cross, God has already passed judgment on the best that the world has to offer. When Paul concludes, Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world, he is not saying that God has made the wisdom of the world to appear foolish. He’s saying that he’s already destroyed it. He’s saying that he’s already passed judgment. He’s already be fooled it. How has God done this? Well, verse 21 is the answer, since in the wisdom, it’s it’s structures, and its rhetoric and its goals and its happy debates and its scholarship, since the world, through its wisdom, did not know Him. God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe it pleased God to do it this way, and a moment’s reflection reveals why a god discovered by human wisdom will be both a projection of human fallenness and a source of human pride.

You see if, at the end of the day, God is the sort of being who is discoverable by mere intellect. Then all the people with high IQs have a leg up and knowing God and all that will do is guarantee a certain kind of arrogance all over again. Or if it all depends on whom you know, or if it all depends on how much money you have, then all the rest of us can run away and hide. We can’t face this sort of God. The gods of the wise are not gracious to those the wise deemed foolish. Instead, it pleased God through the foolishness of what was declared, of what was preached, the message of the cross to save those who believe,

those who believe, children can believe. So can adults. Blacks can believe, so can whites. The poor can believe. So can the rich,

the intelligent can believe. So can the unintelligent, the illiterates can believe, and so can those with tertiary degrees. What God has done is level the playing field, and he has insisted that all the things to which human beings attach their palm cannot be the critical factor in bringing men and women to Christ. No, no, it’s through the message of the cross, and that message is received by faith, by self, abandonment to God. We come on his terms. The second thing this paragraph says is this, the message of the cross proves that God’s folly has outsmarted human wisdom and his weakness has overpowered human strength. What Paul does is divide those who are perishing into two groups who represent the fundamental idolatries of every age. He says verse 22 Jews demand miraculous signs and greed. Texts look for wisdom. What he means by this is that Jews traditionally tended to think of religion in terms of a powerful display from God, signs, miracles, wonders. We remember how often men and women asked Jesus, in the days of his flesh, to produce some sort of sign, some sort of proof that he really was who He claimed to be. And after all, he did do some pretty spectacular things. So why should he object to doing one more? Why doesn’t he just call their bluff? They want Him to do a miracle. Why doesn’t he just do it? Then they sort of have to believe, don’t they, but it doesn’t work like that. Does it for if he starts doing things at their demand, then he is in their pocket. He’s less and less like a Messiah who comes and sovereignly freezes people, and more and more like a genie in a bottle. All you have to do is rub it the right way and out he pops and does another trick. Who’s in charge? Well, the person rubbing the bottle. Some people want religion exactly the same way. They want a religion of power in which we are the manipulators, whether with priestly incantations or a bit of magic or a bit of supernatural display, so long as it is done on our demand, and who remains at the center? Oh, well, there’s another approach, the approach of the Greeks who want this, this public explanation, this public philosophy in the marketplace. Because you see, knowledge is power if you have a whole philosophy of life that explains things, then if you belong to this group with this acknowledged public philosophy, you can explain everything else. It’s one of the things that that somehow manages to hold public philosophies together. If you’re a Tory, you can always explain everything that goes wrong by all the wig follies and vice versa, no matter what happens to the economy or what happens to the morals of the nation or it doesn’t matter you belong to the inside group, and the inside group always has an explanation for everything that goes wrong, and it’s never your fault. Knowledge is power. So by our strong adherence to this ism or that wasm, that the end of the day, we have simply gained power and returned to self centered, self focused, self adoration. In both cases, there is profound self centeredness, and God has not taken on trust. He has to present his credentials to human beings. We want to approve him. We want him to meet our criteria. And if he doesn’t stand up, we won’t have anything to do with him, which means, of course, that I am still number one, and I am God. By contrast, Paul says, while the Jews demand miraculous signs and the Greeks look for wisdom. We preach Christ crucified. Now that’s the shocker. Christ crucified trips off our lips so easily today, but in the first century, was an oxymoron. Was like saying fried ice was a contradiction in terms. Messiah meant power, Messiah meant splendor, Messiah meant glory. Messiah meant victory. Messiah does not mean crucifixion. But Paul says, what we preach is Christ crucified. Of course, Paul himself had to come to terms with that. He started off as a Jew who persecuted the church precisely because he thought the notion of A crucified Messiah was blasphemous. Doesn’t the Bible say Cursed is everyone who hangs on a cross? How can you possibly elevate to the central place of worship and adoration and praise someone who is a despised criminal, who dies an odious death, who hangs there in shame, who is weak, who can’t be victorious, who is overcome by minor political potentes. The whole notion is vaguely blasphemous, and Paul wanted no part of it. Then he met the resurrected Messiah, and he had to rethink all that he had formally believed. If, if this Jesus of Nazareth had risen from the dead and was at God’s right hand, then then he was vindicated in his death. Then, why did he die? Then all the Christian claims began to twig. They began to make sense. He died, not his own death, but our death. He was wounded for our. Transgressions. He was bruised for our iniquities. He died an ignominious death to take others death to pay for their sin. And the very power of God is displayed in the moment of greatest weakness. The wisdom of God is displayed exactly where everyone thinks. There is only we preach Christ crucified a stumbling block to Jews, foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. When he is hanging on the cross and it looks as if all the pretensions of this man have dissolved in weakness. He is performing His work of greatest strength. When you look at this man hanging on the cross, and it just doesn’t make sense in terms of any of the public philosophies of the day, when he seems such a fool. In fact, he’s accomplishing God’s Wise plan, and God folly outsmarts human wisdom. God’s weakness outstrips human strength.

