WHAT'S YOUR MESSAGE?

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified”(1 Corinthians 2:1-2).

If Paul is to walk amongst us today, I believe he will cringe and ask “what are you people talking about, What has happened to the gospel?” It seems the Corinthian church to whom Paul wrote his letters was no different a society than what we have today.

One of the things that characterized the city of Corinth was the varied nature of its society. Its position as an important sea port on one of the busiest routes in the Mediterranean ensured this. In the streets of Corinth, military men from Rome, mystics from the east and Jews from Palestine continually rubbed shoulders with the philosophers of Greece. When Paul had preached the good news about Jesus in this city, it was a cross-section of this cosmopolitan society that responded and formed the Christian church in Corinth. Not surprisingly, men and women from such different spiritual and intellectual backgrounds brought with them into the church some very different concepts and ideas.¹

The Corinthian church was situated in a very complex cosmopolitan society characterised by immorality and the abundance of human philoshophies; what the Apostles called old wives’ fables(1 Timothy 4:7), Jewish Fables(Titus 1:14) and cunningly devised fables( 1 Peter 1:16). So simply put; the Corinthian church was struggling with the infiltration of human wisdom. Philosophy, psychology, secular principles that have no scriptural bearings etc were all craving for attention and spewing deadly venom in an attempt to silence, discredit and adultrate the gospel of Christ. So it was based on such vicious attack on the gospel that needed clarification which necessitated 1 Corinthians 2.

Make time to read 1 Corinthians 2, a solid discourse differentiating the wisdom of God and the wisdom of the world. Paul wrote to pinpoint what was important. He wrote to ensure that their faith would be built in God, not human philosophies: “That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.”(1 Corinthians 2:5).

What is your faith built on? I personally believe as Christians, we have to start re-examining closely our beliefs; whether we have not diluted it with human wisdom. Is it the gospel of Christ, or its the gospel of the “latest trend”? As much as knowledge is good and desirable, when the world‘s way of doing things is wholly imported into the church without any system of filtration, then we are in trouble.

 1: John Drane, Introducing the New Testament, (Lion Publishing, 1986) Page 315