Not to Impress, but to Transform


1 Corinthians 2:1-4
1And I, when I came to you, brothers, did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom. 2 For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.

I was told as a child that people who use foul language when they speak are simply displaying the fact that they have a small vocabulary, which was a direct reflection of their intellectual prowess. (It was my mom who told me that. She had some fairly subtle child-rearing tools.) That idea did a great deal to curb my use of foul language, but it also planted in my mind that words were powerful and using them well was an admirable goal. And without going into it too far, suffice it to say that putting words to paper each day, as I do in this blog, is probably an outgrowth of that conversation. In the time of Paul, verbal discourse was the entertainment of the day. People would stand in the public square and display their vast intelligence with a barrage of words. The less the hearer understood, the smarter the speaker. Paul, who was probably an intellectual powerhouse, goes in the opposite direction. His goal was not to impress, but to transform.

Once again, we find Paul pointing squarely at Jesus. He comes with the wisdom of God rather than the foolishness of men to bring the message of the Gospel. He could have gone the other way and the people would have walked away impressed with Paul's fine intellect and powers of debate. But in that case, Paul is lifted up and Jesus is left behind. Instead, he focuses on Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected, and the people are transformed by the Holy Spirit into believers. The Kingdom of Heaven is filled and the people need to find alternate entertainment.

Finally, the message of these few verses is powerful. We know only Christ crucified. I guess that our “era” has been titled The Information Age, and that seems to be an apt description. Many of us carry a smartphone that can give us almost any information we want within seconds. And we are almost addicted to that process; chief of sinners though I be. But in the midst of gaining all that knowledge, we may be losing the most important aspect of living – knowing Christ crucified. So maybe it’s time to lay down that idol of knowledge (which Paul deals with in more detail later in this Epistle) and put all that information (and the love of it) into its proper place – a mere tool that need not gain the admiration of others or even a place of importance in our lives. Instead we too know only Christ and speak of Him in simple words that everyone can understand.

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