That’s the message of the cross. Now Paul turns to the outreach of the cross. Paul has largely been looking at people who do not want the message of the cross, who, in fact, openly reject it. Now he turns to those who accept it, and he finds that who they are supports his main point by and large. He says, they are not the wise or the glamorous or the gifted or the saintly. No, they’re the nobodies. Verse 26 brother, think of what you were when you were called. He says Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were influential, not many were of noble birth. Paul wants the church to recognize the point. He recognizes that they’re brothers in Christ, but, but he says, look around. Go ahead, look at yourself. You don’t represent the very cream of the British aristocracy. He says, You’re not all fabulously wealthy. You don’t all have tertiary degrees. In fact, he alludes to Old Testament passages in particular, Jeremiah nine, where God says, Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom, or the strong man boast of his strength, or the rich man boast of his riches. But let him who boasts boast about this that he understands and knows me but I am the Lord who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these thy delight declares the Lord. 100 years from now, no one in this room will doubt this, but all the things about which we boast don’t make much sense unless we boast in knowledge of the living God. So Paul takes Jeremiah’s categories, the wise man, the strong man, the rich man. Where is the wise? He says, Where is the influential, the strong? In that sense, the pacesetters, the opinion makers. Where those of noble birth? Because in the ancient world, even more so than today, those of noble birth tended to also have the money. Now, some have argued that this proves that first century Christians were all twits. They all came from the bottom steps of society. They were all ignorant slaves, poor, broken people, and that’s the only reason why Christianity was successful. In fact, in the second century, there was a pagan scholar by the name of stealthist, who smeared as Christians in precisely those terms. Listen to what he says, gripping with sarcasm, their injunctions. He says writing of Christians are like this. Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought by us to be evils. But ask for anyone ignorant, anyone stupid, anyone uneducated, anyone who was a child. Let him come boldly by the fact that they themselves admit that these people are worthy of their God. They show that they want and are able to convince only the foolish, the dishonorable, the stupid, only the slaves, women and children. Sorry, women and children. But that’s what cels said. And today, there is a certain opinion around that only idiotic people can really believe that the Bible, I mean, this is a scientific age, isn’t it? I only believe what I can see and touch and feel and measure and way those who actually try to uphold through to biblical Christianity clearly have second or third class brains. Christianity is for the dregs of society. I. But the text does not say not any are was not any are influential. Not any are noble. It says not many, not many, not many. In Whitfield’s day, a great evangelist of two centuries ago in this country, the Countess of Huntington once said that she was saved by an M the difference between many and any. And in the first century, we know that’s the case. Yes, there were poor, Ill bred, unliterate people, but there are also people like Crispus and Gaius, wealthy people like Philemon and Erastus, minds like Paul’s. So then what is Paul saying in this verse? He is saying this, being Wise, Powerful or well born cannot be a criterion of being a Christian, it doesn’t give you an inside track. It doesn’t give you a leg up into the church. That would be the kind of domestication of God by the wise and the well born and the wealthy. That is why the Lord himself so frequently calls those who are the poor and the disenfranchised. He delights to overturn the values of a proud world. One of the greatest evidences, nevertheless, of the power of the gospel is precisely that the gospel takes men and women from every stream of society try to make a sociological or psychological profile of Christians, and you can find no no consistent pattern. It’s not everybody with a certain IQ, or everybody of a certain color of skin, or everybody with a certain educational background, or everybody with a certain national characteristic, or whatever. You find Christians from every tongue and tribe and people and nation from every socio economic stratum. The point is that none of these things are finally determinative and who is and who isn’t a Christian, they do not provide you with a leg up. That’s what Paul means. So that if the Corinthians now want to attach special significance to the social values common in ancient Paganism, a certain kind of wisdom, a certain kind of power, certain kind of wealth. He wants to remind them of what’s basic brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards. Not many were influential. Not many were of noble birth. Now Paul moves from the empirical observation to the underlying principle verses 27 or 28 God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not, the things that are passing away, the things that have no final, enduring significance. Why to nullify the things that are and God’s ultimate purpose in this verse 29 so that no one may boast before him. No one comes before the living God and says, My dear God, you got a great cash with me. You did. No one treats God as if he or she is doing him a favor, as Paul says, elsewhere where then, is boasting. It is excluded. We are saved by His grace, His favor. He sent his son. His son bore my sin and my guilt in his own body on the tree. Where is the place for boasting there. So the positive case is put in the last two verses. It is because of him that you are in Christ, Jesus, nothing else. It is God’s act. It is because of him that you are in Christ, Jesus and Christ, Jesus has, in fact, become our wisdom, not the wisdom of the world.

