Wisdom of the World...

So I thought I'd make a quick post about something I was reading this morning, more as a mental brainstorm for myself than anything.

In 1 Cor, it talks a lot about the wisdom of the world vs. the wisdom of God. The wisdom of the world is folly to God, and the wisdom of God is folly to the world.

I find myself all too often trying to live by the world's wisdom, but the world's rules, trying not to be the last kid picked in the proverbial game of kickball that is my life. Recently I have spent so much time trying to fit in to this world, compromising my beliefs so that I won't looked at like I'm crazy, when all along that is what I need most. That is what I'm called to. "If we're crazy, it's for God, but if we're sane, it's for you."

I want to be crazy in the eyes of the world, to be laughed at, to be the scum of the earth, because it is in dying that we live. We are meant to live in an upside down kingdom.

Honestly, I have very little problem saying that I believe in God, that's a rather normal thing. Most people do in some form or another. My problem is that I really, really, really believe in God, in his goodness and his desire to renew all of creation.

In 1 Cor, Paul says "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, ²³but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles"

How is it wise to die? In the world's eyes, it's not. But it is the thing that sets us free.

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

There is so much in those verses to talk about, but I want to focus on the last part of the last verse for now.

Paul wants us to have faith in the power of God. The word power there is "dunimas". We get the word dynamite from the same root, and this word is in specific reference to miracles.

Paul wants us to have faith in the miraculous working of God. In the dynamite of Jesus.

Not in what the world tells us, because that is folly. Not in what our doctors learned in a textbook. Not in the scientific or the provable, but in the miracles of God. Not to say that doctors are bad, or that you shouldn't trust what they say, but we are called to have faith in God, not in doctors.

Doctors are trained to see what is scientifically possible in this world, believers are meant to see the impossible and make it happen.

I believe that God is good, that he is miraculous, and that we are meant to worship him for this. I believe that God wants to demonstrate his power today.

He wants us to have faith in his goodness, in his purpose, in his working in this world. He wants us to have faith in what he says, not what the world says about him or what he is capable of.

I would like to point out that Christian teaching can be just as worldly as anything else. Paul called the Jews' wisdom worldly, just like the Gentiles'.

The only wisdom I am to follow is that of God, and right smack in the middle of Paul's discourse on wisdom, he says he intended for the Corinthians to have faith not in the wisdom of man, but in the power of God.

Let us have faith in God, faith in his goodness, and faith in his miracles. Paul did...