No, no, our wisdom, that is our righteousness, our holiness. Are redemption, declared just in the sight of God, made holy to stand in the presence of his blazing glory, free from slavery to our own sin.

Therefore, Paul says, As it is written, let him who boasts boast in the Lord, finally Paul turns to the preacher of the cross, to anyone who declares the message of the cross. You see, the pretensions and arrogance of the Corinthians were opposed not only by the message of the cross and the outreach of the cross, but also by Paul’s own example. People when he went to them, even the preacher, in other words, who would introduce them to Jesus, had self consciously turned away from showmanship and self reliance. What does he say when I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom, as I proclaim to you the testimony about God. You see in the ancient world, much more so than today, there was a lot of emphasis on rhetoric, on eloquence. This was taught in British schools, in American schools, in Canadian schools, until the turn of the century, in some cases a few decades farther on, people learned not only what to say, but how to say it. It was part of a decent Western education until fairly recent times, and you learned different forms of argument. You learned what a parody was and how to handle irony, how to use sarcasm without being so sarcastic that in fact, you actually won disapproval. You learned how to use rhetorical devices to make the speech sound proper. If you were brought up in really good schools, you had the right intonation and the right forms of speech, the right vocabulary. It was all part of decent reading. Nowadays, a lot of that is gone by the influence of television. We have Talking Heads, talking heads who can move from sport to world class disasters to happy events with the same sort of tone and intonation. And that has destroyed a great deal of what used to be called rhetoric in some Arab countries, this is more understandable. A friend of a very close friend of mine in Egypt is a Christian Egyptian, an Arab speaker who not only knows colloquial egyptian arabic, but who is fluent in both pen and oral speech in high Arabic. Arabic is the language which has not only a variety of colloquial forms, but also a high written form that everybody admires and thinks is very posh. For many years, though he was a Christian, he had a great deal of influence, not only in Egypt, but in much of the Arab world, precisely because he wrote such stellar Arabic in his column in a in a Cairo newspaper. He was a journalist. Eventually, he gave it up and he became a preacher. When he started preaching, he used high Arabic, and it wasn’t long before he had 800 people in Cairo, if you please, attending his services. People loved to come and hear him preach His sonorous tones, his flying phrasing, his superb command of the language. It was a literary art form, and after about three years, he switched to colloquial Arabic. He made a choice for he had discovered that many people were listening to his art. They were not listening to Christ. The art was actually obscuring the gospel. And he made a choice. Paul understands that. You see, Paul is not here giving a rationale for sloppy preaching. He himself was obviously gifted in this area. Since when he goes to mister for example, with Barnabas, the pagans there think that he’s so good, they call him Mercury Hermes, the god of communication, what he would not do is use manipulative devices, devices that would attract all kinds of attention to himself, so that everybody would say how wonderful he was. But that would somehow obscure the Gospel itself. No, no. Paul’s philosophy of preaching is much more straightforward. It is in the first place the proclamation of the testimony about God. That’s what he said when I came to you, I chose not to come with eloquence and superior wisdom as I proclaim to you, the testimony about God, preaching, witness of any kind, for that matter, is first and foremost, the declaration of what God has done. It is the proclamatory thing. It is not simply dialog. It is not simply discussion. It is the proclamatory thing in which you announce what God has done. It is a proclaimed thing. It is the message preached. It is declared. This is what God has done. Divide around it, handle it as you please. But this is what God has said and what God has done. It is Secondly, supremely focused on Christ crucified. He said, I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus, Christ and Him crucified. This does not mean that he resolved to be as ignorant as he possibly could be and only use Jesus crucified as a catch formula. All you have to do is read Paul’s letters, and you discover that he was not a narrowly focused man. And then when you read the book of Acts and discover how he preached, you know he was thinking all the time. The way he approaches the Athenians in Acts 17 is not the way he approaches the Jews in Pisidian Antioch in Acts 13 and 14. It’s a different style. Let’s say it’s a different focus, a different emphasis. He’s thinking all the time how to communicate, but everything centers finally on the cross. He comes back to the cross. What is the non negotiable? What he resolves to know. All is Messiah crucified, for that is the heart of the message. Without it, there are no conversions. Without it, men and women do not come to know the living God. So he resolves to make that his supreme focal point. Moreover, he knows that it is frequently most effective this preaching when the preacher is ill or weak or overwhelmed or afraid, isn’t that what he says, I came to you, he says, in weakness and fear and with much trembling. You remember the story? Kid got beaten up and thrown in jail in Philippi, just up the road, run out of town on the rail in Thessalonica, short changed in Bria in Athens. He faced major intellectual hurdles, and now he arrives in Corinth, and the place he discovers is a bit of a moral cesspool. He’s deeply discouraged and in Acts chapter 18, God visits him in a night dream and says, preach on Paul. I have many people in this place. I came to you with weakness and fear and with much trembling, Paul stayed there substantial times. Saw a church planted. He comes to learn that God’s strength is made perfect in weakness. He knows too that this kind of preaching is not manipulative. Verse four, my message and preaching were not with wise and persuasive words. You see, it is possible to tell the right kind of story that gets a third of the congregation in tears. It might be quite innocent. It might be the moving of the Spirit. It might just be a clever story. The same people will weep at a decent opera or a good a good story on Masterpiece Theater. And Paul does not want to be manipulative. He is afraid of getting people to make decisions, quote, unquote, of getting them to change their mind simply because they find Paul himself attractive or convincing or capable. No, no, no. He says, my message and my preaching were not with wise and first ways of words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on man’s wisdom but on God’s power. At the end of the day, gospel preaching is characterized by transforming power from the Spirit of God. Men and women do change, and they change because God, by His Spirit, changes them. He uses the message of the cross, not with manipulative displays,

but in ways that glorify His dear Son, Jesus, the cross, then must shape not only our message, but our outreach, the way we talk to people, our preaching and our preachers, Our witnessing and those who witness what this passage does is smash the great idolatries of even the evangelical world, our love of methods, our concern with self promotion, Our gimmicks, our endless desire for one more genes in this church, there is a long heritage of capable preaching, but Roy Clements would be the first to tell you that if at the end of the day your faith is largely dependent On his oratory, you are trusting a broken shard. Her oratory never changed anybody, not in this radical, Christ centered, cross centered spirit and power way you

in North America, we are deeply afflicted with endless managerial skills and gimmicks. I was in conversation not long ago with a minister of the gospel in a church of 500 people who assured me that the fundamental reason why, in many places, Christianity was faltering a bit in the western world is because of being the inappropriateness of our methods. So we had a whole new batch of methods. Now, do not misunderstand it. Methods are important. There’s no point trying to witness to a world where we never engage the world. We have to think through what we’re doing, but where we think that the fund, the final fundamental difference will take place simply because we’ve adopted the right method. Then what we’ve done is manufactured another ism, another public philosophy that sorts it all out, if you just do it my way. And Paul says, I resolved to know nothing among you except Jesus, Christ and Him crucified in many parts of the evangelical worlds. Now there is a quiet assumption that people know the gospel. It works like this. Let me draw an analogy from the Mennonite tradition. Told me by a colleague of mine at Trinity by the name of Paul Heber. He springs from the Mennonites part of the Anabaptist tradition. He says that a few generations back, the Mennonites believe the gospel. They focused on Christ and His death and resurrection and so forth. They believed the gospel, but they understood the gospel to have certain social and political ramifications their past business and so forth. Whether you agree with them or not makes no difference. That is the way they handle things. They believe the gospel, and they saw that there were certain ramifications. The Next Generation assumed the gospel and identified themselves with the ramifications in the social and political, in the arena. This generation, he says, Now, in some cases, quietly denies the gospel, but elevate elevates those social and political ramifications, not only to the point of self identity, but to the point of supreme importance. In other words, if you focus enough attention on the periphery long enough, eventually it displaces the central now in North America, as I read it, more so than here, but not completely missing here. I fear. There is this tendency to focus so much attention on relative peripheries that what we lose sight of is the gospel. It’s not that we deny it, we just don’t pay much attention anymore. We are going to change society a little more by our schemes or by our educational factors or or by our forms of outreach or assimilation. In other words, we’re already approaching stage two in the Mennonite experience, where we assume the gospel and rarely articulate it, and focus all the attention on the relatively peripheral. It cannot be. It cannot be. If we slip into that pattern, we will only be one step from denying the gospel, for it is the gospel of God that is powerful unto salvation to those who believe, let us pray.

Our Father, we thank you for your goodness in our lives. We frankly and cheerfully confess we would not have seen the power of Christ crucified had he not opened our eyes by the Spirit. We pray Lord God for wisdom in our day and generation, in our homes, in our workplaces, to know how to work out the gospel in quiet witness, in integrity of life, in grateful testimony, so that we ourselves will be focused on Christ crucified, to those who are perishing foolishness, but To those who believe the very power of God, we pray Lord God, that we may learn to live under the cross without interest in self promotion and Democrats, but desirous constantly presenting who you are, what you have done for us In your dear son, announcing this with joy and enthusiasm, as it introduces the only polarity in the human race that is of any eternal consequence. Visit us. We pray with genuine salvation, with men and women who are transformed by your truth, living in the light of eternity, we ask in Christ’s name, Amen. Amen.